A few days ago British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited British soldiers at Camp Bastion in the Helmand region of Afghanistan. It was a good idea to go to see them there, as more British troops have been wounded in Afghanistan than in Iraq this year. His trips to see British forces on active service are superb; open-necked shirt, serious private discussion with the military commanders, and then a back of a truck rallying call to hundreds of men and women, without a note in sight, and hitting all the right buttons. At Camp Bastion he told them:
“Here in this extraordinary desert is where the future of world security in the early 21st century is going to be played out.”
It was eloquent and he has made similar remarks before. It frightened me for the evidence is that the Taleban and Al-Qaeda are winning in the long run.
I do not think for a moment that Kabul is about to fall to thousands of Taleban fighters. I do believe that before winter set in NATO’s forces, in what the British Army has described as the fiercest fighting since the Korean War, on occasion hand to hand, had inflicted heavy losses on the Taleban. Most foolishly the Taleban attacked well-defended posts, where the allied defenders had the benefit of air cover. The basic problem is that the democratically elected government of President Hamid Karsai, who has charmed the international community, is losing the hearts and minds of its own people.
The Economist (June 10) had this to say of Afghanistan:
“Contributing to the deep unease about security, and even more insidious, is the existence of a criminal mafia largely funded by the multi-billion dollar drugs trade, whose activities are made easy by endemic corruption. The fact that in many cases the drug barons hold senior public offices discredits the government and its international backers.”
Director of America’s Defense Intelligence Agency Gen. Michael Maples warned Congress in the summer that the Taleban’s recovery represents the greatest threat to the Afghan government’s authority since 2001. The government’s control over much of the country is weakening day by day.
The reconstructed Afghan National Army, 42,000-strong, is of very uneven quality. It suffers from a high rate of desertion. The local police are unreliable and their loyalty is sometimes in doubt. At the NATO summit in Riga on Nov. 28 Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s secretary-general, claimed that “effective Afghan security forces would be gradually taking control” by the spring of 2008. It is a comforting idea, but many experts would doubt it.
The Taleban, backed by the revenues of Afghanistan’s largest ever opium harvest, together with Al-Qaeda, tribal militias opposed to the government and drug traffickers, have become increasingly effective and have been intimidating the people. Some sixty schools in the south have been forced to close. One head teacher was beheaded before his school — for teaching girls!
NATO has taken over security responsibility for the whole country, and has deployed 32,000 troops under an excellent British general, David Richards. In the summer there were urgent calls for extra troops. A thousand Polish troops are due to arrive early next year. However, in the words of Gen. Sir Michael Rose, who commanded the UN Protection Force in Bosnia:
“Given the level of resources NATO has at the moment, and the strategy we are pursuing, we simply cannot win. The forces there can’t achieve the objectives they have been given.”
I agree NATO has sent far too few troops for the size of this vast mountainous country. The Soviet Union fought in Afghanistan, with many more troops, between 1979 and 1989, before it was forced to withdraw. The Taleban come and go over the border with Pakistan, and have an almost inexhaustible supply of new recruits from the extremist religious training schools there.
The NATO summit made some progress over the numerous caveats operating among its troops in Afghanistan. It has been like having a football team in which only a few players are authorized to tackle the other side! It seems in future France, Germany, Italy and Spain might allow their forces to move outside their own area of operations when needed. Gen. David Richards must be allowed far greater flexibility.
I have no doubt of the importance of what is going on in Afghanistan to world security. One of the important features of our world in this new century is that the chaos of failed states is passed on to neighboring states.
It is not clear to me who is going to send more troops to fight the Taleban on their own ground. The Taleban have time on their side; how long are the Western democracies prepared to fight in Afghanistan? Longer than the Soviet Union?
