LONDON/KABUL, 14 February 2008 — NATO is in disarray and the West faces defeat in Afghanistan unless it overhauls its counterinsurgency and reconstruction strategy, Britain’s Paddy Ashdown wrote in an article published yesterday.
Ashdown, who was rejected last month by Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the post of senior UN envoy to the country, called in the Financial Times for renewed efforts to win Taleban moderates away from the insurgency.
“With fighting in Afghanistan now entering its seventh year, no agreed international strategy, public support on both sides of the Atlantic crumbling, NATO in disarray and widening insecurity in Afghanistan, defeat is now a real possibility... We have not lost in Afghanistan ... But we will lose if we do not start doing things differently,” he warned.
Ashdown said the consequences of failure in Afghanistan would be appalling. “Global terrorism would have won back its old haven and created a new one over the border in a mortally weakened Pakistan,” he said. Ashdown called for more cooperation between international military and civilian efforts and a greater focus on governance and the rule of law across in a country where corruption and lawlessness is widespread.
Of an international security effort which has at times caused civilian casualties, he said: “Breaking up the Taleban by winning over the moderates is a far better route to success than bombing and body counts.” US-led forces toppled the Taleban government in 2001, but Taleban rebels launched an insurgency two years ago and violence has risen sharply since then.
Washington has called on NATO allies to send more troops to Afghanistan and to commit more of them to the south of the country where the Taleban insurgency is strongest.
Meanwhile, a bomb ripped into an Afghan army convoy near a former Taleban stronghold yesterday, killing three soldiers a day after gunmen attacked the home of the area’s leader, the official said. The force of the blast knocked one of the vehicles out of the convoy in the Musa Qala district, district chief Abdul Salaam told AFP.
“Three soldiers were martyred and three others were wounded and their vehicle was destroyed,” said Salaam, a former Taleban commander who was appointed district chief after the town was retaken from militants in December. Salaam also said Taleban gunmen had on Tuesday attacked his house about 10 kilometers from the town.
He was not at home at the time but there was a roughly 30-minute gunfight that ended when Afghan army reinforcements arrived, he said. There were no casualties. Salaam was a governor of Uruzgan province during the 1996-2001 Taleban government. His shift in alliance to the government is an example of how authorities want to push reconciliation as one way to end support for a Taleban-led insurgency.
In another development, the main association for German soldiers said boosting the number of German troops in Afghanistan and shifting them to the violent south makes no strategic sense and would stretch military equipment to the limit. NATO partners, and Washington in particular, have put increasing pressure on Berlin to shoulder more of the burden in dangerous southern parts of Afghanistan.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled out a deployment to the south and reiterated that a parliamentary mandate only allows the country to send up to 3,500 soldiers to Afghanistan as part of NATO’s 43,000 strong mission, German media have said she could send more troops.
“There are no plans for that,” said Bernhard Gertz, the head of the Bundeswehrverband, the army’s quasi trade union, which represents some 65 percent of German soldiers in Berlin. Gertz said reinforcing German troops, as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged Berlin to do in a letter recently, would cause problems.
“We are clearly reaching capacity limits, but not in terms of training or the number of available soldiers. We have problems, bottlenecks, with helicopters, with televisor links,” he told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday. “We are light years behind the equipment of our allies.”
Many Germans are uncomfortable about the emergence of a strong army in a country still trying to come to terms with its Nazi past.
Gertz said Germany had only 19 specially equipped CH53 transport helicopters, with 6 of them being stationed in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif and others undergoing modernization or being used for training purposes at home. “Ironically, Gates in his letter... asked for (helicopters). He should know that we’re not only touching limits but that we simply don’t have any more,” Gertz said.
