The six recent deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan bring the number killed in that country this year to at least 101, the deadliest for the US military in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion. The toll reminds us of the situation in Iraq where US military deaths this year have exceeded 850, also a record.
The war in Afghanistan is supposedly different from the one in Iraq — but the similarities, foremost of which is the violence against US forces, are growing. In method, target and impact, the attacks on US forces in Afghanistan have shown how much the Taleban have borrowed from the Iraqi insurgency. It is an influence conceded by the Taleban themselves who, according to their sights, see one and the same enemy.
Regime change in Afghanistan has been sold as one of the few successes of the new world born of the 9/11 attacks on America. Less than two months after the planes hit New York and the Pentagon, the Taleban were driven from Kabul and Osama Bin Laden from his mountainous Afghan hide-out. Unlike in Iraq, the Afghan invasion had the sanction of the UN. It also had the support of most Afghans, with 70 percent of the electorate turning out for presidential elections in 2004. How then — five years on — is Afghanistan so near collapse and why has what appeared to have been a swift military victory gotten bogged down?
The answer can be given in one word: Iraq: Washington’s refusal to take nation building in Afghanistan seriously and instead wage a fruitless war in Iraq. For Afghanistan the results have been too few Western troops, too little money and a lack of coherent strategy and sustained policy initiatives by both Western and Afghan leaders. The Pentagon turned its attention away from Afghanistan during the build-up to the invasion in Iraq, leaving the military with too few resources to back up the initial victory with an adequate security presence.
For the Taleban this lack of concentration has enabled it to regroup, rearm and resurge, whether in the southern provinces or from its Pakistani hinterland. They are a guerrilla force more sophisticated, better organized and more numerous than ever before, with a new and deadly penchant for remote-controlled bombs and, unusual for Afghanistan, suicide attacks, the clearest evidence yet of coordination between the Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies.
The Taleban cannot be eliminated completely. They can loosely control much of Afghanistan’s four southern provinces much of the time. The counterinsurgency battle US and NATO forces now face will take a decade or more to win. The same situation holds for US troops in Iraq: the insurgency can never be done away with completely. The next US president must level with the American people, in a way President Bush never has, about the real burden of an attempt to build two countries from scratch at once. That burden can no longer be borne by military families alone.
