There is something seriously dysfunctional about international thinking on Afghanistan now. It is six years now that many countries have had their forces in Afghanistan, including the UK, the US, Germany and Italy. It is six years since the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda allies were turfed out of Kabul.
Six years is a long time in war, longer than either of the two world wars, and respectively four times and twice the duration of US military operational commitment, respectively, to the first and second world wars.
Six years on and there is a real danger that the Taleban could retake Kabul, and large parts of Afghanistan caught in all-out civil war, with reach well beyond the country’s fragile borders to the Asian republics to the north, Pakistan to the south, and Iran to the west.
The authoritative Senlis Council has just warned in 110-page report that 54 percent of Afghanistan’s national territory is now “controlled” by Taleban. NATO needs to get a grip, warns Senlis, an NGO specializing in regeneration based in London, Paris and Canada. Immediately, the alliance must double its combat power from 40,000 to 80,000 troops and those soldiers must be prepared to fight.
Earlier this year, I was hearing in Kabul from the outgoing NATO commander, Lt. Gen. Sir David Richards, that Afghanistan was “the winnable war”. The Taleban had been turned back from seizing Kandahar and opening the road to Kabul in the Pangwei Valley the previous autumn. So what has gone wrong in the nine months since we talked?
Richards’ shrewd chief of staff, Maj. Gen. James Bucknall, seemed to understand the real problem. He said that some practical, and extremely rough and ready, methods had to be employed to build stability through the south, principally through tribal deals. Like his friend and brother-in-arms Maj. Gen. Jonathan Shaw, he believes that the problem is not primarily military, or rather it cannot be solved kinetically, with force and firepower, alone. Unfortunately, the Americans seem to be taking the view that there’s almost no problem across the region that can’t be resolved by bombing. If there is to be a military solution, the Senlis figure of a NATO force of 80,000 is not enough — any more than if there ever were a military answer to the Iraq conundrum (the present American and coalition force of around 175,000 is about only a third of the force required to stand a chance of imposing security nationwide).
The problem with the Senlis figure and proposals like those for special combat aid teams, increasing areas of poppy growth for purchase for pharmaceuticals, is that they are over-elaborate and unrealistic. The NATO meeting at Noordwijk in Holland last month called for huge increases in troops to be sent to Afghanistan. At best, they got a few thousand from former East Bloc countries, and the Scandinavians. Germany refused to put combat troops in the front line; the Netherlands suggested it might pull out their combat units, and Canada indicated it couldn’t sustain its casualty rates for much longer.
There now has to be a radical shift in thinking to concentrate on a set of simple and achievable objectives. First, Kabul and, for the time being at least, Karzai, must be saved. Second, civil war between the Tajik-based Northern Alliance and the Pashtuns, now increasingly turning to a regenerated Taleban network, must be averted. To do this, the “ink spot” approach of picking different centers from which to spread stability and security, like Lashkar Gah, the British focus of operations in Helmand, must be abandoned. So, too, the Senlis and other plans for alternative crop production to poppy must be put in the pending tray and left for later.
The biggest need is to set Afghanistan in context. Increasing Talebanization in Pakistan and along the Baluch and eastern Iranian border is a major problem to which there is no easy solution. The US is planning to send in more special forces to seek out Taleban and Al-Qaeda training camps in the province of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan — but this seems an implausibly risky gamble. Anyway, it betrays a narrow tactical cast of thought, always the substitute for thinking strategically. The Afghan problem is international at several levels, in crime and drug trafficking and as a target for resurgent international jihad groups. It is now longer the winnable war, but part of a broad regional conflict, with real global impact, and a particular impact for countries like Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. Despite the rhetoric from prime ministers, defense ministers and generals, it is still not getting the really tough analysis and decisive action it requires — and deserves.
