Every time US planes bomb what they think are Taleban hide-outs in Afghanistan, they kill women and children. It infuriates Afghans and strengthens their opposition to the 70,000 foreign troops being in the country, some 58,000 of them from NATO and allied states. But it works the other way around too. When Taleban forces plan an ambush to kill NATO forces and they kill local people including children instead, as happened on Thursday in a massive bomb blast on the highway south of Kabul, the anger and revulsion is turned on it.
There will be many who see in Thursday’s blast and the surge in violence that has occurred in the past few weeks across the country, further proof that no matter how many troops the US and its allies send to Afghanistan, they are not going to win. That is wishful thinking; it ignores the deep animosity most Afghans have for the Taleban. In any event, the notion that Afghanistan has always been a graveyard for foreign armies is a myth, based largely on the experience of the Soviets in the 1980s.
It was a graveyard for them because the US poured a fortune in arms and money into making it so. Afghanistan’s earlier history is a much more checkered picture. The British lost the first Afghan war in 1842, won the second in 1880 installing their own choice of ruler, while the third, 90 years ago, was a political victory for Afghanistan; its independence was restored. But it was no graveyard for anyone; the British had no stomach for a fight after World War I.
The NATO-led forces and the Americans in particular now understand very well the need to keep civilian deaths to an absolute minimum. The new coalition commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has spoken publicly about it several times. Unfortunately, war is not a surgical operation that adheres to rules. Things go wrong. Whether Gen. McChrystal’s intentions succeed therefore remains to be seen. The same goes for the planned troop surge. It has worked in Iraq, but Afghanistan is not Iraq. The terrain is different, so is the political situation. For example, support for the Taleban in troubled Helmand province is primarily about opposition to central government diktat. In any event, it is weakening. The two main tribes there now appear to want to see the Taleban crushed. In the longer term, the working with the tribes, as was the case in Iraq, will be far more effective in ensuring peace and security in Afghanistan than military muscle.
That said, without military muscle, there is no hope of ending the Taleban threat. It is within this context that Moscow’s agreement to allow the US to ship military material to Afghanistan via southern Russia, signed during President Barack Obama’s visit to Moscow, has to be seen. It is a remarkable departure. In effect, Russia is now an active part of the anti-Taleban military alliance. That Moscow wants the Taleban destroyed is no surprise; they threaten its central Asian backyard — but working this closely with Washington? There has been nothing like it since the World War II. What will the next step be? Russian troops back in Afghanistan? The strategic significance of the deal has not even begun to be understood.
