By Dave Anderson:
The 2009 Afghan campaign season will be winding down in the next few months as snow and cold weather begins to close the passes of the Hindu Kush and isolate each valley. Fighting will continue as both ISAF/Afghan government forces and anti-government forces will be seeking contact but contact is much harder to achieve in the winter than during the dry and hot summer. Fighting will resume next spring when the terrain is more easily passable. That has been the rhythm and tempo of the fighting in Afghanistan for the past eight years, and it is reasonable to assume that this pattern will continue.
So what should we expect to see the multiple strands of anti-government violent groups that we call the Taliban do next year? Where are the most probable avenues of success and goal attainment available to them? What are their goals? What capabilities would they seek? The rest is speculation, but it is an attempt to answer some of these questions.
I am assuming that the many strands of the Taliban want either a weak central government that has no ability to bother local Pashtun politics, economics, smuggling and other arrangements or they want to control the government. The first goal is a much more achievable goal and it has the attendant side effect of placing less of a fixed target on the backs of the Pashtun elite if/when something goes wrong that pisses off the United States or other countries with global strike capacity.
The center of gravity then is the international forces that buttress of the Karzai government and provide some thin tentacles into the Pashtun heartland. The secondary center is the legitimacy of the Karzai government. This is a secondary target mainly because it is already a joke of corruption, ballot box stuffing, ineffectiveness and ethnic division to the primary audience of Pashtun tribal networks.
The international forces are the primary effective backers of the Karzai government in the Pashtun dominated regions of Afghanistan. They are the strength and the vulnerability of the Karzai government, and this is where the Taliban should focus their efforts next year. 2010 will be a good year if the Taliban is able to force the withdrawal of at least three national contingents by the start of 2011.
Now how to do this?
The first line is to attack the weak point of the American COIN doctrine --- the hold and build portion. I would be looking to routinely hit any civilian aid component that is not paying significant protection money to the Taliban as US doctrine has the build civil society outsourced to non-uniformed individuals. That is changing, but humanitarian agencies, and workers are seen as an integral part to American success, and they tend to be the most exposed and least protected Westerners. The intermediate term goal is for all of the hold and build activities to be undertaken by uniformed individuals so as to increase the cost of operations as well as narrow the support base.
If there is any fungible or mobile resources in the Pashtun heartland, I would move those resources off of anti-American attacks (as the Americans will be around for at least another couple of years) and dedicate those resources to anti-British and anti-German attacks. As Steve has pointed out, the British political establishment in all parties are looking for an out. Abu M. notes that the German political establishment has minimal stakes in Afghanistan, especially as the original mission has drifted into a quasi-imperial COIN effort.
Shifting additional money, weapons, fighters, trainers and other supplies to these two national sectors with the intent of causing disproportionately heavy casualties and costs over the next year would be a viable means of breaking the already thin commitments these two nations have for the Afghanistan fight. The withdrawal of 10,000 to 15,000 UK and German troops would not be fatal, but it would be a steady drip of increased costs and increased isolation of the United States and the Karzai government.
If there are modern man-portable anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank missiles available for purchase and smuggling, those systems would be extremely valuable in squeezing district and provincial level logistics. Anti-tank weapons would help increase the cost of road transport while the typical work-around of dangerous roads, helicopter resupply of basic goods, would be put under threat by modern SAMs.
The next big decision for the Taliban and Pashtun militias is on the governance angle. Insurgent forces routinely seek to assassinate and/or intimidate local government officials. The question is one of target sets. The Taliban has a reputation of being tough to corrupt and being harsh but fair/predictable in their governing style. That is very valuable, especially as a foil to the Karzai government's patina of corruption. Does it make more sense for the insurgents to go after the few non-corrupt officials or to go after the many corrupt officials? If the target set is discernibly anti-corrupt official, the Taliban loses a critical reputational advantage as the Darwinian process will make many currently corrupt officials less visibly corrupt. At the same time targetting honest officials will make being honest the most dangerous trait in Afghanistan as an honest official will have as their enemy both the insurgent and their co-workers who are on the take. I think being an honest official in Afghanistan will be a poor career choice next year.
These are some of the probable moves that we should expect as the Taliban, Pashtun fighters, smugglers, warlords and other groups that are currently shooting at ISAF and Afghan government forces continually probe for advantages over the next year.
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