The "Known Unknown" In Kabul

By Steve Hynd

Dexter Filkins at the NY Times had some great on-the-spot reporting yesterday from the Taliban's high-profile attack in Kabul. The Afghan government and coalition officials may be talking the attack down as a sign of desperation from the Taliban, but just as in Pakistan the message common people will hear most loudly is that the government and its allies cannot keep them safe. And they'll blame those who fail to keep them safe more than they'll blame those trying to do them harm.

Mohammad Nasir, a taxi driver, said the government needs to do more to stop foreign attackers from crossing the border.

"They always say that these attackers are coming from outside, but they don't have wings to fly from the sky and come here, so they come from the ground," he said. "If we had professional Afghan forces, they could stop them ... but we see we don't have professional forces to keep them from coming."

...One man who owned a store in a shopping center that was the site of one of the fiercest standoffs on Monday said the militants told the manager to evacuate the building before the fighting started.

"They did not take any one hostage. They had Kalashnikovs, but we came out without any harm," Abdul Ghafar said Tuesday as he surveyed the charred exterior of the four-story building.

He criticized government forces for opening fire at the building instead of forcing the militants out by other means.

"Four or five families were dependent on each shop in here. Two, three or more were as partners in each shop and shared their money and invested in the mall," he said.

I remember something like this from the IRA's last spree in London. There comes a point, usually about the third large- scale attack with none foiled, where people start blaming the government and security forces for failing to protect them more than they blame the terrorists for attacking civilians. To borrow some Rumsfeldian terminology: that extremists will try to attack becomes a "known known", but why the government and security forces keep failing to stop them becomes a "known unknown".

To halt that process now, the Afghan government needs to very visibly disrupt at least one high-profile attack before it begins. It can't be international forces, because then people will just see those forces as a prop for their own incompetent government. But it's entirely unclear whether the ANA and Afghan police have the capability to gather intelligence and then carry out such a complex disruption.

Such is the thin gruel of COIN when the host government is corrupt, incompetent and illegitimate.