By Steve Hynd
The news that an Afghan Army soldier attacked his British Army mentors with an RPG, killing three and wounding four, is making waves across the pond today, where over 70% of Britons already want their nation out of the quagmire as fast as possible. Yet the conventional received wisdom is that this incident, having been caused by an isolated rogue, will not seriously affect the underlying NATO policy that "we can stand down when they stand up".
Defence officials insisted � hoped, may be a better term � he was a "rogue" soldier. In policy or strategic terms, the killings on their own are not significant. But on top of all the other setbacks, including a mounting death toll from Taliban gunfire and improvised explosive devices, and the recent decision to pull British troops out of Sangin, they are a serious blow which takes on an added significance.
Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said: "This soldier might have been a perfectly good soldier who was then radicalised or went over to the Taliban after his training. From one case it's very difficult to draw a generalisation.
"It doesn't change things in practical terms, but it may change things in political terms. It makes the strategy that much harder to sell to the public."
What no-one seems to be pointing out, though, is that the pattern of "isolated rogues" killing their mentors in Afghanistan is a worrying metric for the success or failure of that underlying strategy.
In November last year, five British soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman. There were similiar incidents which caused the deaths of two US soldiers in October 2009, twice in 2008 and another in 2007. There have been at least eight such incidents in Afghanistan in the last three years and the pace of these killings by "rogues" is accelerating.
By contrast, in the entire seven year occupation of Iraq to date there have been exactly three reported cases of Iraqi security forces attacking their coalition mentors - and all of those were in Mosul, which is still causing trouble as the last bastion of Al Qaeda and the indigenous Sunni insurgency there.
By just this simple metric, then, getting to the point of a reliable Afghan security force that can "stand up so we can stand down" is at least six times more difficult than in Iraq. Suddenly, "isolated rogues" doesn't do justice to the problem for NATO's strategy.
"From one case it's very difficult to draw a generalisation." ... yeah but there have been others
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of curious how England's new ruling coalition is going to deal with OEF.