Afghanistan Strategy: Desperately Seeking Every Which Way But Lose

By Steve Hynd

Two news stories today show just how much "between a rock and a hard place" the U.S. and its allies are in Afghanistan. The first is from Canadian Press and reports that the "clear and hold" parts of COIN ops in Kandahar are failing.

A security cordon set up around Kandahar city has failed to keep out insurgents, who are filtering back in as coalition forces escalate operations in the province's rural areas.

The cordon was erected under the command of the Canadian military as part of the initial phase of the ongoing offensive to stabilize Kandahar, and consisted of a series of checkpoints around the city.

It passed to U.S. command in recent months, and American military officials now acknowledge it has not provided the desired level of security inside the city.

"We recognize it is not where we would like it to be in terms of the conditions setting," said Lt.-Col. Vic Garcia, deputy commander of the American task force responsible for Kandahar city. "We're taking measure to adjust."

Both American and Canadian military commanders have trumpeted recent success against the Taliban in many of Kandahar's rural areas. But violence in the city itself has failed to abate.

The Taliban have launched an assassination campaign against anyone associated with the Afghan government, sending a wave of terror through the city.

In the past two months, they have managed to kill -- among others -- two members of the religious council, a deputy mayor, an education official and a prison officer.

"The ring really hasn't shut closed in any way, shape, or form," said Peter Dimitroff, a security consultant for NGOs in southern Afghanistan.

According to figures calculated by Dimitroff, there were 18 IED strikes in Kandahar city during the last 12 days of October alone. The strikes, he said, were distributed across several city districts.

"There's been no area of Kandahar that's been shut down by a security cordon," he said. Insurgent groups "can still strike anywhere where they want to at any time."

That's not good news for Petraeus, especially when the third leg of the stool appears to have become "demolish", not "build". But everyone from Obama, Gates, Mullen and Petraeus on down has admitted that military force cannot defeat the Taliban and end the indigenous insurgency in Afghanistan. The strategy, since last January, has been to reconcile the Taliban - to get them to stop attacking the Afghan security forces and their foreign, occupying allies and instead to join Karzai's government.

That's not going to work either. As Kathy Gannon at AP writes, all it would accomplish if successful would be to swap one group of foreign-backed insurgents for others. The mujahedeen of the old Northern Alliance and Shiite Hazara tribesmen, many of whom see the terms Taliban and Pashtun as co-terminous, are dusting off their weaponry ready for a renewed civil war.

In the Panjshir Valley, heartland of the Northern Alliance, Mohammed Zaman says that when the U.N. came looking for weapons, "the mujahedeen gave one and hid the other 19."

"We have plenty of weapons, rocket launchers and small arms and we can get any kind of weapons we need from the gun mafias that exist in our neighboring countries," he said. "All the former mujahedeen from commander to soldier, they have made preparations if they (the Taliban) come into the government."

...The Hazara, a mainly Shiite ethnic group, are also worried.

"We have lots of weapons but they are not modern weapons. They are simple weapons," said Abbas Noian, a Hazara legislator.

"It is very bad, America announcing they will leave Afghanistan. It has given more power to the militants, more energy. Already we minorities are afraid. We want peace but we are afraid of a strong Taliban," he said.

...Fahim Dashti, a Tajik, was present when the bombers blew up Massoud. He survived with scarred hands and arms and now edits the English-language Kabul Weekly. Dashti says the minorities began rearming about 18 months ago.

"The reason is because we don't know who President Karzai is talking to and what he is saying, but we feel the agenda of the government is to Pashtun-ize the government, the re-Talibanization of the system," he said.

The West is, for want of a better description, screwed, blued and tattooed. There have been many reasons given why we should "stay the course" in Afghanistan and, at the end, none are especially convincing. Particularly the one that should be central: as Nir Rosen puts it:

The Taliban, with their pickup trucks and AK-47s are no threat to the US. Al-Qaeda is not in Afghanistan. They were defeated. They're in Pakistan. They're in Yemen. They're in internet cafes and slums around the world. The Taliban leadership is composed of Afghans. Al-Qaeda which is based now in Pakistan, to the extent that it exists as a real organization is led by Arabs and Pakistanis.

However, the real reason we're still in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban is the one that stays largely unsaid - neither the political nor "serious people" sets are willing to suffer the embarassment of saying the word "defeat".

If Afghanistan policy were a movie, it would be called "Desperately Seeking Every Which Way But Lose."