Back at the beginning again

Extra US troops are on the way to help soldiers like this Canadian already in Afghanistan

AFTER nearly eight years of inconclusive fighting, matters are shortly to come to a head in Afghanistan. The insurgency, which goes under the all-encompassing name of the Taliban, is about to feel the heat of 21,000 additional US troops. Afghans have, of course, seen this all before. The world’s greatest empires have marched onto their land and found nothing but ruin. This time it could be different.

These are not Russian conscripts or English redcoats. The free-firing defenders of compounds across the restive South will find themselves up against perhaps the best troops in the world today, with years of combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. And there seems to be new purpose at Coalition backs, courtesy of its political masters.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has unceremoniously dumped General David McKiernan in favour of Lt Gen Stan McChrystal. Different reasons for McKiernan’s departure were given. Gates said “new thinking” was required. The Afghan media concluded that it was down to the unacceptably high number of civilian casualties. Both the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times claimed that “the move followed criticism of McKiernan among military officials who said he had not moved aggressively enough to overhaul US strategy”.

This charge of a failure of imagination on McKiernan’s part continued on NBC Nightly News. “Critics claim McKiernan was old Army, focused more on conventional warfare than the counter insurgency strategy desperately needed in Afghanistan,” it reported. AP cited White House concern for “challenging an increasingly brutal and resourceful insurgency,” adding that “strategy – still a work in progress – relies on the kind of special forces and counterinsurgency tactics” that Lt Gen Stan McChrystal “knows well”.

If this is the case, then the insurgency should be concerned, particularly as the general that McChrystal – who commanded the forces that both captured Saddam Hussein and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – will answer to is David Petraeus, credited with introducing hearts and minds as well as the ultimately successful Surge in Iraq.

And finally, away from the media concentration on civilian casualties, it appear at last as though the Pakistani military has got serious with Taliban and associated militants within its borders. Sensing an opportunity to make life very uncomfortable for them, Islamabad-controlled forces have announced their intention to push on through Swat and into the Waziri territories, an area that has vexed the world for a number of decades.

Could this finally bring Afghanistan to heel? Experts remain pessimistic. Part of this is down to the elastic shape of the insurgency. There are few who still believe that Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership remain in command of hostilities. However, they remain part of a wider resistance that includes Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami faction, among others.

The US has been left with little option but to get surgical, as casualties not only don’t appear to concern the insurgency, more importantly they don’t seem to matter. Nato is convincingly winning the firefights, but it makes little difference. The Parachute Regiment reported in 2006 that it had killed 700 Taliban in operations during a tour of duty, while the US Marines reported back 400 kills in 2008. Even with public alarm continuing to rise over British deaths, it remains hugely disproportionate.

There are no casualty figures recorded by the Taliban or anyone else, so these figures cannot be verified. Additionally, no one seems to know what true insurgency numbers are, and here we arrive at the true problem facing American generals.

There is a tale – likely apocryphal - of a group of British soldiers who were drawn into a contact near Musa Qala. As the battle drew on, it became apparent that the number of guns against the troops was increasing. It reached the point where locals were spotted leaving the fields to fetch their Kalashnikovs and join in.

Whether this represents sport for a highly brutalised population, or a general grievance on the part of a nation renowned for fierce resistance to occupation is the issue that Obama’s forces must now resolve. It begs the question of whether hearts and minds will work if it is the people rather than militants that the Coalition is fighting.

Nato’s work to separate out the two continues. Following a successful tour for its first cultural understanding officer, where Mike Martin’s fluent Pashtu allowed him to map out tribes, politics and economics in partnership with the population, the British army has plans to send more to Afghanistan to assist in intelligence efforts that were, some officers privately admit, non-existent.

Whether the Americans will have the patience for such initiatives is moot, as already powerful voices are beginning to question the strategic reasons for remaining in Afghanistan. Writing in the influential Foreign Affairs journal, John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University and author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, said: “George W Bush led the United States into war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein might give his country’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Now, Bush’s successor is perpetuating the war in Afghanistan with comparably dubious arguments about the danger posed by the Taliban and al Qaeda.”

Arguing that the Taliban has “limited interest in issues outside the ‘AfPak’ region”, he contends that “if they came to power again now, they would be highly unlikely to host provocative terrorist groups whose actions could lead to another outside intervention”. Citing the limited logistics that the 9/11 plotters utilised in Hamburg prior to the attack, Prof Mueller adds: “The very notion that al Qaeda needs a secure geographic base to carry out its terrorist operations is questionable.”

He also points out that al Qaeda has largely discredited itself in the Islamic world through its “counterproductive” terrorism, that there is no evidence to suggest that the group has established a foothold in the US, and believes it to be nothing more “than a few hundred people running around in Pakistan, seeking to avoid detection”. Indeed, argues Prof Mueller, “no convincing evidence has been offered publicly to show that al Qaeda Central has put together a single full operation anywhere in the world since 9/11”.

The US, with its improved resources and conditions, now stands a real chance of defeating its enemies in this part of the world. Whether that will achieve its objectives takes it right back to the questions it faced at the beginning of the War on Terror.