Go east and solve this problem

WITH the formal British handover in Basra now complete, attention is now turning to the fight against the Taliban insurgency. It’s a switch that hard-pressed forces in Afghanistan have been looking forward to, and it comes at a time when the US presence is also being stepped up.

Some 21,000 extra US troops, bringing total numbers to 59,000, has been accompanied by General David Petraeus’ appointment as the new head of US Central Command, covering Afghanistan. This brings closer the likelihood of a new strategy; it was the Petraeus-led US surge in Iraq, a modern and upscaled classic counter-insurgency operation, that is today widely credited with paving the way for the American exit there.

President Obama is also planning hearts and minds, announcing more civilian aid workers, inspector generals to scrutinise military-business deals, and a new UN contact group that would include – significantly – Iran.

Increases in military strength, combined with a surge in diplomatic and reconstruction efforts, are widely believed to be the remedy for Afghanistan. But, supposing this does bring an end to a three-decades-long problem, there are very real dangers that it will create new dilemmas.

Soldiers in Afghanistan, particularly British combatants, have had to deal with under-resourcing, an unreliable partner in the Afghan army, and sometimes spontaneous violence from a fickle local population. But there are some signs that their presence has been attritional. The highest number of casualties comes from roadside bombs. At present, they are proving hard to defend against, but British forces developed an ultimately successful strategy for dealing with something similar in Northern Ireland. Small arms firefights remain constant, but Taliban fire is often ineffective. NATO’s is not. With air support, dead insurgent numbers can run to scores. And with suicide attacks, the Taliban will eventually have to consider the question of denuded and finite manpower.

No doubt this is not lost on experienced Taliban commanders. And, with NATO pursuing a tactic of decapitation strikes, with high profile kills almost every other week, that problem is magnified. It will only get worse when US reinforcements arrive. At some point, the Taliban will have to question whether Afghanistan is worth such a toll on its forces.

There is no real structural cohesion in the Taliban. Like all movements, it is riddled with egos and internecine, deadly dispute. But there is, however, a general realisation of strategic objectives among the Islamists. They are proselytizers, and for that they need a base.

Whereas once Afghanistan provided refuge, now violent Islamists receive training and resources from within Pakistan. It prompted Gordon Brown to call the mountainous border “the crucible of world terrorism” when he visited the country this week. The Pakistani government recently and controversially ceded control of the Swat Valley to Taliban-style forces led by Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, a Sharia-focused native party with few links to Afghanistan, save through alliance with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the umbrella Taliban organisation in Pakistan.

However, even here, the connection is remote. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader, recently sent an admonishing letter to the TTP which read: “Attacks on the Pakistani security forces and killing of fellow Muslims by the militants in the tribal areas and elsewhere in Pakistan is … harming the war against the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.” The letter may have been an indication of his situation, and of his increasing irrelevance in the region’s politics and conflicts, as it was ignored.

Successful NATO action in Afghanistan could pin back the Taliban in those mountainous tribal areas. Here, their resolve would be severely tested. However, Pakistan makes this impossible. The country complains of being sapped of manpower following the Waziristan war. Furthermore, even the government cannot guess at the position of its own Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which helped create the Taliban. Supposedly purged of Islamists by Pervez Musharref, and also credited for the Buner withdrawal (albeit at US insistence), claims persist that it supplies militants with intelligence on NATO targets and operations.

Asif Ali Zardini, the Pakistani president, has criticised the US for drone attacks within his borders. It is safe to assume that there will be no countenance of operations by outside forces there. Anyway, what it would achieve is moot, as it may serve to stir an already restive population to open revolt.

If there is one chink of light in all this, it is the increasing irrelevance of al-Qaeda. Although Osama bin Laden remains a jihadist figurehead, it is open season on his deputy, Ahman al-Zawahiri, and the organisation itself. The inability of al-Qaeda leaders to move far from their hideouts has had a corresponding effect on their standing. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the so-called “ideological godfather of Al Qaeda”, has withdrawn his support for the organisation, accusing al-Zawahiri of being “only good at fleeing, inciting, collecting donations and talking to the media.”

Young Taliban who are fighting and dying every day may have a less than charitable view of these non-combatant Arabs. But any diminishment of al-Qaeda is likely to demonstrate the hydra-headed capability of violent Islamism. People will instead look to the organisation of the day (the Taliban, in this case) for inspiration.

If nothing can be done to halt the establishment of an Islamist state in Pakistan, which could lead on to conventional war with its neighbour, there may come a point when the West has to ask if there was any point being in Afghanistan at all. The problem will have just moved east.