General Dostum and the flipping future

Dostum, in front of a portrait of his ally, enemy, and ally-again Ahmad Shah Massoud

ELECTION day has arrived in Afghanistan. After months of vicious fighting that has led to casualties on a scale not seen since the Falklands War, most of the British public will be less interested in the successful and safe shepherding of millions of voters to the polls than in hearing what justification the Brown government will now trot out when it is tackled after today about the rising number of soldier deaths.

This was the point of Operation Panther’s Claw – to secure the polling rights of Afghans. And while many people have grown increasingly alarmed by the upswing in military casualties, it is to be expected when an army goes on the offensive, as our’s has done in Helmand. Perhaps Downing Street is already thinking ahead, as the news has been thick with senior soldiers (including the much-briefed against and outgoing head of the army, Sir Richard Dannatt) reassuring viewers that morale couldn’t be higher, and that there is real resolve among the troops to see the job finished.

No one doubts such purpose. Nothing quite hardens a soldier’s heart and gives him cause to redouble his efforts against the enemy than the death of a cherished comrade. But the clear problem for some time is that there is no widespread understanding as to what “the job” really is.

At first, there was strategic clarity. With the prudent use of special forces and air power to bolster the Northern Alliance fightback, the Taliban – al-Qaeda’s hosts – were swiftly swept from power in a matter of weeks following 9-11. But then, as with Iraq, little thought seemed to have gone into what would happen the day after. Afghanistan began to tumble down the to-do list, particularly when the Bush administration opened a second front in the Middle East. Once that was returned to some semblance of order (although, with the deaths of 95 people and injuring of 500 more in a series of bomb blasts across Baghdad yesterday, such an assertion remains moot), and focus switched back Afghanistan, that lack of intent showed.

Since then, of course, the Government has failed in its game of double standards, publicly declaring its support for operations there while denuding forces of vital support – both materially and in manpower – that could have made a real difference to the conflict. Although Gordon Brown has been blamed for this shambles, and although he displayed a near-legendary miserliness in his dealings with the Ministry of Defence while chancellor, Tony Blair must also shoulder much of the responsibilities. It was his vanity, which supposed the UK was still capable of fighting imperial wars when it clearly was not anymore, that led to this mission drift.

Since then, we have heard a variety of reasons for maintaining the presence in Helmand. There was and remains our commitment to dealing with the “crucible of terrorism”, where three quarters of terror plots against the UK are hatched. Brown is probably right when he says this. The only problem is that he can do nothing about it, as this area is in fact the lawless Waziri mountainous region of west Pakistan, where few – not even the well-equipped Pakistani army – dare venture.

But even this, the strongest case for remaining in Afghanistan, is built on quicksand, because it presupposes that these terrorists – which we’ll call al-Qaeda for convenience’s sake – adhere to some kind of command and control structure. al-Qaeda was through with that the moment the B52s arrived over the Tora Bora some eight years ago. It doesn’t need a base (ironic, given the meaning of its name) because it is something far more worrying. It’s an idea. And an idea that only needs the internet to flourish. Let us suppose that the tribal areas could be cleaned out, a task far more invidious than Helmand. Any Islamist hiding out there – Osama bin Laden, perhaps – would quietly move on – to Somalia, for example. If Islamic terrorism requires a base, it only needs a Third World country where anarchy reins. That leaves it spoilt for choice.

We’ve had other reasons, mostly fatuous, like the Afghan government’s success in getting girls back into schools. As laudable as this is, it is not worth the lives of British soldiers. And you have to marvel at the audacity of the Government when it gives this example, given the standard of school leavers here.

Fighting with one hand tied behind their backs and for no clear strategic reason, it could be assumed that the British army has been handed the worst of all worlds. Except that it’s getting worse. The Taliban now sits on the outskirts of Kabul, and while taking the capital is beyond it, its presence there is symbolic, and telling. But now, however, is time to get away from confusing this insurgency with the Taliban. This flatters Mullah Omar who, with his pretensions to become the “Commander of the Faithful”, varies little from the preening and sometimes comical arrogance of other petty Afghan warlords.

But here, again, we can’t seem to get around the issues of asymmetrical warfare. If it is the Taliban that is co-ordinating this nationwide insurgency, are we to believe that Mullah Omar directs it from the hut hideouts he switches daily, and from his famous motorbike? Creating endless nightmares for Nato from such testing personal circumstances would make him the equal of Genghis Khan. But, as we saw following the Taliban’s almost embarrassing collapse in 2001, Genghis Khan he is not.

The truth is that Nato commanders don’t know how this war is being co-ordinated – if it is being co-ordinated. The chances are that, with up to 30 years’ of experience in fighting under their belts, many commanders are reverting to type by securing the areas that they have always fought over. We can’t count their guns and, in any case, it probably doesn’t matter. They kill one or two of our soldiers while we kill hundreds of their’s (a very unscientific approximation puts the kill rate at around one to 50 in Nato’s favour), and it makes no difference to the order of battle. They are back in the same compounds and hedge lines in the same numbers shooting at British troops the very next day.

This leads on to perhaps the most burning question that most people will have today: can we ever win militarily? There is an argument that the army’s relationship with redevelopment is symbiotic, and you certainly cannot have the latter without the former, as insurgents will waste no time in delightfully blowing up prestine new schools and water plants if they are improperly defended.

But do we really need to engage in redevelopment? Should we engage in redevelopment when the government is clearly incapable of standing on its own two feet? The last argument for maintaining troops in the country is that we are helping to train the Afghan army. This is doomed to fail, say detractors, because the new army doesn’t have a clue, and is riddled from top to bottom with corruption and Islamist informants. However, building a workable state on the back of an army seems a far more sensible option than redevelopment in a country that has only known war for three decades. And it was, until recently, the way Pakistan conducted its public affairs for some considerable time.

Of course, the army isn’t strong enough yet, or competent, to take on the insurgency. But why should it? Instead, why shouldn’t the US and the UK spend more time in flipping the country’s assorted warlords, getting them to back the Afghan government, isolating the nay-sayers to the point where they become irrelevant or exposed, and where they can be done away with?

The best example of a switching warlord is the Uzbek general, Abdul Rashid Dostum. A Soviet officer for the duration of the war during the 1980s, before joining the mujahideen, he was first loyal to then-president Mohammed Najibullah before leaving the communist regime to its fate during the Fall of Kabul in 1992, joining with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the ‘Lion of Panjshir’, who was eventually murdered by two al-Qaeda assassins on the eve of 9-11. The two would fight against veteran mujahideen Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, before Dostum sided against Massoud with the Islamic hardliner, after the Tajiki entered into government with Burhanuddin Rabbani. He then aligned himself with Rabbani against the emerging Taliban, while trying to inveigle his way into its favour. That this failed owing to, ironically, an act of disloyalty by one of his closest supporters didn’t stop him trying to play it both ways with the Northern Alliance, too. He was later appointed, subsequently lost, and then regained his title as commander in chief of the Afghan armed forces.

While Dostum has a reputation for flipping – so much so that the CIA still doesn’t trust him – there is a belief that the puritanical Taliban conversely remains incorruptible. But this plainly isn’t the case. Since 2004, scores of ranking Taliban have become reconciled with the Afghan government, including the senior commander Abdul Wahid, the Hotak brothers of Wardak Province, Nur Ali Haidery Ishaqzai, a former director of Ariana Afghan Airlines under the Taliban, Abdul Salam Rocketi, once corps commander in Jalalabad and now a member of parliament, and Arsala Rahmani, a deputy minister under the Taliban then and a senator now. Even al-Qaeda associates, such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, have come in from the cold.

The truth of war in Afghanistan is that in all the years of fighting, commanders prize being on the winning side far higher than declared loyalties to commanders or movements. Possibly it is because they remember all to well the horrible fate of Najibullah – tortured, castrated and hanged along with his brother Ahmadzai when the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. Or possibly because flipping is now a cornerstone of the rules (such as they are) of conflict in this part of the world.

When Taliban leaders first made such overtures to US forces, they were rewarded with reservations on the first plane to Guantanamo Bay. The legacy of one such rebuff is that troops loyal to one such commander that made his way into the rendition system remain in the field and actively hostile to Nato to this day.

These days, there is less bull-headedness from the White House, and this is to be welcomed, because Nato has taken on a responsibility in this part of the world that it cannot be judged to have carried out properly if it refuses to learn the art of war in Afghanistan. Maybe it would be more palatable to western governments if it was badged as a fast-track truth and reconciliation scheme. Even Hamid Karzai, sometimes emboldened by the surfeit of Western weaponry at his disposal to be less than diplomatic, realises there can be no peace without a negotiated laying-down of arms. Let us hope that he, or his replacement, make it a priority in the months to come.