AMID A deepening divide in Washington over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, the US military commander in Kabul, Gen Stanley McChrystal, has launched a new counterinsurgency strategy aimed at bolstering support for the Afghan government amid a growing recognition that the war will be lost without popular backing for the administration.
Gen McChrystal is pulling back forces from thinly populated outlying areas where some of the most intense fighting against the Taliban has taken place and deploying them to defend major population centres from the Taliban.
US military and political strategy is increasingly focused on how to legitimise President Hamid Karzai’s government. President Obama is holding off from committing more troops to Afghanistan amid wrangling between the military and politicians, and among the ruling Democrats, over whether Gen McChrystal’s recent request for additional forces can turn the tide or will drag the US deeper into a mire.
Gen McChrystal, in a report to the Pentagon leaked to the Washington Postthis week, says that pervasive corruption and incompetence, along with the failure to protect the civilian population, has severely undermined confidence in the government. That has been compounded by President Karzai's fraud-tainted re-election last month.
Former US president Bill Clinton said this week that things were “teetering” in Afghanistan and that Mr Obama would be wise to hold off from committing more troops until the question of the disputed presidential election was resolved.
In Kabul, a sense of deep gloom and foreboding about the future of western engagement has settled on many western diplomats in the capital. The diplomats say that the fiasco surrounding Afghanistan’s presidential election has, in the words of one official, “destroyed Obama’s Afghanistan strategy at the first hurdle”. Mr Karzai is also being blamed by many ordinary Afghans for unpopular Nato airstrikes in which civilians are killed.
"In Afghanistan realities often drown out wishful thinking and the election has brought corruption and legitimacy to the forefront of concerns," says one of the city's most experienced foreign observers. – ( Guardianservice)