THE ARRIVAL of 17,000 additional US combat troops in the coming months in Afghanistan will mark the latest attempt by Washington to address the war it thought it had won in 2001. Some 4,000 military and civilian trainers will also be dispatched to bolster the Afghan security forces, and President Obama has pledged to step up diplomatic engagement and aid.
The new strategy echoes much of the so-called surge that helped turn around the situation in Iraq two years ago. But Afghanistan is not Iraq, and there is much trepidation that more boots on the ground will lead to more fighting and more air strikes, resulting in more civilian casualties, which will only serve to increase support for the insurgency.
An insight into Afghanistan today was provided by Mary Fitzgerald and Brenda Fitzsimons in a series of articles published in this newspaper last week.
The recent appointment of Gen Stanley McCrystal as the new commander of Nato-led forces in Afghanistan is a ground for cautious optimism towards the sort of counter-insurgency thinking that proved a success in Iraq. The magnitude of the task in Afghanistan means there can be no alternative to painstaking, more localised efforts to unpick what has become an amorphous insurgency and weaken its hold on the wider population. That population, disillusioned and distrustful after eight years of broken promises of security and reconstruction, is key, and any attempt to stabilise Afghanistan must ensure that the needs and aspirations of ordinary Afghans take centre stage.
The lofty promises in 2001 to rebuild a fragile post- Taliban Afghanistan foundered as the world turned its attention elsewhere, allowing the Taliban to regroup, the country’s warlords to regain their footing and opium production to soar to more than 90 per cent of the world’s supply. Afghanistan languishes on the bottom rungs of international development indices, with some of the highest illiteracy and infant mortality rates.
The Taliban are not popular among the majority of Afghans, but until the Afghan government and its international backers demonstrate that they are bringing genuine security and real economic opportunities to the country, the Taliban will be able to exploit growing discontent by presenting themselves as patriots. Afghans are dissatisfied with the feeble and ineffectual rule of President Hamid Karzai, rampant corruption, aid ineffectiveness, and the rising number of civilian deaths caused by international forces.
David Kilcullen, the Australian counter-insurgency expert whose ideas were central to Washington’s most recent Iraq strategy, talks of “accidental guerrillas”, those who join an insurgency, not out of ideological commitment, but because they have been dispossessed, had relatives killed, or homes destroyed. His thesis – that such combatants can be coaxed from the insurgency through deals or negotiation – is appealing when applied to Afghanistan. But until the conditions are right for reaching out to the Taliban, the emphasis must be on preventing more “accidental guerrillas” joining up.