The Wargamer

Strategies on the Wind

Of the three major combatants forces now fighting in Afghanistan, neither the Taliban, the still-unreliable and only partly professionalized government forces, nor the US/NATO coalition has sufficient manpower, mobility, and deep enough infrastructures to make “taking and holding the strategic ground” a viable option. There’s just too damned much of it, as even Ghengis Khan eventually concluded, and as both the Russian and British Empires found out very quickly. Troops from one faction or another will arrive in a village on day, set up security procedures and defensive works, and will stay in residence only for as long as their sometimes ephemeral purposes require. They are often pulled out as suddenly as they arrived; their presence may offer real security to the locals, but that feeling of safety may last a week, a month, or a season, and when the troops and weapons that provided it move on, the land around that village is controlled by nobody. The local inhabitants know only that eventually some other body of men with guns will arrive, “dressed in a little brief authority”, and establish the same sort of temporary dominance as the last garrison, only in the case of the Taliban, they would impose rather more strict guidelines the locals are expected to adhere to.

That is why a given rural hamlet may show up on the situation maps as being “pro-NATO” one month, and “pro-Taliban” the next. In reality, the local inhabitants – as poll after poll has shown – want more than anything else to be left the hell alone by all the men with guns. So far, it seems quite certain that the overwhelming majority of ordinary Afghan citizens do NOT want to live under a Taliban regime. Poor they might be, but whatever circumscribed freedoms and spontaneous joys they have come to treasure on a human-to-human level, would be proscribed and condemned by the dour, humorless, severity of the hard-line Taliban leaders, those sexually repressed and intellectually blinkered zealots who have been known to have men executed for listening to dance music on transistor radios, and women stoned to death for carelessly (or defiantly) appearing on the streets with their legs visible and their features uncovered by a bee-keeper’s helmet. Even in rural Afghanistan, contemporary ideas have slowly trickled into the villagers’ consciousness, and it must surely have occurred to many of them that one need not revert to 13^th-Century ignorance in order to be a “good Muslim”.

Untold millions of those ordinary people would rejoice openly if the Taliban were utterly crushed, and many have fantasized about rising up en masse and beating the local Taliban garrison to death with stones and pruning hooks, or with their bare hands. But their dilemma is crueler than their private passion for being left alone can withstand. A mass rejection of the Taliban and its joyless life-style would undoubtedly lead to the insurgents’ quick defeat, but on the block-by-clock village level, the proverbial man-in-the-street has no choice but to hedge his bets. To declare open hostility to the Taliban, in many places, is to court a singularly unpleasant death; to burn all your bridges to the insurgents (by turning into a double agent or by actively aiding the US/NATO coalition by passing along timely intelligence), is also to ask the not-unreasonable question: What will become of me and my family if the Western forces suddenly pull out, before they have ground the Taliban down to the level of a nuisance and before the indigenous forces ostensibly commanded by the Kabul government have become large enough, competent enough, and steadfastly honest enough to replace the foreign armies that currently supply the collective backbone as well as the heavy firepower needed to obtain even a marginal combat performance from the “official” Afghan Army?

The Face of the Enemy Remains Veiled

During the first several years of the Western presence, the ability of the Taliban to disperse without disintegrating, to hide in the Pakistani badlands without losing cohesion, were gravely underestimated. While Washington relegated the Afghan front to the status of a sideshow – deceived by the rapidity with which their large combat units broke and ran under the sledgehammer bombardment of B-52s – the Taliban regrouped, took stock, cultivated their network of sympathizers within the Pakistani Army and, perhaps more critically, within Pakistan’s ruthless I.S.I. (Inter-Services Intelligence directorate), they stockpiled weapons, recruited far more men than they had lost, and began aggressively re-establishing their malign influence in those huge remote areas of Afghanistan where the Kabul government’s writ means nothing and its token garrisons could either be subverted into sources for arms and information, or if necessary over run without much difficulty. Indeed, the Taliban have openly boasted of their connections with the so-called “security forces” from Kabul; US/NATO troops have captured many Taliban weapons whose marking can be traced back to shipments unloaded in Karachi harbor and trucked, at no small risk and great cost, from there to the armories in Kabul. Through the greed and venality of Karzai’s commanders, it is WE who are supplying many of the weapons the Taliban turn against us. And until fairly recently, what the Taliban didn’t obtain from corrupt “friendly” sources, they obtained from our supposedly “pro-democracy” friends in the Pakistani armed forces.

The recent and comprehensive STRATFOR analysis used as the main source of many of the facts cited in this report begins its concluding chapter with the following cold but clear-eyed statement:

Today, the two primary sources of power in Afghanistan are the gun and the Koran – brute force and religious credibility. The Taliban purport to base their power on both., while the United States and NATO are often derided by wielding only the former – and clumsily at that. Many Afghans believe, rightly or not, that far too many innocent civilians have been killed in indiscriminate airstrikes.”

Of course, U.S. air strikes are severely limited by rules-of-engagement precisely designed to avoid collateral damage. The recent upsurge in civilian deaths, in fact, marks a new and disturbing change in Taliban tactics, one which might well be traced back to the influence of Palestinian and Iraqi volunteers who now comprise a significant percentage of the Taliban’s frontline warriors.

During their protracted war against the Russians, the Mujahideen never intentionally took up defensive positions in the middle of the civilian populace. To do so, they felt, was unmanly, dishonorable, and un-Islamic. Rarely, too, did collateral civilian deaths occur in large numbers during the intra-Islamic civil war that erupted after the Russians pulled out. This is something new, and the Taliban may be exploiting it now because their recruits with Hammas experience have convinced the Taliban high command – whoever and whatever THAT may be, in addition to the elusive and ghost-like Mullah Omar – that, in terms of propaganda value and for purposes of recruiting, forcing the Americans to bomb mixed civilian and military targets WORKS.

A fifteen-year-old boy who lost both parents and one of his arms to a stray NATO bomb is not going to direct his burning hatred at the Taliban commander who used his family as bait by assuring them that close proximity to insurgent positions would offer them “protection” – no; he’s going to direct that hatred at the remote, anonymous pilot who toggled the ordnance from a high safe distance.

Mind you, we suspect that if anti-Taliban clerics really cared to, they could undoubtedly find passages in the Koran that would serve to condemn this cold-blooded stratagem as “unmanly, dishonorable, and un-Islamic”, but those clerics have so far kept conspicuously silent and neither NATO nor the morally compromised Kabul government has had any major successes in recruiting respected clerics to speak out against the more callous, even murderous, excesses of the Taliban. Foreigners face an almost insurmountable cultural chasm in trying to deal rationally with men who live by a medieval set of precepts, and that is unlikely to change no matter how many fluent Arabic-speakers we deploy in the Afghan theater of operations. Such a theological counterweight will have to develop – as it sporadically but crucially has in Iraq – from within the Muslim community itself.

The STRATFOR analysis continues:

It comes as little surprise that popular support for the Taliban is on the rise in more and more parts of Afghanistan, and that this support is becoming increasingly entrenched. For too many years, U.S. attention was wholly distracted by, and most of its military power absorbed in, Iraq. During this period of limited U.S./ NATO presence, and given the lack of organized opposition inside Afghanistan, the Taliban were able to make significant inroads.

…but the Taliban still have not coalesced to the point where they can eject U.S. or NATO forces from Afghanistan. Far from a monolithic movement, the term “Taliban” encompasses everything from the old hard-liners of the pre 9/11 Afghan regime to small groups that adopt the name as a “flag of convenience”, be they Islamists devoted to a local cause or criminals wanting to conceal their true objectives…the multi-faceted and often confusing character of the Taliban “movement” actually creates a layer of protection around it. The United States has admitted that it does not have the nuanced understanding of the Taliban’s composition needed to identify potential moderates who can be split off from the hard-liners.

While the STRATFOR report’s major conclusion – the Taliban are on a roll! seems indisputable, and will certainly be hard if not impossible to reverse, the Taliban still face some enormous problems. If they’re “on a roll”, then it’s very much a slow-motion roll by a force which may have more internal contradictions, and face more external problems, than we previously comprehended. And although it has been painfully slow in having an effect, we are at last beginning to perceive some of the nuances of Taliban behavior, rather than viewing them solely as a faceless horde of fanatical automatons in black turbans.

At present, for example, the Taliban derives added cohesion and clarity-of-direction from the fact that Mullah Omar, like Ho-Chi-Minh before him, is the supreme leader and by definition the dictator of Taliban strategy. No one has seriously challenged him, nor – so far as we know – as anyone attempted to displace him by force. But what happens when Mullah Omar, who is an old man and – to judge from the one authentic photograph of him known to exist – not an especially robust physical specimen, falls off a cliff or gets careless one day and wanders into the sights of an armed drone? What arrangements have been made for his replacement? CAN he be replaced without causing serious disruption to the legion he commands and inspires? Time alone will provide the answers, but at least we are now paying special attention to all monitored Taliban communications for any hints, however oblique, of illness, injury, or failing abilities. Confirmation of his death will open a window of opportunity in some fashion or other.

The “Ho-Chi-Minh” paradigm only goes so far; Mullah Omar has shown himself to be cunning, patient, tenacious, personally brave, and capable of inspiring devotion from afar. But unlike Ho, he does not have a brilliant military disciple like General Giap to translate his agenda into battlefield victories. If the Taliban has such a military genius, he has not revealed himself yet, and perhaps Mullah Omar would not welcome the appearance of such a potential rival. He is a man motivated solely by theological zeal, relatively if not completely unalloyed with “nationalism”. It is unlikely that he cares very much whether or not a “nation” called “Afghanistan” even continues to exist. His focus is intense, burning, but his will broadcasts on a very narrow bandwidth and Islam is no more a monolithic religion than any other; to assume that the Taliban represents the Koran’s truest interpretation is like assuming the Opus Dei movement represents the whole community of Catholics. When he dies, he may take a large part of the Taliban’s cohesion with him.

Nature remains neutral. The logistical and command/control problems imposed by Afghanistan’s vast distances and often savage terrain cannot be overcome by prayers to Allah. Operationally, the Taliban face the same difficulties as the U.S. and NATO forces opposing them, but they lack the foreigners’ technological assets to overcome them. As our intelligence-gathering capabilities increase – and they are, albeit very gradually the chances of forcing Taliban units into combat on unfavorable ground, and of achieving tactical surprise over them, are sure to increase.

In order to force a U.S./ NATO withdrawal before their current edge becomes dulled by time, space, and the inevitable fractures caused by internal dissent, the Taliban must do a much better job of consolidating their power than they have so far shown the capacity or the will to do. The relatively desperate tactic of hiding their fighters among innocent civilians may be temporarily expedient, but is cannot sit well with the Muslim foot-soldiers who agree with the Mujahideen that such tactics smack of cowardice and dishonor.

The Obama Administration has at least restored the Afghanistan conflict to its rightful place on the global anti-terror agenda, and the new President has repudiated his predecessor’s tendency to fight the Afghan war on a shoestring while pouring disproportionate money and military power into the tarpit of Iraq, where the ferocity of the insurgency was, to a large extent, a consequence of decisions shaped by lies, arrogance, and false assumptions, and where our deceptively “easy” military victory was followed – against the seasoned and expert advice of many senior military commanders – by a succession of colossally stupid and wasteful policy-choices which History will judge very harshly.

As this article goes to press, a new and potentially decisive wild card has gone into play: the Pakistani government has finally turned against its former Taliban proxies and has initiated its first large-scale, coordinated offensive into the strategically vital Swat region. Fighting has been heavy; casualty figures on both sides are unverifiable by objective sources, but by all accounts they have been heavy.

Moreover, as that campaign enters its second month, the trade-off for de-clawing the internal Taliban movement has been an internal refugee crisis of horrific proportions, one which the Islamabad government may not be able to handle. It is a risky undertaking for an army that has always been riddled with Taliban sympathizers. If, when the smoke clears, the regime in Islamabad emerges as a more committed enemy of the Taliban, then the regional dynamic will have changed profoundly.

For the moment, we can only conclude that, while we were distracted by the dramatic events in Iraq, the enemy in Afghanistan recovered and regained the initiative. Neither the Taliban nor their opponents have yet made full use of their potential strength in Afghanistan, and until they do, there will be more questions about the ultimate fate of that violent and forlorn land than answers. Can the U.S. and its half-hearted allies sustain the kind of commitment necessary to roll back the enemy’s current progress? Can the Taliban do what they must to build on their temporary advantage, or will human nature, doctrinal friction, conflicting tribal loyalties and presently-unseen internal rifts cause them to fragment and degrade their combat effectiveness? Can the Karzai government mature into reasonable effectiveness, if not rid itself of the more egregious forms of corruption that undercut all its spasmodic efforts to achieve viability?

Nah, let’s not even go there. In reality, it may be enough just to keep their greed, treachery, and incompetence down to a manageable level.

When the Swat offensive is declared over and done with, we shall examine it in as much detail as the available information permits.