EYE ON AFGHANISTAN – A MONTHLY SUMMARY OF EVENTS, TRENDS, AND STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENTS

By

“Wile E. Pathan” (*)

(*) “Wile E. Pathan” is the Kiplingesque pseudonym for a journalist, historian, and wargamer who has a particular interest in this critical theater of counter-terror operations. The information presented in these reports is NOT classified, but much of it is drawn from articles and analyses not available to the general public, many of which have appeared only in pricey, limited-circulation newsletters aimed at a readership primarily comprising members of the intelligence community and military professionals with a special interest in the subject.

June, 2009

If you lie shot on Afghanistan’s plains

And the women come out to cut up the remains,

Just roll on your rifle and blow out your brains

And go to your God like a soldier.

•   Rudyard Kipling

JUNE, 2009:

HAS THE TALIBAN INSURGENCY REACHED A TIPPING POINT?

Unpalatable as it may be to admit it, it seems indisputable that the Taliban insurgents now enjoy the initiative in Afghanistan. But “initiative” in this kind of war is a fragile, slippery thing, and the Taliban simply cannot claim a “decisive” victory, or impose undisputed power, until they make the critical shift from a loose confederation of guerilla bands into some semblance of a cohesive, disciplined army. For the time being, their movement is riven by tribal and personal animosities, a significant infusion of forces loyal only to poppy-field warlords, some quite powerful, who are willing to pay lip service to the Taliban’s harsh code of fundamentalist Islam, but whose deeper motives are those of pure, cold greed and the consolidation of personal power. Such motives are not compatible with Mullah Omar’s puritanical agenda, and the militias loyal to the drug lords are not likely to dissipate their strength in cooperative combat operations against the daunting firepower available to the US/NATO/ and (to a much lesser extent) the handful of reliable units fielded by the weak, vacillating, and notoriously corrupt central government in Kabul.

Still, the Taliban have emerged from their cross-border sanctuaries in Pakistan displaying remarkable recuperated powers, aggressiveness, and a frustrating ability to spread their influence almost as widely as it they did before U.S. intervened in the stalemated civil war between the so-called Northern Alliance and the hardcore Taliban forces who had bottled them up in a relatively small corner of the country. As a clear-eyed and not-very-optimistic recent analysis by STRATFOR summarized the present situation: “The U.S. and NATO are losing because they are not visibly winning; and the Taliban are winning because they are not perceived by the general populace to be losing.”

As history has demonstrated time after time, this is the essence of guerilla warfare. A regional insurgency has a deeper commitment to the struggle than any special-interest-controlled central government, or any foreign expeditionary forces involved in propping one up. The guerrillas operate within a much longer time-frame – indeed, the time-line for them is essentially open-ended – than do the forces battling to suppress them. Every month that the US and NATO commanders cannot point to meaningful, measurable progress – preferably progress that can be verified by independent observers – contributes to the gradual erosion of their political and moral support. Democracies tend to have short attention spans, and the current global economic malaise has become an on-going distraction from the “War on Terror”, as well as a growing constraint upon the financial, and manpower, contributions the NATO states are willing to make to prosecute a war that seems (at least potentially) endless, whose “victory conditions” remain murky if not indefinable, and whose cost, in blood and treasure, can only continue to grow.

Matters aren’t being helped any by the resurgence of Russian pride, power, and influence in the regions around the periphery of Afghanistan. This, too, is a distraction – and a potentially serious logistical inconvenience – that is only likely to grow in the foreseeable future.

It is clear the public support in the democracies is gradually eroding; barring another monstrous act of terrorism, perpetrated against innocent civilians, which could restore that support – an eventuality devoutly not to be wished the only things that will reanimate the Western cause would be a succession of high-profile military and civic success in Afghanistan…Signs Of Progress! And in recent years, such tangible signs have been few and often disheartening transient.

These are realities that play to the Taliban’s inherent strengths. And as in every protracted guerrilla conflict, the crucial metrics by which progress can be measured, are the evident perceptions and attitudes of the local civilian populace, who unfortunately always bear the brunt of suffering in these conflicts, regardless of where their private loyalties and personal agendas may lie. As long as the resolve and effectiveness of the foreign occupiers continues to diminish, then the technological advantages they bring to bear on the insurgents (which have, from time to time, inflicted serious damage to their leadership), however awesome they may seem, are also perceived as a temporary reality. Meanwhile the lurking, low-tech cadres of the insurgents increasingly come to be seen as a permanent reality.

The Taliban seem to have eyes and ears everywhere; their agents are presumed to be closely observing the actions of the locals, and to be keeping lists of those whose Islamist zeal and demonstrable support of the insurgency are deemed false or wavering. Should NATO pull out one day, and the Taliban re-impose their medieval form of theocracy upon Afghanistan as a whole, everybody who even suspects his name might be on such a list will either be forced to flee into exile, or live around-the-clock with a fish-hook of dread lodged in his belly

Of course, there are material, monetary, and status advantages that come from cozying-up to the foreign powers, if one can manage to do that secretly or in a manner that unfriendly witnesses will see as superficial, or harmlessly opportunistic. That is why so many civilians cooperate with the foreign troops in temporary, often superficial ways, from time to time and place to place. But such acts of cooperation are mostly skin-deep, and the blandishments offered to part-time informers are not remotely sufficient to win their “hearts and minds”, to permanently convert them to staunch supporters of the Kabul government, which will fold up like a house of cards the day the US and NATO units start packing for a withdrawal. Once the foreigners and their firepower are gone – unless by some now-unthinkable miracle we manage to form a large, professional, incorruptible Afghan army and police force – the Taliban will slide like an oil slick into the power vacuum, the “lists” will come out, and those accused of “collaborating” will be systematically liquidated.

The conclusion is worth repeating: based on the deteriorating situation as of the summer of 2009, only two things can halt the slow descent toward catastrophe: 1) A string of unequivocal military successes that significantly erode both the Taliban’s actual strength and the perception of the mass of civilians that a Taliban victory is inevitable, and, 2) the accelerated training and fielding of indigenous Afghan soldiers and security troops who are skilled, motivated, effective, and not so blatantly on-the-take.

Neither of these conditions seems likely to obtain at the present time, although as the year progresses, we may see some favorable surprises.

THE LAY OF THE LAND

Most of Afghanistan is so rugged, undeveloped, and unpopulated that neither side can, or needs to, make a significant permanent commitment to “hold the ground” – there is nothing on or under that ground (other than the opium-producing poppy fields) worth fighting for, and vast tracts of it are so bereft of human habitations that the only “hearts and minds” likely to be influenced by military operations are those of the vultures, the lizards, and the occasional venomous reptile. Therefore, in perhaps three-quarters of the rural countryside, no one is “in control” (or even wants to be). Marginal land – terrain that can at least support subsistence agriculture and provide drinking water – used to be at least nominally under control of one tribal faction or another, but today much of even that terrain is a no-man’s land. Long before the Russians launched their 1979 invasion, the pro-communist puppet regime in Kabul had cunningly dismantled or undermined much of the centuries-old system of tribal power-allocation. Not that this system brought lasting peace – raids and revenge feuds sputtered all the time, but these, however viciously fought, were localized, clan-focused affairs and were usually regarded as a spectator sport by the uninvolved and a safety-valve for the dammed-up testosterone of virile young males who for religious reasons had to channel their excess energies into something other than sex. If a particular feud threatened to spiral out-of-control and engulf a whole region, the tribal elders usually stepped in and horse-traded (or woman-traded) their way to a negotiated settlement in which “honor” was satisfied on both sides. The system was certainly untidy, and to Western eyes not much better than organized gang warfare, but it DID, for many centuries, maintain a shaky kind of order, enabling the farmers and craftsmen to pursue their trades without fear of casual slaughter.

Today, that age-old system is in tatters; there is nothing remotely akin to the cohesion and recognized lines-of-authority you would find in, say, the Sunni tribal region of Anbar Province of Iraq. In practical terms, this means that a coherent (if often ineptly-implemented) military/political strategy of the sort which has brought about reduced violence and a modicum of stability to sizable portions of Iraq, is simply not feasible in Afghanistan. In that beleaguered country, the fragmenting of traditional tribal power-sharing arrangements, already well-advanced by the time the Russians came rumbling in, has been further shattered by civil war, the grimly repressive ministrations of the Taliban, and most recently the destabilizing impact of a large US and NATO military presence. The sheer rococo complexities of internal affairs – political, theological, linguistic, and geographical – are so extreme, so constantly in flux, and so bewildering to the outsider, that they make Iraq seem like Switzerland in comparison.

There’s a wild card in this volatile mix, too, that doesn’t obtain in Iraq: the drug-lords who control, protect, and oversee the early distribution of Afghanistan’s vast opium harvests, source of approximately four-fifths of the world’s heroin supply. The regional drug lords often field militias that are better armed and better trained than the average battalion of Afghan “regulars” and whom the Taliban have no scruples about enlisting for operational purposes. For appearances’ sake, and to insure that no “stray napalm” incinerates their poppy fields, the drug lords hire their troops out to the insurgents and make a sham display of Islamic rectitude in order to stay on their good side. Few, if any, have aided the foreign armies with intelligence or manpower because without the decriminalization of narcotics, they only thing the Americans (and most of the NATO governments except the enlightened Dutch, who don’t exactly inspire terror on the battlefield) want to do with their crops is eradicate them (after, of course, trying to persuade the peasants to plant and manage those crops that there’s much more satisfaction and reward to be gained by plowing under the poppies and cultivating artichokes, lima beans, or watermelons instead – a hard-sell even to the least educated farmers, whose families have turned a decent living growing opium poppies for, oh, the last couple of millennia or so…).

As if these internal problems weren’t vexing enough, there’s the ineluctable fact that even the most patriotic, pro-democracy member of the Kabul bureaucracy can pocket more cash from turning a blind eye to the opium trade in a single year in office than he would make from a lifetime of dutiful, straight-on service in the fields of sanitary engineering or culvert repair. The amounts of cash that wash up from the poppy fields are so inconceivably huge that almost every member of the Kabul regime “dips his beak” into the river to some extent or other, and what the self-righteous outsider labels “massive corruption” is only, to those involved in the process, another day at the office. The Poppy Problem is, for the foreseeable future, so entrenched and intractable, that most US/NATO commanders have just set it aside in a separate compartment, marked “to be dealt with when Hell freezes over” and are now trying to cut deals with some of the drug lords in order to tap into their unrivaled knowledge of what’s going on in the remote rural districts. Don’t expect any of those officers to say as much on the record, but after all, there’s a monumental precedent already there to serve as a blueprint: the CIA’s involvement with warlords in the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War, a series of operations so deeply cloaked in secrecy that only the dimmest outlines of them have yet been made public. It happens in the Real World, people; and if it helps neutralize the Bad Guys, who among us is moralistic enough to object if private fortunes are made on the side? The ramifications of the Poppy Problem just exacerbate a situation already complicated beyond most outsiders’ comprehension, and at the moment, the Taliban are leveraging this situation in their favor, while our side is not and, publicly at any rate, cannot.