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2 A catalogue of errors in
Afghanistan By Michael Scheuer
Afghanistan is again being lost to the
West, even as a coalition force of more than 5,000
troops launches a major spring offensive in the
south of the country. The insurgency may drag on
for many months or several years, but the tide has
turned. Like Alexander's Greeks, the British and
the Soviets before the US-led coalition, inferior
Afghan insurgents have forced far superior Western
military forces on to a path that leads toward
evacuation. What has caused this scenario to occur
repeatedly throughout history?
In the most
general sense, the defeat of Western forces
in
Afghanistan occurs repeatedly
because the West has not developed an appreciation
for the Afghans' toughness, patience,
resourcefulness and pride in their history.
Although foreign forces in Afghanistan are always
more modern and better armed and trained, they are
continuously ground down by the same kinds of
small-scale but unrelenting hit-and-run attacks
and ambushes, as well as by the country's
impenetrable topography that allows the Afghans to
retreat, hide, and attack another day.
The
new twist to this pattern faced by the Soviets and
now by the US-led coalition is the safe haven the
Afghans have found in Pakistan. This is the basic
answer to why history has found so many defeated
foreign armies littering what Rudyard Kipling
called Afghanistan's plains.
The latest
episode in this historical tradition has several
distinguishing characteristics. First, Western
forces - while better armed and technologically
superior - are far too few in number. Today's
Western force totals about 40,000 troops. After
subtracting support troops and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization contingents that are
restricted to non-combat, reconstruction roles -
building schools, digging wells, repairing
irrigation systems - the actual combat force that
can be fielded on any given day is far smaller,
and yet has the task of controlling a country the
size of Texas that is home to some of the highest
mountains on Earth.
Second, the West
underestimated the strength of the Taliban and its
acceptability to the Afghan people. When invading
in 2001, the West's main targets were al-Qaeda's
Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and Taliban
leader Mullah Omar and their senior lieutenants,
and because the operation specifically targeted a
group of top leaders, the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border was not sealed, and so not only did the
pursued troika escape, so did most of their foot
soldiers.
Those escapees are now returning
in large numbers, and are better armed, trained
and organized than on their exit. It seems likely,
in fact, that the force being fielded by the
Taliban and their allies - al-Qaeda, Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, among others - is
at least equal in number to the coalition.
Furthermore, the membership of the force
is not just a few Taliban remnants and otherwise
mostly new recruits; rather, they are the veteran
fighters that the coalition failed to kill in 2001
and early 2002. The Taliban forces are not new;
they are the seasoned, experienced mujahideen who
are - like former president Richard Nixon in 1972
- tanned, rested and ready to wage the jihad.
Western leaders in Afghanistan are also
finding that many Afghans are not unhappy to see
the Taliban returning. Much of the reason lies in
the fact that the US-led coalition put the cart
before the horse. Before the 2001 invasion, the
Taliban regime was far from loved, but it was
appreciated for the law-and-order regime it
harshly enforced across most of Afghanistan.
Although women had to stay home, few girls could
go to school and the odd limb was chopped off for
petty offenses, most rural Afghans could count on
having security for themselves, their families and
their farms and/or businesses.
The
coalition's victory shattered the Taliban's
law-and-order regime and, instead of immediately
installing a replacement - for which there were
not enough troops in any event - coalition leaders
moved on to elections, implementing women's rights
and creating a parliament, while the bulk of rural
Afghanistan returned to the anarchy of banditry
and warlordism that had prevailed before the first
Taliban era.
Making matters worse was the
fact that many of the actions the coalition did
successfully undertake - especially elections and
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