The 'war on terror' moves East
By Jason Motlagh and Jim Lobe
The Pentagon's announcement on Tuesday that it is dispatching about 3,200 US
Marine Corps to Afghanistan underlines both Washington's mounting concern about
the strength of the Taliban insurgency and the growing sense that the central
front in its nearly six-and-a-half-year-old "war on terror" has moved back to
its South Asian roots.
The deployment, which will take place over the next three months, will bring
the total number of US troops in Afghanistan to a record level of about 30,000
- still significantly less than the 160,000 in Iraq but nonetheless an implicit
admission that US and North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces have not been able to subdue the
largely Pashtun rebels.
Indeed, on the eve of the Pentagon's announcement, a suicide bomber penetrated
a luxury hotel in the capital Kabul, setting off a blast that killed more than
half a dozen people, including a US citizen and a Norwegian reporter covering
the visit of his country's foreign minister, in what the New York Times called
"one of the most brazen assaults by the Taliban in the heavily protected heart
of the Afghan capital ..."
Washington hopes that the additional troops will help both stabilize
Afghanistan and shame its reluctant NATO allies into sending more troops to the
same end. Of the 3,200 new troops, about 1,000 will be used for training the
Afghan army, and the rest will be deployed to southern Afghanistan to fight the
Taliban alongside British, Australian, Dutch and Canadian troops, who have
taken record casualties during the past year.
Tainted record
Commandant General James Conway first pitched the plan last year after
hostilities in Iraq's al-Anbar province in Iraq calmed down, saying marines on
the ground there could either return home or "stay plugged into the fight" and
head to Afghanistan.
Marines with a "more kinetic bent", Conway said, are needed to take the fight
to the enemy.
But trend lines show that in an Afghan-style counter-insurgency, strength in
numbers may not apply. In fact, successive troop buildups since the Taliban
were ousted in late 2001 have been matched by a steady increase in
insurgent-related violence.
Overall, attacks increased from nine in 2002 to 103 last year, according to the
Rand Corporation, and some 300 foreign troops have died in the past two years.
While north and west of Afghanistan are today relatively safe, the
Pashtun-dominated southern and eastern provinces are much worse. Six years on
it's understood that the crucial window to inject development and win over
disillusioned Pasthuns when the Taliban fled was diverted by the Iraq war.
According to the Congressional Research Service, Washington has spent about
US$3.4 billion a year on reconstruction, or less than half of what went to
Iraq.
The aid that has trickled into Afghanistan has gone almost wholesale towards
military expenditures. But the integrated "light footprint" strategy used so
effectively to topple the Taliban, in which special forces on horseback and
small ground units reinforced Northern Alliance irregulars, was replaced by
blast-walled compounds and heavy armor vehicles.
Security efforts stood to receive a big shot in the arm from the US Congress'
latest military spending package, which exceeded $10 billion - a massive
upgrade from years past. Yet about 80% of the total was earmarked for military
purposes versus just 20% for reconstruction. This makes little sense in an
agrarian country where infrastructure has been shattered by 30 years of war.
Instead of punishing the Taliban, Western military technology has often
backfired to strengthen their cause. Errant air strikes have killed hundreds of
civilians and poisoned public faith in a weak central government. The Taliban,
meanwhile, never miss a chance to capitalize on the mistakes of the foreign
powers they frame as occupiers.
Take Helmand province, home to most of the country's booming opium industry
that accounts for 92% of the global market. Taliban activity was minimal until
the British deployed 4,000 troops there last year; now there are 7,000 troops
and it has become a hotbed of the insurgency, made worse by increased drug
production, street crime and corruption.
This failure is not lost on those who have spent time in the Afghan badlands.
Former marine Captain Nathaniel Fick, a seasoned veteran of the Afghan and Iraq
campaigns, highlighted in an August 12 Washington Post op-ed what he called
"the paradoxical world of counterinsurgency warfare - the kind of war you win
without shooting".
Those now backing on a "surge" of marine manpower to hunt Taliban appear to
have forgotten what he reminds us: "The laws of these campaigns seem
topsy-turvy by conventional military standards: money is more decisive than
bullets; protecting our own forces undermines the US mission; heavy firepower
is counterproductive; and winning battles guarantees nothing."
Today these four basic principals of counter-insurgency, based on army and
marine doctrine, are taught to Afghan security forces at the Afghanistan
Counter-insurgency Academy in Kabul. However, it is the marines themselves who
have courted controversy in the country for being too heavy-handed.
Last March, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the former top US commander,
expelled a marine special operations company after their convoy was ambushed
and they went on a "rampage" in Nangarhar province that left 12 civilians dead,
including an infant and three elderly men, according to a report by the Afghan
Independent Human Rights Commission. One man was said to be so riddled with
bullets that he could not be identified.
"In failing to distinguish between civilians and legitimate military targets,
the US Marine Corps special forces employed indiscriminate force," the report
said. "Their actions thus constitute a serious violation of international
humanitarian standards."
Faced with mounting public anger over the shootings and a series of botched air
attacks, President Hamid Karzai is said to have pushed for the expulsion. The
unit had been the first marine special operations company sent overseas before
the incident, and US officials noted that an order for all 120 men to be
redeployed was unprecedented, stressing the gravity of the incident. At
present, only 300 marines are stationed in Afghanistan.
With a large marine force now being sent into the country, there is speculation
it may be part of a broader effort by senior officers like Conway to raise the
corps' status after hard knocks in Iraq. Afghanistan is in a sense still viewed
by the American public as "The Good War" compared to Iraq, and a closer
association could improve the image of the force in the long term.
Pakistan - that other problem
The still-shaky security situation in Afghanistan is not Washington's only
concern in the region.
Continuing political uncertainties in the wake of former prime minister Benazir
Bhutto's assassination in neighboring Pakistan, where a number of disparate
Islamist and Pashtun militias have recently united under the leadership of a
Pakistani Taliban commander closely allied with al-Qaeda, have propelled that
nuclear-armed nation to the top of Washington's national-security agenda.
Indeed, the assertion that "Pakistan is the world's most dangerous place" has
become a new cliche of foreign policy discourse in Washington in recent weeks.
Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates highlighted that concern, noting,
"Al-Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks
on the Pakistani government and Pakistani people," he asserted, just a week
before Bhutto's assassination.
Her killing, as well as indications that Pakistan's deeply unpopular president
and former army chief, Pervez Musharraf, was maneuvering to first delay and
then to manipulate elections now scheduled for next month, renewed a growing
policy debate over what conditions, if any, Washington should attach to its
nearly $1.5 billion in mainly military aid to Pakistan this year.
Indeed, the Pentagon's quiet announcement late on December 31, just two days
after Bhutto's assassination, that it had approved the transfer by defense
giant Lockheed Martin of 18 F-16 warplanes to Pakistan fueled criticism that
the George W Bush administration's priorities were badly skewed.
"The decision to go ahead with a half-billion sale of advanced fighter aircraft
to Pakistan shows how dangerous misguided President Bush's policy is: How can
the White House even think of green-lighting such a sale at such an incredibly
sensitive time," said the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
Joseph Biden.
"It sends exactly the wrong message to the Pakistani generals, and to the
Pakistani people. This is the time we should be putting the pressure on the
government and military to fully investigate the assassination of Benazir
Bhutto and to hold free and fair elections - not let them off the hook," he
said.
And while Biden and others argued that military aid should be conditioned on
political reform, other critics have focused on recent reports that most of the
$11 billion the US has provided Pakistan over the past five years has been used
to buy conventional weapons systems more appropriate for war against India than
the increasingly powerful Pakistani Taliban based in the Pashtun-dominated
Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North-West Frontier Province.
"The F-16s really can't be used for counter-insurgency in FATA," according to
Steve Coll, author of the prize-winning history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and
al-Qaeda from 1979 to 9/11, Ghost Wars and president of the New America
Foundation (NAF). "The F-16s are a symbol of what has been wrong with US aid to
Pakistan."
Increasingly worried about the advances made by the Pakistani Taliban under
Baitullah Mehsud - whom Musharraf blamed for Bhutto's assassination - and the
ineffectiveness of the Pakistani military in fighting it, top US officials have
been discussing plans to authorize the Central Intelligence Agency and Special
Operations Forces to mount cross-border operations from Afghanistan against key
Taliban and al-Qaeda targets.
Such actions, however, would trigger a severe backlash against both the US,
whose popularity in Pakistan, like Musharraf's, is at an all-time low, and any
Pakistani leader who is seen as condoning the raids, according to regional
specialists. Musharraf himself has publicly denounced the idea, although he has
occasionally permitted missile strikes against specific targets by US aircraft
based in Afghanistan.
"It would be political suicide for a Pakistani leader to permit [such
operations]," said Peter Berger, the co-director with Coll of the NAF's
Terrorism and Counter-Insurgency Initiative and a well-regarded expert on
al-Qaeda and the region.
"[Popular] approval for [Osama] bin Laden goes up to 70% in FATA and the
Northwest Frontier," he added, noting that one recent survey showed that three
out of four Pakistanis nationwide oppose US intervention.
The administration is also reportedly mulling plans to try to replicate what it
considers a success in Pakistan - supporting Pashtun clan militias that are
willing to take on Mehsud and his Taliban, although scores of clan leaders who
might have taken up arms have been executed or replaced by various Taliban
factions over the past several years.
A related option - which appears to be the operational strategy at the moment -
is to ensure that at least some US military aid is tied to specific
performance, step up counter-insurgency training for the army and the
paramilitary Frontier Corps, and provide $750 million in development aid to
FATA over five years as part of a long-term effort to weaken the insurgency.
But Christine Fair, a regional specialist at the Rand Corporation, has argued
that such a plan is "four years too late", given the degree to which radical
forces have taken control of the region. "I'm not sure who we would spend it
on," she said at a recent briefing.
US officials are also hoping that next month's elections will produce a large
moderate and secular majority in parliament, oust the radical coalition of
Islamist parties that currently control regional governments in the Pashtun
belt, North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan, and help restore confidence
in the central government which has been badly battered by Musharraf's efforts
over the past year to remain in power.
Jason Motlagh is a freelance journalist based in Delhi. Jim Lobe is
a correspondent for Inter Press Service.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
