WASHINGTON - After months of planning and putting pieces in order, aspects of
the new United States strategy in Afghanistan are beginning to be concretely
implemented - including a surge of troops and attempts to curtail the poppy
trade that allegedly funds insurgents.
But some aspects of the new strategy are lagging behind, and questions linger
about the feasibility of winning by concentrating new US forces in
Afghanistan's south and east, where the Taliban has largely established full
control.
On Thursday, 4,000 US Marines made their way by helicopter into Afghanistan's
enormous Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold
in the south where poppy cultivation runs rampant.
Those troops, part of the 21,000 additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by US
President Barack Obama, are being given a different objective than past
incursions into Taliban-controlled territory: the seek-and-destroy missions
against Taliban commanders and safe houses are being replaced with an attempt
to create a sustained presence in Afghanistan to allow for the growth of good
governance.
Indeed, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the ground gained
by the Taliban since the militant group's government dissolved in 2001 was
because the Afghan national government had failed to fill the void in the
provinces. Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, is sometimes ridiculed as the
"mayor of Kabul", the capital, because of his government's limited reach.
With no one to turn to for protection or, for example, to handle judicial
disputes, the Taliban provided the only alternative.
The US strategy hopes to mend this trust deficit between the international
coalition and Afghans by providing services: "Our focus is not the Taliban,"
Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson was quoted as telling his officers before
they moved into Helmand. "Our focus must be on getting this government back on
its feet."
The US troops will not be relegated to their bases when not on specific
missions.
"We're doing this very differently," Nicholson said, according to the
Washington Post. "We're going to be with the people. We're not going to drive
to work. We're going to walk to work."
The tactical shift - in line with the strategic counter-insurgency principle of
winning over the local population - is a welcome change for many who were
disturbed by the gains made by Taliban in the past few years, when US
priorities were elsewhere. But some voices have been warning that the strategy
may not be the best one.
In contrast to the perceptions of many outsiders, writes Gilles Dorronsoro, an
Afghanistan expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the
Taliban are not a disjointed group of fighters. Rather, the "professional"
insurgent force has a cohesive strategy, strong national communications and
intelligence networks, a robust propaganda operation, and is even finding
allies outside its ethnic Pashtun roots.
"These developments, and the strength of the insurgency, makes the current
coalition strategy of focusing its reinforcements in the South [Helmand and
Kandahar] risky to say the least," writes Dorronsoro in his latest report for
Carnegie, "The Taliban's Winning Strategy in Afghanistan."
"The insurgency has made significant inroads in the past months, consolidating
its grip in the south and the east, securing the sanctuary in Pakistan, and
opening new fronts in the north. The situation around Kabul is unclear," he
writes.
"The biggest mistake is to concentrate the reinforcements in the south, while
failing to react quickly and decisively to stop Taliban inroads in the north,
where success now would be achievable," write Dorronsoro.
In other words, while focusing on a very uphill battle in the south, the US-
and North Atlantic Treaty organization-led coalition risks losing the north and
Kabul. If that were to occur, the Taliban would be a full-fledged national
insurgency, and chances of coalition success would drop precipitously.
But despite such warnings, it appears that the US will indeed focus a
significant portion of its new resources on the south.
In addition to the 21,000 additional troops already ordered, Joint Chiefs of
Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, the top US military commander, told the
Washington Post that General Stanley McChrystal, the new top commander in
Afghanistan, will have latitude to make requests for more troops.
McChrystal is in the middle of a two-month review of the war effort, and Mullen
said he has been told, "You come back and ask for what you need."
But even as Mullen told the Post that the war cannot be won by military means
alone, serious deficits are coming to light in other areas.
Part of the new strategy for Afghanistan was supposed to be what was called a
"diplomatic surge" - an influx of State Department and US Agency for
International Development officials to help with reconstruction and governance
issues. But that surge has yet to materialize in any significant way.
The Washington Post reported from Afghanistan that only two new state officials
were joining marines in Helmand, with a dozen more promised for later this
year. The marines are filling the gap with 50 military civilian affairs
experts.
Nicholson emphasized this dual capacity of the marines' mission in Helmand:
"We're not going to measure your success by the number of times your ammunition
is resupplied," he told officers. "You're going to drink lots of tea. You're
going to eat lots of goat. Get to know the people."
On Saturday in Trieste, Italy, in conferences set up around the Group of Eight
meeting there, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard
Holbrooke, told allies that the US strategy to cull the poppy trade in
Afghanistan was being radically shifted.
Afghan poppies supply more than 90% of the world's heroin, with about 50% of
that coming from Helmand. Some of the profits are allegedly funding the
Taliban.
The past US policy has been poppy eradication, but will be shifted to focus on
alternative crops for farmers.
"The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a
failure," Holbrooke said, according to Reuters. "They did not result in any
damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated
people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban."
"The poppy farmer is not our enemy. The Taliban are," he said.
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