WASHINGTON - While United States officials insist they are making progress in
reversing the momentum built up by the Taliban insurgency over the past several
years, the latest news from Afghanistan suggests the opposite may be closer to
the truth.
Even senior military officials are conceding privately that their much-touted
new counter-insurgency strategy of "clear, hold and build" in contested areas
of the Pashtun southern and eastern parts of the country is not working out as
planned, despite the "surge" of some 20,000 additional US troops over the past
six months.
Casualties among the nearly 130,000 US and other North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) troops now deployed in Afghanistan are also mounting
quickly.
Four US troops were killed on Wednesday when Taliban fire brought down their
helicopter in the southern province of Helmand, the scene of a major US
offensive centered on the strategic farming region of Marjah over the past
several months.
That brought the death toll of NATO soldiers this week alone to 23, including
10 killed in various attacks around the country on Monday, the deadliest day
for NATO forces in two years.
"It's been a tough week," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Wednesday.
Seventeen of the 23 were US soldiers, bringing the total US death toll in and
around Afghanistan since the US intervened to oust the Taliban from power in
late 2001 to more than 1,100, according to the independent iCasualties website.
While senior military officials attributed the steadily rising toll to
Washington's surge of a total of 30,000 additional troops by next month, as
well as the beginning of the Taliban's annual spring offensive, none other than
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that the US and its NATO allies were
running out of time to show results.
"The one thing none of the [alliance's] publics ... including the American
public, will tolerate is the perception of stalemate in which we're losing
young men," he said in London on Wednesday on the eve of a key NATO ministerial
meeting in Brussels this week at which Afghanistan will top the agenda and
Gates himself is expected to prod his interlocutors to fulfill pledges to
provide more troops.
"All of us, for our publics, are going to have to show by the end of the year
that our strategy is on the track, making some headway," he said.
Obama, who last November set a July 2011 as the date after which Washington
would begin to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, has said his administration
will conduct a major review of US strategy and whether it is working at the end
of this year.
The latest polling here shows a noticeable erosion of support for Washington's
commitment to the war compared to eight months ago when Obama agreed to the
Pentagon's recommendations to send the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan
to bring the total US presence there to around 100,000.
An additional 34,000 troops from NATO and non-NATO allies are supposed to be
deployed there by year's end.
According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Thursday, 53% of
respondents said the war in Afghanistan, which last month, according to most
measures, exceeded the Vietnam conflict as the longest-running war in US
history, was "not worth fighting". That was the highest percentage in more than
three years.
The same poll found that 39% of the public believe that Washington is losing
the war, compared to 42% who believe it is winning.
While public skepticism about the war appears to be growing, the foreign policy
elite, including within the military, also seems increasingly doubtful for a
number of reasons.
Disillusionment with President Hamid Karzai - already running high as a result
of last year's rigged elections and his tolerance for government and family
corruption - gained new momentum last weekend with the forced resignations of
his two top security officials, Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and intelligence
chief Amrullah Saleh, who were considered by Western officials as among the
most competent of Karzai's cabinet members.
The two men reportedly objected strongly to Karzai's order to release all
accused Taliban prisoners who are being held without enough evidence for
trials.
The order was seen as the latest in a series of moves designed to reconcile
with the Taliban leadership, a step that Washington has strongly opposed until
now.
Among other things, the US fears that such a move could prompt leaders of the
Northern Alliance, which consists of non-Pashtun groups, to break with the
government and prepare for renewed civil war of the kind that devastated
Afghanistan before the Taliban first took control in 1996.
Karzai's bid for reconciliation stems from his conviction, according to a
number of accounts, that US strategy is unlikely to succeed in weakening - let
alone defeating - the Taliban and that his hold on power will ultimately rely
on reaching an accommodation with them.
That impression may well be grounded in an accurate assessment of the way
Washington's counter-insurgency strategy is actually playing out.
Indeed, the Marjah campaign, which was heralded as a major test of Washington's
new strategy when it was launched in February, appears to be faltering badly.
Late last month, Washington's overall military commander, General Stanley
McChrystal, even referred to it as "a bleeding ulcer".
While it initially succeeded in "clearing" Taliban from the region McChrystal's
pledge that US troops would bring with them an Afghan "government in a box"
that would provide basic security and social services proved, as a feature
story in Thursday's Washington Post described it, "largely empty".
As a result of local disillusionment with the police and the very few Afghan
civilian officials that followed the US military into the area, insurgents have
regrouped and in some areas regained the offensive, according to the latest
reports. One recent study found that the majority of the population had become
more antagonistic to NATO forces than was the case before the operation began.
The Marjah experience has cast doubt on a yet more ambitious and strategically
critical operation planned for Kandahar.
While Washington had initially planned to launch a major military operation to
"clear" Taliban from neighborhoods in and around the city before introducing
the civilian component of the counterinsurgency strategy, it has now reversed
the order in hopes of not alienating the local population as it did in Marjah.
But the presence of more police and civilian officials will no doubt require a
build-up of NATO troops to protect them, particularly in light of a stepped-up
and highly effective Taliban campaign to intimidate government officials who
are perceived as cooperating with the Western forces by assassinating selected
targets, including even low-level bureaucrats.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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