WASHINGTON - While top officials in the
Barack Obama administration insist that the United
States' strategy in Afghanistan is working, the
violent aftermath of last week's apparently
inadvertent burning of copies of the Koran at a
military base is fueling growing pessimism about
the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) mission there.
Some three dozen
Afghans were killed in anti-US protests that drew
tens of thousands of people into the streets in
Kabul and other cities around the country
following news of the incineration at Bagram Air
Base and despite a series of apologies from US
commanders all the way up to President Obama
himself.
Two US military officers working
at a supposedly secure site in Afghanistan's
Interior Ministry were also shot execution-style
by an Afghan security official in apparent
retaliation for the burnings
in what was the latest
of 36 "fratricidal" Afghan attacks on foreign
troops in the US-led International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) in the past 14 months.
That the assailant escaped suggested that he may
have been supported by others in the ministry.
Their killings prompted ISAF commander US
Gen John Allen to order all ISAF and US staff
working in Afghan ministries to leave their posts
temporarily. Officials here said Tuesday they did
not know when the order would be lifted.
On Monday, nine Afghans were killed when a
car bomber detonated his vehicle at the entrance
of an air base used by US and ISAF forces in
Jalalabad, a city in northeastern Afghanistan,
which late last month celebrated the transfer of
control over security from ISAF to Afghan national
forces.
"It has been a truly grim week and
one where these events raise questions about US
strategy and the value of continuing with the
current approach to the war," wrote Anthony
Cordesman, a highly respected military and
security expert at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), in a lengthy
commentary released Monday under the dour title of
"Afghanistan: The Death of a Strategy".
He
noted that the increasing unpopularity of US and
ISAF troops was just one factor - along with
persistent government corruption and incompetence
and Pakistan's tolerance and support of Taliban
sanctuaries - among several others that challenged
the basic assumptions of the counter-insurgency
(COIN) strategy the Obama administration adopted
in 2009.
Cordesman concluded that it was
"now clear that withdrawal timetables will
continue to accelerate, cutbacks will continue to
grow, and popular attention will continue to shift
away from Afghanistan."
Indeed, most
analysts here predicted that the past week's
events are likely to hasten the withdrawal of US
and other foreign combat troops from Afghanistan
through 2014, leaving only an as yet undetermined
number of military and police advisers and
trainers, according to NATO's current timetable.
"The US public has trouble understanding
why the United States continues to sink blood and
treasure into Afghanistan when the people we are
trying to help are killing us," Andrew Exum, a
counterinsurgency specialist at the Center for a
New American Security, told the Los Angeles Times.
Washington, which has some 90,000 US
troops deployed in Afghanistan, is scheduled to
reduce that number to 68,000 by this September.
The pace at which the remaining troops
will be withdrawn has been a major source of
contention both within the administration and
between Republicans, who generally have favored
maintaining as many troops - and bases - in
Afghanistan as long as possible, and most
Democratic lawmakers who have repeatedly pressed
for an accelerated withdrawal.
Nonetheless, the administration is
standing firm, at least for now. "This is not an
endless commitment that will take lives far into
the future," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
told unhappy Democrats during a Senate hearing
Tuesday.
"[W]e have made progress on the
principal reason we were there - security. Because
of our platform and our presence in Afghanistan,
we've been able to target terrorists, particularly
top al-Qaeda operatives, including [Osama] bin
Laden in their safe havens. And we have made
progress in helping the Afghan people."
Likewise, NATO Secretary-General Anders
Fogh Rasmussen told an audience here Tuesday that
his forces will "continue to stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with our Afghan partners. We
are in Afghanistan to build stability and security
for the Afghan people, which is in the interest of
our own security."
But given the most
recent events, particularly the "fratricidal", or
"green-on-blue", attacks by Afghans on ISAF
forces, Rasmussen's determination is likely to be
severely tested, especially when NATO chiefs meet
again to discuss Afghanistan strategy in Chicago
in May.
Indeed, it was the killing by an
Afghan soldier last month of four French troops at
a fortified base that prompted President Nicolas
Sarkozy to decide to withdraw all of France's
nearly 4,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of
2013, a year before their scheduled departure.
Last Friday, the German contingent also announced
it had closed one of its military outposts in the
face of anti-NATO demonstrations touched off by
the book burning.
Just a few days before
the Koran burning, another two US soldiers were
killed by an Afghan soldier in eastern Nangahar
province near the Pakistani border.
While
US and NATO officials have routinely described
these attacks as "isolated" incidents, a
classified report disclosed by the New York Times
last month found that explanation "disingenuous,
if not profoundly intellectually dishonest".
"Lethal altercations are clearly not rare
or isolated," according to the report, which was
drafted last May by a US command in eastern
Afghanistan. "They reflect a rapidly growing
systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may
be unprecedented between 'allies' in modern
military history)."
The report found that
the animosity of Afghan soldiers was fed by many
factors, including traffic disruption caused by US
convoys; indiscriminate US fire that causes
civilian casualties, the use of flawed
intelligence sources, US road blocks, night raids,
violation of female privacy during searches; past
massacres by US forces; rudeness, disrespect and
arrogance in dealing with Afghan soldiers, and
unnecessarily shooting animals.
For their
part, US troops complained of illicit drug use,
"massive thievery", incompetence, corruption,
covert alliances with insurgents, laziness, and
poor hygiene, among other criticisms, by their
Afghan counterparts.
The report's
disclosure, as noted by tomdispatch.com, came
during the same week that a videotape of four US
Marines casually urinating on the corpses of dead
Afghans circulated on the Internet, another in an
accumulating, decade-long series of incidents,
including the bombing by US warplanes earlier this
month of eight young shepherds, ranging in age
from six to 18, that have alienated Afghans from
their Western "allies".
"If we are not
able to restore trust between Afghan and coalition
troops, then the strategy is unworkable," John
Nagl, another counter-insurgency specialist at the
US Naval Academy, told McClatchy newspapers this
week.
Jim Lobe's blog on US
foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
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
