http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/printout/0,13155,1376181,00.html Remember This War? In Afghanistan, the Taliban is back, opium output is plentiful, the army and police are weak and reconstruction work is slow. Now NATO is taking over but are its forces ready for the task? BY J.F.O. MCALLISTER / LONDON Abdul Salaam Rocketi, a former frontline Mujahedin commander in Afghanistan, earned a surname that reflects his prowess with rocket-propelled grenades and spent eight months in detention after U.S.-led forces drove out the Taliban in 2001. Now, as a member of the Afghan parliament, he encourages his former Taliban comrades to reconcile with the government of President Hamid Karzai. But he can't visit his constituency in the southern district of Zabul because security is terrible and he's received too many assassination threats. Rocketi is grateful for foreign aid, but frustrated that donors regularly cough up so much less than promised that the country's development can't really take off. "We live like beggars," he says.
It's widely agreed that Afghanistan's national army and police, despite some improvements, are far too small and weak to take on powerful narco-traffickers, local warlords and increasingly audacious Taliban forces; nevertheless, Rocketi despairs at Karzai's recent proposal to recruit tribal militias to become a sort of police auxiliary, which he figures will just encourage them to greater lawlessness and corruption. "These militias destroyed our country," he says, referring to the devastating civil war that shattered Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. "The nation was fed up with them, so the Afghan people welcomed the Taliban. And now the government wants to bring them back? This is madness." Now the greatest military alliance in the world is hoping to transform Afghanistan's madness into some sort of normality. NATO now has 21,000 troops in its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) up from 9,000 in June and will be adding thousands more by the end of the year, when it takes charge of security in the country's eastern sector. The reinforcements are coming primarily from the U.S., Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, though 33 other countries also contribute to isaf. (Around 10,000 troops under direct U.S. control will continue to hunt Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders in the wild reaches straddling the border with Pakistan, where the Taliban maintains bases.) There's a consensus among European political élites that Afghanistan isn't an Iraq; even left-wing governments believe the war there is legal and worth fighting to keep the country from reverting to a safe harbor for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But amid new demands for peacekeepers in south Lebanon and a worsening situation in Afghanistan at least 14 Canadian and British soldiers have been killed and dozens more wounded since the beginning of August NATO countries are unlikely to make further commitments of troops and money, even if that's required to turn Afghanistan around. ISAF's mission is demanding, and getting more so. In late July it took control of the south, a historically neglected region where the Taliban is particularly strong, and it will be in charge of the whole country by the end of the year. "The insurgents are fighting in numbers and with a strength that we didn't anticipate six months ago," says Major Luke Knittig, an ISAF spokesman. Taliban forces, in disarray after coalition forces toppled them from power in 2001, are now able to operate in platoon-sized units of about 40 men, and sometimes larger, and are also employing tactics honed by insurgents in Iraq, including suicide attacks and roadside bombs. Foreign forces have suffered more casualties in the past year than at any time since 2001. After six British soldiers were killed in four weeks earlier this summer, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government hurriedly deployed an additional 900 reinforcements. In mid-August, a plan was announced to pull British troops out of some isolated posts in Helmand province. David Richards, the British lieutenant general now in charge of ISAF, says he will emphasize using his troops to create "zones of security." "I'm more likely to try to facilitate reconstruction and development than just fight," he says. "We can do more of that given our numbers." Perhaps, but the problem is that there are really two Afghanistans. One is the place Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush like to emphasize: where some 6 million people voted democratically last year for their new government and a diverse parliament now operates; where some 4.5 million refugees have been welcomed home from squalid camps in Pakistan and Iran; and where 5 million children now go to school, including girls, who were excluded by the Taliban. With that backdrop, the idea that foreign soldiers can provide a little added security while development projects and local security forces gain momentum does not seem far-fetched. But a much darker set of indicators is also at work. Afghanistan ranks 117 out of 158 on Transparency International's 2005 index of perceived corruption. Around 60% of the population has no electricity, and 80% no potable water. The returning refugees have found few houses or jobs. The country is the world's biggest supplier of opium, the raw material for heroin. The illegal drug economy which some analysts estimate is equivalent to half the country's official gdp corrupts its politics, and finances the Taliban's recruitment of the unemployed and its purchase of high-quality weapons. President Karzai is highly regarded by the foreign politicians who are trying to prop up his government U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called him an "extraordinary leader" on a lightning visit to Kabul in June but instability and unkept promises have sapped his appeal at home. New hospitals and schools stand half finished because money has run out, or because aid agencies have removed their workers for fear of attack. Even in Kabul, the city that has profited most from international aid and a relative stability, many say life has changed little in the last five years. That second Afghanistan is stony soil for ISAF. As troop levels increase in the south, commanders anticipate attacks elsewhere in the country where their forces are not so numerous and helicopters are in short supply. The camps in Pakistan from which Taliban fighters flow into Afghanistan (though Pakistan denies it) are off-limits lest attacks destabilize President Pervez Musharraf. Within Afghanistan, ISAF's rules of engagement don't permit it to attack the Taliban outright, but do permit "proactive self-defense" an ambiguity exacerbated by the differing restrictions each national contingent has negotiated to the rules of engagement that reflect its government's willingness to accept casualties. On a recent trip organized by NATO, Council on Foreign Relations expert Max Boot says he heard "a British officer berating a Dutch air force officer for limiting his activities to tame convoy escorts and not having the guts to engage in real combat." But Afghan forces are hardly ready to take up the slack. Retired U.S. General Barry McCaffrey, after an inspection trip in June, calls the Afghan army "miserably under-resourced," with "no mortars, few machine guns, no grenade machine guns and no artillery. Many soldiers and police have little ammunition and few magazines." The police are even worse off. Mohammad Akhunzada, the former governor of Helmand province in the south, says the police "are overwhelmed. They are fighting the Taliban with no support, with one magazine [of ammunition] between them. Sure, they call in the coalition forces, but they take 24 hours to arrive. How are they supposed to provide security under those conditions?" On top of this is a paradox at the heart of ISAF's strategy: a decision to overlook poppy cultivation, even though the opium trade is a central prop of the Taliban. But an eradication program would suck ISAF into a grinding war with locals who have no other way to earn a living. All that leaves NATO governments in an awkward bind. They have had to acquiesce in the Pentagon's proposed drawdown of some 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan to ease pressure on its forces in Iraq, but their own elastic now seems fully stretched. "The Afghan effort is one people still very much support," says a defense official from France, which has more than 1,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan, "but we've got forces in the Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chad, Congo and Lebanon; there's only so much we can do." Unless NATO members "push this through to a successful end, and all together," says this official, "we may find ourselves back at the drawing board before long." Gianni Vernetti, an Italian Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, praises ISAF as "efficient multilateralism. We have a strong U.N. mandate, and, for us, Afghanistan is a long-term commitment," he says. Prime Minister Romano Prodi's center-left government struggled to keep its majority intact during parliamentary votes in July over whether to reaffirm its existing troop commitments to Afghanistan, but that pledge appears unshaken by Rome's subsequent decision to send a sizable force to Lebanon. Birgit Homburger, deputy head of Germany's Free Democratic Party, joins the European chorus that ISAF's mandate "must be extended. We cannot simply stop halfway through." Nevertheless, a recent poll showed that 56% of Germans want to "withdraw as quickly as possible from the country," with 38% disagreeing. The German parliament is due to vote in September. Can the accumulation of worrying signs be reversed? During a visit to Afghanistan in July, Homburger was surprised by the optimism expressed by both Afghans and foreign workers despite the Taliban's attacks. "The population is aware they are being helped. They do see progress," she says. However, the awful logic of almost-failed states is hard to escape: without security, development is impossible, and without development, security is impossible. Only outside help can break that dynamic. Afghanistan is about to discover whether it may need a little more from its NATO friends than they're prepared to give. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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