yolland
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Parts 1 & 2 of an interesting series currently running over at slate.com on the current status of the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. I chopped off quite a bit of the first article.
Interesting that he doesn't even touch on how relations with Pakistan fit into the whole picture.
And here's Part 2:Knitting Together an Afghan Strategy
By Fred Kaplan
KABUL, June 20, 2006--NATO, it turns out, does have a strategy for Afghanistan—an intriguing mix of military force, economic development, and political empowerment that combines classic counterinsurgency theory with high-tech communications and more than a dollop of precision air power.
...the Western campaign here is huge, much bigger than most press accounts indicate. The air base in Kandahar, an hour's flight south of Kabul and the center of constant clashes with Taliban insurgents, is breathtakingly enormous—a 9-mile perimeter holding 10,000 personnel, a 10,000-foot runway (in the process of being doubled in size), hangars and parking spaces for over 100 jets and helicopters, as well as a handful of Predator drones. The base is, as one British officer puts it, "one of the busiest military airfields in the world"—and it's getting busier and bigger all the time. Back in Kabul, an elaborate underground Command Joint Operations Center monitors and coordinates all military activity. Three enormous screens display detailed maps marking the location of U.S., NATO, and insurgent forces. Communications centers receive requests for air support—and transmit the orders to provide it. A bigger center is being constructed to link joint operations to a new joint intelligence command. The point is, NATO seems here to stay for a long time—or at least it wants to convey this impression to the Afghan government and people, to the Taliban insurgents, and, not least, to itself. The Afghan operation marks the first time NATO has led a major expeditionary combat force outside Europe, which is why the mission is regarded as a threshold—a test of whether alliances in general have a role in these sorts of conflicts and of whether this alliance in particular has any role in the post-Cold War world.
Problems have surfaced already. Spokesmen boast that 27 NATO nations are taking part in the operation. But, besides the United States, only four—Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, and Romania—have agreed to let their troops be stationed in Afghanistan's southern provinces, where almost all the fighting with insurgents is happening.
U.S. and NATO commanders have sent throughout the country 21 Provincial Reconstruction Teams—joint civil-military projects—to do reconstruction work. But then, starting a couple of months ago, the Taliban gummed up the works by going on the rampage after four years of relative calm. European politicians, who thought they'd voted to let their troops join NATO peacekeeping operations, suddenly found themselves in a shooting war. And the NATO commanders' subtle distinction between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency—with its implicit jab at the bomb-happy Americans vs. the civilized road-builders of the alliance—began to blur. Only a handful of PRTs have managed significant progress, and even their beneficiaries fear reversals if the security forces leave too early. In the PRT at Qalat, a town just north of Kandahar, the two U.S. Army companies are about to be replaced by two Romanian companies. Over the course of a 10-minute talk, the governor of Qalat told a group of foreign visitors three times, "Please don't let the Americans leave."
Even the headiest multilateralists are beginning to wonder if the transfer of authority, from the United States to NATO, might be premature. So, a division of labor is materializing. When the transfer takes place this fall, about 7,000 Americans will join the roughly 11,000 troops now under NATO command. But another 13,000 Americans based here will remain under separate U.S. command.
NATO officers don't like to spell out this distinction. They want to convey an impression of a coherent and unified command. To a remarkable degree, they're succeeding. It's striking to see German, Dutch, British, and, yes, American officers working in the same room as if they were equals. But on a fundamental level, the Americans are still leading the pack, doing things that European politicians cannot agree among themselves to do. Quietly, many NATO officers prefer it this way. And this may be the best approach from an American standpoint as well. Better this, in any case, than having to pick up the entire burden, in cost, lives, and ill-fated stabs at legitimacy.
By the fall, the United States and NATO will have, all told, 33,000 troops in Afghanistan—only half of whom are currently permitted to go fight in the south. This is a big country. Just the dangerous southern provinces—Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and Uruzgan—are, together, nearly as big as Germany. We may not have enough troops to control them.
There are three ways to expand troop levels. First, the Afghan national army could hold the lid on secured areas. Well, maybe some day. Judging from a quick tour of the ANA's training center in Kabul, this is as yet a nascent army: inexperienced, ill-equipped, able at best to fight alongside Western armies but not at all on its own. The Western governments have agreed to build up this army to 70,000 troops. (It currently totals 30,000.) But Gen. Mohammad Amin Wardaq, an Afghan army veteran and the commander of the training center, said that 70,000 "is a small number, a very small number." (Pentagon officials have recently said the number might shrink further, to 50,000.)
Second, there are the Afghan police, but they tend to be not just ill-equipped but incompetent and corrupt. One NATO officer notes: "They haven't been paid for three months—some not for six or seven months. How could they not be corrupt?" A reform campaign by President Hamid Karzai is improving things, but only slightly. Terence Jagger, Gen. Richards' political adviser, quoted one international study noting that of Karzai's 86 recent picks for chiefs of police, 13 are "corrupt, depraved, or both."
A third possibility is that the United States, NATO, or both will simply have to pour in more troops as their successes build. Is this likely? Much depends on whether there are successes—and whether they inspire Western nations to build on the achievements or declare victory and go home.
Are there any lessons for Iraq to be learned from here? Or are the two situations just wholly different from the get-go? And how much is too much to spend--economically, militarily, timewise and otherwise--on rebuilding Afghanistan?Can Freedom and Opium Coexist?
KABUL, June 21—A military aide at NATO's headquarters in Afghanistan told me a story that explains how hard it will be to win the war here: "An Afghan farmer stops growing poppies and shifts to wheat. But the Soviets destroyed the irrigation system 30 years ago, so he can't grow much. There are no good roads, so he can't deliver what he has grown to market. There's no money for silos, so he can't store the crop for another season. His drug dealer pays a visit, says he doesn't want wheat, and tells the farmer to pay him $3,000—the sum he would have made by selling opium from the poppies—or he'll kidnap the farmer's daughter. The farmer goes to the chief of police, who reminds him that the drug dealer is the regional governor's brother-in-law, and asks him, 'Where's the $500 you owe me for protecting your property this year?' "
It's the story, the aide said, of hundreds of farmers all over Afghanistan, and it's a story that is corrupting everything about Afghan life. Opium poppy production, which totals 4,100 metric tons a year, accounts for a huge share of the Afghan economy—and of the Taliban's operational fund. (If a drug dealer isn't one of the insurgents, he's often coerced into giving them a slice of his revenue.) In short, Afghan's security problem and its economic problem are interrelated.
More than 20,000 (soon more than 30,000) U.S. and NATO troops are in Afghanistan, trying to keep the country intact. A year or two ago, some military commanders, especially from the United States, Canada, and Britain, thought the best way to deal with the opium-Taliban nexus was simply to torch the poppy fields. But they—along with officers from most of the other NATO nations—soon realized that instant eradication was impractical and counterproductive. Poppy seeds are robust; they can be replanted quickly, require almost no water, last a long time, and are easy to transport. Meanwhile, the torching only alienated the farmers from the government (which was being propped up by those doing the torching) and drove them into the arms of the Taliban. "This is a counterinsurgency operation; we're trying to win hearts and minds," one high-ranking officer said during a NATO-sponsored visit to Kabul and Kandahar last week. "The last thing you want to do is deprive the farmers of their livelihood."
So, here's the task that NATO commanders now know they must perform: First, rout the Taliban, province by province. Then provide the farmers alternative livelihoods—and the infrastructure (roads, waterlines, and so forth) to sustain them. And they have to do this quickly, to show the people that they can turn to the Afghan government for basic needs—and that, therefore, they don't have to turn to the Taliban.
There's a further complication. The Afghan government isn't up to taking a lead or even providing much support. "There are one or two really able people in President [Hamid] Karzai's Cabinet," a NATO political adviser said, "but otherwise, the civil service is really weak." The army is still in formation. The Treasury's cupboard is bare. The Ministry of Interior has "remarkably little capacity to do anything." Local and regional governments are weaker still, mainly because they have such scant talent, so few resources, and thus so little power. Finally, there's the pervasiveness of the drug economy. An officer involved in coordinating counternarcotics policy estimated that a quarter-million Afghans are directly involved in poppy production. Worse still is the corruption that the trade has generated. "You won't find more than a handful of politicians in this country," the officer said, "who don't have some hand in the drug business."
One problem is that, in many areas, security doesn't allow much; life is too dangerous for development to take hold. (Several nonprofit organizations have pulled out after seeing too many of their specialists killed.) Another problem is that the operations are uneven and diffuse. A "provincial development center," which is supposed to set a common agenda for the PRTs, hasn't met since April. Money abounds, from governments and the private sector, but there's no mechanism for fast-track contracting. The PRTs themselves each combine a dozen or more entities with no clear hierarchy.
Still, Afghanistan is making "unspectacular progress," as one NATO political adviser put it, and that's good in two ways—the progress itself and the modesty of the claim. Unlike Iraq in the days just before and after Saddam fell, you don't hear wide-eyed officials singing prophecies of Afghan Jeffersons or de Tocquevilles. The writers and analysts who went on this NATO-sponsored trip last week were handed several "mission statements" by various officers. None of them put it quite so starkly, but they all boil down to this: Create an environment sufficiently secure to let the Afghan government muddle through. Gen. David Richards, NATO's commander in Afghanistan, was most direct. "Don't try to impose Western precepts on what is basically a post-medieval society," he said. "People here want basic things. They want them quickly. Go to places that need governance. Listen. Send in engineers. Within a week, send in bulldozers. Build roads. Don't talk about sophisticated structures of government or demands for gender equality." Put in these terms, if the West is willing to pour in a lot of money, materiel, and manpower (though far, far less than we've squandered in Iraq) and stays put for, say, a decade, the task is feasible.
Consider what's gone on here the last quarter-century. The United States helped the mujahideen kick out the Soviet invaders—then we abandoned the place; the Cold War was won, who cares about Afghanistan? The Taliban filled the vacuum and opened the gates to al-Qaida. After 9/11, the United States helped the Northern Alliance kick out the Taliban—then, remarkably, left the place once again, or at least the southern provinces. The Taliban once more moved in. (The surge of fighting in the south these last few months stems not so much from the Taliban's return—they came back a while ago—as from the West's return, prompting Taliban resistance.) [Last quarter-century? More like the last 24 centuries! Seriously, these have to be among the most battle-hardened people on the planet.--y.]
An anarchic Afghanistan is in nobody's interest. The country's poppy fields account for 87 percent of the world's opium and heroin supply. They also fill the Taliban's coffers. The return of Taliban rule will wreak havoc not only here but across the border in Pakistan and beyond—maybe, as before, far beyond. If the United States and NATO packed up tomorrow, the place would fall apart for sure. In the end, preventing that dim prospect is what this operation is all about.
Interesting that he doesn't even touch on how relations with Pakistan fit into the whole picture.
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