U.S.-led coalition losing Afghanistan
Don Melvin
Cox News Service
Sept. 14, 2006 12:00 AM
LONDON - Almost five years after a U.S.-led coalition attacked Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks, experts warn that the country is slipping away.
The Islamic fundamentalist Taliban are back, controlling half the country by some estimates. Fighting in the south is some of the fiercest that Western troops have faced in 50 years.
On Wednesday, NATO announced that suicide bombings have killed 173 people in the country this year amid an escalation of violence that has seen at least 40 militants slain and an aid worker gunned down.
Beyond that, opium production has soared almost 60 percent this year, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. And extreme poverty is driving people back into the arms of the Taliban, according to a European think tank.
In short, many international experts think that the war on terror is on the verge of being lost in Afghanistan while the U.S. forces grapple with continuing problems in Iraq.
"The U.S. has lost control in Afghanistan and has in many ways undercut the new democracy in Afghanistan," said Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of the Senlis Council, a policy research group with offices in London, Paris, Brussels and Afghanistan.
"I think we can call that a failure, and one with dire consequences which should concern us all. The U.S. policies in Afghanistan have re-created the safe haven for terrorism that the 2001 invasion aimed to destroy."
This is a startling reversal from the early heady days. The initial victory came quickly after U.S.-led offensive began on Oct. 7, 2001. Kabul, the capital, fell on Nov. 13. A few days later, most of the country was under the control of the coalition and its Afghan partners, the Northern Alliance.
But things have begun to go very wrong. Violence has flared, particularly in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul. In June, an American-led force of 11,000 troops launched the biggest offensive against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan since 2001, in a push named Operation Mountain Thrust.
The result has been fighting that American and British officers have described as ferocious. An analysis of coalition casualty figures from May 1 to Aug. 12 by the U.K.-based Royal Statistical Society showed that an average of five coalition soldiers were killed by the Taliban every week, twice as many as during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Afghanistan, a mountainous country of 31 million people that is slightly smaller than Texas, has long been a graveyard for foreign troops. Most recently, in 1989, the Soviet Union pulled out after nine years of trying to control the country ended in failure.
On Aug. 1 of this year, 8,000 NATO forces took military control in the south from the U.S.-led coalition. But the situation has not stabilized. NATO commanders are calling for up to 2,500 more troops to augment the 18,500 already there, along with greater air support.
U.S. Gen. James Jones, NATO's supreme allied commander, said the alliance's 26 nations had failed to deliver fully on commitments to staff and equip its force in the country. He said much of the international strategy for Afghanistan's reconstruction was on "life support," the Financial Times newspaper reported.
Foreign ministers from the alliance's 26 member nations will meet in New York next week to discuss NATO's operation in Afghanistan. But so far, the London-based Times newspaper reported, citing unnamed sources, most NATO countries have balked at the thought of sending more troops. Only tiny Latvia is reported to have responded positively, promising to increase its troop presence in Afghanistan from 36 to 56.
Just as violence has increased, opium cultivation has also reached record levels. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crimes reported this month that about 408,000 acres are now being used to grow opium, up 59 percent this year alone. In 2001, during the last year of Taliban rule, the figure was less than 20,000 acres
The Taliban cracked down on opium cultivation then, but now may be thriving on it. Revenue from the harvest is expected to be over $3 billion this year, said Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the Office on Drugs and Crime.
Reinert, of the Senlis Council, believes that efforts to eradicate opium cultivation are part of the reason the U.S.-led coalition has lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghan population.
Farmers whose crops have been forcibly eradicated often have no other means of feeding their families, he said.
"There is a really huge humanitarian crisis in southern Afghanistan," he said. "I have never seen that in Afghanistan before. It's like Darfur. That's like 15 minutes away from the Canadian camp in Kandahar."
While the coalition eradication effort fuels anger, Reinert said, the Taliban, using "social-service tactics," respond to the needs of the poor, compensating farmers whose opium has been eradicated by the coalition.
www.mlive.com/newsflash/international/i ... ernational
NATO chief: More troops for Afghanistan
9/15/2006, 10:46 p.m. ET
By PAUL AMES
The Associated Press
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — NATO's top commander renewed an appeal Friday for allies to urgently provide up to 2,500 troops for the battle with Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan, but officials said it likely would take two weeks before governments reply.
Gen. James L. Jones told a closed meeting of ambassadors from the 26 NATO allies that Poland's welcome offer of 900 troops in February had not diminished the immediate need for more troops, planes and helicopters, according to officials at NATO headquarters.
Diplomats said they expected the call for more troops to feature at a meeting of allied foreign ministers Thursday in New York, but said decisions likely will have to wait until defense ministers gather Sept. 28-29 in Slovenia.
They said governments needed time to assess what forces they could make available, to test political support for deployment and to find funding for such a mission.
Officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was closed.
Canada announced Friday that it was sending tanks and about 200 more soldiers to Afghanistan, bringing its total commitment to 2,500 troops.
Last week, Jones said the reinforcements were needed to pursue the Taliban before the onset of winter enabled them to take refuge in the hills.
Allies have been reluctant to commit forces, as they already are stretched by other international missions and are worried about the risk of high casualties from the tough Taliban resistance.
Although key allies such as Spain, Italy and Turkey have said they would not send combat troops, NATO commanders said they were confident of eventually getting the reinforcements. The delay, however, meant they had less time to be effective before the snows set in.
NATO has about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan. Most are engaged in peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts in the north and west, but since July about 8,000 troops — mostly from Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States — have pushed into the Taliban's southern heartland.
They have been surprised by the ferocity of Taliban resistance and have sustained more than 30 deaths. NATO has said, however, that enemy casualties run into hundreds, and Jones told the ambassadors that an ongoing campaign to push the Taliban out of two key districts west of Kandahar was going well.
NATO Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the possibility of speeding up the Polish deployment was being negotiated. Diplomats said funding from other allies could help facilitate an earlier deployment, and perhaps encourage other financially strapped eastern European nations to participate.
Canada's Defense Department said the reinforcements it was sending include an infantry company, a squadron of about 15 Leopard tanks, some military engineers to bolster Canada's provincial reconstruction team and a special anti-mortar unit.
The Canadian infantry will help protect the provincial reconstruction team while the tanks will provide some heavy-hitting combat support.
Danish Defense Minister Soeren Gade said his country may send special forces to support a separate U.S.-led counterterrorism operation in eastern Afghanistan. Denmark already has about 300 soldiers in southern Afghanistan with the NATO force.
Norwegian Deputy Defense Minister Espen Barth Eide also said his country's government is discussing whether to send more troops. He said no troops would be sent immediately. Norway's three-party coalition government is split on the issue.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/a ... 01103.html
Tensions Overshadow Gains in Afghanistan
Civil Conflict Could Reignite as Stability Remains Elusive
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 16, 2006; Page A18
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 15 -- Despite scattered gains by international troops fighting Taliban insurgents in the country's south, Afghan and foreign analysts here have voiced concern that a recent peace initiative is backfiring and that lapsed Afghan militias could be drawn into the conflict unless it is quickly quelled and replaced by aid and protection.
NATO and U.S. military officials here said this week that an intensive two-week operation against Taliban fighters in Kandahar province had been a tactical success, killing more than 500 insurgents and forcing others to retreat. Afghan and foreign forces also retook a district in neighboring Helmand province that had been seized twice by the Taliban.
But these pockets of progress on the battlefield are part of a larger, murkier political map. As other Afghan militias begin defensively rearming, ethnic tensions have risen, raising the specter of the kind of civil conflict that devastated the country in the early 1990s.
A call for additional troops by NATO's senior commander has so far drawn only one positive response, Poland's offer of 1,000 personnel. Military officials here say pro-government forces need to win key areas soon and to begin delivering aid and security if they are to halt the slide in public support.
"We can't just keep fighting endless battles without having something to offer the next day," a senior Western military official said. "We have killed a lot of Taliban, but they are not running out of foot soldiers, and for every one we kill, we create new families that hate us."
On Sept. 5, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, announced a peace pact with domestic Taliban forces operating in the tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border. The next day, he traveled here to promote the agreement and to try to ease tensions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, saying the two leaders should work together to fight the Taliban and terrorism.
Under the peace deal, Taliban groups in Pakistan pledged not to cross the border to attack in Afghanistan. But since Sept. 5, assaults on Afghan and foreign forces near the Pakistani frontier have continued.
Musharraf, meanwhile, infuriated Afghan officials by making comments in Europe this week that equated members of the Taliban with Pashtuns, the largest Afghan ethnic group, and suggested they were more dangerous than al-Qaeda.
"Associating the Pashtuns with the Taliban is an affront to a community who is eager to establish security and sustainable stability all over Afghanistan," the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. The ministry expressed "profound regret over Pres. Musharraf's attempt to attribute a murderous group and the enemy of peace to one of the ethnic groups living on the both sides of the Durand line."
The Durand Line, arbitrarily drawn by the British in 1893 to separate Afghanistan from what is now Pakistan, is a perennial irritant for both countries. It divides Pashtun tribal lands and is not accepted by many Afghans.
Many Afghans say they suspect that Musharraf's deal with Taliban forces in his own country is an attempt to wash his hands of a domestic problem and push it across the border into Afghanistan. At the same time, they say, he has gratuitously insulted a neighbor that had hosted him just days before.
Musharraf has stood by his pact and denied intending to give offense. He and Karzai are scheduled to meet separately with President Bush in Washington this month. The Bush administration strongly backs both rulers and is eager to patch up their tense relations. Since the overthrow of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers in late 2001, the United States has made a major investment in troops and money in an effort to bring stable and democratic rule to the region as an antidote to Islamic extremism.
Tensions Overshadow Gains in Afghanistan
Inside Afghanistan, persistent and widening attacks by anti-government insurgents have provided ethnic militia leaders in both the north and south with an excuse to regroup and potentially rearm their forces, many of which were disbanded after 2001 under an ambitious, U.N.-sponsored program.
In the Pashtun south, where Afghan army and police forces are underpaid, poorly equipped and scattered thinly across the conflict zone, the government has authorized local police forces to form auxiliary contingents, most likely drawing on idle former militiamen. In some cases, tribal leaders have threatened to form their own defense forces.
In the north and west, dominated by the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups, former Islamic militia figures who fought Soviet troops in the 1980s are said to virtually control daily life in many areas. Despite a new program to disarm and pacify the region, Afghan and foreign observers said some commanders appear to be gaining further strength as the Taliban threat draws closer and villagers seek powerful patrons to protect them.
"In the north, they ask how they can be expected to disarm if the south is arming itself," said one Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. Ethnic divisions are so deep in Afghanistan, the diplomat added, that if the Karzai government were to fall, civil conflict might resume almost immediately.
"Five years ago, the Taliban were very weak and the warlords had all fled the country," said Sayed Daud, director of the Afghan Media Resource Center, a nonprofit research agency. "Now the Taliban are back and the warlords are back. They have made a lot of money, they have weapons, and the government can't touch them."
The insurgency continues to spread beyond the south. In the past week, fresh attacks have taken place as far apart as Ghazni province in the east, where Taliban and NATO forces have been battling over several villages, and Farah province in the far west, where 150 Taliban fighters stormed the provincial capital and others shot and killed an Afghan U.N. employee.
But the most urgent need, military officials and diplomats said, is to contain the southern conflict, defeat the insurgents in key districts of Kandahar and Helmand, and begin providing support to civilians there.
British and Canadian troops have fought intensely and suffered numerous casualties since NATO took over command of the southern front from the U.S.-led coalition on July 31. But military and diplomatic observers cited concern that forces from other NATO countries, operating under narrower mandates laid down by edgy governments, will not shoulder enough of the burden.
"A great deal is at stake here for NATO. It's their first operation outside Europe and an important test case," said one foreign observer. "If the fighting worsens, some members may ask whether it is worth the risk, and some may ask why they should put their soldiers in harm's way while others are sitting in easy places."
Even more is at stake for Afghans, who felt abandoned by their Western supporters after Soviet troops withdrew in 1989 and now fear the same could happen again. NATO and U.S. military officials reiterated this week that their commitment is long-term, but they also said time is running short.
"It took us four years to learn how to operate here. NATO doesn't have four years," a U.S. military official said. "It's not enough to kill Taliban. We're trying to help build a government that is weak and still fighting off the competition. That's the really hard part."
Come on, The USSR couldn't hold the country in nine years. And they're probably even less concerned with "honest" war.
