The difficult global inheritance of the United States administration of Barack Obama is exemplified in the possible loss of the Manas air-base in Kyrgyzstan. This would be a painful event in any circumstance, not least as it may involve the Bishkek government making a deal with Russia that would further signal a changing geopolitical balance in the region. But the troubles the US and its allies are facing in Afghanistan means that this is a particularly bad time to be threatened with a loss of facilities and influence in another part of central Asia.
The latest developments in Afghanistan represent a decisive phase in the ongoing struggle since the Taliban regime was terminated at the end of 2001. The low-level but enduring insurgency in southeast Afghanistan that then ensued left much of the rest of the country relatively stable, until Taliban militia began to make a serious comeback in 2004-05. The response was a build-up of Nato troops in the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), and a separate expansion of United States combat-troops under direct US command.
In the 2005-07 period, a pattern emerged of a developing insurgency whose most intensive periods of violence were in the summer but which tended to be relatively quiet in the winter months. A certain increase of violence in the winter of 2007-08 was a departure from the established cycle, without itself being a definitive break. In the past few days, however, four indicators suggest a real winter escalation in Taliban activity.
The Taliban’s reminder
The first event is the killing of twenty-one police officers and the wounding of eight more in a suicide-attack on 2 February 2009 in Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province. This province has been less prone to violence than the neighbouring provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, but that relative calm is now ending.
The second indicator is the increased number of attacks on convoy-routes through Pakistan into Afghanistan, through which at least 75% of Nato supplies travel. Many of these have been directed at individual trucks, though some have targeted major supply-depots. An operation, also on 2 February, took a different form: it demolished a thirty-metre-span iron bridge, twenty-three kilometres west of the Pakistani city of Peshawar. This has severed the supply-lines along the most important route, which cannot be restored until the bridge can be prepared.
The third factor is mounting evidence that combat-trained paramilitaries who have previously been in Iraq are now seeing Afghanistan as the main focus in the war with the “far enemy” of the United States and are moving there in large numbers, possibly in the thousands (see Sayed Salahuddin, “Afghanistan says foreign fighters coming from Iraq“, International Herald Tribune, 4 February 2009)
The overall number of Taliban fighters active within Afghanistan is estimated at 15,000; this may be a misleading figure in that far larger numbers may by present or inactive, or else based in Pakistan. The significant point is that, according to Afghan defence minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, in some of the conflicts with groups of Taliban paramilitaries last year, as many as 60% of the fighters were foreign (see “Iraq militants ‘in Afghan switch’“, BBC News, 4 February 2009).
This growing internationalisation of the conflict has been underway for some time; it now appears to be accelerating. It is part of and in turn reinforces the view within the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups that they are engaged less in a nationalist endeavour to retake control of Afghanistan, but rather militants in a global campaign.
The fourth feature is that the United States army has taken the unusual step of deploying substantial numbers of additional combat-troops to Afghanistan in the middle of winter, rather than wait until a likely upsurge in conflict from May 2009 onwards. Almost 3,000 troops from the 10th Mountain Division have been deployed to Logar and Wardak provinces south of Kabul; they will be followed by the much larger number – possibly as many as 30,000 – who are likely to be sent to Afghanistan during the rest of 2009 (see Fisnik Abrashi, “NATO: 3,000 US Troops Deploy Near To Afghan Capital“, Associated Press, 27 January 2009)
The investment of new forces is combined with a shift of thinking at senior levels in the Pentagon towards a greater focus on “counterinsurgency”. This is embodied in a new and still secret report from the US joint chiefs-of-staff to President Obama, which recommends “a shift in the military mission in Afghanistan to concentrate solely on combatting the Taliban and al-Qaida”.
An account of the background says:
“The Pentagon is prepared to announce the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan as early as this week even as President Barack Obama is searching for his own strategy for the war. According to military officials during last week’s meeting with Defense Secretary [Robert] Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon’s ‘tank’, the president specifically asked, ‘What is the end game?’ in the U.S. military’s strategy for Afghanistan. When asked what the answer was, one military official told NBC News, ‘Frankly, we don’t have one.’…” (see Jim Miklaszewski & Courtney Kube, “Secret report recommends military shift in Afghanistan“, NBC News, 4 February 2009).
The moving target
A key indicator of just how complex the conflict has become for the United States and its allies is the attacks on the coalition’s supply-lines. These have been largely secure throughout most years of the current Afghan war, even though much of the territory through which the trucks drove has been controlled by local tribal groups with connections to the Pakistani Taliban. The reason is that the contractors running the trucks have regularly paid “taxes” – in essence, protection-money – to these groups. Some of this money has been passed on to Taliban militia who used it to help finance the insurgency (see Tim Ripley, “Hanging by a thread”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, February 2009 [subscription only]).
This situation – a combination of tacit truce, strategic denial, and convenient subvention of the enemy – has effectively broken down. The contributory reasons include the wider escalation in the conflict over 2008, when much of western Pakistan became a safe haven for Taliban and other militia groups and the widespread use of armed drones to attack presumed Taliban and al-Qaida targets within Pakistan in response inflicted many civilian casualties and infuriated local people. The new vulnerability of supply-lines is a result.
But this is just one aspect of a general decline in security across most of southern and eastern Afghanistan, a matter of intense concern to the young Barack Obama administration. The commitment of the new team in Washington (albeit with some familiar faces still in charge) to a major “surge” in the number of US forces also builds on plans already made under George W Bush, but with a twist: for the purpose is less to seek outright military victory than to exert sufficient force to bring cooperative elements of a weakened Taliban into negotiations.
The argument is neat but flawed, for the addition of foreign troops may also – as a new report by the analyst Gilles Dorronsoro argues – itself provoke increased Afghan resistance (see Focus and Exit: An Alternative Strategy for the Afghan War, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2009). This is a view shared by many British soldiers returning from recent deployments in Afghanistan.
The critical moment
It is not clear how Washington’s analysist will evolve in a fluid military and diplomatic situation, and in circumstances where the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is coming under severe domestic pressure in an election year. Much much will depend on high-level deliberations around the time of Nato’s sixtieth anniversary summit (hosted jointly by France and Germany) on 3-4 April 2009. The annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, to be held on 6-8 February 2009, may be crucial in influencing its outcome; the seriousness of the US’s concerns at this stage is reflected in the presence of vice-president Joe Biden, national-security adviser General James Jones, the head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, and the special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke (see Gerhard Spoerl, “Searching for a New World Order“, SpiegelOnline, 30 January 2009).
In both Munich and at the Strasbourg-Kehl summit, a key point of discussion is whether other Nato states will increase their involvement in Afghanistan. Three Nato members are key to this – the Canadians, Dutch and British. These are the only states other than the US that have deployed substantial numbers of troops for combat-roles in southern Afghanistan. The decision by these states over whether to increase their forces will be crucial to influencing other Nato member-states.
At present the signs are that they will not commit to large new deployments. There is little enthusiasm in the Netherlands; the mood in Canada favours progressive disengagement. The fact that Britain has more combat-troops in Afghanistan than any country apart from the United States makes its choice the most significant of the three; and the government of Gordon Brown (anxious, apart from other motives, to be seen to work closely with the Barack Obama administration), has sent a few hundred more soldiers to Afghanistan.
Inside the British army itself, however, there is widespread unease and disenchantment with the country’s role in Afghanistan (though this rarely enters the public domain). It will be very hard for the London government to persuading the military to agree to a serious upgrade of numbers and commitment.
The reluctance of allies, a relentless insurgency, doubts over the Afghan government, pressure from competing priorities – all this adds up to a difficult induction for Barack Obama’s Afghan policy. If it remains committed to an Iraq-style “surge” in Afghanistan, it may need to pursue this policy in the absence of the solid Nato support it needs. Yet this would conflict with the president’s determination to be much more multilateral than his predecessor.
The tensions are multiplying – perhaps enough to ensure a fundamental rethink of United States policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The period around Nato’s sixtieth anniversary may be even more worth watching.
Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001here
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click
Paul Rogers’s most recent book is Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) – an analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 era and why a new security paradigm is needed
roger hollander 
The “AfPak” war: Washington’s three options February 21, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, War.Tags: Afghanistan, afghanstan war, afpak, al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, bush administation, denis blair, kabul, Karzai, kyrgyz, NATO, pakistan, paramilitaries, paul rogers, richard holbrooke, Robert Gates, roger hollander, surge, Taliban, warlords
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The United States decision in the closing months of 2008 to send an additional 3,000 troops to Afghanistan was largely in response to an escalation in Taliban activity that has now lasted through the current winter. Those troops, from the 10th Mountain Division that has repeatedly been deployed in Afghanistan since the start of the war in October 2001, are now installed in Logar and Wardak provinces south of Kabul (see “Afghanistan’s critical moment“, 6 February 2009). President Barack Obama announced on 17 February 2009 that he is deploying 17,000 more US soldiers, many of whom will attempt to limit the free exchange of paramilitaries between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In the past two weeks there has been a much greater media focus in the United States on the deterioration in security in Afghanistan, much of it prompted by the decision to send the extra troops. This has even made headlines across the domestic news-channels, occasionally even displacing the dominant concern with the economy; but this rare focus on an international story is accompanied by commentary that tends to underplay impact of more troops on the wider strategic environment. Indeed, one result of the Republican efforts to define a narrative of victory in Iraq around the effects of the 2007-08 “surge” has been an assumption that what “worked” there will have a similar effect in Afghanistan.
This ignores the fact that senior US military commanders remain deeply reluctant to withdraw large numbers of troops from Iraq, not least because they are far from sure that the surge really has had the claimed effect (see Helene Cooper, “Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan“, New York Times, 24 January 2009). Their reluctance also means that the US army and the marine corps remain seriously overstretched, which makes the desire for greater Nato burden-sharing in Afghanistan so strong.
The meeting in Krakow of Nato defence ministers on 19-20 February 2009 has not had the desired result in this respect. The US defence secretary, Robert M Gates, has had reluctantly to accept that increased Nato support in Afghanistan will come only in the form of civil aid and assistance with police and army training (see Matthew Day et al, “US demands for more troops in Afghanistan ignored“, Daily Telegraph, 19 February 2009).
Poland and Britain are the only allies that have appeared to offer much support; but even if both countries agreed to increase their troop levels further (from Britain’s 8,300 and Poland’s 1,000) the numbers would be unlikely to exceed 2,000-3,000. This is far below the figure of 10,000-plus extra troops (in addition to the current reinforcement) that many analysts in Washington believe is necessary if the military situation is to be stabilised and the Taliban surge countered.
A four-way tide
The extent of the current problems in Afghanistan is illustrated in four current developments:
* Washington’s new director of national intelligence, Denis Blair, warns that “Afghanistan’s weak and corrupt government is failing to halt the spread of Taliban control”, and says that “public support for the Taliban and local warlords” is increasing (see Mark Mazzetti, “Intelligence director says global crisis is top threat to U.S.“, International Herald Tribune, 13 February 2009)
* The Pakistani government’s agreement on 16 February 2009 to change the legal system in the Swat region may bring to an end the intense fighting between 12,000 government troops and an estimated 3,000 paramilitaries, but it is also likely to allow an increase in Taliban influence outside of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) next to the border with Afghanistan. This makes it deeply unpopular in Washington. Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy of President Obama to Pakistan and Afghanistan (or what an increasing number of strategists is coming to call “AfPak”) is worried that it could amount to a surrender to the Taliban (see “US concerned over Pakistan deal“, BBC News, 20 February 2009)
* Three government ministries in Kabul were hit on 11 February by simultaneous suicide-attacks. This can be seen as an extension of the “swarm” tactics that have been used by paramilitary groups in several countries (see John Arquilla, “The coming swarm“, New York Times, 14 February 2009). The use of several small units in simultaneous actions has proved to be effective; the Mumbai attacks in November 2008 tied down most of India’s federal counter-terror forces, for example (see “The lessons of Mumbai“, 1 December 2008). The ability of the Taliban to conduct such operations in Kabul is yet another indication of their penetration into the heart of the capital
* The Kyrgyz parliament voted on 19 February to end the US agreement to utilise the Manas air base, which is currently used to tranship 15,000 US troops and 500 tonnes of equipment a month through to Afghanistan. The plan for the Russians to take over the base makes this an even greater setback for the US, even if there may be further negotiations before the evacuation is enforced (see Thom Shanker & Ellen Barry, “U.S. hints at payment to keep Kyrgyz air base open“, International Herald Tribune, 20 February 2009).
A three-way choice
The pressures of the Afghan situation face the Barack Obama administration with three core policy options. The first is to maintain the status quo. The aim would in military terms be to avoid any increase in violence while in political terms accepting the need to make pragmatic deals both with an ineffective government in Kabul and with an array of regional warlords. The United States would in this event reinforce its own troop levels, without expectation of any major injection of fresh forces from its Nato allies. The hoped-for result would be to prevent security in Afghanistan from deteriorating further and thus al-Qaida from re-establishing itself. This would require a decade-long commitment at current levels of engagement.
The second option is to find the means to increase military forces in Afghanistan to well above 100,000 troops – even if this entails an early and risky withdrawal from Iraq. The aim would be to defeat the diverse Taliban and warlord militias, thus subduing violence and facilitating a peaceful transition of security and power. This would require a long-term US military presence, but with the function of enforcing a peace rather than suppressing a war.
The third option is to withdraw in a planned and phased way. The aim would be to minimise further losses and damage in a campaign acknowledged to be essentially unwinnable. The US would in this event be accepting that the western military presence is widely viewed in Afghanistan as a foreign occupation that serves to stimulate violent opposition. This would require a readiness to negotiate and compromise with elements of the Taliban and other militias (much as the Islamabad administration has done in Swat).
The surprise option
What will the Obama administration decide? It is worth remembering that in its broad stance towards the George W Bush administration’s conduct of the “war on terror”, it has as yet shown few signs of new (far less radical) thinking. Indeed, and in contrast to its policies on the domestic economic crisis, the current administration so far represents continuity rather than change. The proposed Afghan troop “surge” is only the most notable example (see (see Charlie Savage, “Obama’s war on terror may resemble Bush’s“, International Herald Tribune, 19 February 2009).
It is likelier, then, that the emerging Afghan policy will be much more in the direction of the first or even second options than the third. The problem for Obama and his colleagues in that event, however, is that neither choice may actually be workable – in part because conditions in Afghanistan have gone too far, in part because the world has passed the point where it is conceivable for western states to occupy countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan.
More immediately, the conflict in Afghanistan cannot be separated from developments in western Pakistan. They are part of the same, “AfPak”, reality. This makes the Swat agreement significant in terms of the Obama administration’s three policy options: for if it does seek a closure in Afghanistan that brings some measure of achievement it will have to extend its war much more fully to Pakistan, with all the dangers that entails. This, at its heart, is the same dilemma that was faced by George W Bush and would have been faced by John McCain if he had won the November 2008 election.
There is, however, at least the potential for a different approach. The infusion of 17,000 troops notwithstanding, a fundamental and long overdue reassessment of Afghanistan policy may yet take place in the coming months. The Obama administration might just have or acquire the capacity, the confidence, the judgment and the resources for a radical change in policy. The door to a surprising outcome is by no means closed.