The Afghan elections

US busy building relationships

By Maj-Gen Ashok K. Mehta (retd)

(August 15, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) After the first ever non-state actor takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 1996, elections in the badlands are still an alien activity. The polls have become necessary to give legitimacy to the present Hamid Karzai government. Who the Afghans will choose on August 20 --- a second term for Mr Karzai or a regime change through Dr Abdullah or Mr Ashraf Ghani, both of whom served in the Karzai Cabinet --- is not certain. The Americans have distanced themselves from the incumbent President.

Whoever is the winner, little will change for the Afghan people, caught between foreign forces and the Taliban and for whom the new NATO Secretary-General, Mr Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has sought “better life opportunities”. The long-awaited military surge timed with the elections is under way - Operation Khanjar met by the Taliban’s Operation Fauladi Jal, which vows to disrupt the elections.

After some years of US meandering in Afghanistan in March President Barack Obama unveiled his new strategy for Af-Pak which includes metrics to measure “success and progress” to determine whether or not the strategy is working. The President’s National Security Adviser, General James Jones, has come up with a set of nine broad objectives on the civil and military side for metrics to steer Af-Pak with weightage to development and nation-building. These include rule of law, justice, self-reliance of the Afghan security forces, democracy and governance.

According to Rory Stewart in the London Review of Books, “the new US Army and Marine Corps counter-insurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank document, replete with commitments to rule of law, economic development, governance, state building and human rights. In Mr Obama’s words, ‘security and humanitarian concern are all part of one project’. Implementing on the ground, these objectives require stamina and resources and measuring success or progress is not easy.”

Meanwhile, Mr Obama’s Chief Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan has advocated replacing the global war on terror with more narrowly focused assault on Al-Qaida and engagement with the Muslim world. Are the Americans fighting the wrong enemy? The current surge is against the Taliban in South and East Afghanistan and around Kabul whereas the hardcore Taliban elements are in sanctuaries around Quetta in Pakistan. The Americans say that the precondition for the defeat of Al-Qaida is the defeat of the Taliban and, similarly, for fixing the Afghan state, Pakistan has to be fixed first.

The new US strategic insight emphasises protecting Afghans and building relationships rather than the usual fixation on head count. Avoiding civilian casualties has become a prime concern, especially from errant air-strikes which have reduced from 35 to 17 per cent in June. As many as 1000 civilian deaths up to July 31 are the highest in the war, the majority caused by insurgents. Foreign soldiers killed in July were 75, the highest in a month and bulk of the toll taken by American and British troops. Morale of the fighting forces is dented but operations bash on regardless.

From January to mid-July this year, US combat forces recorded 129 suicide deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than the number killed in the battle and a three-decade high. This is less than the average Indian Army fratricidal rate in counterinsurgency operations.

Things are far worse in the British camp where mounting complaints from Field Commanders against fighting the war “on the cheap” - shortage of helicopters, paucity of troops and fragility of mine-resistant vehicles - have bruised morale and raised in Britain the question: why are we in Afghanistan? To make matters worse, the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee has noted the absence of higher political direction to Commanders.

The Taliban, too, has switched tactics. Gone are pitched battles, the killers are roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices and suicide squads for which R&D has not devised any antidote. Out of every three soldiers killed, two are victims of IEDs. The British, who have a long history of counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, have drawn a plan involving a necklace of fortified watch towers to spy on Taliban planting bombs as they did in Ulster against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The biggest challenge of the war is to get to the roadside bomb and human bomber-making networks.

In the sights of the Taliban are Afghan security forces and foreign troops. Attacks on Afghan forces, which number 170000, could go up to 6000 this year from 81 in 2003. The Afghan Army is expected to grow from 90,000 to 134,000 by 2011. With nearly 100,000 NATO forces from 42 countries, the operational force level is 270,000 whereas the requirement is for nearly 500,000 to quell the insurgency while winning hearts and minds. These figures can never be made available by Western nations, terribly averse to troop casualties. There is a limit to what the US and the UK, the main burden-bearers, can provide and do in Afghanistan.

With the accent on counter-terrorism, development has been inadequate. The NATO concept of Provisional Reconstruction Teams has not proved successful and the proposal to send experts will not work either. Defence and development need to be applied in tandem, not staggered, contingent upon resource availability. Building institutions and capacity is a long-term objective and cannot be achieved in two or three years with an eye on an exit strategy.

Britain’s Chief of General Staff-in-Waiting, Gen David Richards, who has been the NATO force commander in Afghanistan, dropped a bombshell recetly when he told The Times that the mission in Afghanistan could last up to 40 years. He said while the Army’s role will evolve, the whole process of nation-building might take as long as 30 to 40 years. For President Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, this generational commitment would be politically unacceptable and, more importantly, unaffordable. Contextually different, the Indian Army’s sizeable deployment in J&K has become open-ended.

President Obama’s evolving Af-Pak strategy will falter, even fail, if it attempts any short-cuts. Avoidable are past mistakes: misreading the Taliban defeat as the end of insurgency; not reconciling with some Taliban elements earlier; failing to prevent the revival of the Taliban; not holding the captured ground; defaulting on reconstruction; engaging in errant air-strikes to compensate for boots on the ground and backing warlords, sidelining the moderate Taliban. The view of some Kabul think-tanks is that the US strategy is too little too late.

Af-Pak is in for a long haul. Last week the death of terrorist mastermind Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan was a boost to counter-terrorism and a blow to Al-Qaida. Remarkably atypical is the absence of terror strikes on India since the attacks on Mumbai. Some hidden hand is holding back the jihadis, but sudden turbulence in Af-Pak could shatter the calm over Delhi. The spillover of the Taliban is a real possibility.

During a recent TV debate, to the question “Should Indian troops be in Afghanistan?” the panelists offered the following: a retired General emphatically said “no” but “we should have contingency plans”; an IDSA scholar, simply “no”; and a journalist, “it’s not our war”. The contingency plan refers to our notional base in Tajikistan which is usable courtesy Russia’s approval. Three “noes” do not mean India should be caught off-guard, exercising merely its soft power across the Hindukush. President Karzai is a friend of India. His re-election will not be unwelcome.

-Sri Lanka Guardian