Wrong priorities in the war on Taliban

With the end of combat missions by US-led NATO troops, the ill-trained and overstretched Afghan army is having to assume responsibility for conducting the battle against the Taliban, which has gone over to the offensive and recently regained territory lost to NATO forces.

While NATO has left behind a training and advisory mission, called “Resolute Support”, consisting of 13,000 mostly US personnel, the foreign military departure from Afghanistan looks ominously very much like the US abandonment of Iraq at the close of 2011.

The result could be the same: A military and political vacuum into which the jihadists of the Taliban will pour as did the jihadists of Islamic State into Iraq.

“Resolute Support” forces are due to wind down in stages through 2016 until US forces become a “normal embassy presence” by the end of that year.

Although senior US commanders had recommended the US leave at least 10,000 troops in Afghanistan for several years, President Barack Obama decreed total withdrawal.

In any case, it is clear that such a low number of US troops cannot play a major role in upgrading Afghan troops protecting the weak regime installed by the US.

Experts on Afghanistan predict confidently that this year the Taliban will gain territory as well as power in the government.

After 13 years of military campaigning against the Taliban, the US has failed to defeat the movement and stabilise Afghanistan. Therefore, mainstream Taliban elements, who represent some of the country’s Pashtun majority, will have to be drawn into the government.

Unless a settlement between Kabul and the Taliban is reached, already destabilised Pakistan could face a major upheaval.

The policy Britain used to follow when it departed colonial possessions was “divide and leave”. The US practises “decimate and leave”.

The first and key example of this latter policy was Iraq, now a failed state with 30 per cent of its territory occupied by the upstart Islamic State (IS).

Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, who has not yet formed a government, has called upon the Taliban to “lay down their arms”.

They responded by escalating attacks on the Afghan army, particularly in the capital, Kabul. Around 4,000 Afghan troops were killed in 2014. The smell of blood makes the Taliban scent all out victory.

At peak deployment there were 140,000 troops from 50 countries in Afghanistan, 100,000 the US and 9,500 from Britain.

Washington’s regional allies, Jordan and Turkey, have also dispatched troops to Afghanistan.

Command and control has always remained with the Pentagon, which designed a disastrous military strategy for Iraq and appears to have done the same for Afghanistan.

Stunned by Al Qaeda’s September 2011 attack on New York and Washington, the US and sympathetic allies mounted a military campaign in Afghanistan in October 2001 to drive the Taliban from power because the movement had played host to Al Qaeda.

Since then, the US has spent $1 trillion on the war against the Taliban. Some 3.500 NATO personnel died and more than 30,000 have been wounded in action, and thousands suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome because of their deployment in this war.

As with civilian fatalities in the 2003 US war on Iraq, there has been no systematic Afghan body count. The US and its allies tally only their dead and wounded.

While UN statisticians estimate the Afghan civilian toll to about 2,000 a year, a 2011 study by Brown University put the Afghan toll at 12,000-14,000, Iraqi fatalities at 120,000 and Pakistani deaths in the US war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban at 35,000.

So far, $100,000 billion has been spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan. This is far more than was invested in rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan after World War II.

Unfortunately, Afghanistan has followed the example of Iraq. At least half the amount spent in Afghanistan has disappeared due to corruption or has been misspent.

Roads that go nowhere have been laid, and schools and hospitals built with substandard materials are about to collapse.

Nevertheless, the US has pledged to provide billions of dollars in aid through 2017, very well aware that a large proportion of the money will disappear into the pockets of corrupt contractors and politicians, or will be used on ill-fated projects.

Corruption in the security forces also follows the Iraqi pattern.

For example, in Afghanistan, the US has been funding non-existent or “ghost” police officers. In Iraq, 50,000 “ghost” soldiers have been on the payroll until recently. Some probably remain although President Haidar Al Abadi has attempted to revise the rolls.

While boosters of the ill-advised Afghan adventure insist that post-withdrawal Afghanistan will not follow Iraq into becoming a failed state, pragmatic analysts disagree.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who closely follows the career of the Taliban, has dubbed the US pullout plan “catastrophically wrong” and argued that Afghanistan can be expected to collapse into civil war.

He also predicted the emergence of jihadist factions “more extreme than the Taliban, as has happened in Iraq and Syria”.

George W. Bush and his hawkish advisers should have focused on taking out Al Qaeda, which was a relatively small, marginal movement in 2001.

Following Bush’s 2003 war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, along with its offshoots, has turned out to be a far greater danger to this region and the wider world than the Taliban.

Clearly, Bush and his minions got their priorities wrong when they decided to wage war on the Taliban.

Furthermore, there were other alternatives available to the US in 2001.

A report by the Rand think tank investigating the success rates of various methods employed between 1968 and 2006 against 268 groups using terrorism to gain their goals found that peaceful political accommodation resolved 43 per cent of the cases, policing and intelligence ended 40 per cent, and military action seven per cent.

In 10 per cent of cases, “terrorist” groups achieved their aims and ceased violence.

It would appear the Afghan Taliban could add a digit or two to the successful 10 per cent.