The risks of military entanglement in the South

As British and American forces battle against the Taliban in the southern province of Helmand, it is worth considering, even if only for a moment, whether or not they are fighting in the right place.
I don't say this lightly, as many soldiers have already died and it is in no way a criticism of their bravery to point out that they may have died for little palpable gain.
Last month Gilles Dorronsoro, a French scholar working with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published The Taliban's Winning Strategy in Afghanistan , which argues that military forces have little chance of making gains in the South and should therefore concentrate on holding and consolidating the North of the country. He says that while all military eyes have been on Helmand, the Taliban has been extending its influence in the North.
Dorronsoro makes the point that the Taliban, which he describes as "a revolutionary movement, deeply opposed to the Afghan tribal system and focused on the rebuilding of the Islamic Emirate", has been under-estimated - a point that has often been made in this blog.
"They have made clever use of ethnic tensions, the rejection of foreign forces by the Afghan people, and the lack of local administration to gain support in the population. In so doing the Taliban have achieved their objectives in the South and East of the country, isolating the Coalition, marginalizing the local Afghan administration, and establishing a parallel administration (mainly to dispense Sharia justice and collect taxes)", he says.
Moreover, he notes, in recent months, a more professional Taliban has succeeded in making significant inroads by recruiting from non-Pashtun communities.
Dorronsoro argues that the current Coalition strategy of focusing its reinforcements in the South (Helmand and Kandahar) is risky to say the least. The lack of local Afghan institutions there will require a long term presence and therefore a need for even more reinforcements in the coming year.
Meanwhile, he says, the pace of Taliban progress in other provinces far outstrips the ability of the Coalition to stabilize the South. The Coalition should change the priorities of its current strategy, shifting resources to stop and reverse the Taliban’s progress in the North, while reinforcing and safeguarding the Kabul region or risk losing control of the entire country.
He makes some very pertinent points about the US strategy of killing Taliban commanders.
"Ironically, the International Coalition is unwittingly helping the Taliban maintain its cohesion by killing those commanders in the field most capable of opposing the central shura. Prime examples are Mullah Akhtar Osmani, killed in December 2006, Mullah Berader in August 2007, and Mullah Dadullah in May 2007. Evidence of the resilient character of the Taliban’s structure is the fact that the International Coalition’s killing of major leaders and its battlefield victories have not reversed the Taliban’s momentum."
The Taliban, says Dorronsoro, has created a sophisticated communications apparatus that "routinely outperforms the coalition in the contest to dominate public perceptions of the war in Afghanistan.” He says they build on the growing discontent of Afghans through a relatively sophisticated propaganda apparatus, which employs radio, video, and night letters to devastating effect. Videos, made in as-Sahab, the Taliban’s media center in Quetta, Pakistan, are readily available. This is certainly accurate, as I can attest myself. Last summer I came across Taliban videos being circulated by mobile phone around Kabul.
Backing up research by the Afghan organisation Cooperation for Peace and Unity (see my previous blogs on their research), Dorronsoro says that the main driver of the insurgency is not the political programme of the Islamist radicals, but local conflicts (many of which have an ethnic component) that have been allowed to flourish through government inaction, incompetence and corruption.
There is much to recommend Dorronsoro's analysis. Unfortunately, it would appear that battle lines have been drawn and that a re-emphasis on the North would now look like a defeat. We are reminded of one of the oldest laws of warfare - know your enemy.

Local conflict key to peace in Afghanistan

Local conflict in Afghanistan is increasing at a faster rate than the insurgency and armed conflict, says a new report from the Afghan organisation Cooperation for Peace and Unity.

I have been impressed by the quality of CPAU’s work and have commented on several of their previous reports. This latest report, Trends in local Afghan conflicts, is based on CPAU’s research into local conflicts in five provinces in the country. All five local conflicts were the subject of separate reports and this latest publication pulls all this work together.

It notes that there has been a significant increase in local conflicts since 2005 and that these conflicts are increasingly involving whole communities and that they are increasingly threatening livelihoods and undermining the ability of government and aid agencies to work effectively.

“Local conflict is affecting many communities which struggle to find suitable ways of resolving their disagreements. Many of these conflicts turn violent and they are being aggravated by the worsening security situation in Afghanistan,” said CPAU’s director, Kanishka Nawabi.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, CPAU has also found that the work of international development agencies can exacerbate these local conflicts. They cite several cases where development projects have led to water and land disputes that have threatened the ability of local people to support themselves.

“The international community has an obligation to ensure that its programmes in Afghanistan do not increase local conflict and make the situation worse for local people,” says Nawabi.

CPAU wants more peace building and conflict resolution projects to help resolve these disputes and also wants to improve access to justice and non-violent conflict resolution. It is calling on the international aid agencies to ensure that their programmes address local conflict and include funding for peace building, including a new programme for charity workers.

Two more excellent reports from CPAU

Readers may remember that I recently wrote about a report from the Cooperation for Peace and Unity organisation about the background to conflict in Kunduz. Now the same organisation has published two further reports, one on Wardak and the other on the Jaghori and Malistan districts of Ghazni. In total, CPAU has now released five reports, which can be downloaded here.

The report on Jaghori and Malistan, like all these CPAU reports, makes fascinating reading. These two districts are mainly inhabited by Hazara Shias, which are surrounded by districts in which Pashtuns predominate.

Overall in Ghazni, the Taliban has been resurgent in recent years, not least because central government authority simply does not extend to this area. According to the report, a 2008 survey found that 46 per cent of people in Ghazni had never seen the Afghan National Police and 51 per cent had never seen the Afghan National Army. In Jaghori, the figure was 90 per cent.

CPAU believes that a major factor in the growth of support for the Taliban is the failure of the government and foreign forces to guarantee security. People in the country feel that they have been left behind to fend for themselves. Thus when the Taliban presents itself as a force for stability, many people accept the argument. There are more Taliban than police and desertion rates from the latter are very high.

Despite the deteriorating security, in 2008 around 150 US troops based in the rural Nawa district were pulled out due to sustained Taliban attacks. For the people of Ghazni, this signified that the central government was not in control of the rural areas. According to the report:

“This and similar events seem at worst to have led locals to turn their support to the Taliban as the primary power holders and a source of security in the absence of an alternative, or at best diminished local will and capacity to resist Taliban presence and the establishment of associated shadow government structures”.

The report says the Taliban view Ghazni as a strategic province with proximity and road access to Kabul via the Kabul-Kandahar road. They have also spread propaganda throughout villages across the province, mostly through the distribution of night letters (shabnamah) which highlight the government’s shortcomings and urge villagers to join their movement as the only potential solution to their difficulties.

In much of Ghazni, the Taliban has already established shadow government structures with shadow District Commissioners in many Pashtun-dominated districts, including Andar, Dih Yak, Zana Khan, Gelan and Waghaz. Some areas have shadow police chiefs. According to UNAMA, the Taliban’s parallel administration in Ghazni is run by the Quetta Shura.

Another way in which the Taliban is making inroads into the region is through the migratory Kuchi minority. There is a history of conflict between the Kuchis, who winter with their flocks in the south and then move up to this region during the summer, and the Hazaras. Grazing rights and other issues have led to armed conflict, particularly last summer, when dozens of Hazaras were killed. Reports suggest the Taliban are using their followers within this community to extend their control into Hazara areas.

The report also notes changes in Taliban tactics over the past two years including an increased reliance on suicide and roadside attacks, and the exploitation of existing ethnic and cultural tensions to divide communities. In the Jaghori area, for example, this has led to the killing of key community figures’ family members, kidnappings, and killing Hazara labourers from Jaghori working in nearby Pashtun areas.

The Taliban has also begun to attack soft targets such as schools:

“From January to July 2006, 202 attacks on schools in 27 provinces were reported by the Ministry of Education. In Ghazni and five other south-eastern provinces 208 schools were closed between April and July 2006 for security reasons and due to threats. Girls’ schools and schools built by foreign NGOs or with foreign funding were specifically targeted. By June 2008 the threat of the Taliban had successfully prevented school attendance to the extent that even girls’ schools in Ghazni city were forced to close down.

The CPAU report makes for bleak reading, but unlike almost all the other material coming out of Afghanistan it is based on solid, empirical studies and a genuine understanding of local ethnic, tribal and social conditions. The information contained in all five reports should be standard reading for anyone working in Afghanistan and a standard by which other work should be judged. Sad to say, that is not presently the case.