The brilliance of U.S. Afghan strategy has reached new heights. From the tail end of the Washington Post's article last Friday on the growing use of tanks and more extensive hard hits in the war, we get this:
"Why do you have to blow up so many of our fields and homes?" a farmer from the Arghandab district asked a top NATO general at a recent community meeting.
Although military officials are apologetic in public, they maintain privately that the tactic has a benefit beyond the elimination of insurgent bombs. By making people travel to the district governor's office to submit a claim for damaged property, "in effect, you're connecting the government to the people," the senior officer said.
Clever technique. How many of these travelers to the district governor's office will show up with a car bomb instead of a complaint form?
Just as there has been a softening of the July 2011 deadline to begin a pull-out of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a willingness to concede U.S. military presence will last beyond 2014 despite NATO's confirmation of its withdrawal calendar in Lisbon this weekend, and the very real possibility that U.S. combat operations will continue after that date, there is now the sense that the U.S. is repeating Soviet tactical mistakes albeit with nothing approaching the Red Army's brutality.
None of this is any surprise to historians or others who have followed U.S. "progress" in Afghanistan. Nor is it any surprise that there is a downplaying of the upcoming December review of Afghan policy. That review was scheduled last December when the administration announced its second troop surge in Afghanistan, the first having been ordered in March 2009. There are now about 100,000 U.S. troops there, and 50,000 more from other countries, mostly from the NATO alliance. Just how dicey things really are can be guessed at from the fact that the administration does not want the popular Gen. David Petraeus to testify to Congress about the review, saying "he is most needed right now in Kabul, focusing on the war.” It's understandable at one level certainly. The Republicans are eager to count coup against the administration and perhaps obscure in the public mind that it was the bankrupt Afghan policy of the Cheney-Bush White House that did a great deal to put us where we are today.
Place all that against the fact that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president who stole his most recent election, is putting more and more distance between himself and the patrons who cover his expenses.
Ahmed Rashid, the former Pakistani guerrilla and best-selling author, who has known Karzai for 26 years, sees the Afghan president turning away from the West in general to prepare himself for withdrawal when it does happen.
His single overriding aim now is making peace with the Taliban and ending the war—and he is convinced it will help resolve all the other problems he faces, such as corruption, bad governance, and the lack of an administration. ...
He no longer supports the war on terrorism as defined by Washington and says that the current military surge in the south by the United States and its NATO allies is unhelpful because it relies on body counts of dead Taliban as a measure of progress against the insurgency, which to many would be a throwback to Vietnam and a contradiction of Petraeus’s new counterinsurgency theory to win over the people. In particular he wants an immediate end to the night raids conducted by US Special Operations forces—a demand that has put him in direct conflict with US commander General David Petraeus. According to Karzai, these raids—which in the last three months have killed or captured 368 mid-level Taliban leaders and killed 968 foot soldiers—are counterproductive because they antagonize the civilian population. Indeed, no one knows how many civilians are included in the casualty figures, which are provided by the US military.
At the NATO summit, President Obama dismissed Karzai’s concerns about night raids, according to press accounts. “If we’re ponying up billions of dollars to ensure that President Karzai can continue to build and develop his country,” Obama said, “then he’s got to also pay attention to our concerns as well.”
Karzai, faced with continuing complaints about corruption, resistance from his own ministers, criticism and confusing mixed messages from the United States, an escalating war that many observers, including at the CIA, don't think is working, must figure out his own way forward. As Rashid writes, his efforts to show himself as presidential by rhetorically reasserting Afghan sovereignty has a precedent. It's what President Mohammed Najibullah did when the Soviets left in 1989. The country was soon in civil war, and Najibullah was ultimately captured by the Taliban, murdered and hung along with his brother from traffic signal posts in Kabul's Aryana Square.