Asia-Pacific, Headlines, North America

/UPDATE*/POLITICS-US: Afghanistan Moves Back into the Limelight

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 3 2008 (IPS) - Six and a half years after the ouster of the Taliban, U.S. media attention is returning to Afghanistan where more U.S. and NATO troops were killed in June than in any previous month.

Indeed, as noted by both the New York Times and the Washington Post Wednesday, June was the second month in a row in which U.S. deaths in Afghanistan approached the toll in Iraq.

Twenty-eight U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan last month, just one fewer than the 29 in Iraq, while another 18 soldiers from Washington’s allies also lost their lives to Taliban forces. The British military, which has the second-largest contingent in Afghanistan, lost 13 soldiers, including its first servicewoman killed in the war.

Even President George W. Bush admitted Wednesday it had been a “tough month” in Afghanistan, insisting, however that the increase in the death toll showed that the coalition forces were taking the offensive.

“You know, one reason why there have been more deaths is because our troops are taking the fight to a tough enemy…,” Bush told reporters in the White House Rose Garden.

And while most analysts agreed that the increase in the number of coalition deaths was at least partly a result of U.S., British, Canadian, and Dutch forces, in particular, moving into areas in eastern Afghanistan where their presence had previously been sporadic, they also credited a sharp rise in Taliban activity and its adoption of more unconventional tactics, including the greater use of roadside and suicide bombings imported from the Iraq war, as well.

“What it points to is that the opposition is becoming more effective,” Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University, told the Post Wednesday. “It is having a presence in more areas, being better organised, better financed, and having a sustainable strategy. In all, their strategic situation has improved.”

Indeed, the record of the last two months has suggested that the Taliban is at least as much on the offensive as U.S.-led forces, whose combined strength has reached all-time high of more than 60,000 troops, of which about half are from U.S. allies operating under NATO command.

In addition to the growing coalition death toll, the Taliban mounted a particularly bold assassination attempt against President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in Kabul in late April. Six weeks later, it staged a spectacular jailbreak in Kandahar that freed hundreds of suspected collaborators. Its forces subsequently seized and briefly held seven villages around Afghanistan’s second-largest city.

A Pentagon report released just last week – the first review of the situation in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001 – concluded that the Taliban has effectively “coalesced into a resilient insurgency” that was spreading into previously relatively peaceful parts of the country.

While the top U.S. commander in eastern Afghanistan told reporters that attacks in his sector have increased by 40 percent in the first five months this year compared to the same period in 2007, the report predicted that violence will likely increase through the rest of the year. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, told reporters Wednesday that he was “deeply troubled” by the situation.

While no one believes that the Taliban is powerful enough to oust the Karzai government, Mullen and the Pentagon have been arguing for months that it needs at least 10,000 more troops deployed to Afghanistan to adequately cope with the challenge.

But where those troops will come from remains far from clear. In late March, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he would send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and Germany announced last week that it would match that figure by next fall, but the conditions that have so far been attached by both countries to their forces in Afghanistan make it unlikely they will be deployed to the south or the east where the Taliban is strongest.

The Pentagon, which added 3,000 marines to its Afghan force earlier this year, has been unable to come up with more troops because of Bush’s insistence that nothing be done to put at risk the progress his “surge” strategy in Iraq has helped achieve.

That has frustrated Gates’ and Mullen’s hopes of withdrawing more of the 140,000 troops who will remain in Iraq after the surge officially ends Aug. 1 to free up additional forces for deployment to Afghanistan.

“I’ve made no secret of my desire to flow more forces, U.S. forces, to Afghanistan just as soon as I can, nor have I been shy about saying that those forces will not be available unless or until the situation in Iraq permits us to do so,” Mullen said Wednesday.

But public support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in countries that are expected to supply them, including the U.S. itself, is growing more doubtful.

A multi-national Pew Global Attitudes Project poll conducted in April – before the bloody months of May and June – found bare pluralities of respondents in the U.S. and Britain in favour of “keep(ing) troops in Afghanistan until the situation is stabilised” as opposed to removing them. In the U.S., 44 percent of respondents said they favoured withdrawal, up from 32 percent in February.

In NATO members France, Germany, Spain, Poland, and Turkey, on the other hand, majorities ranging from 54 percent to 72 percent said they favoured withdrawal. Only in Australia, a non-NATO country that has contributed combat troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq, did a strong majority (60 percent) say they preferred to stay.

Some experts believe that even adding troops – at least in the quantities the Pentagon believes is necessary – will not appreciably redress the deteriorating dynamics in Afghanistan if other key factors, including the ineffectiveness and growing corruption of the Karzai government, the lack of economic development, and the steady increase in the opium and heroin trade which help finance the Taliban, are not addressed.

At least, if not more, important is the safe haven enjoyed by Taliban forces in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan much of which has come under the control of the Pakistan’s own Taliban and militias allied to it.

Relations between Washington and the Pakistani military have deteriorated sharply in recent weeks over U.S. pressure on Islamabad to prevent the infiltration of Taliban forces from the Pakistani side of the border. And the new civilian-led government, which is still working out internal divisions on key issues, appears unprepared to deal with the problem.

“No matter how many more troops you add into Afghanistan, you won’t really be able to get at the root of the problem” of safe havens in Pakistan, Rubin told a public-television interviewer last week.

“It won’t be possible to have a resolution in Afghanistan unless the situation in Pakistan is significantly improved,” said ret. Amb. James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s special envoy on Afghanistan during and after the 2001 war.

“The primary focus needs to be on how the United States, Europe, and other concerned countries can best secure control over the border regions,” he added, noting that the steps necessary to do so, including the practical and legal integration of FATA into the rest of Pakistan and an agreed demarcation of the currently disputed border, “are (not) going to happen quickly.”

(*Adds comments from Adm. Michael Mullen and ret. Amb. James Dobbins. Story first moved on Jul. 2, 2008.)