Raymond Barrett

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

The American commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan has warned of mission failure if more troops are not brought in to battle the Taliban insurgency.

In an internal policy review leaked to the Washington Post last week, General Stanley McChrystal portrayed a potentially grim future for the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) mission to bolster the fledgling Afghan government, while preventing al-Qaeda from using the country as a base of operations.

‘‘Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term [next 12 months] – while Afghan security capacity matures – risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” the report added.

The recommendations, due to land on the desk of US president Barack Obama this week, outline a number of options to tackle the Taliban resurgence. The most aggressive strategy calls for an extra 30,000 troops, over half of which would go towards training the nascent Afghan security forces, whose fighting ability and ‘‘commitment to the cause’’ has been questioned by some security experts.

This year has been the deadliest one for the coalition forces involved in Operation Enduring Freedom since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Nato forces have suffered more than 360 fatalities so far this year, compared to a total of 57 in 2003. The report also laid blame at the feet of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whose government is increasingly seen as both impotent and corrupt.

Karzai’s star has fallen considerably of late, reaching a nadir last month when he clashed with the US special representative to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, over alleged electoral fraud. The death of six Italian soldiers this month in a suicide bombing in the Afghan capital was further proof that the Taliban are gaining strength while the government’s position is weakening.

Increasingly, opponents are deriding Karzai as merely an US-backed ‘Mayor of Kabul’, with little real control over outlying insurgent strongholds, such as the southern province of Helmand. McChrystal’s call for ‘‘more boot s on the ground’’ had been widely expected, as the Bush administration’s strategy of ‘counterterrorism’, rather than ‘counterinsurgency’, has been labelled a failure.

Stephen Biddle, a senior Fellow for defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the strategic assessment group that devised the report, said last week that a major shift in tactics was needed. ‘‘Counterterrorist strategies focus on killing specific hostile individuals – members of terrorist organisations or their leadership. Counter insurgency focuses, not so much on killing the enemy, but on protecting civilians. They’re very different undertakings.”

In the past, Nato forces have relied on missile strikes from pilotless drones as they attempted to kill senior Taliban commanders. But such attacks generally involved high civilian casualties, with women and children often among the dead, generating further antipathy towards an Afghan government desperately in need of friends.

On taking office, the Obama administration acknowledged the failure of the previous counterterrorism strategy by removing the previous Nato commander and replacing him with McChrystal, who has the task of turning an increasingly blood-dimmed tide.