For those of you who still believe everything is going just swimmingly in Afghanistan...
Springtime for Killing in Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: May 28, 2006
This is all because The Fool ran off to invade Iraq for no damn reason at all while ignoring the real "war on terror" and its perpetrators who still roam free in Afghanistan.
Springtime for Killing in Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: May 28, 2006
TO most Americans, Afghanistan has been a war of great clarity, the opposite of the war in Iraq with all its troubles and cloudy origins. Attacking in a moment of unified anger, with global allies beside it, the United States had a clear mission: respond to an assault on American soil by driving Al Qaeda fighters from their bases in a country undeniably tied to the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001.
Victory over the Taliban government was swift, and the aftermath gratifying: Afghans welcomed American troops and aid workers, and seemed to settle into a pattern, however fitful and difficult, that would lead to recovery, stability and increasingly democratic government. And this summer Americans would start drawing down forces in southern Afghanistan, replaced by British, Canadian, Dutch and Australians under NATO command.
Or so Americans thought.
In the last six weeks, a resurgent Taliban has surprised the Americans with the ferocity of its annual spring offensive and set some officials here to worrying that the United States might become tied down in a prolonged battle as control slips away from the central government ? in favor of the movement that harbored Al Qaeda before 2001. And the number of American troops has quietly risen, not fallen.
"Afghanistan is the sleeper crisis of this summer," says John J. Hamre, who was deputy defense secretary from 1997 to 1999.
Not only have officials been surprised by the breadth of the militants' presence and the brazenness of their suicide attacks, roadside bombings and assaults by large units. They have also had to face up to the formidable entrenched obstacles to transforming Afghan society: the deep rivalries among ethnic groups, warlords and tribal leaders; the history of civil war; the trouble central governments have in extending their writ beyond the capital; and the hostility toward efforts to attack poppy growing and drug smuggling, which give many a livelihood.
The Taliban benefit from all those weaknesses. Their fighters have joined forces with drug smugglers against the government and Western troops. And they have gained sympathy from fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan who, a decade ago, helped them seize power in Afghanistan in the first place.
With all of that figuring in the current turmoil, the Pentagon is now rethinking the pace of its plan to draw down the forces there. In fact, it beefed up troop levels to as high as 23,000 from 19,000 in recent months, including more helicopters and crews, engineers and infantry troops, even as its allies fell short in delivering the forces that might have let many Americans come home.
The recent fighting, the fiercest since 2001, has been mainly in three southern provinces where the Taliban have traditionally been strong, and where NATO is scheduled to take over. That planned shift seems to help explain the Taliban's timing.
According to American military officials, the Taliban began preparing to ramp up the violence once it became clear that NATO planned to bring in 6,000 troops to replace Americans. Hard fighting, the Taliban presumably calculated, would test the allies' commitment to stand and fight, and the will of Western voters to support a fight.
"It was to be expected that the Taliban would exploit the fact that we are changing from one operation to the other," said Rear Adm. Michiel B. Hijmans, defense attaché at the Dutch Embassy here. His country has about 1,300 troops in Oruzgan province.
At the same time, British and Afghan Army forces for the first time pushed into parts of northern Helmand province, the center of the illicit poppy-growing region, drawing fire from drug traffickers and increasing the number of Taliban fighters whom the traffickers hired for security.
Military commanders say the emboldened Taliban fighters have now shattered a sense of relative calm and political stability in the south, terrorizing residents who already were skeptical that the government could offer security and services in the hinterlands. Militants have set off 32 suicide bombs, 6 more than in all of 2005, Pentagon officials say. The number of roadside bombs is up 30 percent over a year ago, with insurgents getting designs off the Internet.
And in the past two weeks, Taliban fighters have appeared in battle in groups of up to 300 men, more than triple the size of the largest groups seen before. The militants draw not only from hardened fighters spirited in from sanctuaries in Pakistan, but from impoverished farmers who are paid $4 for every rocket they launch at allied troops.
"It's fair to say the Taliban influence in certain areas is stronger than it was last year," Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, said earlier this month.
Meanwhile, the Americans are finding the Pakistanis much more reluctant to face down the Taliban ? who are brethren from the Pashtun ethnic group that dominates in Afghanistan ? than they have been to confront Al Qaeda, who are largely outsiders. "Has Pakistan done enough? I think the answer is no," Henry A. Crumpton, the American coordinator for counterterrorism, said in Kabul this month, in comments that Pakistani officials protested. "Not only Al Qaeda, but Taliban leadership are primarily in Pakistan, and the Pakistanis know that."
The pitched battles in southern Afghanistan have left more than 250 people dead, and by last week their impact was competing with Iran and Iraq for the attention of policy makers in Washington.
After President Bush met with his National Security Council on Afghanistan last week, administration officials played down the notion that any big changes in policy were considered for Afghanistan, where American assistance has totaled $10.3 billion so far. But lawmakers and their aides summoned Pentagon intelligence analysts for classified briefings and suggested that the violence might force a re-evaluation of the plan to reduce American troop levels there to about 16,500 by this fall.
"The handoff to NATO is the right thing to do, but we should certainly assess our troop presence there," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. "If you study the Iraq war, one of the major reasons for our difficulties clearly is that we never had enough troops on the ground, ever."
As a result, plans for NATO to take control of American forces in eastern Afghanistan by year's end may be postponed until early next year to assess NATO's effectiveness in the south, said a senior administration official who was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. "We've made tremendous progress in Afghanistan and no one wants to endanger that progress or move too quickly to satisfy some external deadline or agenda," the official said.
General Eikenberry said he expected a fierce summer but thought that the fighting would die down by the fall. Even after NATO assumes control in the south, perhaps in late July, the United States will still be the largest contributor of troops in Afghanistan, hunting terrorists, training Afghan soldiers and the police, and supporting Afghan counternarcotics missions.
"I'm more concerned in the long term about the results of the drug war in Afghanistan than I am about resurgent Taliban," said Gen. James L. Jones, a Marine officer who is the NATO military commander. In the end, these officials say, if the Afghan police and Army can hold their own against the Taliban and bring security, the Afghan people will welcome that. The government and its NATO allies have not lost the people yet, they say. But it is getting close to that.
This is all because The Fool ran off to invade Iraq for no damn reason at all while ignoring the real "war on terror" and its perpetrators who still roam free in Afghanistan.
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