Afghanistan and the war without end

The trio of senators comprised of Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel and John Kerry, a team that would oversee the Afghanistan conflict under the administration of Barack Obama.

Having completed a tour of eastern Afghanistan, the senators were en-route back to the capital Kabul, when a US military general escorting them, pointed out that the mountain complex of Tora Bora where Osama bin Laden had once hidden out lay nearby.

Hagel, a Vietnam veteran was wary of making a detour given that the helicopters were low on fuel and weather conditions were rapidly deteriorating. Biden who was in charge of the group insisted though that they change course to take a look. It was a decision that turned out to be a near catastrophic mistake.

With the helicopters subsequently forced to make emergency landings, the three senators and others on board were stranded in snow within sight of gun toting locals whose allegiance was uncertain. It was only after an hour’s forced hike through hostile territory that the senators were safely under protection of US troops.

Pondering Coll’s account, the entire debacle seems an apt metaphor for US involvement in Afghanistan. In short, a tale of bad decision-making, logistical failures and dodgy allies.

After 17 consecutive years of war and over a $1trillion spent, right now the US-led attempt to defeat the Taliban has left the country in a parlous state and the Islamist insurgency in the ascendency.

So stark is the reality on the ground that President Donald Trump has been converted into action. These are changed days for a US president who has always insisted on drawing the US back from overseas military involvement.

By his own admission Trump’s “original instinct,” on Afghanistan “was to pull out". But in August of last year barely eight months into his presidency, he was insisting that the US preoccupation in Afghanistan from here on in would be “killing and not nation building.” Trump now seems more determined than ever to stick to that course of action.

“We’re going to finish what we have to finish...what nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it,” he insisted last week speaking out about Afghanistan to UN ambassadors on the Security Council.

That message was reiterated yet again during his State of the Union address, when he announced how “our warriors in Afghanistan have new rules of engagement.”

As it stands Trump appears serious on Afghanistan. In the coming months, the total number of American troops in the country will grow to an estimated 15,000. Nearly a third of them, 4,000, will have been sent under Trump’s new war strategy.

It might be a long way off the 100,000 US troops that were in Afghanistan at one point and failed to make headway even then, but already analysts are once again talking of “mission creep” as Washington increases its boots on the ground.

Trump’s promises on finishing what needs to be finished in Afghanistan have of course been heard before.

“It’s 2018, and there are young men and women now being sent over there who were literally in diapers when we first sent troops to Afghanistan,” Will Fischer, a former Marine lance corporal who served in Iraq said.

“We’re fighting the same battle over and over again,” says Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois and a veteran of the Iraq war. “Our troops are losing their friends, they are shedding blood, over the same patch of ground, over and over again.”

Right now the news from the Afghan front could not be worse for Washington. Indeed so bad is it, that according to a US government watchdog, the US military is seeking to block the release of information about the war’s progress.

Last week, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), revealed he was struggling to get permission to even release unclassified data in his report to Congress.

“The number of districts controlled or influenced by the Afghan government had been one of the last remaining publicly available indicators for members of Congress ... and for the American public of how the 16-year-long US effort to secure Afghanistan is faring,” John Sopko, the special inspector general, said in the report.

Sopko went on to say that this was the first time that SIGAR has been instructed not to release unclassified information in one of its quarterly reports.

“If they start classifying this stuff now, what are they going to do next month?” Sopko asked. “It’s a slippery slope.”

This latest restriction imposed on releasing data, which some observers say is tantamount to US government censorship, comes after several other measures for gauging the development and strength of Afghanistan’s security forces were blocked or restricted last Autumn. Among them were casualty rates.

“The public now knows less about the conditions on the ground than before, and that’s by design. This is Trump’s way of war in Afghanistan,” observed analyst Catherine Putz.

Putz maintains that the data being withheld are simple and accessible measures of the war’s progress, and the still-missing civilian casualty information once provided an uncomfortable, but vital, check on the war’s moral compass. “Its absence, and the censoring of other data points, contribute to the obfuscation of the war,” Putz insists.

However, what information we do know indicates major setbacks in the fight against the Taliban and the Islamic State, who are comparatively new players in the Afghanistan insurgency.

The Taliban now control or threaten much more territory than when foreign combat troops left in 2014. In all, Taliban fighters are now said to be openly active in a staggering 70 per cent of the country.

About 15 million people, half Afghanistan’s population, are living in areas that are either controlled by the Taliban or where the Taliban are openly present and regularly mount attacks.

In 14 of the country’s districts the insurgents are now in full control and have an active and open physical presence in a further 263, figures significantly higher than previous estimates of Taliban strength.

The Taliban have pushed way beyond their traditional southern and eastern strongholds. Evidence now indicates that western and northern parts of the country are increasingly falling under their sway.

Then there is the extent to which the increased Taliban presence is also happening in tandem with the rise of IS.

It was back in 2015, that the extremist group rooted in Iraq and Syria marked its arrival in Afghanistan with a suicide bomb attack in the eastern city of Jalalabad, killing more than 30 people and injuring more than 100.

While IS is largely confined to a relatively small stronghold on the border with Pakistan in the eastern province of Nangarhar, it now also has a presence in 30 districts, in places like Khanabad and Kohistanat in the north.

IT was in Khanabad in November 2001 following the September 11 attacks and the subsequent US intervention in Afghanistan, that I witnessed the routing of the Taliban there as part of the battle to take the northern city of Kunduz.

Today though the insurgents have returned to the district with a vengeance and Khanabad has become a key base for IS.

The brazenness of the widening Taliban presence has been evident of late in its public flaunting of its latest training camps.

Just last week on its propaganda website, Voice of Jihad, the Taliban released a 20 minute long video showing what it calls its Abu Bakr Siddique Camp in which

Taliban fighters are shown marching in formation, training with weapons, navigating fiery obstacle courses, and conducting operations in vehicles.

At the end of the video, the Taliban fighters are shown during a nighttime operation. The manoeuvres are captured through a night vision device and the Taliban fighters are seen using US-made weapons, including M4 assault rifles.

In other clips, the fighters are depicted parading around with a number of captured Afghan police Ford Ranger pickup trucks, the same trucks supplied to the Afghan police by the US military. The location of the camp however remains undisclosed.

Analysts increasingly point to the insurgents using sophisticated night vision and laser targeting equipment in their operations. Some are part of what is known as Taliban Red Units a specialist insurgent formation that has increasingly featured in attacks on government positions, especially at night.

“The unit is equipped with American weapons and night vision,” said Imamuddin Rahmani, a spokesman for the Afghan police in Kunduz. “The Red Unit carried out several attacks on check posts in Kunduz, captured the check posts and killed several soldiers. The Red Unit is a headache for security forces in Kunduz,” the police officer said.

Not surprisingly given such developments, the Afghan government like its US counterpart is keen to play down the spread of Taliban control and insists is it making progress in the fight against the insurgents. Like Washington too it increasingly points the finger of blame at neighbouring Pakistan which the Afghan government insists is behind support for the Taliban.

In a televised speech to the nation on Friday, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani insisted that the “centre of Taliban terrorism is in Pakistan” and demanded that authorities in the country “show some concrete action to rid their territory of insurgents.”

Last week too, Afghan officials visited Pakistan with what they describe as evidence of Taliban attacks emanating from militant training centres in Pakistan.

Afghanistan’s Intelligence Chief Masoom Stanikzai and Interior Minister Wais Ahmed Barmak presented documentation and confessions from arrested insurgents claiming to have been trained in Islamic seminaries in Pakistan.

It is the alleged involvement of Pakistan spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) from which Steve Coll’s new book Directorate S get its title, based as it is on the department within ISI that works to “enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence in Afghanistan”.

It goes about this task, Coll explains, by supplying, arming, training and generally seeking to legitimise the Taliban.

In Kabul they have long become impatient with what they see as Pakistan’s malign meddling, hence the war of words recently. It remains, though, the war on the ground that continues to really trouble the governments in both Washington and Kabul.

Trump has always remained critical of his predecessor Obama’s strategy - and clearly on the advice of his generals, now seeks to win the war by increasing troops, intensifying airstrikes and revealing less information to the US public while bringing unprecedented pressure on Pakistan.

Whether his strategy will be any more successful in bringing the Taliban to heel remains doubtful. If anything, it has already only served to empower and embolden them and IS as recent attacks in Kabul killing upwards of 128 people have shown.

“It doesn’t matter how many times a general says the war is going well, victory seems as distant as ever,” says analyst Catherine Putz. Right now few would disagree with such an assessment.

After almost 17 years of war in Afghanistan, experts have stopped asking what victory looks like and might now just be beginning to consider the spectrum of possible defeats.