To Conquer the Taliban in Afghanistan, NATO Must Retire
    By Adrien Jaulmes
    Le Figaro

    Tuesday 12 December 2006

    In Afghanistan, NATO is committed to a war that does not speak its name. Close to 150 soldiers, including many British and Canadians, but also a few French, have died this year in ever more brutal combat against the Afghan insurgents, who are continuously consolidating their power.

    In the south of the country, successive operations have been launched to attempt to loosen the Taliban's vise around the main cities. In September, it took several weeks to "clean up" the Panjwayi district, barely several dozen kilometers from Kandahar. NATO, which lost six soldiers, asserted at the end of Operation "Medusa" that it had inflicted a severe defeat on the Taliban. But American and European airplanes, which have effected over 2,000 air sorties since the beginning of the summer (or ten times as many as in Iraq over the same period), have taken numerous - civilian - victims. And several weeks after the end of the battles, mortar rounds recommenced the shelling of coalition positions in Panjwayi and suicide attacks resumed in the region.

    An escalation is under way. NATO's general staff, which must hold an immense country with some 31,000 men (a fourth as many as in Iraq, a fifth as many as the Soviets had during their Afghanistan occupation), obviously is demanding reinforcement. Terms that recall the war in Algeria or Vietnam crop up in communiqu s: unverifiable accounts of "rebel losses," plans for the "Afghanization" of the war, and general staff communiqu s less and less in touch with the situation on the ground.

    NATO's mission immediately after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 was to assist the new Afghan government until it should be capable of assuring its own security. The Kabul region has benefited from this presence very much, and the relative security in the Afghan capital remains that mission's main success.

    But Hamid Karzai's government barely controls the provinces, and the prospects of seeing the Afghan army take over from international forces any time soon are not encouraging. In spite of the millions of dollars gobbled up, the plan for training the Afghan army has succeeded in creating only a little 30,000-man army, barely half of which is operational. The desertion rate among recruits remains very high. As for the Afghan police, it is an institution at best ineffective, but more often corrupt, thus broadly contributing to the government's lack of popularity.

    The foreign forces find themselves almost naturally directly engaged against the insurrection. But these soldiers, welcomed on their arrival by an Afghan population weary of years of civil war, are seeing this capital of sympathy progressively erode the more they are involved in combat. Cut off in their fortified bases, NATO troops go out in convoys only. Fearing suicide attacks, a novelty in the Afghan theater that has already cost many soldiers their lives, their vehicles roll down the middle of the street in Kandahar and shoot over the heads of drivers who don't throw themselves into the ditches quickly enough. The same methods used in the Cantal or the Corr ze would undoubtedly bring on a popular uprising in their wake just as quickly as they have in Afghanistan.

    The Taliban, who vanished into the landscape under US Air Force bombs, and who had lost any popularity during the course of their several years in power, no longer look so bad to the Afghan population. Now people more willingly remember their struggle against corruption and the security they brought with them, rather than their brutality and capricious ukases.

    By committing themselves to be in the fore of a long and difficult counter-guerrilla war, an effort T.E. Lawrence compared to "eating soup with a knife," so difficult and ineffective is the operation, NATO risks feeding its own enemies by attracting the resentment of a fiercely independent people that already chased the English out twice in the nineteenth century and the Soviets in the 1980s.

    Rather than exhausting its military resources and the political determination of its member governments in an endless war, NATO would be well-advised to review its strategy from top to bottom.

    International programs to reform Afghan society, such as the one to eradicate poppy cultivation or for the emancipation of women - as well-intentioned as they may be - hardly help the government win over an Afghan peasantry traditionally quick to revolt against reforms from the outside. NATO officers are demanding ever less discreetly that these programs be put on standby.

    Afghanistan must not be left on its own, at the risk of becoming a black hole harboring jihadists from the entire world once again. But the only victory possible for NATO remains allowing the Afghan government to little by little retake control of the country, rather than substituting itself for it or pursuing dreams of westernizing Afghanistan. That result remains achievable.

    Nonetheless, it is urgent to get out of the vicious circle of the anti-guerrilla fight, to concentrate diplomatic efforts on controlling Afghanistan's borders - through which the insurgents re-supply themselves - and to continue to supply Hamid Karzai's government with military and air deterrent forces, while limiting military operations to a strict minimum.