The United States ambassador to Kabul, scheduled for transfer to a similar post in Baghdad, escaped assassination by a whisker this week. As Iraqs insurgents respond to the international conference in Brussels on 22 June with a coordinated series of assaults in Baghdad killing up to forty people, and a leaked CIA report warns that the war in Iraq is creating a new generation of militants trained in sophisticated techniques of guerrilla warfare, Zalmay Khalilzads near-escape highlights the wider problems the US faces in its prosecution of President George W Bushs war on terror.
If you find Paul Rogerss weekly column on global security valuable, please consider supporting openDemocracy by sending us a donation.
It was not supposed to be like this. A high point of the war on terror was Bushs State of the Union address of January 2002 in which he identified an axis of evil (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) and celebrated the demise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The speech, four months after 9/11, represented a moment of confidence, but it was not long before some of Bushs key European allies started to worry about its belligerent rhetoric and its clear targeting of Iraq in particular. These concerns were crystallised by Bushs West Point speech in June 2002 that spoke of the need to pre-empt potential threats.
By mid-2002, the gloss of the rapid victory over the Taliban was already fading as violent conflict resumed in the mountainous Tora Bora region of southeast Afghanistan. During the rest of 2002, the United States found it necessary to deploy many thousands of troops to control a small but persistent guerrilla campaign against what it described as remnants of the Taliban.
Another flurry of violence in spring 2003 was largely sidelined in the wake of the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. By early 2004, evidence that the Taliban was becoming more active than at any time in the previous two years could not be ignored. Although the widely anticipated Taliban spring offensive did not develop, the Afghan provinces neighbouring northwest Pakistan saw continued unrest.
Now, in mid-2005, US military commanders lead a force of nearly 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, and are consolidating the major military bases at Bagram and near Kandahar into centres for renewed operations. These combat troops are separate from the several thousand troops attached to the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), which was developing more of a peacekeeping and peace-enforcing role in Kabul and some other major centres of population.
The absence of a major Taliban offensive in 2004 may partly have been averted by military operations conducted by Pakistani and American forces on either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border (see two columns in this series from March 2004, Into the Afghan fire and A war of shadows). At that time, the US military was hopeful that its sustained pressure would definitely end the Taliban threat.
A neglected war
It is now becoming clearer by the week that the resurgence of violence observers expected a year ago is at last occurring in much of the south and southeast of the country. Three weeks ago, a column in this series (Bushs credibility gulf) reported the many attacks across the country in April; two weeks ago, another column (Between Iraq and Afghanistan) described the wave of incidents at the end of May. In the past week, the pace has accelerated further, with major encounters pitting Taliban and other guerrilla movements against Afghan police and army units as well as United States forces.
The town of Mian Nishin, a district headquarters in Kandahar province, has been at the centre of this conflict. An exchange of fire on 18 June between Afghan and US-led forces there left nine guerrillas killed; but over the next two days, a determined assault by a larger Taliban contingent captured around thirty police officers and effectively established control of the town.
Among the victims was the police chief in Mian Nishin, who was tried and executed by the Taliban. This was followed by reports that a judge, an intelligence officer and a local civil servant had been assassinated in neighbouring Helmand province.
Mian Nishin was recaptured from the Taliban on 21 June, after intense fighting and US air strikes that left around thirty-one Taliban and nine policemen killed. The next day, US sources reported an upsurge of conflict in Zabul province in southern Afghanistan, with about forty insurgents killed in an eleven-hour battle that also left two large US helicopters damaged. As the fighting in Zabul continued, US A-10 strike aircraft and helicopter gunships, backed by British Harrier aircraft, pounded presumed Taliban bases in the area. By 23 June, US sources were claiming seventy-six insurgents killed, with the loss of twelve Afghan police and soldiers and five US soldiers wounded.
There have been many other attacks in the past three months, with hundreds of people reported killed. The wider human cost of this continuing conflict is devastating.
The military problems Afghanistan is posing for the United States, especially in light of the continuing relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan, are illustrated by one recent incident. On 20 June, three Pakistani men were arrested on charges of planning to assassinate Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador in Afghanistan and a key figure in the war on terror. The arrests apparently took place only minutes before an event Khalilzad was due to attend. The fact that those arrested are from Pakistan has resulted in strong criticism of the Pakistan government in elements of the Kabul media.
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here.
The militants university
The incident reveals a wider concern, shared by the US military and political leadership, that the Pakistani authorities are doing far too little to curb the flow of paramilitary groups across the border into Afghanistan. There is also private criticism of the Pervez Musharraf government over its failure to pursue, capture or kill Osama bin Laden, who is widely believed to be in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan. This is turn reflects a more general problem for the United States: its inability to exert influence on a Pakistan where support for the al-Qaida movement and its affiliates, and criticism of US policy, cross many sectors of society.
Meanwhile, the new CIA report leaked to the New York Times confirms the view that Iraq is replacing Afghanistan as the main training-ground for Islamist paramilitaries and potentially offers an even more effective one because of its urban warfare environments. Militants have been returning from Iraq to fight in Afghanistan, and it is possible that the manner in which Iraq insurgency tactics are now being adopted there owes much to this experience.
It is too early to say whether the current increase in violence in Afghanistan represents a major resurgence of the Taliban and associated groups. But it is clear that the level of combat in Afghanistan now is more significant than anything witnessed in the past three years. At the very least, it means that the United States has to maintain far larger numbers of troops in the country than it could ever have expected. While much political and media attention remains concentrated on Iraq, events in Afghanistan will continue to shape the course of the war on terror.
Further Links:
Project on Defense Alternatives
http://www.comw.org/warreport/
Oxford Research Group
http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/
Afghanistans.com
http://www.afghanistans.com/Links.htm
