United States forces in Iraq have responded vigorously to the bombing of the Italian police headquarters in Nasiriya, the destruction of three of their own helicopters and a recent increase in attacks on their troops. The stepping-up of raids on suspected guerrilla hiding-places has even included the use of short-range ballistic missiles and strike aircraft.
Initial reports stated that the US response had led immediately to a decrease in attacks on their forces, possibly by as much as 70% within barely a week of the new strategy being launched. In reality, the actual decline is more like 30%; in any case, subsequent figures released during this weeks visit to Baghdad by the commander of US Central Command (Centcom), General John Abizaid, are revealing in other respects.
No end in sight
Press reports in recent months have suggested that attacks on US forces were running at about twelve a day during the summer months, rising to around thirty a day in October. It now appears that the figures have been much higher throughout.
Colonel William Darley, speaking for Centcom on 25 November, said that attacks from May to July 2003 actually averaged twenty a day, rising to forty-five a day before recent operations began, and falling to thirty-five a day now.
In the event, even this modest increase in stability proved short-lived, and the past week has seen an upsurge of violent incidents, although with some apparent changes in tactics by the guerrilla forces. One general trend has been for them to direct operations more towards supposed collaborators and less towards heavily-armed US patrols.
On 20 November, a suicide bomb killed four people at the Kirkuk offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), including a senior party official. Two days earlier a member of the Basra municipal council, Sargoun Nanou Murado of the Assyrian Democratic Movement had been abducted and killed; a senior education official was killed in Diwaniya the same day.
There have been further attacks on Iraqi police units, including a car bomb which killed six policemen and three civilians in Khan Bani Saad, fifty kilometres north-east of Baghdad; another killed six people and wounded many more at the police station at Baquba, sixteen kilometres further north. In other incidents, a police chief in a town near Baghdad and a police colonel in Mosul were assassinated.
Another recent trend has been to stage assaults on high-profile targets associated with the US occupation. These have included an attempt to shoot down a DHL cargo aircraft and a number of mortar attacks on coalition facilities in Baghdad. Perhaps most striking was a series of attacks on the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels and the oil ministry, all in heavily-guarded districts of Baghdad, using multiple rocket-launchers hidden in donkey carts.
Although direct operations against US troops have recently been fewer than in October, there has been a notable upsurge in incidents in the northern area around Mosul, which was previously spared much of the violence. This has included the killing of two US soldiers on 23 November in the city of Mosul itself, and the sabotaging of a pipeline that transports gas from the Jambur field to the Baiji refinery. This caused a fire that was visible from thirty kilometres away.
One indication of the concern being felt by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is the 24 November decision of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council to ban the al-Arabiya TV news channel from broadcasting from Iraq. Both the banning of the channel and the seizing of equipment from its Baghdad offices was approved and authorised by the head of the CPA, Paul Bremer, and his political masters in Washington. This decision follows complaints against both al-Arabiya and its competitor al-Jazeera about their reporting from Iraq.
Planning for a long stay
Against this unstable background, there are further indications that the US is still working towards a long-term US military presence in Iraq. According to a New York Times report, a rapid US military withdrawal is not anticipated and the US army is currently planning for as many as 100,000 troops to remain in Iraq in 2006. Even more indicative is a statement from Paul Bremer (Time, 24 November 2003) that the US would probably have bases in Iraq for ten-twelve years.
Bremer was also quoted as saying: The American government will not leave. We intend to have an agreement with the new Iraqi government in which it will ask for our continued assistance in the security of Iraq. That will establish the terms in which our troops will stay here. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer admission of the requirement for a client regime in Baghdad; in itself this calls into question any US policy of enabling truly independent democracies to develop in the region.
The Afghan warning
In the past two weeks, reports from the Middle East have been dominated by events in Iraq and also by the paramilitary attacks in Riyadh and Istanbul which together killed 68 people and injured over 800. In this flurry of coverage, significant developments in the Israeli/Palestinian confrontation and, even more, in Afghanistan have been somewhat overlooked.
In Israel, the most remarkable event has been a warning from four former heads of the Israeli internal security force, Shin Bet, that current Israeli government policies are not only failing but are risking the very existence of the state. They call, in particular, for recognition of the rights of the Palestinians.
This is still not a view welcome in many circles in Israel, a fact that results partly from the human cost to Israel of the intifada of the last three years, especially the impact of suicide bombings. According to recent figures, 892 Israelis have been killed in this period and 5,981 injured, mostly civilians. These are far larger than the casualties experienced by the Israeli Defence Forces in their three-year invasion and occupation of much of Lebanon in the 1980s, a cost that eventually forced an Israeli withdrawal from most of the territory they had occupied.
What can be forgotten, though, is that the costs to the Palestinians have been massively greater among a smaller population. In the past three years, 2,570 Palestinians have been killed and 24,006 injured. In addition, 2,202 Palestinian homes have been destroyed, many of them in punitive raids, and 14,000 damaged.
The other major issue of recent weeks has been further evidence in Afghanistan that serves to confirm the assessment that post-conflict peace-building is going badly wrong. There is now clear indication of the Talibans resurgence, a process that may not have a visible impact during the coming winter but could become apparent in spring 2004.
Even the current situation is problematic, with General Abizaid describing combat operations as every bit as much and every bit as difficult as those that go on in Iraq. One US response has been to inaugurate a series of military operations against Taliban remnants that seem just as resilient as those better-known remnants in Iraq.
The largest of these has been Operation Mountain Resolve; it was a helicopter involved in this that crashed on 22 November in circumstances still unexplained, killing five soldiers and injuring eight. Other recent incidents have included the killing of an Afghan demonstrator and the wounding of three others when soldiers opened fire on a crowd of disaffected former militia trying to break into the ministry of defence building in Kabul, and a rocket attack on the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel on 21 November.
Ten days ago, a French UN official, Bettina Goislard, was killed in the eastern town of Ghazni. She was the first UN official to be killed since the fall of the Taliban regime, though at least twelve aid workers from other agencies have died in the past eight months. The focus of these assaults has been the south-east of the country, where there is abundant evidence that Taliban and other militia are seeking to force out international organisations, both UN and non-governmental, as a prelude to gaining more control.
Last week the UN suspended all refugee assistance in the region, withdrew foreign nationals and halted road travel for all staff. These moves follow a car bomb attack on the UN compound in Kandahar and the hijacking of a vehicle belonging to a UN-affiliated landmine clearance group all in addition to the murder of Bettina Goislard.
The overall problem in Afghanistan can be summed up in this way: the administration of the president, Hamid Karzai, does not control much of the country beyond Kabul; international security assistance is still far too limited; the pace of reconstruction is excessively slow; and the United States persists in seeing the problem almost entirely in military terms, in a way that extends even to their support for acceptable warlords. In these circumstances, opium poppy production has soared and, with the cascading of light arms into an already heavily gun-orientated society, levels of security and public order are poor.
Taliban militia, aided by these trends, have substantially regrouped, reorganised, and re-established supply lines from Pakistan. They now have considerable influence in several Afghan provinces. Their strategy now has two components. The first is a campaign of guerrilla warfare involving attacks on weak targets that have a high psychological impact, such as the murder of aid workers and the hotel rocket attack. In addition, persistent attacks on Afghan government and police forces, rather than US forces, mean that government control of some areas has greatly diminished.
This aids the Talibans second aim, to build support for a much more systematic and large-scale guerrilla offensive beyond the coming winter. This includes further improving supply lines, establishing arms caches and recruiting new militia, all with a view to engaging in an enhanced military campaign designed to wear down US forces next year. There may well be a strategic political dimension here, in that such a move would coincide with the most intensive part of the forthcoming US presidential election campaign.
It is possible that the next few months will see a substantial expansion in the work of peace-building, principally by the Afghan people themselves but aided by increasing international support. On present trends, though, the latter does not seem very likely; Afghanistan simply does not have the priority accorded to Iraq in the war on terror.
One thing is clear, however. If the Bush administration does find itself in deep trouble over its policies in Afghanistan (as in Iraq), this will only confirm the persistent warnings from UN officials, NGOs, President Karzais officials and many others both inside and outside the country.
The current dilemma was given poignant expression by Hamid Karzais interior minister, Ali Ahmad Jalali, a few days ago: We have so many challenges, so little capacity and so few resources. We have terrorists, warlords, drug traffickers, failures by our own people. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and ask what Im doing here. The key to establishing security is to win peoples trust, and the government needs to do a lot more.
