The Loya Jirga discussions in Kabul last week, and the tentative agreement to withdraw from Kabul and its immediate vicinity some of the heavy weaponry in the hands of warlords, appeared to indicate that Afghanistan might be moving towards political stability. The following days, though, brought reminders of the endemic insecurity across much of the country.
Read the first column in Todd Gitlins weekly series from New York, Our Election Year.
On 5 January, the offices of a United Nations refugee centre in Kandahar were attacked with small arms and a grenade, and the following day twelve people were killed and many others injured in a bomb attack near a United States base in the same city. On 10 January, five Afghan soldiers and three civilians were killed in two incidents in Kandahar and Helmand provinces; the next day, ten Afghan soldiers were reported killed in an attack on an Afghan army post in Nimroz province in the south of Afghanistan.
The death toll in southern Afghanistan; in barely a week was 51 people killed and many more injured, bringing the overall losses to over 450 since August 2003. From an American perspective, a worrying feature of this recent upsurge in violence is that it follows a particularly large counter-guerrilla offensive by US and other troops known as Operation Avalanche.
It has been clear for some time (and reported in earlier columns in this series) that Taliban elements have been regrouping in preparation for a possible substantial campaign in summer 2004. Recent Taliban actions have been directed against aid workers and other non-military targets rather than US forces, with the intention of damaging the morale of the Afghan military, police and public servants. There was, however, some expectation that such violence would diminish during the winter as Taliban units prepared for their coming campaign.
The latest spurt of violence suggests that even in the middle of winter, Taliban elements are able to undertake damaging attacks on a wide range of targets. At the very least this means that the United States will have to commit many thousands of troops to Afghanistan against its original plan to withdraw most of its forces by as far back as eighteen months ago.
In just over two years since the Taliban regime was overthrown, 100 US troops have been killed in Afghanistan. Afghan civilian, military, police and Taliban deaths are numbered in the thousands.
Iraq: a mosaic of violence
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the insurgency continues. There has been some decline in the numbers of attacks on US troops, although these continue at over a hundred each week. Three more helicopters have been shot down, including a Black Hawk in Fallujah, killing nine US soldiers, a Kiowa observation helicopter and a heavily armed Apache attack helicopter. A particular concern is that insurgents are using Russian-made SA-7 shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles more frequently, rather than the less accurate rocket-propelled grenades (Washington Post, 14 January). These require more maintenance and expertise but are heat-seeking, unlike the unguided RPG weapons.
In a possibly related incident, air force technicians are examining a C-5 military transport that had been carrying 63 people in a flight from Baghdad when it was hit by ground fire and was forced to return to base. Elsewhere, more than thirty US soldiers were injured and one killed in a night-time mortar attack on a US military base west of Fallujah.
Attacks by insurgents on Iraqis have also continued. One day alone, 9 January, was especially devastating: an Iraqi police officer and a civilian contractor were killed near Baghdad, and five people were killed (and over thirty-five injured) in a bomb attack on a Shi'a mosque in Baquba, 50 kilometres north-east of Baghdad. In a further attack on a police station at Baquba four days later, at least four people were killed and many injured.
Overall, the US casualties since the start of the war on 20 March number nearly 500 dead and close to 3,000 seriously injured. Iraqi military casualties are not known but are thought to be well over 10,000. Over 9,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, and at least 20,000 injured.
The vigorous counter-insurgency operations continue to exact many Iraqi casualties. In the past week, three demonstrators were killed in Fallujah; seven job-seeking protestors were injured during two days of violent protests in the southern city of Kut; and there were violent demonstrations in Amara in southern Iraq, leading to the deaths of six Iraqis in clashes with Iraqi police and British soldiers. On 12 January, US troops killed seven Iraqis described as bandits in the act of stealing oil from a pipeline.
The strains are showing
The failure of the Bush administration to attract sizeable military commitments from other countries means that the forces required to maintain the current level of occupation in Iraq have to come almost entirely from the US army and Marine Corps. Many of the troops currently in the region have been there for more than a year, and a huge operation to replace them is now underway. This is made more difficult by the risk of attacks on land convoys and also missile attacks on aircraft.
In all, the US is in the process of replacing about 110,000 troops in Iraq, 20,000 in Kuwait and 10,000 in Afghanistan. The net effect of this is that more than eight of the armys ten active service divisions are involved in the moves. Even including the Marine Corps contribution, there are few spare manpower resources and therefore an increased need to rely on reserves.
The effects of extended service are being felt in many branches of the armed forces. The National Guard ended 2003 at about 10,000 below its intended recruitment target and the army is offering re-enlistment bonuses of up to $10,000 to troops currently in the Middle East. But there remain particular areas of concern, most notably in relation to retaining helicopter pilots.
Training such people is costly but a combination of aircraft losses (fourteen helicopters shot down since 1 May in Iraq and others in Afghanistan) with extended tours of duty, mean that it is proving difficult to maintain crew strengths.
This is one aspect of a wider problem in the overall strategic direction of the war on terror. As a result, elements within the military are now making severe criticisms of the policy. Until now there have been many reports of unease in higher military circles combined with an extreme reluctance to go public. This is what makes the recent analysis published by the US Army War College so significant.
The US military is worried
Bounding the Global War on Terrorism contends that the current conduct of the war on terror is deeply problematic and that the war with Iraq is an unnecessary diversion: The global war on terrorism as presently defined and constructed is strategically unfocussed, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security. The report warns that the current posture may have set the US on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.
The author, Jeffrey Record, is a thoroughly establishment defence analyst with around three decades of experience of Middle East security. Twenty-five years ago he was a strong advocate of the development of Jimmy Carters original Rapid Deployment Force into US Central Command, the military command responsible for fighting the 1991 and 2003 wars with Iraq.
The Rapid Deployment Force had been established after the US military recognised their limited ability to intervene in the oil-rich areas of the Persian Gulf, and Jeffrey Record was one of those who thought that even this step was inadequate given the proximity of the Soviet Union to the region. He was also one of the very few people arguing that internal instability within the Gulf States might require eventual US intervention and, in a paper published in August 1980, pointed to the risk of Iraqi intervention in Kuwait exactly ten years before it happened.
Record is also a former staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a visiting professor at the USAF Air War College and at the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, and author of many of the substantive texts on US security policy in the Middle East. His views therefore come from within the centre of military thinking; there is no doubt that he is here saying in public what many senior US military officials are thinking in private.
Even this trenchant criticism does not in any way entail a major change in policy, primarily because the neo-conservative security axis is both powerful and deeply entrenched in the Pentagon and the White House. What it does mean, though, is that if the considerable problems in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to kill and seriously injure US soldiers in the run-up to the presidential election in November 2004, the willingness of US military leaders to keep quiet will diminish rapidly. This is yet another reason why foreign policy may become a key issue in the latter stages of the election campaign.
