The devastating violence of recent weeks in Iraq temporarily abated during the two-week Operation Lightning that saw widespread United States security operations and the deployment of 40,000 Iraqi troops in and around Baghdad.
The lull proved short-lived. On 7 June, thirty-three people died in a series of attacks across northern and central Iraq; in the northern town of Hawija, fourteen died and twenty were wounded in three co-ordinated attacks on army checkpoints; and north of Baghdad, four Iraqi soldiers were ambushed and killed.
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In Baghdad itself, a police officer and a foreign ministry official were killed in separate attacks; other police officers were slain near the Abu Ghraib prison and in Mosul, and three US soldiers were killed in two separate incidents.
On 8 June, further attacks killed two industry ministry officials in Baghdad and a translator for US troops near Baquba, while the main oil pipeline to Turkey was blown up.
Taliban defiant
In Iraq, few such incidents are reported outside the region unless they involve particularly heavy loss of life. This is even more true of that other theatre of the war on terror, Afghanistan. Reporting of Afghanistan in western media has focused on two issues in recent months: the growth of opium poppy cultivation (see From Taliban to heroin, 17 March 2005) that now sees Afghanistan accounting for 87% of the worlds illegal opium production; and the narrative (promoted especially by the George W Bush administration) that the capture or surrender of significant Taliban leaders makes Afghanistan something of a success story.
The optimistic view of Afghan trends is countered by attacks on US troops, including a roadside bomb killing of two soldiers on 4 June and the assault on a US base at Shkin that killed two more American soldiers and two Pakistani drivers on 8 June. These assaults, both in southeastern Paktika province, seem to be part of a spring offensive by the Taliban and other elements, but they are also evidence of longer-term deterioration in the security situation.
These deepening military problems have arisen despite the presence of 18,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, mostly American, and the thousands of troops from several Nato countries assigned to improve security in Kabul and some other cities.
One of the best sources of information on Afghanistan is the monthly review of the British Aid to Afghanistan Group, set up in 1987 by a consortium of development NGOs. Its April edition, well before the current upsurge, reported numerous incidents, among them:
- 2 April: three police officers killed in a Taliban attack in Helmand province
- 6 April: an Indian doctor employed by a construction company abducted and his driver killed in Zabul province
- 6 April: three police officers ambushed in a Kabul suburb, killing two and wounding the third
- 9 April: a government official kidnapped and then murdered in Zabul province
- 13 April: an Afghan women working for an NGO killed in a drive-by shooting
- 16 April: two Afghan members of a United Nations unit injured by a roadside bomb
- 25 April: six people killed in a Taliban attack on a mayors office in Kandahar province.
The combination of such endemic insecurity and the Talibans spring offensive is serious enough, but it is reinforced by two further developments that pose additional problems to United States forces and their allies.
The first is the wave of unrest across Afghanistan and Pakistan that followed a Newsweek report on 9 May of the desecration of the Quran at Guantànamo prison camp. Although Newsweek later questioned its own source and retracted the story, copious other evidence of similar actions includes a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (see Cam Simpson and Mark Silva, Red Cross Told US of Koran Incidents, Chicago Tribune, 19 May 2005).
In any case, the significance of the unrest was the manner in which the report of a single incident revealed a hitherto largely dormant yet evidently deep-seated anti-American sentiment. By mid-May, the protests had spread beyond Kabul to several Afghan provinces (NC Aizenman & Robin Wright, Afghan Protests Spread, Washington Post, 14 May 2005). They were probably exacerbated by the fact that many of the long-term Guantànamo prisoners are from Afghanistan itself.
The second development is the nature of the renewed Taliban activity, and mounting evidence that militants in Afghanistan have learned from tactics used in the Iraq insurgency. It is even possible that some paramilitaries have applied their first-hand experience in Iraq to the struggle in Afghanistan.
Some fighting in Afghanistan is similar to the open warfare typical of the battles of late 2001. On 3 May, for example, a small force of US troops and Afghan police stumbled across a group of between sixty and eighty Taliban militia who responded to US reinforcements by engaging in a seven-hour fight (see Despite Years of U.S. Pressure, Taliban Fight on in Jagged Hills, Carlotta Gall, New York Times, 4 June 2005); around forty Taliban may have been killed, against one Afghan police officer killed, and five US troops and six Afghan police wounded.
In such open combat, the US forces can normally use a large array of firepower to gain control, though in the aftermath many Taliban supporters can cross the border from Pakistan or appear from local towns and villages to replace the militants killed. The Pakistan connection makes it difficult for US forces to conduct successful counter-guerrilla operations.
A greater problem for the US, however, is an apparent change of tactics by the Taliban and its associates, away from a concentration in fairly large groups organised in hierarchical fashion. This approach proved vulnerable to disruption, and has been replaced by a large network of several hundred small units that have relatively few interconnections.
In the new approach, particular units may be required to attack targets such as oil supplies or aircraft at an indefinite time, then lie dormant until another target is selected. This combines an element of central organisation with a very high degree of dispersal and tactical independence; individual groups may be unaware of the identities, let alone the tactics, of other groups in the network (see Revival of the Taliban Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, 10 April 2005).
There are strong echoes here of how the Iraq insurgency has developed. It now appears that a number of Taliban paramilitaries were sent to Iraq even before the 9/11 attacks, presumably on the assumption that the Bush administration would eventually terminate the Saddam Hussein regime. After gaining experience in Iraq, these personnel have now returned to Afghanistan and are putting their experience and training in Iraq into practice in their own country. To complicate matters further, some foreign fighters from Arab countries (as well as Pakistan) who are almost entirely unknown to the Afghan authorities or the US forces have entered Afghanistan to aid the guerrilla war.
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here.
There is a quite extraordinary irony in all this. A number of analysts have commented on how the Bush administrations prosecution of the Iraq war is providing combat experience for Islamist paramilitaries, especially from Saudi Arabia, that provides al-Qaida and its associates with an extensive training-ground to replace its ejection from Afghanistan. Now the blowback from the Iraq theatre includes an increase in the sophistication and effectiveness of guerrilla movements in Afghanistan itself.
When the United States terminated the Taliban regime in late 2001, largely by a combination of rearming the Northern Alliance forces and by aerial bombardment, it could do so primarily by conventional military means. It is now faced with a much more intractable guerrilla war, waged by opponents who have in many cases learned directly from one of the most dangerous of all military environments: post-Saddam, United States-occupied Iraq.
