Michael H. Clemmesen’s Weblog

Following Obama’s hesitant Afghan “Surge” decision

December 4th, 2009

The addition of 30 000 American and some 7 000 European soldiers might stabilise the situation. However, if the other weaknesses of the Western posture remain in place, it will only become a short postponement of departure in defeat.

The Iraq “Surge” worked quickly in spite of hopeless odds because the additional troops could reinforce the already ongoing inclusion of Sunni moderates in the protection and stabilisation of their communities. It worked because the decisive sources of the until then constant slide towards intensified civil war were inside Iraq.

In Afghanistan and in the Pashtun and Baloch areas of Pakistan the source of terror and insurgency is in the tribal zone of the mountain borderland southeast of the Durand line, basically beyond the reach of effective influence from Islamabad, Kabul and Washington. It has always been an uncontrolled and difficult “Yaghistan” for those governing the plains to the south. In the 1980’s it was developed and armed to become a major base and refugee training camp for insurgency in Afghanistan. By adding islamic radicalisation a Frankenstein’s Monster production line was created that not only theaten the stability of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but inspire frustrated muslims in India and the West to stupid acts of terror.

NATO Forces that follow general McCrystal’s directives (maybe even some European allies?) will work according to the humane and effective principles of internal defence and development combined with the military stability and counter-insurgency guidelines rediscovered in 2005-2007 by U.S. Army and Marine Corps major-generals and colonels and eventually dictated to a resistant-inert Pentagon by Robert Gates.

However, the Pakistani army still uses the combination of conventional land offensive, air strikes and body counting that the British Indian forces used in South Waziristan in 1919-20 and again elsewhere in the tribal areas two decades later. Such operations have no lasting influence on the tribesmen outside the soon besieged garrison towns. With India still considered its main enemy, Pakistan does not have the Russian Chechnya option of combining brutal suppression with the maintenance of a constant and massive security force presence necessary to “modernise” the tribesmen.

A couple of years ago the Pakistani government made peace with the tribes, believing that they would leave Pakistan alone and concentrate on breeding mayhem in Afghanistan. It soon became clear that the radicalists correctly perceived the step as appeasement built on weakness, and therefore they responded by advancing their territorial control towards Islamabad and hit large cities with a bomb terror campaign that underlined the inability of the government to provide security.

Now people in the West that support an immediate troop withdrawal argue that Afghan war is just a civil war (all rebellions are) where the West support the most corrupt side and that we shall be left alone after departure. They ignore the trans-border character of the war, the clear signs that the Taliban seek power in Kabul and decisive policy influence in Islamabad (which will destabilise the South Asian situation) as well as the fact that the uncorrupt previous Taliban rulers made Afghanistan the base or inspiration for attacks i New York, Washington, Madrid and London.

Therefore the north-western tribal areas will remain as the uncontrolled base for serious trouble, and even a massive surge of high-tech CIA assassinations from the sky cannot do much to change that. As the tribal areas cannot be brought under effective control from either side, Afghanistan will not be stabilised and safe until a robust national (=multi-ethnic) Afghan border gendarmerie has been deployed; sponsored by the West to make service attractive and to limit corruption; trained with the assistance of the Russian Border Guard to draw on the most comprehensive experience; supported by both helicopters and light, high-mobility vehicles and the latest distant surveillance means to make the mission feasible.

Entry filed under: Posts in English