Afstan overview: US doing well in east but country's future still murky

Excerpts from a good (long) piece in The Economist:

...events at Charbaran were important in one respect: in a counter-insurgency strategy that is summed up by the catchphrase “clear-hold-build”, Afghan security forces, backed up by American power, are showing that they can hold areas cleared by the Americans. In a war that has often gone from bad to worse, this is good news for NATO...

General Dan McNeill, the American commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), notes that his mission is seriously “under-resourced”. Yet he suggests that the Afghan army and police will become strong enough by 2011 to take the lead in most areas, allowing NATO to start reducing its forces and to take more of an advisory and support role—providing, for example, embedded advisers who can organise air support and medical evacuations.

The Afghan army is the most respected institution in the country. Western trainers say that, in contrast with Iraqi forces, Afghan soldiers have little fear of closing with the enemy; if anything, the problem is holding them back so that Western aircraft can have a clear shot at insurgents. Thanks to a beefed-up training programme, paid for largely by America, the Afghan army has grown to more than 50,000 troops; it has started conducting large-scale operations alone and is building up an air force. By 2010 it is due to expand to 80,000 men. The often corrupt Afghan police are being retrained en masse.

Nobody thinks these forces, even at full strength, will be anywhere near large enough. Afghanistan, though bigger than Iraq geographically and with a roughly comparable population, has less than a third as many security forces employed, whether Western or indigenous. Still, Afghan forces are due to take charge of the capital, Kabul, in the coming months. In Nangarhar province, the gateway to Pakistan, where al-Qaeda had several camps in Taliban times, the Afghan army and police are doing most of the security work in Jalalabad and other main towns, while American forces try to secure the borders...

American commanders feel Nangarhar is ripe for investment in roads, airports and electricity generation. Their confidence contrasts sharply with the pleas for help from the embattled Canadians in Kandahar and the defensiveness of the British in Helmand [emphasis added]. Perhaps the most striking evidence of the pacification of Jalalabad is the sight of American Humvees waiting patiently at traffic lights.

Green fields, and purple

Detailed data on security are hard to come by in Afghanistan. Even the UN declines formally to release its “accessibility map”, which these days depicts a country in two halves: a relatively quiet north and west and a restive south and east where, with few exceptions, the risk to humanitarian workers is deemed to be either “high” or “extreme”.

Few dispute that the American-controlled east of the country is faring better than the south [emphasis added], where other NATO allies are in charge. Although America accounts for more than half the foreign forces in Afghanistan (divided roughly evenly between ISAF and its own counter-terrorist mission, Operation Enduring Freedom), it has suffered fewer deaths than its allies this year.

The differences between the east and the south are most apparent from the military helicopters that skim the treetops at breakneck speed. This year the fields in Nangarhar and Kunar are green with wheat. Helmand and Kandahar, though, show the pink and purple patchwork of illegal opium poppies. Insecure areas provide the most fertile ground for poppies, and southern Afghanistan is the most insecure. The opium and heroin trade, in turn, finances the insurgency and corrupts the government.

Since Europeans cannot or will not commit more troops against the Taliban, the war effort in the south shows signs of being re-Americanised. Last year saw a mini-surge, with an extra American brigade deployed to Afghanistan when five more were sent to Iraq. This year an additional marine expeditionary unit—a 2,400-strong force with more air power than the whole 7,500-strong British task-force—has been deployed to the south for seven months to disrupt arms- and drugs-smuggling routes in Taliban strongholds.

There is talk of sending two more American brigades, about 7,000 soldiers, and of placing the southern region under permanent American command [not happening]. This might improve things. At present, each national command has different priorities and allied units are rotated every six months, compared with 15 for the Americans (to be reduced to 12 months later this year). General McNeill, who took over as ISAF commander in February last year, says he is “on my fourth commander in the north, the second in the east, the third in the capital, the third in the south and the third in the west.” The military effort, he says, needs more consistency...

There are underlying reasons why the south is more troublesome than the east: its tribal structures are weaker, making it harder for elders to make deals stick; it is more remote from Kabul and the main trade routes; the population is less educated and more xenophobic; and it is the ideological heartland of the Taliban. That said, a growing number of British officers grudgingly recognise that America is learning the lessons of irregular warfare, drawn mainly from British colonial experience, better than the modern British army.

After much trial and error, the allies more or less agree on the tenets of counter-insurgency. The objective is not so much to kill the enemy as to protect the population and extend the authority of the Afghan government; development, dialogue, amnesties and reconciliation are important tools for weakening the insurgents...

...The Americans, say the British, have the advantage of time and resources: they have been in the east ever since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, whereas the British only got to Helmand in 2006. More important, the Americans have more forces at their disposal. They have been able to deploy right up to the border with Pakistan, whereas the British and Canadians are more thinly spread and have surrendered the southern frontier, and much of the countryside as well, to the insurgents [emphasis added].

America's slush fund

Probably the most striking difference between the Americans and the British is in their use of money. Britain channels most of its economic aid through the government in Kabul in the hope of building up the bureaucracy there, whereas America finances private contractors to carry out big projects, such as road construction and power stations.

For American commanders, “money is bullets.” They have at their disposal a slush fund, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, known as the Commander's Emergency Response Programme (CERP)...

In Kunar province, one of the most turbulent in the American sector, valleys that last year proved deadly to American forces are being pacified. Troops will clear an area of insurgents and seek to stabilise it by bringing in a new road in consultation with village elders, who are expected to do their bit to keep bad elements out. Sometimes a new school will be set up in a hostile village as the precursor to the arrival of American and Afghan government forces.

Roads are especially favoured [emphasis added], because they allow remote villages to sell their produce and enable Afghan forces to move quickly to trouble spots. The recent opening of a new road linking the Pech valley to the provincial capital, Asadabad, resulted in a quadrupling of live births in the town's hospital as villagers were able to get medical help. The Americans unashamedly outbid the insurgents: if the rebels pay $5 a day for a fighter, the Americans will offer $5.50 a day for road labourers. “Where the road ends the insurgents begin,” says one American officer [we're paying attention to roads too]...

...The Americans are more deeply committed to winning in Afghanistan—militarily, economically and in terms of mental effort—than any of their allies [emphasis added]. They have rewritten their counter-insurgency doctrine, and incorporated all manner of civilian functions—anthropologists, political scientists and agricultural experts—into their ranks. By serving the longest tours, Americans learn faster. Their soldiers may yet end up paying the cost in terms of mental health. But for the moment America sees itself at war, while Britain is still engaged in an optional operation.

The enemy within

The most serious problem in Afghanistan, however, will not be solved by new military tactics or command structures. It is the weakness of the Afghan government. Corruption is rampant, from the lowly airport security guard demanding bribes from foreign travellers to government officials who occupy gaudy houses known as “narcotechture”...

Allied soldiers will continue to fight, build roads and host meetings with tribal elders in the hope of isolating the insurgents. But in the longer term, unless the Kabul government can be made to work more effectively, their efforts and sacrifices may be in vain. As Ibn Qutayba put it a millennium ago, there can be no lasting government without “justice and good administration”. Even American money and power will struggle to achieve that.