21 September 2012
The month of September saw the last of the 33,000 surge
troops leave Afghanistan, in accordance with President Obama’s directive of
eighteen months ago. Some 68,000 U.S.
troops remain. These are scheduled to
leave by the end of 2014. The question
is what will happen to Afghanistan afterwards.
By 2014, the U.S. will have spent a dozen years developing
Afghan society, building infrastructure, training Afghan police and military,
and encouraging democratic governance in that country. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that
the U.S. has staked its prestige in a successful Afghanistan after 2014. At some point, the Afghans have to take care
of themselves.
If the history of war is any guide, the crucial factor in
keeping the government of Afghanistan out of the hands of the Taliban will be
morale. If the Taliban are not seen as
the inevitable victors after an American withdrawal, if Afghan forces do not
regard the Taliban as their superiors on the battlefield, then the chances are
better than even that the regime in Kabul that America leaves behind in 2014
will survive. It will survive even the
departure of current president Hamid Karzai.
This is not to say that the contours of the region of
control by Kabul will not change from what they are now, with U.S. troops
present. The area in which the writ of
Kabul runs ought to shrink from what it is now.
But this is no reason for despair; it is simply a recognition of the
geography of the country and the loss of offensive power backing the Kabul
regime occasioned by the departure of U.S. forces.
The loss of some space will lead to a crisis of morale – for
some. If the regime and the Afghan armed
forces which support it are able to dominate the crisis, then one of two
possible outcomes will occur.
The first possible outcome is a new equilibrium. Afghanistan will settle down into a loosely
knit country dominated in the hinterland by local warlords, of which the
Taliban will be one of several; and the capital area will be controlled by a
regime nominally like the one left behind.
Such was the nature of the country from its founding in the 1747 to the
1973 revolution.
The second possible outcome is that the Taliban decide to
square off with the Kabul regime and fight a real war on real battlefields for
control of the entire country. This they
will find difficult to do. The Taliban,
throughout its existence, has never had to fight a battle that required the
coordination of battalions of troops, the accurate delivery of firepower, and
logistical resupply of ammunition. They
seized power in the 1990s due to a collapse in morale of their opponents, who
feared individual retribution; and they lost power in 2002 because of the
coordination of U.S. air power with the Northern Alliance troops, who simply showed
up. The speed of the Taliban collapse in
2002 surprised many - they lost both Kabul and Kandahar in a single campaign
season - but such is the effect of a sudden loss of morale.
While the Taliban may be able to locally outnumber Afghan
troops in the mountains, the major cities and population centers are on
plains. The semi-trained Afghan forces
greatly outnumber the untrained ragtag forces that the Taliban at the best of
times are able to put into the field.
The Taliban can train a dozen for a single operation – as evidenced at
Camp Bastion – but putting together the platoons and companies and battalions
required to fight a stand-up battle with the Afghan National Army (ANA) and to
resupply them are likely beyond their capacity.
The Taliban can dominate here than there with small numbers through
threats against individuals. But when
enough Taliban bunch together they become a visible target, hittable even by
ANA forces.
This is where morale comes in. If the ANA believes that the Taliban are
unbeatable, if the ANA commanders are incompetent or lazy, if the Taliban are
able to undermine the morale of the ANA by threats and assassinations, and if
the Kabul regime is so corrupt that it fails to look after the soldiers
protecting it, then threat alone can cause a collapse of the ANA despite the
disparity in offensive power between the ANA and the Taliban.
Afghanistan is a large country with rugged terrain – ideal
for small guerrilla bands to dominate here and there. The big picture, however, is that the Kabul
regime is favored by geography to control the most space and the large
population centers. The Kabul regime can
survive if its morale holds up, and if that confidence is transmitted to the
forces that protect it and to the population it governs.
-30-
Vincent J. Curtis is a free-lance writer who was embedded
with U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, and reported on behalf of the Buffalo
News. A version of this piece was published in the Buffalo News.
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