Who's training the Taliban?
The war in Afghanistan is, at a very fundamental level, political. The dispute growing between the High Peace Council and the National Movement is, at a very fundamental level, political. Iâ??ve been harping on this for years, that many of the biggest problems we face in Afghanistan are neither military nor economic in nature, but political. The U.S. has never had real challenges on the battlefieldâ??the Army and Marines are terrifyingly good at â??clearingâ? areas. But the politics of what to do with those cleared areas has always mystified NATO and ISAF.The Washington Post recently reported that the Marines have spent nearly $1.3 billion in the last 18 months in Marjeh, and there remains no political structure to assist with governance. Even in supposedly successful places like Nawa, also in Helmand, the Marines have shown a marked inability to understand and affect the political context of the areas they controlâ??and they have been substantially more successful than the Army in doing this! But theyâ??re stuck in a stilted mode of thinking that, once the guys with guns sweep through, they can lavish money upon an area and declare it successful.
This is not a war the Taliban are winning: from a political perspective theyâ??re barely more functional than the Afghan government is. It is a war we are losingâ??by ignoring the politics of Afghanistan, of the basic political question driving the war (e.g. what will be the ultimate political system of Afghanistan), and the politics preventing Afghans and Taliban from sitting down to negotiate, we are sowing the seeds of failure. - Joshua Foust
This sounds right to me. And let's be fair - it may not be possible for the U.S. to finesse the politics of Afghanistan to get the outcome Washington desires even if (a huge if) we properly understood these politics and the levers we'd need to move them in our direction. A "political" solution is contingent on a lot of factors, some of which may not be amenable to American bombs and/or bribes. The present course suggests the U.S. is simply trying to save face in Afghanistan - delivering enough of a blow to the Taliban that they will be weak enough for the Afghan National Army to hold them at bay when the U.S. departs in 2014.
There are, though, problems with that approach. Specifically, the Afghan National Army and police:
Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American in charge of the NATO effort to train Afghan forces, said Monday that although NATO was on track to reach its goal of training 305,000 army and police forces by October, attrition remained a significant problem. Those forces currently total 296,000.General Caldwell said that about 30 percent of Afghan soldiers leave the Army every year before their terms of service are up, particularly in areas of heavy combat where they are needed most. In addition, he said that only one in 10 recruits can read and write, meaning NATO must first provide literacy training so that soldiers are able to write their names and read serial numbers on their weapons. So far, he said, NATO has trained 90,000 men in basic literacy.
The Taliban, by contrast, do not have the world's most powerful military alliance training them in military techniques and literacy and equipping them. And yet, with 296,000 men under arms we're still not confident that these Afghan troops can keep the Taliban insurgency at bay. Pretty astounding, isn't it?
