Indian Defence Review

There was no Afghan Army to secure the country post. The US therefore had to rely on the highly discredited and unpopular warlords (who had been overthrown earlier by the Taliban). The use of warlords seriously undercut the legitimacy of the Afghan Government of President Karzai. The first and foremost requirement for an independent state is a national Army. It is simply inexplicable why it has taken over a decade to rebuild a viable Afghan National Army. A professional Afghan Army would have consolidated the new Afghan state and been far, far cheaper than maintaining US or NATO forces in this region.

From Regular to Dispersed Warfare. The Taliban meanwhile had learnt its lessons. It had initially fled to sanctuaries in FATA and North West Frontier Provinces in Pakistan. America now diverted attention and resources away to Iraq. Seriously under funded and under resourced, Afghanistan was left to its own devices. The Taliban found the force to space ratio ridiculously low in Afghanistan. It simply seeped right back in. The Quetta Shura led by Mullah Omar was ensconced by the ISI in the city of Quetta itself. It targeted Kandahar. The Haqqani Shura based in Waziristan targeted Khost, Paktia and Paktika provinces. Gen Parvez Kayani called Haqqani a prime strategic asset. The Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar made NWFP its base for targeting the Afghan provinces of Nangrahar, Nuristan and Kunar. Hekmatyar was the ISI’s poster boy during the Afghan Jihad. He had bombed Kabul to rubble because he could not capture it. There are thus three clear tiers of the Taliban:

For some strange reasons the Americans are planning an Afghan army of just 134,000 strong and a police force of 82,000.

In 2006, the then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced that America would be withdrawing from Afghanistan. Pakistan had then resolved to re-install the Taliban in Kabul. Even while it enacted the charade of fighting the US Global War on Terror (GWOT), it stepped up support to the Taliban in a major way. From that year onwards there has been a distinct upsurge in the attacks of the Taliban inside Afghanistan and a visible rise in the use of IEDs.

Narco-Terrorism. The ISI had simply revived the Narcotics Empire of the Golden Crescent to pay for this insurgency. 9 percent of the Afghan population had been killed, 33 percent had fled to other countries as refugees and 11 percent were internally displaced. Most of the cultivable areas were strewn with mines. The entire labour-intensive, traditional system of Afghan agriculture thus broke down and the Afghans had reverted to poppy cultivation, which is not manpower intensive.

If the Americans are serious about pacifying the region and want to protect the population, they will need to commit enhanced resources and stay the course for at least one to two decades

This opium economy has been fuelling the Taliban War since then. In 2008 the US 24 Marine Expeditionary Group( MEU) and the 205th Corps of the Afghan Army had launched major search and destroy operations in the Helmand province, the prime centre of gravity for opium cultivation and Taliban operations in Afghanistan. The American MEU withdrew in Sep’ 08 and handed this area over to the British troops. The British were woefully thin on the ground and had to cede most of this key terrain to the reinvigorated Taliban.

The ISAF troops have proved to be surprisingly soft and effete. The French and Germans hardly operate at night. The British troops are overstretched and visibly demoralized. The ISAF focused primarily on Force Protection with the help of indiscriminate airpower which distanced them physically and psychologically from the Afghan people. The lackluster combat performance of the ISAF forces led the US military to wryly comment “ISAF stands for – I Saw Americans Fight”. The Taliban has been relying on the large scale use of lethal Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and standoff fire to inflict casualties. Even after the surge, the 68,000 US troops and the 32,000 ISAF/NATO troops are far too thin on the ground to fight a proper CI campaign. LT Gen Stanley McChrystal has now asked for 40,000 to 60,000 additional troops.

The best answer to the Taliban however, is a strong and capable Afghan Army. The insurgency in Afghanistan requires an Afghan solution. For some strange reasons the Americans are planning an Afghan army of just 134,000 strong and a police force of 82,000. This is far too small for a country the size and ruggedness of Afghanistan. The pre-Soviet era Afghan Army was 350,000 strong. The Soviets had rebuilt the Afghan Army strength to 550,000. This is the optimal size for Afghanistan. Anything less than this will lead to an imminent collapse after an US withdrawal.