[Last week when 17 Canadians were arrested for an alleged bomb plot to punish Canada for its participation in Afghanistan, Jon Stewart quipped "Canada? How could anybody hate Canada? That's like hating toast! It's not something people have strong feelings about either way. And Afghanistan? Dude -- that's so two jihads ago!" But as much as I love Stewart, that's a perfect example of how us American forget places exist when we're not looking at them. The war in Kanahar is very live, and Canada is playing the main role in it. Here's a great article from 2 weeks ago on how they are losing. Badly.]
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060526.wxafghan27/BNStory/Front
Taliban rising
GEOFFREY YORK
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Almost every day, Mahmood Sadat sees the
stark human proof of the Taliban's rural victory. He sees it in the
corpses of the children who perish in his hospital for want of a
village doctor.
It happened again a few days ago, and it broke his heart. Unable to
find a doctor for their feverish four-year-old child, an illiterate
village couple had forced water down the throat of the unconscious
boy. By the time he reached the hospital in Kandahar, it was too late
for Dr. Sadat to do anything. The boy died from the water in his
lungs.
The boy could have survived if his parents had found a doctor -- but
all the doctors have fled the villages for fear of the Taliban's
terror tactics.
In much of southern Afghanistan's vast countryside, the militant
Taliban insurgents have already achieved their victory, leaving only
the cities and a few isolated outposts in the control of the Canadians
and other coalition forces. And day by day, they are creeping closer
to the cities, operating openly on the outskirts of Kandahar and other
major cities.
"In the rural areas, the Taliban do whatever they want -- even in the
daytime, not just at night," said Dr. Sadat, a pediatrician who
himself was forced to give up his work in a rural clinic after four
doctors there were killed.
"The doctors and teachers have all left the rural areas because they
are afraid of the Taliban. The rural areas are out of the government's
control. Day by day, it is getting worse."
For three months now, Canadian troops have been struggling to extend
their presence into Kandahar's rural districts. It might be too late.
Some officers admit privately that the coalition has wasted the past
four years by failing to push beyond the main cities. Instead of
bolstering the new government's reach in 2002 when it was popular, the
coalition is now trying to prop up what's become a much-hated
authority that has squandered most of its public trust.
Since their defeat in 2001, Taliban militants have been allowed to
regroup, re-arm and re-exert their influence. Most of the southern
countryside is now paralyzed, beyond the influence of Afghanistan's
central government, lacking any government services and unable to
break the Taliban's stranglehold. Just as it was in the 1980s during
the Soviet occupation, the foreign troops control the major cities
while the guerrillas control the mountains and villages.
The Taliban know they cannot beat the coalition in a head-to-head
battle. But they don't need a military victory. They only need to
terrorize the "soft targets" -- doctors, teachers, government
officials and villagers -- and destabilize the country. By destroying
the economy and killing any sense of hope, they are creating a
potential army of disillusioned young men.
It's a classic guerrilla strategy, and it's working. "The conventional
army loses if it does not win," former U.S. secretary of state Henry
Kissinger once said. "The guerrilla wins if he does not lose."
Analysts say that the Taliban have more fighters in Afghanistan today
than at any time since 2001. A record opium harvest in the south has
bolstered the Taliban's financing, with many farmers supporting the
Taliban as a bulwark against the threat of poppy eradication by the
coalition.
Even after a major sweep by Canadian forces near Kandahar this month,
and after a battle that killed dozens of rebels, Canadian commanders
acknowledged that the insurgents simply returned to the villages after
the soldiers had pulled out.
And their strength is not just in the south. In a two-day period this
week, the insurgents mounted more than 20 attacks against the
coalition in 12 provinces of the country. They are reported to have
control of rural districts in Ghazni province, just 135 kilometres
south of Kabul, the base of the central government.
"There's no doubt that the Taliban have grown in strength and
influence in certain areas in Kandahar, Helmand and in southern
Uruzgan," U.S. military spokesman Colonel Tom Collins told a briefing
this week.
"They prey upon people who don't have a lot of hope. They recruit
people to join their cause. These people may not believe much in the
cause, but they need a job."
The Canadians are trying their best to build goodwill in the villages,
providing small-scale aid projects and the occasional day of medical
services. But it's agonizingly slow work, requiring heavily armed
security. Months of goodwill can be shattered by a single night of
mistaken bombing -- as happened last week when dozens of villagers
were killed or injured by a coalition attack near Kandahar. (The
coalition later admitted that the bombing may have "dampened the mood"
among the villagers.)
While there are about 8,000 coalition troops in Kandahar province,
most are stuck in support roles at the Kandahar airfield. Only about
1,500 are combat troops. At any given time, only a few hundred troops
are patrolling the 54,000 square kilometres of the province, along
with a few hundred at the "forward operating bases" -- isolated posts
in the heart of Taliban territory. This makes a ratio of one soldier
for every 36 square kilometres of territory, not nearly enough "boots
on the ground" to make much of a difference. Most of these soldiers,
moreover, have no training in the tribal and ethnic complexities that
bedevil their work.
The Taliban have multiplied their strength by using roadside bombs and
suicide bombers to keep the coalition off-balance. To avoid the bombs,
Canadian convoys race at top speed through Kandahar, too fearful to
linger. "They're like mice, running from hole to hole," the Afghans
sometimes quip.
While the coalition has struggled to build a political commitment for
its presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban are recruiting a steady
stream of volunteers, churned out by religious schools in Pakistan
that propagate a militant anti-Western brand of Islam. The Taliban
have enjoyed a haven in Pakistan, where the government has turned a
blind eye to their sanctuaries. And the border between Afghanistan and
Pakistan is too porous for the Afghan security forces to control.
"We don't have enough police," said General Rahmatullah Raufi,
commander of the Afghan army forces in southern Afghanistan. "The
police don't have control in most rural areas. The Taliban have a lot
of power in our region, and they will get stronger. They have modern
weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and modern vehicles. They have
training centres in Pakistan and everything else they need."
While the coalition struggles to build trust among the Afghans, the
reality is that the coalition doesn't trust any of the locals. Even
those who are hired to work in menial jobs at the Kandahar airfield
are sometimes watched by armed guards because of a fear that they will
suddenly attack the troops.
"Don't forget -- the enemy is listening," a common poster at one of
the Canadian military bases reminds the soldiers.
The Taliban numbers, meanwhile, seem almost inexhaustible. During the
past two years, casualties on both sides have steadily risen. In the
first three weeks of this month, the coalition said that 420 Taliban
fighters were killed, injured or captured in southern Afghanistan. Yet
the Taliban have continued to escalate their attacks. Their numbers
are clearly much greater than the coalition expected.
They also take a very patient view of history. They know that more
Western troop reinforcements are arriving this year, but they also
know that 3,000 American soldiers are due to be withdrawn from
Afghanistan this summer. They are willing to wait for the coalition's
willpower to falter. As one Canadian officer noted, "We have all the
watches, but they have all the time."
Just like the U.S. troops in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the
coalition is trying to prop up a corrupt and unpopular government.
Local governments are dominated by so many warlords and gangsters that
many Afghans express nostalgia for the Taliban regime of 1996 to 2001,
which at least was not perceived as corrupt and immoral.
"The Afghan population is throwing up its hands," a veteran aid worker
in Kandahar said. "The disorder today is coming from the government
itself. Its mandate was to clean out the warlords, but instead it's
engaged in an endless dance with them. Everyone says that the Taliban
regime, if nothing else, at least stopped the corruption and created
law and order."
Another aid worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the
government is rapidly losing support as the Taliban move closer to the
cities. "The Taliban are travelling openly in convoys, coming into the
towns and sitting with the people at night, trying to influence them,"
he said. "The people are taking a passive role now, but in six months,
if this situation continues, they could support the opposition."
Most aid agencies have withdrawn from southern Afghanistan, and
foreign aid workers are unofficially barred from most villages -- not
just for their personal safety, but also because they would draw
Taliban reprisals to the villages.
"The international community now faces the disturbing prospect of the
new insurgency embedding itself in communities and spreading to other
weak districts, and a progressive de facto dismantling of
Afghanistan," said a report last month by the Senlis Council, a
security and development policy group based in Europe.
The Canadian mission is not yet doomed, but it cannot hope to succeed
without more reinforcements, a long-term commitment to the country,
and a new strategy to "drain the swamp" in the Taliban sanctuaries in
Pakistan.
The world has seen failed peacemaking efforts before -- in Somalia and
Haiti in the 1990s, for example, when premature withdrawals led to a
social collapse. A senior RCMP officer, Superintendent Wayne Martin,
worked in Haiti for a year in the late 1990s. Now he is serving in
Kandahar as part of Canada's reconstruction effort, and he hopes that
the lessons of Haiti have been learned.
"My greatest fear is that the same thing will happen here as in
Haiti," he said. "Things were starting to move forward, at a glacial
rate, and then it fell back."
He believes that the international community needs to commit itself to
10 or 15 years in Afghanistan to support the peace process. "This is a
marathon, not a sprint... I'll be in a wheelchair in a nursing home
before we know whether this effort has worked or not."