Intelligence

Job done: Taliban ‘are on the run’

Christina Lamb Kabul

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2583182_1,00.html

British Nato commander claims military victory even as insurgents come back fighting

“MY aim today is to convince you that we actually won the first and second Anglo-Afghan wars, contrary to popular belief,” said Colonel Dudley Giles as he showed a group of officers and diplomats inside Kabul’s Bala Hissar fort last week.

The fort is in ruins, destroyed by British troops in 1879 in retaliation for the murder of the British envoy. Giles is an accredited battlefield guide and in between heading Britain’s military police in Kabul for the past nine months, he has led a series of tours emphasising British military prowess on Afghan soil.

Down below in Kabul’s Nato headquarters, the most recent British general to attempt to tame the Afghans is engaged in a similar exercise of persuasion.

As General David Richards hands over control of all 31,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan to his American successor, General Dan McNeil, this morning, the message is very much “mission accomplished”. It is a message somewhat tarnished by the loss of the key southern town of Musa Qala to the Taliban.

Recent visitors to Richards’s office have been given a presentation entitled “2006 Achievements” that claims Nato “has gained the psychological ascendancy”. It goes on to cite statistics ranging from 6m children in school to 22m calls a month being made on the Afghan mobile phone system.

“In many respects I think we’ve been more successful than I anticipated,” Richards said last week. “At the start of the summer there was huge scepticism about Nato — could we fight, would we even still be here by now? Not only has Nato unequivocally proved it can fight but actually, militarily, it has defeated the Taliban.”

The fall of Musa Qala, where British troops had withdrawn after a much criticised peace deal with local elders, has nevertheless cast a pall over Richards’s farewells.

The attack was prompted by an airstrike near Musa Qala 10 days ago that was aimed at a Taliban commander named Mullah Ghafour but killed his family instead. He retaliated last weekend by invading the town centre but was driven out by local elders. On Friday he returned with more than 200 men and captured the town.

At Nato headquarters in Kabul yesterday, they were putting a rather desperate spin on events, saying the incursion proved to critics such as the Americans that the Musa Qala agreement had not been a peace deal with the Taliban. “We will take it back but in a manner and timing of our choosing,” said Mark Laity, a spokesman. “It’s a question of if, not when.”

Whoever ends up with their flag flying over Musa Qala, the general will not be returning home as “Richards of Afghanistan” as he clearly hoped when he arrived last April. But he has acquired widespread respect from both Afghans and diplomats as well as a nasty bout of whooping cough topped with viral pneumonia.

“General Richards has done a good job,” said President Hamid Karzai yesterday. “He’s tried hard and the situation is much better. But I don’t think we can declare victory.”

In fact he has overseen Afghanistan’s most violent year since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, with more than 4,000 Afghans and 191 coalition soldiers killed. The general, who before taking command had criticised the American forces for being “too kinetic”, ordered more than 650 airstrikes in September.

The number of strikes has now fallen to one or two a day, though this is partly because of the traditional winter lull in fighting by the Taliban.

“I am very unhappy about all this bombing and have told Nato this repeatedly,” Karzai said. “As we speak, there is a little girl of four being operated on in Germany because of Nato bombing in which 22 innocent people were killed. Rather than going in Afghan villages and sometimes bombing without really checking, making mistakes, we should go to the sources of terrorism, the places where they are trained and financed.”

Many of the casualties, including the girl, were sustained in Operation Medusa, when Nato forces battled for two weeks in September to stop Taliban forces taking the key city of Kandahar. Richards describes the battle, which left more than 500 dead, as “the turning point of the whole campaign” and insists Nato has won Kandahar. “There is very little Taliban activity there now,” he said.

Furthermore, Richards claims that had he had the extra troops he pleaded for but which are only now are being sent by Britain and the US, he could have won the war.

“I don’t really feel bitter because I’m a professional soldier,” he says with a laugh. “But I would love to have had them. During Operation Medusa if I’d had that reserve I would have prevented the Taliban getting out of the neck of the bottle (back to Pakistan) and swung them into Helmand and done the things already we’re about to do in Helmand.

“If I’d had that reserve I could have made it a more conclusive victory. I could have defeated them and accelerated progress in Helmand.”

Although Richards insists that he always expected to have to fight hard in Afghanistan, he concedes that he was surprised by the intensity. However, General Abdul Rahim Wardak, Afghanistan’s portly and genial defence minister, insists last summer’s heavy fighting could have been avoided.

“What people now call last year’s resurgence of the Taliban was the result of three or four years of preparation,” he said. “The Taliban believed the international community were not firmly committed to Afghanistan and would disengage. So from day one when the West started arming our army and police with those old weapons of the Soviet era that we’d fought with for 30 years with their barrels malfunctioning, etc, it did not give a very good message.

“The Taliban also chose a critical time to emerge — both militarily, just when there was a handover of command, and politically, when there was a lot of questioning in European capitals about the wisdom of deploying their forces here.”

This, the minister said, was what gave them the confidence to try to take Kandahar. “Militarily, it made no sense to send irregular troops against sophisticated conventional forces and compel them to engage in conventional battles. It was a big military gamble and they lost. But it stretched us to our limit.”

Not only is Nato beefing up its forces with an additional 1,000 Polish troops and 800 more British, but the US has extended the stay of 3,200 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Brigade.

There is renewed focus on doubling the Afghan National Army (ANA) to 70,000.

Just as Afghanistan started unravelling because attention had switched to Iraq, it is Iraq that is prompting a realisation in Washington that Afghanistan could go the same way. The past two weeks have seen visits to Kabul from Senator Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House. President George Bush has asked for an extra $10.6 billion (£5.3 billion) in assistance.

On Thursday a beaming Wardak took delivery of 230 Humvee armoured vehicles and 800 army trucks, part of a massive new military consignment from the US.

“Building up the ANA is far cheaper than deploying international forces,” he said. “It was a mistake not to have invested more in the ANA before.”

The big question now is whether the Taliban were dealt a mortal blow by Operation Medusa, as Richards believes, and will not be able to muster their threatened spring offensive.

A Taliban spokesman claimed last month that they have 2,000 suicide bombers. Reports from across the border in Pakistan are of active recruitment. In Quetta, where the Taliban leadership is based, posters exhort: “Come and fight the British.” In Peshawar, prayers in mosques have been followed by impassioned speeches about the infidels in Afghanistan and requests for contributions to buy explosives.

Once again, the focus is on the southern province of Helmand, the Taliban heartland. It is also the centre of the opium trade, whose profits are thought to fund terrorism. Last year Afghanistan was responsible for 92% of world opium production and a quarter of this came from Helmand. Officials believe this year’s output will be higher.

Richards admits that his biggest disappointment has been the lack of progress in Helmand, where 5,000 British troops continue to be engaged in heavy fighting. He long ago stopped talking of the “ink spots”, or areas of development, that he once planned enthusiastically. According to the recently ousted governor of Helmand, Engineer Mohammad Daoud: “Since the British arrived the province has seen far more destruction than reconstruction.”

Many locals see British forces as threatening their livelihood.

Norine MacDonald, of the Senlis Council, a European think tank, has spent the past two weeks interviewing villagers in Helmand while handing out blankets and food aid, and is convinced that Nato has lost the battle for hearts and minds.

“If you’re a 26-year-old man and you see your house destroyed or your daughter killed, you’d turn against the British,” she said. “It’s not about global jihad.”

It was the fear of further alienating the population against the troops that prompted Britain’s refusal to allow ground spraying of the poppy fields in Helmand that was due to start this week.

US officials were furious, believing this to be why Karzai changed his mind about allowing spraying, particularly as the Dutch then insisted it could not take place in Uruzgan either, where their troops are based.

“The Brits really put a spanner in the works,” said one US counter-narcotics official. “How could it go ahead if they wouldn’t allow it in the biggest poppy-growing province?” British officials argue that 10 of Karzai’s ministers spoke out against spraying. Whatever the reason, few expect manual eradication to result in more than a 5% cut. British counter-narcotics officials are reduced to talking of projects such as growing mint.

The eradication force of Afghans and their international advisers, DynCorp, drove into Helmand’s main city of Lashkar Gah on Tuesday, protected by helicopter gunships. They have come under attack every night since and have yet to leave their compound.

In Kabul, many Afghans feel there is too much focus on the south. Although the capital feels far more secure than a few months ago and has seen no suicide bombs for five months, United Nations security officials point out that much of the neighbouring provinces of Wardak and Loghar are no-go areas.

Just last week, as Richards was talking up Nato, a school was burnt down in Loghar.

From today as the British flag goes down and the US flag goes up, this is no longer his problem, though he is thought to covet a role as regional envoy for Tony Blair. Many of his officers believe they will be back soon. Britain is in discussions to take command again next year. Colonel Dudley Giles is one of many who would like to return and perhaps add another chapter to his battlefield tours. He may not convince many Afghans that Britain really did defeat them in the past but most would agree with his message. “We won the war but we lost the peace,” he said.

Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.

February 4, 2007 at 12:10 PM in Middle East, Terror groups, UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home