In Afghanistan, Highway 1 stretches from the capital city of Kabul in the north to Kandahar in the south. Along the way, it intersects an east-west crossing, which if you head due east at the village of Jumah Kala (with a population of about 1,000 in the Andar District, province of Ghazni) through the province of Paktia, takes you right into the Northern Waziristan in the ungovernable Pakistani Tribal District. While NATO forces are clearly seen in the north and south, this rugged mountain-pressed eastern area is, like vast stretches of Afghanistan in many other areas, almost purely Taliban country.In that town – Jumah Kala – they haven’t seen a coalition patrol in two years and no one has seen the provincial governor in a decade, but as the December 25th New York Times notes, they see the Taliban every day: “Insurgent [Taliban] leaders here and in many of the other small farming villages that dot much of the Andar District in Ghazni, one of Afghanistan’s more troubled provinces, have filled the void left by the government. They settle land and water disputes and dictate school curriculums. They issue curfews and order local residents, by way of ‘night letters,’ not to talk to foreign forces…. It is in this environment that coalition forces must try to persuade villagers to trust a government they seldom see, and to help coalition forces root out the Taliban at great personal risk.” And trust me, you really do not want to receive a “night letter,” and if you disobey its dictates, you won’t be around long enough to see if you remotely made the right choice.
The Times continues: “One place the government’s minimal footprint can be seen is in the schools. The government pays teachers’ salaries and buys books. But even here, the Taliban assert their influence. At a school of about 1,300 boys and 30 teachers in the nearby village of Chawni, the Taliban recently posted a letter on the wall detailing the curriculum that was to be taught… ‘So here they get money from the government, books from the government, and they think it’s perfectly legitimate to teach what that Taliban tells them,’ said Captain Schwengler, who commands the Third Battalion’s Company B.”
There just aren’t enough NATO forces to take and hold enough towns to eradicate the Taliban movement that was once just waiting for the inevitable departure of foreign forces to step in and formalize the control they have over most of the country anyway. Unfortunately for the NATO troops wrestling with this Taliban insurgency, the Taliban are so confident of the ultimate victory that they aren’t even laying back and waiting for the Americans and their allies to leave anymore. They now have sufficient strength and experience with the NATO forces to mount an aggressive counter-attack.
The war has accelerated and turned even more brutal: “Without question, security has eroded. Insurgent attacks in Andar have surged 113 percent since 2008, and in neighboring Deh Yak 106 percent, according to military figures. Battalion patrols engage in regular firefights with the Taliban, often up close. And the insurgents are employing more sophisticated improvised explosive devices, imported from the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, using remote control devices and safe-arming switches to set off explosions… Fighters from the Haqqani network, base d out of North Waziristan, Pakistan, have increasingly targeted the southwest part of the province. Military officials say traditional Taliban fighters under the leadership of the Quetta shura have increasingly hit other areas in the province.” NY Times.
Given the less-than-resounding support of our current campaign in recently released intelligence reports and the equivocating prognosis from our own General David Petraeus, it is still amazing that we are projecting remaining militarily active in this country until well beyond 2014. We continue to deploy drones to rain missiles down on suspected Taliban leaders on the Pakistani side of the border, with the concomitant “collateral damage” generating civilian casualties and protests from our “ally” in the fight against terrorism, Pakistan, hoping to decimate a seemingly infinite supply of Taliban leaders.
But even as the Taliban attack civilians within Pakistan herself, populist Pakistani sympathies remain with their Muslim brethren (the Taliban) and not with the hated foreign infidels (NATO), who are seen sending drones into their country to root out “enemies.” On Christmas day: “A woman wearing a burqa lobbed hand grenades into a crowd near a food aid distribution center before detonating explosives, killing at least 42 people in northwestern Pakistan… The suicide attack, believed to be the country's first by a woman, happened as Pakistani security forces attacked hideouts and reportedly killed about the same number of militants…[The December 25th] suicide bombing in the town of Khar, the center of the Bajaur tribal area, came during ongoing fighting between Pakistani security forces and insurgents in the volatile tribal region near the Afghan border…” AOLNews.com, December 25th.
Rumors spread that those targeted had opposed the Taliban insurgency, but mostly these poor people were simply refugees: “Most of those at the distribution center were impoverished refugees who had been displaced by fighting between Taliban militants and the security forces in Bajaur and elsewhere along the border with Afghanistan. More than 300,000 people have been driven from their homes by a military push against the insurgents that began in 2008.” Los Angeles Times, December 25th. Still the Pakistani locals prefer the Taliban. This fight is most certainly looking more like the failed Soviet Afghan campaign of the 1980s and a lot less like any projection of victory projected by either the Bush or the Obama administrations.
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