generalspeaking

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

The Best-Laid Plans ....

"What we've learned is that you can't really leave. The local forces need air support, intelligence and help with logistics. They are not going to be ready in three years or five years."
"You have to be there for a very long time."
Senior Pentagon official

"No matter what happens in the next couple of years Afghanistan is going to have wide ungoverned spaces that violent extremist organizations can take advantage of."
"How long does it take to grow a 15-year-pilot? It takes about fifteen years. We're starting a little late with the Air Force."

Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, U.S. military spokesman, Afghanistan

U.S. soldiers near forward operating base Gamberi in the Laghman province of Afghanistan. © Lucas Jackson

It is the resilience of the Taliban, of al-Qaeda, their ability to recruit, to infuse their recruits with the indoctrinating ethos of triumphalist Islamism that enables them to restore themselves to their previous capacity, each time they are beaten back. They withdraw, they wait, they refresh their arms and their vigour, their commitment and their passion, and they draw in greater numbers to once again reclaim what they lost.

Where at one time the presence of NATO troops met the Taliban at every juncture in their decade of spring offensives and winter withdrawals, sending them back to the remote and hostile mountains, crossing into the wild, ungoverned Pakistan mountainous preserves of rigid Islamism meant that established al Qaeda training camps were destroyed, they too have been restored as breeding grounds for new combat-ready fighters prepared to meet the enemy.

A rival has entered the geography with the presence of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, draining the Taliban and al-Qaeda of some of their fighters, attracted to the allure of a perceived winner, one whose dread presence sends shivers of fear down the spines of those who have seen their reputations precede their presence. Now the al-Qaeda training camps have been augmented with the presence of ISIL counterparts, jostling for territory and acclaim.

Where a few short months back the remote training camps were bleeding suicide bombers making incursions into government-held areas calling on their U.S. trainers and aerial defences to engage, the growing presence of Islamist fighting forces has forced the U.S. administration to abandon its plans to withdraw in the pretense that Afghan police and its military were sufficiently well prepared to defend their country.

It was a shallow pretense, of a military without discipline, lacking unity and command, with conscripts abandoning their posts in impossible-to-maintain numbers. Confidence that the time to leave Afghanistan to Afghans has come and it has gone, and U.S. military commanders are now preparing for a long stay in reflection of the vulnerability of the Afghan government to ongoing militant assaults.

"This is not a region you want to abandon", commented Michele Flournoy, former Pentagon official. "So the question is, what do we need going forward, given our interests?" The interests being, more or less, ensuring that the jihadists who had mounted the most debilitating, devious and destructive assault on American territory in the very heart of the homeland, will never be given the opportunity for a repeat performance.

The "exit strategy" that has involved long, exhaustive preparations, inclusive of which has been the training of Afghans to be responsible for themselves, has become an impossibility. The long-range view now is that any kind of exit is nowhere in sight. Even though the Taliban proved, year after year, their endurance and incorrigible devotion to jihad would not be stifled, even by the best-equipped, most disciplined fighting force in the world, American commanders were still caught by surprise at their resilience and renewed force of presence.

It will take much, much longer for military precision and best-practise military professionalism to eventually penetrate the Afghan psyche, and America, because it sees little other option, has once again nominated itself as the means by which it can be achieved, despite past disappointments in attempting to instill in a reluctant Afghan force the kind of self-reliance based on military competence and confidence that could translate into an effective military.