AFGHAN WAR SIX YEARS ON

Six years ago this month, the Bush Administration launched its first major response to the 9/11 attacks by invading Afghanistan in an operation called Enduring Freedom. Six years on, much of that country remains lawless and OEF, as the invasion is now termed within the Pentagon, could be renamed Operation Without Enduring Freedom, because NATO may have to remain in Afghanistan for decades to come, fighting the Taliban and foreign fighters.
As invasions go, the Afghanistan invasion was far from orthodox because of an almost total reliance on air power. The objectives were to destroy the Taliban, catch Osama Bin Laden and eliminate his Al Qaeda network. That was all left to small teams of CIA agents and CIA allies within the Afghan Northern Alliance militia led by its warlord, General Dostum. They were all backed up by high altitude, precision bombing.
The overwhelming use of “shock and awe” tactics quickly disposed of the Taliban, many of whom faded into the tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. Others simply changed sides, a tradition past time among Afghan fighters. In 2001, reasons for switching allegiances included survival and large sums of cash offered by the CIA to tribal war lords to persuade their men to fight against both the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The objectives of Operation Enduring Freedom were never fully met because the Taliban was not wiped out, Bin Laden and his inner circle were not captured and Al Qaeda remains a serious threat to this day, having morphed into an organization that now supplies many of the foreign fighters killing US soldiers in Iraq.
So, what happened? Why did the early success of removing the Taliban from power not lead to all the objectives of OEF being achieved? Most experts tend to agree that several factors complicated the Afghanistan invasion, the most important being that the US did not put enough troops on the ground. The failure to do so meant that too much emphasis was placed on Afghan allies, namely warlords and their militias, to track down and destroy Bin Laden and his network.
As the Taliban regime crumbled under relentless US bombing, Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers fled into the Tora Bora mountain range along the border with Pakistan. It was terrain Bin Laden knew well from his days as an engineer building tunnels for the Mujihadeen who fought the Soviets to a standstill between 1979 and 1989. During that decade, Bin Laden’s tunnels enabled Afghan fighters during that decade to survive Soviet air assaults and to launch attacks on the Soviet military. By the time the Soviets accepted defeat, they had suffered 30,000 fatalities. More than 50,000 of their soldiers were seriously injured, and as many as 200,000 were treated for illnesses like typhoid and malaria.
Had US military planners studied the history of that campaign they would have known that Bin Laden would seek sanctuary in Tora Bora. That would have enabled them to put sufficient troops on the ground to cut off his escape route. Instead, the Pentagon planners, including Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, relied heavily on US air power, and paid Afghan fighters who were secretly taking bribes from Al Qaeda to let the leaders of that organization flee the country. The outcome was that Bin Laden and his followers made their way to Pakistan, even by-passing formations of Pakistani troops on the border.
The US failure to commit enough troops can be attributed to the fact that the Bush administration was secretly planning another war at that time – the invasion of Iraq. It mean President Bush, Dick Cheney and others were less concerned about the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks than their desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein and go after Iraq’s oil. In pure military terms, Operation Enduring Freedom was grossly mismanaged. Any undergraduate student of history could have told the White House and Pentagon that you cannot take lightly at your peril any campaign in Afghanistan. No one knew that more than the British who lost many soldiers their in 19th century Afghan campaigns. But the British leader in 2001, Tony Blair, was not prepared to question the strategy of his closest ally and friend, George Bush.
Ever since the Iraq invasion in 2003, there has been a growing consensus among experts that the decision not to commit fully to Afghanistan allowed the Taliban to re-group and Al Qaeda to reconstitute itself as a global terror network. Therefore, the potential for victory was sacrificed. One of the likely consequences is that NATO will be fighting a defensive battle there for decades to come.
Afghanistan is hard to subdue, not merely because of its geography and the changing alliances and interference of its neighbors, including Iran and Pakistan, but because it is the world’s largest producer of opium. When the Taliban were in power they incurred the wrath of war lords and their followers by banning the growing of poppies. The US, against advice from the British, now wants to do the same thing and the result will be the same. Sadly, Afghanistan does not have Iraq’s energy resources. It is an economy run on drug money, which in turn fuels terrorism and encourages war lords to resist the US-NATO presence.
Worse still, the Taliban has been back in business since 2005, making much of the country ungovernable from the capital, Kabul, where the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai sits surrounded by scores of bodyguards. He is now considering political deals with the Taliban.
The British forces within NATO have had success against the Taliban in the south but at a cost of lives and injuries to their soldiers. Still, they recognize it is going to be a long campaign and they will need reinforcements. To that end, they have been pulling troops out of Iraq, a war that has no support within Britain.
Afghanistan remains high on the British agenda but so too does a recognition that it has not been accorded the emphasis it needs in Washington, and in some European capitals. Recently the British conservative leader, David Cameron, promised that if he won the next general election in Britain he would make Afghanistan his “number one priority in foreign policy.” He has to be aware, however, that success will depend on the efforts of Washington and London to persuade Pakistan to deal effectively with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Pakistani intelligence created the Taliban and has enough information to destroy it. The same applies to Al Qaeda, which uses Pakistan’s tribal areas to evade capture, train fighters and plan new atrocities.
The lack of commitment by Pakistan is evident in the latest UN statistics. They show a 30% increase in suicide bombings in Afghanistan. As the Taliban wilts under a fierce British military assault in the south, its leaders in Pakistan are sending foreign fighters, many of them with experience in Iraq, into Afghanistan to create mayhem.
No matter how long NATO remains in Iraq, the term Operation Enduring Freedom will always seem like a grandiose plan poorly conceived and sacrificed on the altar of an overwhelming desire by neocons in the Bush administration to settle “unfinished business,” namely the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the securing of his country’s massive oil reserves. That is no longer a fiction and was recently confirmed by the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. He was close enough to the Bush administration after 2001 to know what was on the mind of the president and his inner circle.