AT A taxi-rank on the southern edge of Kabul, drivers lounged against dusty car bonnets and held a grim conversation. Business was bad, they said. The road they travelled, shuttling between Afghanistan's capital and the violent eastern provinces of Logar and Paktia, was often unusable. Between 4pm and 4am, Islamist militants preyed upon it. At other times, American troops closed it.
“We're caught in the middle and we're sick of it,” said Ghafoor, a resident of Ahmadkhel village in Paktia—where he claimed 60 civilians had been killed in on-off fighting between Americans and militants. “We need security. But the Americans are just making trouble for us. They cannot bring peace, not if they stay for 50 years.”
At which, your British correspondent, who had been attracting attention in a dicey area, offered his hand and made to leave. Mr Ghafoor responded with two distastefully outstretched fingers, and said: “I won't shake hands with a Kafir.”
It would be wrong to judge any country, let alone one as fractured and complicated as Afghanistan, on an anecdote. Yet this encounter was consistent with a worrying change detected by many grizzled Afghanistan hands, Western diplomats and soldiers. Across Afghanistan, but especially in the mainly-Pushtun south and east (Pushtuns making up about 43% of this multi-ethnic population), resentment against the foreign-funded government of President Hamid Karzai, the NATO-led force that protects it, known as ISAF, and Westerners in general, is growing.
On August 15th a suicide-bomb attack outside ISAF's Kabul headquarters killed seven; on August 18th a salvo of Taliban rockets struck Kabul, including Mr Karzai's palace. The violence was perhaps aimed at Afghanistan's second presidential election, which was held on August 20th amid reports of intimidation and widespread rigging. Yet there are also worrying signs that the Taliban insurgency, now estimated to affect 40% of the country's districts, has in some places become an insurrection.
Eight years after the Taliban were blasted from power by American jets, and despite the splashing of $32 billion of foreign aid on Afghanistan, there are many reasons for Afghan anger. A failure to provide the security they crave—despite the deployment of over 100,000 ISAF and American troops, more than 120 of whom have been killed in the past six weeks—is the most obvious. Almost two-thirds of Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest places, where 30 years of anti-Soviet, then civil and now anti-NATO war have obliterated irrigation systems and turned roads to dust, is considered too dangerous for aid agencies to reach.
Civilian casualties of the fighting, of which there have been over 1,000 this year, are another source of resentment—and another motive for the insurgency in Pushtun society, where vengeance is justice. Nearly 60% of these deaths were in fact caused by the Taliban and allied Pushtun militants, through their increasing use of terrorist tactics, including over 90 suicide-blasts in Afghanistan this year. But misdirected American air strikes, which have many times destroyed wedding-parties and sleeping villagers in Afghanistan—for example, in western Farah province in May when at least 63 civilians were killed—are the main focus for Afghan rage. Acknowledging this, Mr Karzai on the campaign trial has often been critical of foreign troops.
The grudge-list goes on. Afghans, who welcomed this Kafir intervention in 2001 with outstretched arms, tell stories of American and British soldiers barging into cloistered Pushtun women's quarters, at night, with unclean dogs. If often exaggerated, these tales are rooted in truth. Casual detentions of thousands of Afghan men, on no good evidence, have also done damage. In his Kabul home, Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's black-bearded former ambassador to Pakistan, describes with disbelief the interrogations he endured during three-and-a-half years in Guantánamo Bay. “They said: ‘You are Mullah Omar, you are al-Qaeda, you are a drug-dealer, you are a gold-dealer…'”
With too little knowledge and too few troops, America and its allies have often relied on malign local proxies. Underlining the difficulty of the task, many of these held government posts. Between 2002 and 2006 in southern Uruzgan, for example, American special-forces soldiers were persuaded by the controversial then-governor, Jan Mohammad Khan, that a rival Pushtun tribe, the Ghilzais, supported the Taliban. In the mayhem that ensured, this soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Until 2006, southern Helmand had only 300 American combat troops. While thus neglected, it developed into the opium-growing heart of a complicated insurgency in which drugs, tribal politics and Islamist militancy all play a part. The deployment of 3,300 British troops there in early 2006 poured petrol on this fire. Many have been killed—including 35 in July and August—for little obvious gain. An institutional reluctance to admit the obvious—that the British were too few to bring security to Helmand—made matters worse. It led, for example, to an insane tactic of sporadic sweeps by British soldiers through Taliban-controlled areas, known as “mowing the lawn”, which might have been designed to turn local villagers to the Taliban. Helmand is now in arms, with 20,000 British and American troops now battling to control its main towns and roads.
Even Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, is unsafe. Its walls were pasted with a few campaign posters this week, but also with threatening “night-letters” from the Taliban, warning people not to vote. The militants, it was rumoured, meant to cut off the inky forefinger of anyone thus marked as having disobeyed their injunction. A local parliamentarian, Niamatullah Afari, who said he had been unable to visit his lands on the town's outskirts for years, predicted that no Helmandi would vote outside the province's two main towns.
In Helmand, and elsewhere in the south, the illegal opium trade—which the UN estimated to be worth $3.4 billion at export last year, or 33% of GDP—has also been incendiary. British troops in the fertile Helmand river valley, which alone produces more sticky opium resin than any nation, have been unwitting pawns in drug wars involving tribes, government officials and the Taliban, who get perhaps a third of their income from taxing the trade. An American-funded effort to plough up opium poppies, the main cash crop in much of the Pushtun south, has been wasteful and self-defeating. Last year this policy turned Nad Ali, which, under the control of a pro-government drug gang, had been a rare Taliban-resistant district of Helmand, into a place as hostile as any other.
ISAF maps, showing incidents of insurgent violence in yellow, reveal the effect of these setbacks. In 2005 southern and eastern Afghanistan were light yellow, while a speckly yellow arc traversed the west and north. In 2009 Afghanistan is covered by an almost-unbroken yellow ring, encompassing every thickly populated area. The south and east are rich gold. The northern and western arc is now thickly freckled maize. It includes formerly peaceful Kunduz province where German soldiers, sent there by an anxious government largely for their safety, were last month engaged in heavy fighting.
To what extent is the conflict a popular resistance? It is not a national Pushtun insurrection—like those, rooted in implacable xenophobia, that defeated 19th-century British adventurers and Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. By the government's estimate—unreliable as it may be—the Taliban and other Pushtun militant groups may be able to call on 25,000 fighters. Yet there is at least reason to fear, on the evidence of Helmand alone, that foreign troops are now creating more conflict than they can possibly quell. As an argument for ramping up Afghan security forces—which he later sought to contradict—the Afghan army's spokesman, Major-General Zahir Azimi, acknowledged this. “Where international forces are fighting, people think it is incumbent on them to resist the occupiers and infidels. This feeling is strong in the south and east and it may spread to other places.”
Afghanistan, it seems wise to assume, is at a critical point. The news is not all bad. Kabul, recently reinforced by some 4,000 freshly-trained police, feels a bit safer these days. And 21,000 extra American troops, including 17,000 already dispatched to Helmand and elsewhere, could begin to show similar results. Mr Karzai's cabinet has also improved, with half a dozen technocrats recruited in the past year to the main economic ministries. Yet it seems clear that the international effort to bring stability to Afghanistan, in which a strong, somewhat liberal and democratic state can take root, is failing. Among a relatively few foreign experts on the country—as opposed to the thousands of fat-salaried Western consultants bunkered in Kabul—the mood is bleak. “We think we're at the centre of things, but we're not, we're at the margins of Afghanistan,” says Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a think-tank. “And we're so busy having meetings and discussing our plans we're not even seeing what's coming at us.” Complete failure—withdrawal by NATO and a return to civil war—seems unimaginable. But failure of some lesser sort, still undefined, looks increasingly inevitable.
Softening the blow, there are two reasons for hope. First, however angry and disappointed, most Afghans still back the reconstruction effort. A recent poll for the International Republican Institute (IRI) showed them to be optimistic on a range of related issues, including security and the economy. General Stanley McChrystal, the overall American commander in Afghanistan, finds succour in this. Asked whether he considered his mission possible, he said: “Afghanistan is this tremendously complex, Mad Max, utterly devastated society that's got to be repaired, and I don't know if we can fix it. But we can't ignore it. And I believe there are certain forces here, maybe just the will of the people, fatigue with war—there is a tremendous desire to sort it out.”
The re-election of Mr Karzai, a clear favourite in this week's vote, would in part be an expression of that desire. A small-time leader in the anti-Soviet jihad, from a noble Pushtun family, he was installed as Afghanistan's leader by America in 2001. As a symbol, then, of international support for the country—and not for anything he achieved, while mostly confined for fear of assassination in his Kabul palace—Mr Karzai went on to win Afghanistan's inaugural presidential election in 2004. He has achieved little since, presiding over a spread of narco-corruption by which he seems blithely unperturbed. In July Mr Karzai pardoned five well-connected drug-traffickers who had been imprisoned for up to 18 years for attempting to trade heroin for two truckloads of sub-machineguns. These convictions had been considered a ground-breaking success for Afghan counter-narcotics efforts.
As a hedge against wavering foreign support, Mr Karzai has also favoured detested warlords—including several whom the Taliban were first launched, in the mid-1990s, to eliminate. To boost his chances of re-election, he has formed alliances with Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord linked to the slaughter of 2,000 Taliban prisoners, and Mohammad Mohaqeq, a Hazara strongman, who claims to have been promised five Hazara cabinet seats for his support. As a campaign adviser, Mr Karzai enlisted Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Islamist who welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996. In an IRI poll released last week, Afghans said that of all their politicians, they disliked Mr Dostum, Mr Mohaqeq and Mr Sayyaf most.
The poll predicted that Mr Karzai would win 44% of the vote—a strong lead over his rivals, but not the outright majority he would need to avoid a second-round run-off, provisionally set for October 1st. At the same time, IRI found that 83% of Afghans thought their country needed to change direction. A surge of support for Mr Karzai's main challenger, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, a champion of the Tajik minority, hints at what sort of change they would like. Unlike Mr Karzai, he has campaigned across the country, rallying Afghans and offering them ideas—some good, some bad—on how to solve their problems. In fact in Afghanistan's main cities, the election has fuelled lively debate, for which Dr Abdullah, and two lesser challengers, Ramazan Bashardost and Ashraf Ghani, deserve credit. Yet even without massive rigging in favour of Mr Karzai—which was expected in Pushtun areas where independent observers will fear to go—he was considered likeliest to win. His reputation, though fading, as a peaceable Pushtun, a national unifier and, above all, as the likeliest guarantor of the foreigners' shining promise to Afghanistan may best explain this.
They need to be both bolder and more carefulAPA second reason for hope is Barack Obama, who on August 17th reiterated his commitment to this war (see article). His administration, the inheritor of a losing cause, has set about turning things around in Afghanistan with vim and humility. The appointment of Richard Holbrooke, who at least has vim, as America's new “Af-Pak” envoy represents an overdue appreciation of the regional dimensions of a conflict in which old rivals, Pakistan and India, Russia and America and Iran, all have a stake. Mr Holbrooke would most like to stop Pakistan suffering—if not abetting—the use of its territory by the Taliban's senior leaders, who are said to reside in the Pakistani city of Quetta. Alas, he has been consumed by the equally pressing task of turning Pakistan against its own Taliban foes, with some success. This week an aide to their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, confirmed that he had been killed in an air strike.
In Afghanistan Mr Obama's arrival has brought a flurry of strategy reviews and a ruthless change of command, to usher in General McChrystal—whose own review will be unveiled later this month. It will re-emphasise that the main goal of ISAF and American troops is to protect Afghans, not kill the Taliban among them. Orders to this effect have already gone out. Air power is to be used only when there is no significant risk of civilian deaths.
In a three-week period last month, an American marine battalion, tasked with taking control of Garmser, a Talibanised district of southern Helmand, called in one air strike, to drop a 500-pound bomb. In the same period in July 2007, British troops in Garmser, albeit facing stiffer opposition, called in air strikes that dropped 12,000-pounds of bombs on the district. On the wall of the marines' base in Garmser, a note reads: “You have to look at these people as if they want to kill you, but you can't treat them that way.”
In similar fashion, military convoys are to be driven more carefully. House-searches must be conducted more politely, with respectful understanding of Pushtuns' habit of keeping their womenfolk prisoner and their names secret. Detention facilities, General McChrystal will recommend, should be more humane—and better intelligence gathered from them. Hundreds of civilians are to be sent to assist his forces, mainly to pep up their flagging efforts to provide economic development. Whether ISAF will get more troops, as the general would no doubt like, is unclear. His sacked predecessor, General David McKiernan, requested around 10,000 more American troops—a modest number—and was denied them. Either way, much greater onus will be placed on building up Afghan security forces, a task only seriously begun four years ago. The Afghan army, currently 94,000-strong, is to be pushed to 134,000 within two years. Both it and the Afghan police, of whom there are currently 84,000, may end up being doubled.
The aim of all this is to separate resisters from committed insurgents—to turn the current gold-yellow map back to the lighter hues of 2005. And then to go further. American planners estimate that 70-80% of their enemies should be persuadable, through kinder tactics, economic opportunities—and a formal reconciliation process. That too is on the agenda, though there is currently little agreement on how it might be done. Mr Karzai has often said he is willing to sit down with the Taliban's supremo, Mullah Mohammad Omar. The UN and some European countries would perhaps support that. America, which for seven years has called the Taliban al-Qaeda's cousins, may find this harder to condone. Yet it is worth noting that the Taliban's one-eyed leader has not accepted Mr Karzai's offer.
And why would he? Wherever he is, Mullah Omar must be smiling. America's fresh effort is horribly belated and its commitment to Afghanistan is probably shakier than Mr Obama suggests. To maintain political support for his task, General McChrystal reckons he has a year to show serious progress—a blink-of-an-eye in counter-insurgency time. Nor are all his suggestions entirely new. Previous ISAF commanders, including General McKiernan, also issued promising directives, only to fail because of too few resources and too little understanding in their forces, and too little support from the Afghan government. Rebooting Mr Karzai, assuming that he wins re-election and that it is possible, would be much better for his country than many more American brigades.
But at least Afghanistan's accelerating decline seems at last to have been admitted. That should be a blessing for its people who are caught, wavering, between two enemies. In the words of Colonel Ghooli Khan, the police chief of Garmser, “They do not like the British or the Americans. They just want peace.”
