(Mission of folly: Second part of part two) On the old premise that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the Americans naturally saw the Northern Alliance fighters as their allies, a ready made ground force who could make gains as the U.S. pounded the Taliban from the air.

For the first couple of weeks, the Taliban lines held against the Northern Alliance. Then, the shellacking from the air and the inexperience of Taliban fighters in the face of American air power, took effect. By early November, Taliban lines were crumbling. The Northern Alliance advanced on and seized the strategic city of Mazari Sharif. Widespread looting and executions were unleashed by the Northern Alliance fighters. Over 500 Taliban soldiers, many of them from Pakistan, were massacred after being found hiding in a school.

The seizure of the city triggered a collapse of the Taliban regime, not only in the north, but in the south as well. On November 12, the Taliban fled Kabul and the capital was occupied the next day by the Northern Alliance. Over the next day or two, the Taliban regime collapsed virtually everywhere outside their southeastern stronghold of Kandahar. Pashtun warlords seized control in large parts of the country’s northeast including the city of Jalalabad.

On the run, the remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, likely including Osama bin Laden, fell back on the cave complex of Tora Bora, next to the Pakistan border, southwest of Jalalabad. As U.S. aerial attacks and Northern Alliance fighters sealed the fate of the city of Konduz, the Pakistani air force sent in aircraft to evacuate intelligence and military personnel who had entered Afghanistan in alliance with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. As many as 5,000 people were evacuated from the region by the Pakistanis. Pakistan’s ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda were a factor in the Afghanistan situation prior to September 11 and the subsequent American attack. Pakistan has remained a key player there during the subsequent five years.

With U.S. ground forces joining the struggle, the battle for Kandahar got underway as did an American assault on the fighters in the caves of Tora Bora. On December 7, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban recognized the hopelessness of his position in Kandahar and escaped from the city as the Americans closed in on the airport and Afghan tribal forces seized the city.

A few days later, U.S. Special Forces units and their Afghan allies fought for control of the caves of Tora Bora, backed up by American air power. The Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters managed a delaying action to allow top Al Qaeda leaders, possibly including Osama bin Laden, to escape into border regions of Pakistan to the south and east. (The U.S. have proved as unsuccessful in hunting down bin Laden as their forebears were in their pursuit of Pancho Villa when they invaded northern Mexico in 1916.)

By the end of December 2001, the largely conventional phase of the war was over. At that point, victory appeared to be in the grasp of the Americans and their Afghan allies. As with previous invasions of Afghanistan, however, it was only the beginning. That same month, Afghan political leaders, who had opposed the Taliban met in Bonn, Germany to draw up plans for the installation of a new regime. An Interim Transitional Administration was created. Named chairman of a 29 member body, was Hamid Karzai, who was also appointed to the position of leader on December 22. Six months later, he was appointed Interim President of the transitional administration.

Originally a supporter of the Taliban, Karzai, who was born in Kandahar, was a member of a prominent Pashtun family. When the Taliban took power in 1996, driving the regime of Burhanuddin Rabbani out of office, Karzai, who had formerly served as a deputy foreign minister, refused to serve as the UN ambassador of the new government. He withdrew to Quetta, Pakistan where he advocated the restoration of the Afghan monarchy. In July 1999, Karzai’s father was assassinated, a killing that has been attributed to the Taliban. Following the murder, Karzai threw himself into the struggle against the Taliban.

As Interim President of the new Afghan regime, Karzai exercised little real authority. He earned the nickname “Mayor of Kabul” from those who made the point that outside the capital real power was exercised by warlords, and tribal regional authorities. Though limited in his capacity to govern, Karzai nonetheless became extremely well-known internationally. The Bush administration adopted him as the face of the new, and supposedly democratic, Afghanistan. The Karzai regime was touted as being committed to the rights of women, a major selling point in contrasting it to the Taliban’s harshly repressive policies.

In October 2004, nationwide elections were held in Afghanistan. With his high name recognition, the open backing of the Bush administration, and the use of U.S. army transport during his election campaign, Karzai emerged first among the 23 candidates for the office of president. With 55.4 per cent of the 8.1 million votes cast, Karzai was declared elected without the need for a second runoff ballot. At his swearing-in ceremony in December 2004, the former Afghan king and U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney were present.

While the new American-backed regime of Hamid Karzai was working to secure its legitimacy throughout the country, an increasingly potent insurgency was mounted against it. The Taliban had been beaten in the short military campaign in the autumn of 2001, but now the Taliban was back, with new allies and fighting a very different kind of war.

These foes of the American occupation of the country and of the new regime in Kabul soon learned how to wage this different kind of war and they were able to capitalize on the estrangement of very large parts of the country from the new government. The assumption, sold to the outside world by the Bush administration, and by photo ops of Karzai with foreign leaders in Kabul, that the Taliban was beaten, turned out to be as false as the claim made by George W. Bush in the spring of 2003, that the American mission in Iraq had been accomplished.

American and allied Afghan forces continued to mount large scale operations against the Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents, such as Operation Anaconda in March 2002. In that operation, hundreds of insurgent fighters were killed, but hundreds more managed to slip back across the border into Pakistan. Pakistani forces, who were supposed to seal off the border against just such an escape, proved unwilling or unable to carry out their task.

By the summer of 2002, the insurgents were carrying out highly effective raids against U.S. forces and their Afghan and other allies. In bands numbering from five to 25 men, the insurgents moved quickly, blending effectively into the local population, and assaulted their opponents with mobile rocket attacks. Hit and run guerilla tactics allowed them to inflict casualties against the much better armed Americans and their allies.

In its ancient and modern forms, insurgent warfare combines military and political elements that make life extremely difficult for an occupying force. Foreign occupying armies, however mighty their weaponry, suffer from their lack of knowledge of the local population. They don’t speak the language, they are remote from the culture and customs of the people, and they stand out as aliens in the landscape, no matter how many candy bars they dispense, or children’s soccer matches they organize. Insurgents, on the other hand, speak the language and follow up their attacks by fleeing into villages where they look like members of the local population.

Insurgent tactics are designed precisely to heighten the perception in the population that the occupiers are to be feared, and that they are the source of the country’s problems.

The insurgents’ hit and run attacks have the natural and intended effect of making the soldiers of the occupying armies ever more fearful and hostile, not only toward the guerilla warriors, but toward the local population as well. Sudden attacks in villages and towns, inflicted by men in civilian clothes, riding bicycles or suddenly appearing in the midst of crowds, force a change in tactics by the occupiers. They have to set up roadblocks and check points to keep people at arms’ length, and to sort them out, before letting them go about their business. They issue orders to people to stop when commanded to do so and open fire when they do not.

And then there are the tragic errors when trigger-happy soldiers and top gun pilots kill innocent people who fail to stop at checkpoints or blow up celebrants at wedding parties. These atrocities reinforce the growing antagonism of the population toward the occupiers. It generates a spiral that strengthens the insurgency and makes the task of soldiers who are far from home ever more difficult.

In the autumn of 2002, the Taliban launched a major recruiting drive, centred on the Pashtun areas in the south and south east. In this jihad, whose purpose was to drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan, the Taliban also drew in recruits from the Pakistani side of the border, particularly young men who had attended the madrassas, religious schools that honed the ideology of resistance.

Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters set up small training camps in border areas, and on the Pakistan side of the border they created encampments with as many as 200 men each. Despite the supposed commitment of the government of Pakistan to the War on Terror, the Taliban and Al Qaeda faced few problems from the local Pakistani forces.

Like everything else in this war, reality and public rhetoric had little to do with one another.

The fighters on the side of the United States, including President Hamid Karzai, had little commitment to the human rights cause that was so widely trumpeted by the Bush administration. They ended up on the American side for reasons that mostly had to do with tribal loyalties, regional and personal power struggles and mere chance.

The fighters on the other side were similarly drawn into the struggle for a wide variety of reasons. Devotion to the ideology of the Taliban or Al Qaeda was only one of them. Tribal loyalties, personal grudges, antagonism against the foreign invaders, and anger at efforts to shut down the lucrative poppy trade, the source of 90 per cent of the world’s heroin, were others.

With a new command structure, under the overall leadership of Mullah Omar, a 10 man leadership council was created, to coordinate the Taliban insurgency. Signs of the new organizational structure were evident by January 2003. In the summer of 2003, hit and run attacks in the Taliban heartland of the south east, and even major operations in the mountains next to the Pakistan border were launched. The war the Americans thought they had won nearly two years earlier had returned with a vengeance.

In 2005 and 2006, the U.S. and its allies, including Canada, struck back at the Taliban with major offensives, designed to deny them any ability to hold territory and to cut down on the number of fighters they could deploy. Despite the intensification of the allied effort, by July 2006, British commanders in Afghanistan were warning Prime Minister Tony Blair that the war was far from won.

A study undertaken by the British Royal Statistical Society concluded that during the period from May 1, 2006 to August 12, 2006, an average of five allied soldiers were killed each week by the insurgents, which was twice the rate of casualties suffered by the Americans and their allies weekly during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

On October 5, 2006, when 12,000 U.S. troops came under its sway, NATO assumed overall control of allied operations in all regions of Afghanistan, with British Lieutenant General David Richards in command. About 8,000 U.S. troops remained under separate American command assigned with the tasks of training Afghan troops and carrying out anti-terrorist operations aimed at rounding up Taliban leaders and Al Qaeda units.

In the opening months of 2007, the pertinent question was how many casualties NATO countries were prepared to take to win the struggle in Afghanistan. The fact that the U.S. and its allies regularly killed far more Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters than the insurgents inflicted on them was not unimportant, but it was not decisive. Western countries were highly sensitive to the number of casualties suffered by their forces in Afghanistan. If the Taliban could continue killing enemy soldiers at a steady rate, that would become an important political fact in countries where the public was already highly sceptical about the Afghan war.

In American strategic thinking, the Afghan and Iraq missions were inseparably linked. Both invasions were undertaken by the Bush administration in the belief that the United States could soon overwhelm the local forces and establish pro-American regimes that would have the support of most of the populations of the two countries. This is precisely where the Americans made their crucial miscalculation.

The U.S. military had been redesigned precisely to make use of its superior firepower and logistical superiority to smash any foe, with a deployment of relatively small American forces. The invasions, in both cases, worked well enough, with the armies of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein rapidly overwhelmed.

What the Americans did not foresee was the extent to which Afghans and Iraqis, of various sects and persuasions, would coalesce around the basic goal of pushing out the invaders. The Bush administration made the case that the insurgencies that broke out in both countries in the aftermath of the invasions were largely the work of outsiders and Islamic fundamentalists operating under the broad direction of Al Qaeda.

What the administration did not want to acknowledge was that the cement that held the insurgencies together was Afghan and Iraqi nationalism, the desire of very important elements in both countries not to have their futures determined by outside invaders. It was American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq that was the problem and the source of the resistance.

Powerfully reinforcing the antagonism of many Afghans toward the occupation has been the steady toll of civilian casualties as a consequence of the conflict. While the Taliban has certainly been responsible for civilian deaths, especially as a result of suicide attacks, the killing of innocents by the Americans and their allies provokes enormous hostility. Afghan civilians have died in U.S. air assaults that have gone astray, at checkpoints, in raids that targeted the wrong people, and in villages and towns where NATO forces have heavy weapons to attack Taliban fighters and other insurgents.

In other cases, U.S. and allied forces have raided villages, breaking into houses, tying up and subduing terrified civilians, and sometimes even killing them. Since the start of the war, the Pentagon and NATO officials have had to admit that it is investigating such atrocities and that they do occur.

On January 10, 2007, for instance, NATO officials in Brussels admitted that about 30 civilians were recently killed as a result of “poor communications” between NATO troops and Afghan authorities in southern Kandahar province. Afghan officials put the number of civilians who died in the incident at up to 80.

From the beginning there have been repeated incidents in which civilians have lost their lives as a result of the actions of the armed forces of the United States and its allies. The list is a lengthy one, and only a few well-reported cases will be cited here:

  • On October 10, 2001, a mosque in Jalalabad was bombed twice, once while prayers were in progress and later when efforts were being made to remove the casualties from the first bombing. Between 15 and 70 people died in the first strike and as many as 120 in the second.
  • On October 21, 2001, a hospital and a mosque were bombed in Herat. While the target was about 30 metres from the hospital, about 100 bodies were discovered in the ruins.
  • On December 1, 2001, bombs fell on the village of Kama Ado, killing as many as 100 people in their houses.
  • On July 1, 2002, in the village of Del Rawad, a bombing raid took the lives of 46 people who were celebrants at a wedding party and wounded 117 others.
  • On April 9, 2003, 11 people died and one was wounded in Shkin in Paktika province when a stray American laser-guided bomb struck a house.
  • On January 18, 2004, four children and seven adults died in a U.S. air raid in the village of Saghatho.
  • On October 18, 2006, during a clash between insurgents and NATO and Afghan forces in the village of Tajikai, 200 kilometers west of Kandahar, a rocket fired from a NATO jet killed 13 people inside a house.

The U.S. military and NATO commanders have insisted that every effort is made to prevent civilian casualties. For obvious reasons, civilian casualties are highly politicized and controversial. There are both high and low claims about how many civilians have died and about who is responsible for their deaths.

Studies of the number of civilians who died in Afghanistan in American aerial attacks during the first year of fighting, 2001-2002, have produced estimates that vary from 1,000 to 5,000.

While numbers of civilian deaths for the period 2002 to 2005 are hard to find, all sources agree that 2006 was the bloodiest year of the conflict since the period of the American invasion in 2001 when civilian casualties were especially high.

A BBC news story on October 26, 2006 conveyed the anguish of those who survived air raids carried out by NATO forces. In this case, the report concerned approximately 60 civilian deaths in two attacks in Kandahar province.

“Twenty members of my family are killed and 10 are injured,” one survivor told the BBC. “The injured are in Mirwais hospital in Kandahar city and anybody can go and see them. For God’s sake, come and see our situation.”

Another man told the BBC that women and children were among 15 members of his family who had been killed.

(To be continued)