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A Week in the War: Afghanistan, Jan. 12-18, 2011
January 18, 2011 | 1901 GMT
The ISAF Stays the Course
There seems to be every indication that the United States and
its allies in the NATO-led InternationalSecurity Assistance Force
(ISAF) will continue to pursue their counterinsurgency strategy in
2011. Indeed,our annual forecast for the Afghanistan campaign is
that 2011 will be a year in which the ISAF will seethrough the
strategy it has laid out and resourced, a commitment that will be
sustained in spite of a dynamicwar zone and periodic tactical
adjustments.
Not only did the surge of troops reach full strength late last
year, but 1,400 additional U.S. Marines have
been dispatched. On Jan. 17, more than 1,000 Marines from the
26th Marine Expeditionary Unit embarkedon the USS Kearsarge
Amphibious Ready Group on station in the region began to arrive in
Helmandprovince. The ready group is effectively an operational
reserve employable at the discretion of U.S. CentralCommand chief
Gen. James Mattis, so the number may eventually be closer to 2,500
Marine reinforcements.
The newly arriving Marines are being sent to Sangin, the restive
district in Helmand province that has seensome of the toughest
fighting in recent months. Between this and other measures to
rebalance forces toincrease the overall combat power in
Afghanistan, the military may yet get close to the 40,000 troops
itoriginally wanted for the campaign.
Mattis has also suggested to Afghan President Hamid Karzai that
Afghan security forces be expanded by77,000 recruits 37,000 more
for the Afghan National Army and 40,000 more for the police. The
estimatedcost for sustaining these forces is more than $6 billion
annually. The year 2011 will be a decisive period forthe ISAF and
the current strategy, so the push for more resources was expected.
But while these additionalAfghan forces may be intended to
consolidate recent gains, the expansion may also reflect an unease
over thereversibility of those gains and the challenges posed by
the ongoing Vietnamization of the conflict.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,
claimed Jan. 12 that the Taliban are losingground, even as he has
cautioned against expecting anything but a modest drawdown of
foreign troops in2011. He has also continued to insist that the
Pakistani side of the equation remains a daunting challenge. Aswe
have argued, though the Taliban may be weakening, they are not
being defeated, so a durable politicalaccommodation is critical for
lasting ISAF success. So far, there have been signs of progress at
the locallevel, but just how much these signs suggest a weakening
Taliban movement is unclear. To gauge theirwillingness to
negotiate, the most important signs will be some indication that
recent ISAF gains are havingan impact on internal Taliban
discipline and on how they are perceiving their own success in the
insurgency.
Despite having faced a renewed American-led push for more than a
year, the Taliban do not appear to bedeviating from their
operational playbook. In keeping with traditional practice they
have reduced winteroperations even as the ISAF has tried to sustain
its offensive efforts on the Talibans core turf. This is
perfectly in keeping with classic guerrilla strategy, falling
back in the face of concentrated force, sotraditional notions of
momentum and initiative can be problematic measures of success.
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The bigger question concerns Taliban intentions. Some alteration
of tactics can be expected, which we havealready seen in the
back-and-forth employment of improvised explosive devices and
counters to thosedevices. But if the Taliban are not feeling
pressured and do not perceive the ISAFs short-term push as a
realthreat, they may act in one way, and if they are feeling
pressure and perceive a potential longer-term threat,they may act
in another. The Taliban seem to have held together fairly well thus
far, and these coursecorrections are largely unknowns, but relevant
clues could be forthcoming.
Toward the end of 2010 there was already a perceptible shift in
Taliban activity to the northern and eastern
areas of the country, where pockets of Pashto support are not
nearly as strong as they are along the borderwith Pakistan and in
Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The enemy gets a vote, too, as they
say. It isimportant to remember that the Taliban movement is agile,
adaptive and well-schooled in insurgentresistance and Afghan power
politics.
