To my eyes, the level of United States military presence in Afghanistan makes strikingly little difference. The United States tripled the United States presence in the surge. And then drew those forces down. But Taliban and other anti-government control of areas in Afghanistan has been rising, slowly and steadily, since the beginning of the insurgency around 2004.
The Taliban threat, with this steady rise, is now greater than it has been at any time since the American invasion and occupation of 2001.
The Taliban insurgency has spread through more of Afghanistan than at any point since 2001, according to data compiled by the United Nations as well as interviews with numerous local officials in areas under threat.
In addition, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan over the past two weeks has evacuated four of its 13 provincial offices around the country — the most it has ever done for security reasons — according to local officials in the affected areas.
The data, compiled in early September — even before the latest surge in violence in northern Afghanistan — showed that United Nations security officials had already rated the threat level in about half of the country’s administrative districts as either “high” or “extreme,” more than at any time since the American invasion ousted the Taliban in 2001.
Afghan Taliban’s Reach Is Widest Since 2001, U.N. Says, Rod Nordland and Joseph Goldstein, New York Times
Hillary Clinton was a strong backer of the surge. The surge was quickly proved a failure.
The United States had not meant to triple its forces only for purposes of taking the small town of Marjah in Helmand province. The forces, once successful, would also then fully secure the city of Kandahar.
The current offensive in Marjah is a critical stepping stone for what is likely the most important fight of the Afghan surge in the coming months: securing Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban and the most important city in southern Afghanistan, according to defense officials and analysts.
The military is using the Marjah offensive to destroy an important Taliban haven, but also to test a strategy that emphasizes strong partnership with Afghan security forces and security for Afghan civilians. And some of the same techniques will be used in future operations, such as securing Kandahar.
New Afghan offensive just first step in surge, Julian Barnes, Baltimore Sun
With the failure of the surge, Kandahar was dealt with much more in line with Joe Biden's Counterterrorism Plus plan.
The surge in Helmand was also a long term failure. This year and last has seen very heavy fighting, with gains and losses of the same old ground.
Taliban fighters seized a district headquarters in Afghanistan's Helmand province on Monday despite repeated U.S. air strikes to repel them, adding to the insurgents' recent advances in an opium farming region near a hydroelectric dam.
Taliban Seizes District in Afghanistan's Helmand Province, Reuters (August 2015)
Current losses of districts and towns in Helmand, the previous scene of exceptionally heavy fighting with very high U.S. and British casualty rates, bring out the "blood and treasure" rhetoric.
"We have invested a lot of blood and a lot of treasure in trying to help that country and we can't afford for it to become an outpost of the Taliban and ISIS one more time, threatening us, threatening the larger world," Clinton said.
Hillary Clinton backs Obama's decision to keep US troops in Afghanistan, Ken Thomas, Associated Press
The surveys that exist of insurgent opinion show that the opposition is not to the mere presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan. The opposition is to foreign action, and to the action of the Afghan government we back.
And perhaps surprisingly, insurgents do not want an overly abrupt withdraw of U.S. forces. That could easily bring civil war.
The type of civil war the mujahideen leaders had once brought on Afghanistan after the withdraw of Soviet forces. Those mujahideen leaders, with their war between themselves, being the ones the Taliban had once defeated. And being the same ones the United States had brought back to power when we invaded.
Michael Semple points out that against a United States withdraw schedule, the Taliban, often talked about in terms of their patience compared to us, were counterproductive in taking Kunduz, for purposes of driving out the foreign forces.
One of the Taliban’s actions is that while in all their political messaging they claim they want to see the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan, by launching operations like this the Taliban actually encourage international forces to stay longer, not to leave.
Veteran Observer Dissects Taliban Kunduz Victory, Zhakfar Ahmadi, Radio Free Europe
But also about the way Kunduz was beset with militias, many of them coming from a 2009 plan by the United States. These militias, particularly bad in Kunduz, are part of
why Kunduz was the first provincial capital to be taken. The militias are a very direct cause of Taliban support there.
As it has been seen in places like Iraq, raising militias -- which operate outside a professional command structure -- is a double-edged sword. They may be able to recruit men and motivate them to go into battle, but nobody is accountable for what they do on the battlefield in the areas they capture. That is a big problem.
One of the reasons we are seeing this fighting in the north is indeed because of the complex tribal and ethnic picture in Kunduz and also in neighboring provinces like Baghlan. All major ethnic groups of Afghanistan are represented in the population of Kunduz. If you start supporting militias and giving [them] a free hand to those areas, they all have a history of enmity with some of their neighbors.
Semple said that the fall of Kunduz would lead to militia leaders wanting to give them an even freer hand, and that this would be a political and security problem in the coming days.
But they will also find the failure so far of their conventional security forces will encourage some of the former militia leaders to demand exactly such a free hand, so that's one of the political/security problems the Afghan government will face in the days ahead.
Which is exactly what happened.
The jihadi leaders are meeting and calling for a freer hand. And
the United States military is pressing to again ramp up its 2009 Afghan Local Police plan, after recently having been against doing this, for the failure of the plan.
President Ashraf Ghani has been against the militia plans, for the failure of them, for the harm the militias bring.
The militia expansion plan is a reversal for President Ashraf Ghani, who had long talked about the importance of solidifying “the state monopoly over the use of force” in a country still deeply scarred by its civil war. Militia forces wielded by American-backed warlords were responsible for some of the worst atrocities in that decade-long conflict.
Afghan Plan to Expand Militia Raises Abuse Concerns, Mujib Mashal, New York Times
But he has his own choice of first vice president, Abdul Rashid Dostum, and the United States imposition of Abdullah Abdullah to solve the election crisis, and the ideas of the United States military, to deal with.
The Unity Government deal imposed by the United States was an attempt to ward of the threat of civil war, most overtly coming from Balkh governor Atta Muhammad Nur. After the extraordinary election crisis, there was a strong sense of relief that civil war had been averted. But the mood now seems very pessimistic. Afghans are seeking to leave the country in very high numbers, forming very long lines at the passport office in Kabul.
The war in Afghanistan, not much talked about for so long, will be an issue in the debate over the 2016 party nomination and presidential election, I would guess. Conditions in Afghanistan cannot be expected to be very good.
In the process, Hillary Clinton is here staking out a position on Afghanistan.
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