Southern Afghanistan Is Slipping Away From Kabul Administration To Taliban And Drug Lords

Southern Afghanistan Is Slipping Away From Kabul Administration To Taliban And Drug Lords

(NSI News Source Info) February 3, 2009: Southern Afghanistan is suffering a crime wave, and it's cause is religious fanatics and drug runners. These two groups make an odd couple, but they need each other, even though Islamic conservatives condemn the use of heroin and opium. They are more open minded about just helping manufacture and export the drugs. A British patrol passes opium poppies in southern Afghanistan's violent Helmand province. The Afghanistan province being patrolled by British troops will produce at least a third of the world's heroin this year, according to drug experts who are forecasting a record harvest that will be an embarrassment for the western-funded war on narcotics. In the last two years, there have been 10-40 violent incidents a day in southern Afghanistan, all of them attributed to the Taliban (but some are actually drug, gang or tribe related.) About a quarter of the attacks are roadside bombs, which are mostly used against foreign troops. This is because the Taliban, and Afghans in general, have discovered that, unlike the Russians during the 1980s, the current bunch of foreign troops (NATO and American) are much harder to kill. Worse, they come after you. Attacking foreign troops tends to result in lots of dead Afghan gunmen. Roadside bombs aren't very effective (it takes ten or more of them to kill one foreign soldiers), and they are expensive to set up and set off. Lots of technically trained people are required to build and place bombs. Since the illiteracy rate in southern Afghanistan is over 70 percent, skilled people are hard to come by. But it's even more difficult to get tribesmen to go head-to-head with the foreign troops in a gun battle. The tribal fighters are willing to take on Afghan police or soldiers. The government security forces are not pushovers, but they are not nearly as lethal as the foreign troops. That is slowly changing, especially with Afghan soldiers. So more of the Taliban attacks are being directed at the police, who take more casualties than the Afghan army. This is making it difficult to recruit police, because in some parts of southern Afghanistan, being a cop is very, very dangerous. Some police take the easy way out, accept Taliban or drug gang bribes, and just look the other way. Foreign troops are constantly on the lookout for this, and try to get dirty cops fired (sometimes that works, sometimes the provincial officials are also bought, and even some national level security officials are suspected of bribe taking.) About eight percent of the bomb attacks are suicide bombers. These also require lots of technical skills and a big team to carry out. Plus, suicide bombing is more of an Arab thing, and it's difficult to recruit them in Afghanistan. The best candidates seem to be teenage religious school students imported from Pakistan. While suicide bombers are the most effective bombs, they are not all that effective against foreign troops, and mostly kill Afghan civilians. Overall, Taliban combat efforts are not very successful. The Taliban lose 4-5 men for each enemy (usually an Afghan policeman or soldier) they kill. They will keep trying as long as they can raise enough money to keep thousands of gunmen on the payroll. The cash comes from drug gangs, criminal activities (theft, extortion, kidnapping) and donations from Moslem charities (that raise funds worldwide, but especially from wealthy Gulf Arabs who sometimes know where the money is really ending up.) Another problem the Taliban have is keeping reconstruction programs out of territory they wish to control. Most Afghans want the roads, water, health and sanitation programs the reconstruction efforts (mostly paid for by foreign donors). But the Taliban realize that these improvements contradict Taliban efforts to force everyone to live a pure, seventy century, Islamic lifestyle.

Nato Forces And Taliban Are Almost On Equal War Footing In Southern Afghanistan - Report

Nato Forces And Taliban Are Almost On Equal War Footing In Southern Afghanistan - Report / Taliban United To Keep Afghan and Foreign troops Out Of Southern Afghanistan

(NSI News Source Info) January 17, 2009: The Taliban are shifting strategy in response to heavy losses fighting foreign troops. The Taliban has not been able to come up with a counterstrategy for the smart bomb and UAVs, which give foreign troops an unassailable advantage in battles.

The word has gotten around, and Afghans are demanding more money to take up arms and join a bunch of Taliban. The Taliban still need these large groups of armed men.

Just threatening Afghans about their girls schools, video and music stores, and not having a beard, does not work unless you can show up once in a while with a large bunch of armed friends, and punish those who defy you.

But over 5,000 Taliban fighters were killed last year, and about as many badly wounded or arrested. Some of these were actually working for drug gangs, who employ a lot of the groups of armed men prowling the countryside.

But both the drug gangs and Taliban are united in their desire to keep Afghan and foreign troops out of southern Afghanistan, and often collaborate in that effort. They share information, and the wealthier drug lords often subsidize the Taliban payroll (Holy War or not, the Taliban have to live and that takes cash). Pakistani children stand on the rubble of a damaged portion of a government school wrecked by Islamic militants with explosives in Saidu Sharif, an area of Pakistan's Swat Valley, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2009. In a northern valley where Taliban guerrillas have been waging a bloody war against security forces for more than a year, hard-liners have blown up or burned down some 170 schools, most of them for girls. U.S. troops have been operating in Afghanistan for eight years now, and have established special training courses back in the United States to prepare troops for the unique combat situations they will encounter. Over 100,000 U.S. soldiers and marines have served in Afghanistan, and these are usually the instructors for these preparation courses.

Most of these troops have also served in Iraq, and they know they must warn Iraq veterans to forget about some skills and tactics that worked in Iraq, but won't in Afghanistan. There are also special courses for commanders, who must be prepared to deal with tribal politics in Afghanistan, which is somewhat different than it is in Iraq.

The U.S. Army has collected so much information on troops dealing with Afghans that it has created an online simulation (it looks like a video game) where players can realistically interact with Afghans in a wide variety of situations. This helps to eliminate a lot of opportunities for misunderstandings because of cultural differences. At the same time, the troops in Afghanistan now are trying out new tactics for taking down the Taliban and drug gangs. The U.S. is expanding its intelligence operations in Afghanistan, bringing in a lot of the equipment, and specialists, who were so useful in Iraq. The U.S. Army has developed intelligence tactics that provide "information dominance" that makes it difficult for the enemy to carry out attacks (without the U.S. knowing about it), and more vulnerable to American raids and sweeps.

The information based tactics concentrate on capturing or killing the enemy leadership and specialists (mostly technical, but religious leaders and media experts are often valuable targets as well).

The Australian commandos have specialized in this approach, and made themselves much feared by the Taliban (who will make an extra effort to avoid dealing with the Australians). The U.S. and NATO commanders know that the Taliban leadership is in trouble, with a new generation of leaders only recently shoving the older guys (veterans of the 1980s war with Russia) out of the way, and introducing more vicious tactics (more terrorism against reluctant civilians).

This is backfiring, as it did in Iraq, and the Taliban leadership is not having an easy time trying to come up with a new strategy.

One strategy that is working is making a big deal whenever foreign troops kill Afghan civilians (about 80 percent of civilian deaths are caused by the Taliban, but that has successfully been played down, a real spin victory for the Islamic radicals). This has caused NATO commanders to issue increasingly restrictive rules of engagement to their troops, which the Taliban eagerly exploit to save their butts in combat. The U.S. cultural training for troops concentrates on the Pushtun minority, which has created the Taliban (mostly from a few tribes around Kandahar) and most of the violence (over 80 percent of the Afghan heroin and opium is produced by Pushtun tribes, and lot of "Taliban" violence is actually drug related).

The Pushtun account for about 40 percent of the Afghan population (12 out of 30 million), and have 25 million more Pushtun just across the border in Pakistan. There are also some Pushtun in eastern Iran, but the Iranians are trying for force all these refugees from the 1980s war with Russia, to move back to Afghanistan.

The Pushtun have long (we're talking thousands of years) dominated the region. Not as rulers, the Pushtuns are constantly fighting each other, but as a force that will unite if anyone else tries to dominate them.

Modern Afghanistan (only a few centuries old) came about when non-Pushtun tribes to the north (Uzbek, Hazara, Tajik) agreed to become allies with the Pushtuns in order to keep foreigners (Russians, Iranians, British) out of their little piece of the world. Although the Pushtuns were the minority, they were the largest minority, and it was understood that the Pushtuns would take the lead. So the king of Afghanistan, has almost always been a Pushtun. So is the current president of Afghanistan.

But the Pushtuns believe that president Karzai is too generous to the "lesser (non-Pushtun) tribes" who backed Karzai in the elections (and political bargaining) in becoming president. The Pushtun resent the presence of foreign troops because these heavily armed outlanders threaten Pushtun domination of the northern tribes. In many ways, the current war in Afghanistan is a struggle between the northern (non-Pushtun) tribes and the Pushtun.

Many of the Afghan soldiers and police are from the north, and very few of the foreign troops are of Pushtun ancestry. The Taliban is further weakened by the fact that most Pushtun tribes do not back the Taliban (on most days, such attitudes seem to change with the weather in Afghanistan.)

Fighters with Afghanistan's Taliban militia stand on a hillside at Maydan Shahr in Wardak province, west of Kabul. After years allowing Taliban militants to operate in the rugged tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, Pakistan is now torn over how to respond to US calls for decisive action against extremists. The northern tribes remember that, when September 11, 2001 happened, they were still fighting the Taliban government that had not yet gained control over all of Afghanistan (the "Northern Alliance" of non-Pushtun tribes was still holding out). The United States sent in a few hundred Special Forces and CIA operators, a hundred million dollars in cash and a few thousand smart bombs to help the Northern Alliance out, and the Taliban were broken and fleeing the country within two months.

The northern tribes don't mind Pushtuns getting the top jobs in the government, but are no longer willing to meekly follow the Pushtun lead blindly. The Pushtun see it differently, claiming (with some truth) that they did most of the fighting against the Russians in the 1980s, and that many of the northern tribes cut deals with the Russians (as did some Pushtun tribes, something the Pushtuns don't like to talk about). That had more to do with Afghan politics, (the northern and southern tribes disagreed on how to deal with Russia and modernization) than with anything else. Then came the Taliban (a cynical invention of the Pakistanis, created from Pushtun refugees convinced that a Holy War would bring peace to Afghanistan). Meanwhile, the heroin trade (growing poppies and using a chemical process to turn the sap from these plants into opium and heroin) moved from Pakistan (where the government saw it as a curse) to Afghanistan. Many of the same tribes that produced the refugees who became the Taliban, also produced the most successful drug lords. The Pushtun are many things, including well organized and ambitious. Now both the Taliban and the drug gangs are under attack, and the Pushtun blame the northern tribes and their foreign allies. Outsiders don't see it this way, but most Afghans do. To the Pushtuns, anyone who is not Pushtun is "them." Same deal with the northern tribes, who are weakened by their lack of ethnic and tribal unity (the Uzbeks are Turks, the Hazara are Mongols and the Tajiks are, like the Pushtuns, cousins to the Iranians and Indians). Thus no matter how successful the Taliban might be in the south, among their fellow Pushtun (many of them anti-Taliban), they still have to face the northern tribes, who now have powerful foreign allies that proved invincible in 2001, and can do so again if called on. The Taliban are trying to adopt the Iraq "bombs not bullets" strategy against the unbeatable foreign troops. The use of roadside and suicide bombings are up. But these tactics don't kill enough foreign troops to make a difference, unless the foreign media can be manipulated into declaring the bombing losses as proof that the war in Afghanistan is hopeless. The Taliban are having some success from that, but victory is elusive. That's because the foreign troops themselves know that the Taliban are playing a weak hand and this story keeps getting out to confuse a public accustomed to all the gloom and doom reporting about Afghanistan.

The British and Dutch have recently conducted successful "anti-leadership" campaigns, which disrupted Taliban operations by capturing or killing leaders and destroying bases (caches of weapons, food and equipment) and destroying buildings used by the Taliban (if it was determined that the owners had willingly rented space to the terrorists).

When it is known that the Taliban are forcing the locals to provide aid, the troops just go after the Taliban, and win points with the locals for chasing out these nasty "outsiders."