Foreign forces in Afghanistan are between a rock and a hard place–we can’t stay but we can’t leave. Now one may argue it’s been like that all along. Afghanistan has been plagued by war for decades; surely civil war will follow when ISAF withdraws. But now there are some concrete logistical barriers to leaving.
Earlier this year Pakistan refused to allow the United States to transport supplies through their territory. An apology and a bit of haggling allowed those routes to reopen, but it will still be dangerous and costly to move equipment and supplies out of Afghanistan.
And now insider shootings are frustrating American attempts to train Afghans to take over security. That’s the key step in the plan. Karzai and Obama assure us the Afghan forces will be able to keep militants in check after NATO and allies are gone. But American forces have now suspended training Afghans because of the increasing incidence of uniformed Afghans shooting foreign soldiers. By various accounts, 10-25% of these killings may be accounted for by Taliban infiltration and coercion. If this was actually the Taliban’s plan, it’s brilliant. If foreign forces can’t train their replacements they can’t leave. But they will have to, because of declining morale and domestic pressures, so they will leave without replacements.
Tyrell Mayfield (http://www.thekabulcable.com/?p=1513) pointed out that the number of insider killings is in fact small compared to the incidence of suicide among American troops. In fact, in July more American soldiers killed themselves than died in combat. Now I’m not going to pretend to understand what causes a soldier to take his own life, having never been in combat nor had suicidal thoughts, but I think it must be related to declining morale. So the Mujahadeen are winning the moral war. By this I do not mean that a majority of Afghans believe that the militants are more righteous than American or Afghan troops; rather I mean that the militants believe in what they are doing more than the American forces believe in what they are doing. And because Jihad is a movement and not an organization, drone strikes on prominent leaders and innocent villagers will only draw more militants to the fray.
The war in Afghanistan is becoming decreasingly popular in the United States, as it is in most of the nations who have sent troops. In the USA the main two presidential candidates avoid the issue. Mitt Romney did not even mention the Afghan war–the longest running war in US history–during his convention speech. Barack Obama can only say that we are leaving by 2014. But for many Americans that’s not soon enough. And most observers are forced to conclude that Afghanistan will not be ready by that time.
So we can’t leave, but we can’t stay.
