Peter Jones: US should combine hard ball with hard cash in Afghanistan

Published on Tuesday 20 October 2009 21:55

WINNING the war in Afghanistan, it seems from all the noises coming out of Washington and London, involves a choice between sending more troops and sending a lot more troops.

What choice has been made we may find out from a meeting of Nato's defence ministers in Bratislava tomorrow But might a better strategy be to send more money?

The more – or many more – troops strategy has been presented to president Barack Obama by General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan. His 'plan A' is said to involve options that range from sending between 20,000 and 60,000 soldiers to add to the 93,000 military personnel from 42 countries now stationed there.

About 58,000 of these are American, so Mr Obama is being asked to contemplate doubling their number. As nearly 250 Americans have died there this year in a conflict the public are getting tired of, it is a tough call. Too few may be militarily pointless; too many may be politically costly.

Gordon Brown seems to have been persuaded by Gen McChrystal that more troops are the way to go, having said he is prepared to raise the British presence there by 500 to 9,500, albeit on the condition that the Afghan government deploys more of its forces and that the rest of the Nato coalition does likewise.

If it was obvious that greater military strength would produce the desired result of lessening the attacks by the Taleban, reducing the military death rate and bringing a degree of peace to the benighted Afghans, then he would have taken his decision a lot more quickly.

One analogy that implies the strategy might work is Iraq. Faced with a death toll rising to nearly 900 US soldiers in 2007, the then president George Bush ordered a troop "surge". US casualties promptly halved and this year look likely to be less than 200, enabling his successor to scale down the US presence in Iraq.

But Afghanistan is not Iraq. There, much of the conflict was in towns and cities, which are easier for military commanders to control than is the case with Afghanistan's insurgents. They are spread out across hundreds of miles of some of the most rugged terrain on the planet, which makes it easy to hide their weapons and melt into the local population.

That makes this conflict much more like Vietnam, where no matter how many men and munitions were poured in, the United States suffered setback after setback until, ultimately, it was forced into a humiliating retreat. Given that Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his government are now widely perceived to be as corrupt as the South Vietnamese regime the US vainly tried to shore up, and that widespread fraud in the elections has undermined his legitimacy rather than strengthened it, the Vietnam ghost must be haunting Mr Obama.

Gen McChrystal apparently sees the Afghan conflict as a dispute between the Taleban and Mr Karzai, in which the US cannot tip the balance by force alone. The Afghan population must be brought on board, as their allegiance will decide the winner.

It is highly necessary. Any failure to leave Afghanistan in a relatively peaceful state with the Taleban vanquished is likely to have a catastrophic effect on bordering Pakistan, now struggling to deal with its own Taleban insurgency. Militant Islamists throughout the world would be liable to see any Nato failure as a vindication of their tactics and the West would be right back where it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

But who are the Taleban? Are they really all Islamist zealots? It is estimated that there are notionally about 15,000 people fighting their cause, of which perhaps 1,000 are committed ideologues. The rest are thought to be what the US military call the $10-a-day Taleban or, to put it more bluntly, extremely poor people who have seized the opportunity to earn a lot more than they possibly could by scratching a living from frugal soil.

So there is a "plan B" school of thought in Washington that says it might weaken the Taleban a lot more quickly if the West was to outbid them by offering $20 a day to sign up to work for the Afghan government, whether for the army or just patching roads.

Assuming everyone agreed to down weapons, it would cost about $300,000 a day, a lot cheaper than the current military operation – which is believed to be costing, quite staggeringly, more than $150 million a day.

This might seem so simplistic as to be absurd. But there is a parallel with Iraq. Apart from putting more troops in, the other strategy that worked to reduce the death rate there was to pay the Sunni militants who were the core of the anti-American/British insurgency about $300 a week to join US-organised militia groups providing neighbourhood security in Baghdad.

What were thought to be religiously motivated fanatics turned out instead to be mostly poor people desperate to earn some money to feed their families. It might also go some way to put right the failure of the Bush administration to follow through on its pledge to rebuild the Afghan economy. The big snag here is that fear of what the Taleban will do to collaborators with the infidels may be just as important a fight-motivating factor for non-ideological Afghans as hatred of the foreign invaders.

So, given the dispersed nature of the Afghan population, providing security to make sure the core Taleban ideologues are kept at bay is liable to be extremely important. That means that both plans A and B need to be put into operation at the same time.

But Mr Obama has a rocketing federal government deficit to deal with and he is perhaps the first president to have to deal with the fact that now the US is a financially strapped superpower.