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Troops face long road ahead in Afghanistan

“In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”

That statement, made in congressional testimony in December by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is a growing concern for U.S. officials.

The long, costly slog in Iraq may finally be bearing some fruit, despite an early-January uptick in violence. But the massive commitment of troops and money that has fueled that effort has not been matched inside its rugged neighbor to the east, and many observers worry about the prospects for long-term success there.

While signs of progress in security, infrastructure and governmental organization can be seen, last year was also the most violent in Afghanistan since the Taliban was driven from power in 2001. The opium poppy trade that U.S. officials say fuels the Taliban resurgence enjoyed a record crop. And U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about the porous border with neighboring Pakistan, whose army remains overmatched by Islamic fundamentalist insurgents operating in rugged, barely governed tribal areas.

U.S. officials are cautiously optimistic. “We’re not losing in Afghanistan,” Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, President Bush’s deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, said on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show on Jan. 20. “The Taliban is not winning. But we have a lot of work to do.”

Lute boasts that the U.S. has “never been beaten tactically in a firefight in Afghanistan.”

But he acknowledged that winning on the battlefield won’t suffice “unless we can put those tactical military wins together with improved governance by the Karzai regime and improved, coherent reconstruction packages on the economic scene.”

A shift in tactics has made life even more difficult for U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan. The enemy “will try to increase the number of suicide bombers,” which came in greater numbers in 2007, said Gen. Dan McNeill, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, at a Dec. 13 news conference.

“I think [the enemy] is less likely to try to move big formations and to take on the alliance toe-to-toe. If there are not improvements in the Afghan national police and their ability, I think he will continue to go at them hard and fast, as he has this year,” McNeill said.

According to retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and now director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, acts of violence in Afghanistan rose from 900 in 2004 to 8,950 last year. Over the same span, roadside bomb attacks increased from 325 to 1,469; suicide bombings rose from 3 to 130.

A total of 107 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2007 — the most ever, according to icasualties.org.

All told, the persistence of the Taliban and the drug trade, the daunting task of training the Afghani Security Forces into a force that can defend the nation, and the violence and instability in Pakistan would appear to add up to a long-term U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan — just as officials have said to expect in Iraq.

The tiny Afghan National Army Air Corps provides one example of the need for long-range support. As of Jan. 5, the entire corps was composed of four fixed-wing transport aircraft and 16 helicopters. The corps has 180 pilots, but their average age is 43, some haven’t flown in 15 years, and only 30 percent of them are flying at all, according to Brig. Gen. Jay Lindell, commander of the Combined Air Power Transition Force.

That means that unless the political winds shift dramatically, U.S. air forces will be flying close air support combat missions in Afghanistan until at least 2013 — about the time that Iraq estimates it will be able to defend itself against internal threats.

The current force in Afghanistan pales in comparison to the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. McNeill has 42,000 troops under his command, 14,000 of them Americans. Combined Joint Task Force 82 currently numbers 14,000 U.S. and 1,200 coalition troops. About 158,000 U.S. troops are currently in Iraq.

The disparity in funding is even greater. Through last September, according to the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. had appropriated $575.4 billion on the two wars. Only $126.8 billion of that total was to be spent on operations in Afghanistan.

In an interview with Britain’s The Daily Telegraph newspaper last fall, McNeill said NATO troops were “gaining the upper hand” against the Taliban, but added that further progress is being hampered by the lack of a “force big enough to clear and hold every part of this country.”

Despite the all-consuming commitment in Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, citing that undermanned NATO effort, recently convinced Bush to dispatch 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan this spring. Most will join the NATO effort, a combination of nation-building and security enforcement. About 1,000 will work under the purely U.S. command and help train Afghan Security Forces, a major U.S. initiative.

Gates reiterated Jan. 24 that the Marine deployment is a one-time-only event and hopes that it will spur NATO allies to beef up their troop levels. “I have started a dialogue with my NATO colleagues about falling in behind the Marines when the Marines come out,” Gates said.

Despite the shortfalls, other U.S. officials agree that they’re hitting the insurgents hard.

“We’ve done it as well as it can be accomplished,” said Ambassador Dell Dailey, the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, at a Jan. 22 breakfast meeting with defense reporters.

The Pakistan factor

To a large degree, however, success in Afghanistan is tied to stability in Pakistan.

“That continues to be of grave concern to us, both in the near term and the long term,” said Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman.

“There’s no solution in Afghanistan that doesn’t have to do with a solution in Pakistan,” Lute said on Rose’s PBS program. “And the reason for that is the demographics of the fight.

“Fundamentally, the insurgency in Afghanistan is a fight among Pashtuns. And the Pashtun belt of people and tribes is divided by the Afghan-Pakistan border. So it’s not enough to argue that all the pieces are in place to win in Afghanistan, if in fact the Pashtun rebellion, the Pashtun insurgency resides just across the border in Pakistan.

“So just like Afghanistan has an insurgency on its hands, so does ... Pakistan,” Lute said. “These two are inextricably linked.”

Dailey said the U.S. would not likely unilaterally strike al-Qaida or Taliban insurgents hiding out in Pakistan’s remote northwest region.

In September, Bush told CNN that he would strike inside Pakistan if he had good intelligence on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden’s location.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf told Singapore’s The Straits Times in early January that he would regard such a move as an invasion and meet it with stiff resistance.

“They would regret that day,” he said of U.S. officials.

A more likely scenario would be U.S. military aid to Pakistan — if it is requested. “In those areas where they solicit assistance, we’ll provide it,” Dailey said.

Dailey said a current working U.S. development plan would be a 6-year, $2 billion effort that would include a military component to “reinforce, train, probably restructure” the Pakistani Frontier Corps, composed of local citizens led by Pakistani army officers.

In a Jan. 24 report, U.S. Central Command commander Adm. William Fallon told The Washington Post the plan includes intelligence sharing, increased cross-border cooperation and helping the Pakistani military increase capabilities — presumably counterinsurgency skills.

In a Jan. 24 press conference, Gates said the U.S. remains “ready, willing and able to assist the Pakistanis and to partner with them to provide additional training, to conduct joint operations, should they desire to do so.”

But Mullen added that he was “not aware of any details” Fallon may have proposed. Fallon was in Pakistan last week to meet with that nation’s military leaders.

Gates said he had not heard a Pakistani request for assistance.

Mullen said the U.S. has supplied training assistance to Pakistan “for some time,” but that it takes the form of reimbursements for assistance in the war on terror and training Pakistani officers at U.S. war colleges. Other than that “normal security assistance,” Mullen said he was not aware of any U.S. troops currently working with the Pakistani military.

While Pakistani efforts to take control of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — a rugged 10,888-square-mile area in the northwest part of the country, adjacent to Afghanistan’s border — are largely considered a failure so far, Dailey said the new Pakistani army chief of staff has taken actions “that have shown a deliberate ability to engage, and that’s the conventional ops that have taken place in the Swat Valley. I think we’ve got some aggressive activity that will take place in the … Northwest Province area, in the short term.”

Army Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 82, said in a Jan. 23 news conference at the Pentagon that cross-border insurgent infiltration is down lately because of political instability within Pakistan, cold winter weather and “some success” in border interdiction.

He said the U.S. has “great” military-to-military coordination with the Pakistan military and issued an upbeat assessment of the work in Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan will become self-reliant, self-securing and committed to a representative government,” Rodriguez said. “This can be accomplished with realistic objectives, continued international support and expanded regional support.”

He said he sees “slow, steady progress” toward that point.