Each spring the Taliban set and announce a preferred tactic and/or preferred targets for their summer fighting season. Two year ago there were more direct attacks on small western outpost and patrols. The last year was also mostly a fight against the foreign troops though seldom in direct attacks but through IEDs.  Additionally the last year saw some spectacular attacks on high profile targets in Kabul and other cities.

On Sunday Al Jazeerah published an interview in which a Taliban announced a new schwerpunkt for the coming fighting season:

Mullah Dowran, a regional Taliban commander in eastern Afghanistan, has told Al Jazeera that the organisation is now targeting Afghan security forces.

“We announced we would forgive them many times. We showed them leniency many times in the fight. We tried to make American targets the priority, but the damage created by Afghan forces has become more and more every day. Now they are our priority,” Dowran said.

The usual western media have yet to pick up on this change from last year even though there is already proof that this new line is followed in various parts of Afghanistan.

Helmand: Afghanistan: Militants ‘kill police by poisoning food’

Militants killed four Afghan policemen and two civilians inside a police checkpoint by poisoning their yoghurt and launching an attack, officials say.

Bagakhshan: Insurgents kill 3 Afghan police, abduct 11 in attack on checkpoint in the north

Bagakhshan province spokesman Abdul Marouf Rasekh says the militants attacked the outpost Monday night in Wardoj district.

Uruzgan: At least nine Afghan police killed, infiltrator suspected

Nine Afghan police were killed in an insurgent attack that authorities said on Thursday was believed to have been facilitated by a fellow officer and suspected Taliban infiltrator.

This new line of targeting is an addition to another tactic we see in the series of “isolated incidents” (as ISAF likes to call them) in which men “in Afghan army uniform” kill their western mentors.

Combined these two variations of infiltration attacks will make the planned transfer of security tasks to Afghan forces nearly impossible. Attacked from the inside the Afghan security forces are likely to see increased desertion rates, new problems with recruiting and a general lack of moral.

As usual ISAF will be slow to react to this new problem. It is still planing for a much too centralized Afghanistan with a force that is far too large for the country and can not be sustained even when the west picks up a large part of the bill. The Taliban will always be able to wear such a force down.

A more sustainable strategy would be to decentralized the government, give more power for local leaders and to give the center in Kabul only a small force at hand that then could be used to whack this or that provincial warlord down if he would become too recalcitrant. This of course would have to be based on a political compromise with the Taliban.

It would be the way Afghanistan has been run for centuries and the way it is likely to revert to anyway.