Yesterday U.S. Defense Secretary Panetta characterized insider attacks on US troops in Afghanistan as the ‘last gasp’ of a frustrated Taliban insurgency. But what we really see are the ‘last gasps’ of the western forces in Afghanistan.
The exit plan was to train Afghan forces by embedding western troops with their units and to bit by bit transfer security operations to them.
That plan met reality and it did not survive the impact:
KABUL: NATO-led forces are scaling back joint operations with Afghan forces after a spate of “insider attacks” in which Afghan recruits turned their weapons on Western allies, officers said on Tuesday.
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Under the new order, most joint patrols and advisory work with Afghan troops will only be conducted at the battalion level and above.Cooperation with smaller units will have to be “evaluated on a case-by-case basis and approved by RC (regional) commanders”, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.
NATO restricts joint operations with Afghans
This is an official acknowledgement that the plan to train Afghan forces and to transfer security operation to them has now failed. There is no longer a viable exit strategy but to cut and run.
Tellingly neither the Afghans nor U.S. allies were consulted in this decision:
The decision, which was announced in Washington, appeared to take the UK government by surprise, coming just a day after the defence secretary Philip Hammond defended Nato’s continued work with Afghan troops in the Commons.
He said on Monday: “…it is essential that we complete the task of training the Afghan national security forces and increasing their capability so that they can take over the burden of combat as we withdraw. That is what we intend to do, and we will not be deterred from it by these attacks.”
The original plan could continue if the western forces were willing to take more casualties. But the electorates in the west have long given up on Afghanistan and no politician is willing to argue for plans that are sure to end in many more dead soldiers.
Over the last few days six western forces died in green-on-blue incidents. The Taliban raided a huge and well protected (in theory) base in Helmand, destroyed or disabled 80% of the fighter jets of a Marian Aviation Squadron and killed its commander. A U.S. air attack went wrong and killed or wounded nearly twenty Afghan girls and women who were collection fire wood. The Afghan president spoke out against the one sided U.S. interpretation of a prisoner transfer deal. Several demonstrations about a U.S. anti-Islam film led to violent clashes with police forces. Today 10 foreign contractors, most of them South Africans, were killed in a suicide attack in Kabul.
The plan to exit by 2014 will have to be revised. It is likely that the retreat will now be accelerated and that most of the 150,000 western troops and contractors will be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2013. The plans to keep special forces and their support elements in Afghanistan until at least 2024 will also need a revision. That plan depends on a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) with the Afghan government which still needs to be signed. The Maliki government in Iraq got rid of the U.S. occupation forces by not signing a SOFA. The Karzai government or its follow on will likely use the same tactic to send the foreign troops away.
The U.S. alone still has some 50,000 vehicles and 100,000 containers in Afghanistan. It should leave them for the Afghans. They can take what they can use and sell the rest as scrap to China. It would be a small compensation for what they had and have to endure.