NATO reaching turning point in Afghan war

KABUL - For retired army colonel Gholam Rabani, the troop timetable set by US President Barack Obama is a clear sign that NATO forces will abandon Afghanistan just as Soviet troops did two decades ago.

“Sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to finish the job,” Obama in an unexpected move also set summer 2011 as the start date for US troop withdrawal. The additional military commitment will bring the number of US troops alone in the country to 100,000.

Obama has said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) force would concentrate on training more Afghan forces and properly equipping them to take over security.

For 62-year-old Rabani, who served as army officer and trainer for 20 years during the communist and Islamist governments and now owns a grocery shop in Kabul, it is the 1980s all over again.

When the Russians realised they could not win the war in Afghanistan, they said they would withdraw, but would help Afghan forces defend the country. Then the Russians left the country for the neighbouring countries to destroy it.

“Now there are all the same indications that the NATO will do the same,” he said.

Other major NATO countries, including Britain, Germany and France have also hinted their intentions to withdraw their forces and will jointly convene a conference in January 2010 in London to set clear steps for their future military engagement.

These calls for withdrawal come at the time when Afghanistan is being crippled by a deterioration of security, a rise in corruption, an economy based on narcotics, and militants with safe havens across the border in Pakistan.

Western leaders have said the timeline was meant to put pressure on President Hamid Karzai’s administration to take greater responsibility for governance and security, but observers believe the decision has more to do with public frustration in NATO countries with mounting casualties amidst an apparent stalemate with the Islamist extremist Taliban who once ruled the country.

With nearly 490 soldiers killed, including 300 US and 100 British troops, 2009 marked the deadliest year for NATO forces since 2001. More than one third of US and British military casualties occurred this year.

Polls show that around half of US citizens and around two-thirds of Germans and Britons are against the war in Afghanistan. Support for the war is also waning in other NATO countries with the Dutch and Canadians already setting 2010 and 2011 as their respective dates of withdrawal.

The Taliban on the other hand seem to be more powerful than ever, with the resurgent fighters carrying out more attacks in 2009 than any other year since their ouster.

The country’s opium production continued to drop in the past two years, but Afghanistan still produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opiate, with the money from the drug trade believed to fund the insurgency.

On the political front, Western hopes for a clean and accountable government in Afghanistan were ruined when one third of Karzai’s votes in Aug 20 election were thought to be fraudulent. Karzai was declared the president only after his main challenger Abdullah Abdullah pulled out of a runoff.

Corruption has become endemic and this year Afghanistan placed second on Transparency International’s most corrupt countries list.

Efforts to form militias to fight the Taliban and plans to coax rebel fighters from the Taliban through a reconciliation programme have not yet yielded results.

NATO leaders have narrowed their goals from turning Afghanistan into a democracy to merely training an Afghan security force. The idea is for US and NATO troops to reverse the rise of the Taliban in the short term, buying time for Kabul under Karzai to build up security forces that can take over while international forces phase out.

The new goal is widely seen as a move to prevent the failure of the NATO mission, but even that seems ambitious.

NATO Commander in Afghanistan, US General Stanley McChrystal has said that it would take at least four years to double the size of the Afghan army and police to 400,000 troops. Karzai has set a five-year timeframe for his country’s forces to take over overall security.

NATO is not only in a battle against the Taliban but a war against lack of resources from the West and high rates of desertion among Afghan forces as well as a public relations battle in a country with 90-percent illiteracy.

“For us, it will be a matter of a few years before we’ll see Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban, unless Western countries commit themselves for a longer haul,” said Rabani. “At least for one more decade.”