Obama faces uphill struggle in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON, D.C.: President Barack Obama’s decision to send more US troops to Afghanistan may not be enough to halt the momentum of a violent insurgency that dominates large swathes of the impoverished country, experts said on Wednesday. Obama approved the deployment of 17,000 troops for the coming months even as his administration scrambles to craft a new strategy to tackle a rejuvenated insurgency led by Taliban and al-Qaeda militants. The new US president has signaled his approach will be less ambitious than his predecessor, relying on diplomacy and economic aid as well as military might. But he has inherited a grim landscape in which a stretched North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) force and a weak Kabul government have been unable to keep pace with an emboldened insurgency financed in part by a vast opium trade. The outlook in Afghanistan is dismal partly because former President George W. Bush “allowed a bad situation to get worse” by diverting resources to a controversial war in Iraq, allowing the Taliban to rebound after its ouster in 2001, said Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress. “And that’s the key issue—has it gotten so far down hill that you can’t get it?” Korb told Agence France-Presse. The extra troops, a Marine Expeditionary Brigade and an Army Stryker Brigade, are expected to step up patrols in the volatile south and bolster security along main roads, which have become an easy target for Taliban guerrillas. By safeguarding main roadways, US officials hope the reinforcements will allow a resumption in civilian traffic and open the way for more rural development projects that have been crippled by roadside bombs. “The idea is that with those extra troops you can provide security and send a signal to the Afghan people that they don’t have to fear the Taliban because we have enough troops to clear an area and leave some behind to protect the people,” Korb said. But more troops may still be needed to shore up security, and a larger foreign force in turn runs the risk of alienating the Afghan population. Although Afghans initially embraced the US-led troops that toppled the Taliban regime, that support has declined, a recent poll showed, with civilian casualties from air strikes sowing increasing resentment. The Kabul government and its police force, meanwhile, are riddled with corruption, a Defense department report said earlier this month. And US military officers describe a vacuum of authority in the provinces amid a thriving opium trade. Obama has made clear that US goals in Afghanistan will be more narrowly focused on defusing the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, while downplaying a bid to transform the country. “We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy,” he told NBC television this month. The rugged border area with Pakistan, exploited as a base by al-Qaeda, presents perhaps the biggest headache for the US contingent, according to Gilles Dorron-soro, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There is no quick fix to this situation: even with the full support of the Pakistani government and military [a very optimistic hypothesis] the border will stay out of control for years,” Dorronsoro wrote this month. European allies and US General David Petraeus, the commander for the region, have suggested that the Afghan insurgency could be defused by opening up negotiations with elements of the Taliban, similar to the US approach in Iraq. But the insurgents have little incentive to enter into talks at a time when they are gaining strength on the ground against President Hamid Karzai’s government. “The Taliban are feeling too powerful, a little too successful,” said Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations. “They don’t quite feel the motivation that would bring them to the table at this point to deal with a relatively weaker Karzai government,” Markey said at a conference in Washington last month.

The NATO alliance and the Kabul government also are not ready to make concessions that might persuade the Taliban to put down their guns, he said.

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