Troop ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan Ends With Mixed Results
By ROD NORDLAND
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Afghan soldiers on duty at a checkpoint at the
northern end of the capital, Kabul, on Friday. The station monitors the
road from Mazar-i-Sharif.
The milestone, which still leaves 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan,
went nearly unremarked in the country, with no statement from President
Hamid Karzai or the United States military commander, Gen. John R.
Allen.
Troop ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan Ends With Mixed Results
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Afghan soldiers on duty at a
checkpoint at the northern end of the capital, Kabul, on Friday. The
station monitors the road from Mazar-i-Sharif.
By ROD NORDLAND
Published: September 21, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — The American military says it has now fully
withdrawn the last of the 33,000 “surge troops” sent to pacify
Afghanistan two years ago, but they are leaving behind an uncertain
landscape of rising violence and political instability that threatens to
undo considerable gains in security, particularly in the former Taliban
strongholds in the south and southwest.
Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
American and Afghan soldiers patrolled two weeks ago
in a village in Kandahar Province. NATO-led forces are scaling back such
joint operations.
As the troops head for home, a week ahead of schedule, the American
coalition and its Afghan partners are bedeviled by a host of problems.
The Taliban and their Haqqani network allies continue to pull off bombings, while insider killings of Americans by Afghan troops have raised tensions between the allies, forcing severe cutbacks in strategically vital training programs.
Both governments are arguing publicly over whether to keep battlefield
prisoners locked up without trial, while nervous officials on all sides
are worrying that riots over an inflammatory anti-Muslim video, which
have killed dozens in other countries, will break out in Afghanistan.
Friday’s milestone, which still leaves 68,000 American troops in
Afghanistan, was announced on the other side of the planet by the
American secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, during a trip to New
Zealand, while both American and Afghan officials here studiously
ignored the moment, at least in public.
Some Afghans supporting the government of President Hamid Karzai boasted
that it showed their own forces were ready to take over, while
pro-Taliban forces exulted that they were not. But most Afghans just
worried about what it would really mean for the final two years of the
American presence here.
“What did the surge give us?” a senior American official reflected on
Friday, speaking anonymously as a matter of military policy. “We’re
going to hit a point where, I won’t say that’s as good as it gets, but
now it’s up to them to hold what we gave them. Now, really, it’s
Karzai’s turn.”
No one claimed there was not a great deal yet to be done against an
insurgency that its foes describe as tenacious and determined. “They’re
not going to go away for years,” the senior official said. “Every
fighting season the Taliban, or some number of them, come out of the
corner and they’re ready to fight again.”
Both American and Afghan officials have acknowledged the seriousness of the so-called green-on-blue attacks,
in which this year more than 50 American soldiers were killed at the
hands of Afghan allies. The allies’ dispute over how and how long to
hold suspected insurgents has led to personal negotiations between President Obama and Mr. Karzai in recent days, while the video parody of the Prophet Muhammad has cast a long shadow over relations between the two countries.
“We were not happy about the arrival of the surge troops, and we are not
sad that they left,” said Mohammad Naim Lalai Amirzai, an Afghan
Parliament member from Kandahar. “As the American surge ends, the
Taliban surge will begin.”
Indeed, some of the most worried voices were raised in the heartland of
the surge, in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces in the south and southwest
where the 2010 influx of 33,000 fresh United States Marines and Army
soldiers largely subdued the Taliban on their home turf.
Post-surge, the capital cities of those provinces are more peaceful than
they have been in many years, and the Taliban operate only
clandestinely in the rural areas. But operate they still do.
Ten southern districts, of the 400 in Afghanistan, are responsible for
45 percent of all attacks, according to statistics provided by officials
of the NATO-led
International Security Assistance Force. According to those statistics,
three of the five most active districts over the past 90 days, Panjwai
and Zhare in Kandahar, and Nad Ali in Helmand, were also early focuses
of the military’s surge efforts.
Nad Ali is adjacent to Marja, where Marines began the first surge-related offensive.
In districts once dominated by American troops, then by growing numbers
of newly trained Afghan troops alongside them, residents face the
prospect that in many cases it will soon be just Afghan forces. In
Maiwand district, one such place, where a roadside bomb exploded as
recently as Friday morning, an elder named Haji Abdullah Jan said he was
worried about what he saw as a lack of commitment from government
forces.
“There are soldiers and policemen who are not obeying their commanders,”
he said, “but the Taliban are committed to their jobs.” Like many local
residents, he likened the insurgents to a crouching tiger, waiting for
the moment to pounce.
“At least during the first two years the surge was very successful. It
really reversed the Taliban momentum in most parts of Helmand, Kandahar
and other southwestern provinces,” said Jawid Kohistani, a Kabul-based
military analyst and a former Afghan intelligence chief. “If the
achievements of the surge seem ‘fragile and reversible’ today, it is
because of the failure of the Afghan security forces and the Afghan
government to fill the void and cultivate a good relationship with the
locals.”
He was referring to an oft-repeated remark of the previous American
commander here, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who presided over much of the
surge period, that gains in Afghanistan are “fragile and reversible.”
The senior American official said he disagreed with the Taliban view
that “the Americans have all the watches, and we have all the time,” and
that they are just biding their time until America’s withdrawal of the
rest of its normal combat forces by the end of 2014.
“It’s not like time is on their side,” he said. “They lose their
relevance, lose their donors, limit their power at the negotiating
table; they’re not just going to hide and wait.”
While Taliban activity has been greatly curtailed by surge forces in the
insurgents’ traditional areas in the south and west, they responded by
increasing their efforts elsewhere, officials say.
The insurgents also shifted increasingly to the use of roadside bombs
and suicide bombers, instead of small arms and ground attacks where they
would be outnumbered and outgunned. That greatly increased the number
of civilian casualties, more than three-fourths of which are attributed
to insurgents’ attacks, according to United Nations figures. For the
first time this year, the overall civilian casualties began to decline
in number, according to both NATO and United Nations figures, compared
with last year.
However, the level of violence remains higher than it had been before
the surge forces came. Brig. Gen. Dadan Lawang, the commander of the
Afghan National Army’s 201st Corps, said the biggest change of the surge
years has been the maturing of an increasingly self-sufficient fighting
force.
“Even if more U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, we won’t see any negative
impact because our troops are in a very good position to fight the
Taliban independently,” he said, adding, “But we need the continuous
support of the international community and the United States in
particular.”
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