It is difficult to say which piece of news out of Afghanistan last week was, for very different reasons, the worst.
First there was the onerous number of 23 American or NATO troops who were killed in Afghanistan last week. Following this year’s trend, the number of American war dead this month is higher than in the same month in any previous year in Afghanistan since United States began fighting the Taliban insurgency in 2001. The fallen Americans in June raised the number of U.S. killed in Afghanistan to 1,090.
Then came the dismal reports at the end of last week regarding President Hamid Karzai, on whom this nation has pinned its hopes for victory.
First he fired Amrullah Saleh, the director of Afghan intelligence, and the interior minister, Hanif Atmar, both of whom were highly regarded by American and NATO leaders as competent and above the corruption that is said to widely infect the Karzai government.
The two deposed ministers and other Afghan officials subsequently said, according to a New York Times report, that Mr. Karzai had revealed that he had given up hope that American and NATO troops would stay to defeat the Taliban. He further suggested, they said, that NATO forces, and not the Taliban, were responsible for the stunning rocket attacks a week earlier on a nationwide peace conference in Kabul; and, lastly, that he was now pressing for his own power-sharing deal with the Taliban.
All are shocking. The president’s stunning assessment on the rocket attack also ran counter to compelling evidence by Afghan and NATO officials that it was, indeed, the Taliban that executed the rocket attack against the peace conference gathering.
And then there’s the report that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has backed away from, and is even relabeling, the anticipated offensive against the Taliban centered around the strategic southern provincial capital of Kandahar, home to the Pashtun, Afghanistan’s majority ethnic group and the source of Taliban strength in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The shift in mission follows an apparent rethinking of the hard-fought U.S. battle in February for Marja, a seeming victory in another important southern city, which has rapidly fallen again under the insidious control of Taliban insurgents.
Gen. McChrystal cannot be faulted for rethinking his battle plans, given the way the Taliban has, by personal terror and assassinations, regained the upper hand in Marja so quickly. The strategy has relied on the idea that U.S. and NATO forces can drive the Taliban out of major population centers, and that a built-up corps of Afghan police and army units can then assume responsibility for keeping the Taliban from regaining control.
The strategy hasn’t worked in Marja — and probably would not work in the larger center of Kandahar — because the years-long effort to build an adequate and competent Afghan police and army, a goal supposedly rejuvenated over the past two years, has simply failed to meet expectations. If it will not yet work, then Gen. McChrystal must change his strategy.
But acknowledging that, along with the fresh evidence that President Karzai cannot yet be relied upon to consolidate and effectively lead his government, raises again the critical questions of when, if ever, Americans will see an end to the war in Afghanistan, and whether, and how long, the country should continue to believe that U.S. goals in Afghanistan can be successful.
At this juncture, the shifts by both President Karzai and Gen. McChrystal raise the haunting specter of a war and a Kabul government that continues to slide, even after the United States swallowed its dissatisfaction with the Karzai government’s well-documented electoral corruption in national elections last year.
The United States and NATO have redoubled their support of nation-building and improved security in every way possible, but Mr. Karzai continues to let his allies down, and to leave his country in the hands of grasping warlords and regional governors who conveniently come to terms with a shadow government of regional Taliban leaders, opium traffickers and al-Qaida freelancers. As more American troops are being committed to what will soon become a 100,000 strong contingent, the question of where they are headed becomes ever more compelling, and increasingly more deadly — and for what purpose?