Sunday November 15, 2009

Replaying a sad song

BEHIND THE HEADLINES
By BUNN NAGARA

After all these years and despite all the official denials, it is Vietnam all over again in Afghanistan.

AS headlines this weekend enthuse over Barack Obama’s first Asian tour as US president, the bigger news will be withheld until after his return to Washington tomorrow.

That would concern the latest US plan for strife-torn Afghanistan, a war-weary sub-nation riven by factionalism, sectarianism and deadly conflict in an ongoing civil war, represented by a government of doubtful capacity and questionable legitimacy following a disputed election.

Obama has agonised for months over the type and size of US military reinforcements for continuing the increasingly unpopular occupation of the country. It is a decision that impacts on at least three continents, but whose eventual outcome cannot for now be known.

Nato officials last month said their decision on the occupation will depend on the US position, as US forces are and would continue to be the mainstay of occupation troops. The Afghan government’s position on doing more to look after its country also depends on US efforts to make them do so, assuming there is a sense of responsiveness in Kabul.

Closer to home, any decision Obama makes is bound to upset as many or as much as it would gratify. Options and opinions within the US are far from consensual, and as in Europe most people are now against sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Gen Stanley McChrystal of the US army wants up to 80,000 more troops to secure the country, while the textbook counter-insurgency formula requires several times that number. Defence Secretary Robert Gates is reportedly less certain, preferring a more cautious approach.

Vice-President Joe Biden wants more limited involvement, comprising focused special forces operations and less discriminate aerial attacks by unmanned drones. US ambassador to Afghanistan Gen (R) Karl Eikenberry at first supported the call for more troops, then backtracked to say not yet, not so fast, at least not until the Afghan government shows more sign of wanting to do more.

The US public is increasingly disillusioned with an eight-year war that remains inconclusive, costly, aimless, ill-defined and without the necessary benchmarks for progress. Critics of the occupation, several of whom number among Obama’s supporters, want to end the occupation as soon as possible.

Obama is expected to announce the dispatch of more troops, but the number is expected to hover around the 30,000 mark. McChrystal will find this insufficient, but at this stage whatever number will make little difference to an occupation forced into its final stages.

In recent years, Taliban insurgents had steadily come to control more than half the country’s territory. In recent months, they have gained even more strength.

US intelligence estimates have found that full-time Taliban forces have grown 25% since only last year. Even as US troops continually grow in number, so have Taliban fighters. Apparently, anyone can learn to “surge”.

The Taliban have also learned from the “field experience” of Iraqi insurgents. In Iraq, US armour had been penetrated by deadly shrapnel from the insurgents’ improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

That resulted in stronger and better vehicle armour, producing the US army’s million-dollar-a-piece Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles.

But that brainwave, with each vehicle weighing up to 24 tonnes for the largest model, is now also vulnerable to Afghan insurgent attacks despite the attackers’ low-tech weaponry.

This basically involves coupling larger explosive charges with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Before US military contractors at home come up with a better design to resist this latest type of attack, still more money and lives will be lost in Afghanistan.

Further to a sense that US troops are being “outnumbered” because the numbers seen as necessary are not being made available, there is also a sense of the troops not getting the equipment they need.

This is a remarkable situation for the world’s sole superpower with the largest, deadliest, best-equipped and most expensive military force on the planet.

Accordingly, troop morale has dropped. A new survey of US troops this year found higher stress levels and lower unit morale than in previous years, with fewer mental health workers now to help with it.

Like the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the US-led occupation today is being likened with the debacle of the Vietnam War.

Bush administration officials and some of their current Obama counterparts have rejected the comparison, but only out of administration ideology than from any disinterested analysis.

As in Vietnam, the foreign occupation forces are fighting locals on the latter’s home ground. A corrupt government ruling at the behest of the occupiers has become more of a discredited liability than an asset to the occupation.

And despite the occupation forces’ better weapons and technology, they fail to subdue a homegrown force using simpler, improvised devices and guerilla tactics. Above all, occupation troops themselves are losing their sense of purpose and motivation in continuing the fight.

The US-led occupation of Afghanistan is now more like Vietnam than the Soviet occupation of the country before. After all, it is Washington and the US military-industrial complex that is doing the occupation yet again.

The US army’s MRAP vehicles have proven to be cumbersome, ineffective and slow to respond and manoeuvre in the Afghan terrain, despite the larger costs, higher technology and greater sophistication.

It serves as a symptom of how a large, wealthy and sophisticated superpower is also operating in the Afghan wasteland.

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