The Afghanistan dilemma: Trump risks cycle of escalation

The Taliban isn’t about to capture Kabul but nor can it be bombed to the negotiating table.

Men carry the coffin of a relative who died in last Saturday’s suicide attack in the Afghan capital Kabul. The attack was disguised by use of an ambulance packed with explosives. Picture: AP

In the past 14 days, Kabul has ­endured three deadly attacks, one by each of Afghanistan’s main ­insurgent groups.

On January 20, a team from the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction that Afghan and US officials claim is close to Pakistani intelligence, ­attacked Kabul’s Inter-Continental hotel, killing 42 people in a 12-hour ­assault.

A week later, near Sidarat Square — one of the most heavily guarded locations inside the capital’s Ring of Steel perimeter — an ambulance packed with explosives detonated, killing 103 and wounding 235. The Taliban quickly claimed responsibility.

Then this week, Islamic State’s Wilayat Khorasan launched a ground attack against the Kabul Military Academy on the city’s outskirts, killing 11 and wounding 16 in a five-hour gunfight.

The shock effect on the capital’s population, and on Afghan urban elites generally, has been severe. Local media reports suggest public confidence in the national unity government of President Ashraf Ghani has been shaken by its inability to protect Afghanistan’s cities.

Three factors are driving this spike in urban violence; the first is simply the weather.

War in Afghanistan has a strongly seasonal character: in spring and summer, when conditions in the countryside are more favourable, insurgents focus on rural guerilla warfare — hit-and-run attacks by fighters crossing the mountainous border from Pakistan or operating in the roughly 35 per cent of Afghan rural territory that is currently controlled or contested by insurgents.

In winter, as snow fills the mountain passes and loss of tree cover makes it easier for aircraft and satellites to spot guerillas, insurgents go asymmetric, launching bombings, assassinations and assaults on urban targets.

Then, in March or April, as the weather warms, the Taliban typically announces its annual spring offensive and the rural conflict heats up again.

This winter’s attacks — those of the past fortnight, another in mid-December that killed 50 and wounded 80 Shia worshippers in Kabul, and an attack in the eastern provincial capital of Jalalabad on January 24 in which Islamic State killed six workers for the charity Save the Children — fit this seasonal pattern, albeit at a higher intensity than usual.

That intensity may have something to do with the second factor: US President Donald Trump’s new Afghan strategy.

As announced last August, the strategy was fairly pedestrian. It involved removing Barack Obama’s cap on US troop numbers, replacing his withdrawal timetable with a “conditions-based” approach where forces would stay till the job was done, and using airstrikes, drone ­attacks, special forces and military advisers to pressure the Taliban and bolster the Afghan military and police.

Other than Trump’s harsh language and his relaxing of restrictions on military commanders, there was nothing particularly new in the strategy, which paralleled plans proposed during the Obama administration.

In practice, though, the strategy as executed has brought a massive increase in US airstrikes, up by a factor of three since 2016; a shift to targeting Taliban drug production; and a spike — not mentioned in the strategy but widely reported in the media and ­acknowledged by CIA director Mike Pompeo — in CIA activity, including drone strikes inside ­Afghanistan (previously the preserve of the US Air Force) and aggressive use of Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, comprising Afghans led by paramilitary operations officers from the agency’s Special Activities Division.

US ground forces have increased to 14,000, and another thousand members of a new, specialised advisory unit, the 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade, will begin deploying later this month.

The Taliban took a few months to respond and then, last October, launched a string of significant suicide bombings and ground attacks across the country’s east, south and central provinces.

In part, this was a counter-escalation in retaliation for increased US bombing. Partly it was an ­attempt to consolidate gains against Afghan forces (which have steadily lost control of population and terrain in recent years) before the new US troops could arrive.

As often happens in counter­insurgency, most recently in ­Afghanistan during Obama’s “surge” of 2010 to 2012, in which 140,000 US troops flooded in, a government escalation triggers a countervailing guerilla response, raising the overall level of violence without changing the relative balance between the two sides, a phenomenon that Vietnam-era counter-insurgency strategists called an “escalating stalemate”.

This time, the Taliban campaign to counter the new US strategy seems to be restarting — after the inevitable winter break — with a vengeance.

But a third factor has gained the most attention inside Afghanistan over the past week, after public claims from the former head of the Afghan intelligence service, Amrullah Saleh, that recent attacks were sponsored by Pakistan in retaliation for Trump’s ­decision last month to cancel aid for Islamabad unless it cut ties with the Taliban and the Haqqani network, which Saleh and others have consistently claimed is a wholly owned subsidiary of Directorate S of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s military spy ­agency.

In Saleh’s interpretation (and that of other Afghan intelligence officials and political leaders), the US decision to cut funding to Pakistan prompted the ISI to direct its proxies to mount attacks in ­Afghanistan, to demonstrate how much worse things could get ­unless funding is restored.

This “Pakistani shakedown” narrative resonates with the ­Afghan people. Pakistan denies any involvement in the attacks, though former ISI officers have acknowledged an ­ongoing relationship with the Haqqanis.

Stepping back from the immediate spate of attacks, it’s clear security conditions in Afghanistan are deteriorating sharply, particularly in the cities, which have been under increasing attack since 2015.

The northern provincial capital of Kunduz has twice fallen to the Taliban and been twice recaptured since 2015. Tarin Kowt, capital of Oruzgan province and previously the major Australian base in ­Afghanistan, was also briefly captured in 2016, and centres in Helmand, Kandahar, Ghazni and Nangarhar provinces have come under increasing Taliban ­attack.

The urbanisation of a conflict that was largely rural until 2015 has made Afghan city-dwellers, by far the most politically and economically influential segment of the country’s population, feel far less safe, undermining the government’s credibility.

Likewise, the US government’s recent decision to begin classifying previously public data on Afghan civilian casualties, Afghan police and military losses and numbers of attacks is just the latest indication (real or imagined) that commanders feel they have something to hide. What data we do have tells a negative story: steady loss of ­control by the government over Afghanistan’s population and territory, increased military and police casualties and desertions, a spike in refugees and displaced persons, more civilian casualties, and a series of major attacks all point to trend lines that are heading in the wrong direction.

Even before the new strategy was announced, large-scale ­attacks had become increasingly common: a Taliban bomb outside the German embassy in Kabul killed 150 and wounded 413 last May, and in April an assault on an army base near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif killed at least 170 troops and wounded more than 160, in the deadliest assault on ­Afghan forces since the war began.

Perhaps even more important, Taliban shadow government — the ability of local guerilla cadres to levy taxes, run local courts, resolve disputes, apply resources to Taliban-funded development projects, control the hiring and firing of teachers and doctors, and control school curriculums and district officials — is growing across key areas of the country.

The danger here is not that the Taliban will somehow capture Kabul and overthrow the government: the insurgents control about 8 per cent of the Afghan population and are far from strong enough to conquer the state. But they are equally far from defeat, or from being forced to negotiate from a position of weakness.

Instead, the danger is of another cycle of escalation, in which Trump repeats the Obama surge, increasing the violence and scale of the conflict at great cost in ­Afghan lives, only to once again fail to defeat the Taliban or stabilise the country for the long term.

A recent Pentagon report to congress describes the US objective in Afghanistan as being “to convince the Taliban that they cannot win on the battlefield. The war will end in a comprehensive, Afghan-led political settlement that will include all parties, including the Taliban. The Taliban … must know that their only path to peace and legitimacy is through a negotiated settlement.”

Does the Taliban believe it cannot win on the battlefield?

The past 14 days suggest not. Rather, the risk is that both sides continue to believe they can improve their positions through escalation, and both continue to focus on military rather than political means to end the conflict, and that Trump, who campaigned on ending the conflict and admitted his reluctance to escalate even as he announced his strategy in ­August, will be drawn into an ­escalating war just as his predecessor was.

The rise in violence in Afghanistan’s cities comes against a background of a broadly deteriorating war situation, one that risks drawing the US, and Australia with it, back into an ­almost certainly unwinnable strategy of bombing the Taliban to the negotiating table, when it continues to show no willingness to negotiate under duress.

With war looming in Korea, confrontation in the South China Sea, Islamic State remnants still at large, Saudi forces bogged in a messy conflict in Yemen, Iran increasing its influence from Herat, in Afghanistan’s west, through Iraq and Syria all the way to the ­Israeli border, Turkey turning on the Kurds and a new Cold War developing with Russia, the last thing the US or its allies need is another cycle of escalation in ­Afghanistan.

Afghans — including the families of the 162 killed in the past 10 days — need it even less.