Costs of War: The Second Afghan Front
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
There is an old saying in Afghanistan that you cannot buy an Afghan’s friendship - but you can rent it. And that is just what the US-led coalition and their Afghan allies are trying to do as part of the new US strategy there, approved by President Barack Obama in December and underwritten by an international conference in London last month.
The assault on the town has been given the codename Moshtarak, meaning ‘together’ in the local Dari language, external pageaccording to the BBC, and is the biggest coalition offensive since the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001.
Operation Moshtarak was widely and clearly signaled in advance by coalition officials, and last week, Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar convened a traditional Afghan council, a shura, of 350 tribal elders from Marjah, attended by a senior US military commander, external pageaccording to the New York Times.
A similar move by Shinwari tribal elders from Nangarhar Province - who promised at a shura at the end of January to keep the Taliban out of their villages and ban the cultivation of opium poppy - netted their district $1.2 million in direct US military aid for development projects, external pageaccording to Radio Free Europe.
In fact, external pagethe US declined to sign up for the $140 million its allies in the international coalition pledged for development in Afghanistan at the London conference last month, saying they would channel their reintegration funds directly through the US military on the ground.
Recruting Taliban
On Monday, external pagethe Wall Street Journal reported, quoting Afghan and US military sources, that 10 men assigned by the Marjah shura had been helping coalition personnel in the town “find bombs planted by the insurgents and to find Taliban fighters who have melted back into the population.”
And over the weekend, the external pageNATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said two more shuras had been held, one in Marjah itself and one in nearby Nad-e Ali.
These efforts to engage tribal leaders are a strategy imported to Afghanistan by the US military from al-Anbar province and other parts of the Sunni triangle in Iraq.
It is probably an advantage for the Afghan version of the strategy that it is being used going in - rather than at the end of a long line of rather grotesque policy gyrations, as in Iraq.
The Marjah shura last week, for instance, promised to set up two councils to advise Afghan authorities and US forces once they had control of the town. One would make recommendations on development projects and local appointments and the other would assist in the reintegration of returning Taliban fighters.
This is the hearts and minds campaign that US forces must count on, the one on the ground. Not the media war that they are, predictably, losing, with news reports about the operation this week external pagefocusing on coalition rocket and air strikes which have killed civilians.
But a hearts and minds strategy doesn’t mean you can avoid civilian casualties - it means you do your best to reduce them and get the truth out quickly when they happen; rules that US forces appear to be trying, albeit clumsily, to follow.
It also means you have to try and communicate with the local population, which US commanders have been doing, holding a press conference announcing their plans to occupy the city and urging civilians to stay in their homes, external pagethe Long War Journal reported.
The Wall Street Journal said that allied forces had set up radio towers in the area to broadcast to residents. “The Taliban are savages,” read a portion of the broadcast, relayed to the paper by a local resident.
After the battle
But above all, a hearts and minds strategy is about what you do after you have won the battle. Can the government and coalition forces provide security? Can they earn legitimacy?
Last week, Atmari promised the Marjah elders 1,000 Afghan police to keep the Taliban out once US and Afghan forces had cleared the town.
“Give me your sons and we will make a national police force with them,” external pagethe Times reported him telling the elders. His Interior Ministry last year rolled out a program - also apparently inspired by the US military’s use of Awakening Councils in Iraq - to establish tribal militias to participate in the war against the Taliban.
These reintegration efforts, effectively paying Taliban foot-soldiers to change sides or at least give up the fight, need to be distinguished from the reconciliation efforts by Hamid Karzai - external pagereportedly trying to engage the good offices of Saudi King Abdullah - to reach out directly to Taliban leaders and get them to take part in a national grand council or loya jirga.