Afghani war costing Britain dearly

Sangin is little more than a small town on a remote river running down to the desert plains of southern Afghanistan. It is a scatter of battered concrete administrative buildings, a scruffy bazaar and narrow lanes between mud-walled compounds under a burning sun.

Three years ago it was one of the first objectives of the new British deployment into Afghanistan's Helmand province. It is fast becoming the symbol of all that is going wrong there.

On Saturday five British troops died in double blasts as they patrolled south of the town. The tactic that killed them is simple: a first bomb to immobilise the target, a second to destroy them.

Perfected in Iraq by al Qaeda, the Taleban are now making it their own.

The insurgents know better than to fight the massive power deployed for set-piece operations like that under way a hundred or so kilometres to the south of Sangin, with its hundreds of helicopters and thousands of United States Marines. They wait, weeks and months, and then strike. Time, after all, is on their side.

Three other British soldiers were killed on Friday and Saturday, bringing the total to 15 in 10 days, eight in a 24-hour period.

One of the first to die in the latest spasm of violence was 20-year-old Christopher Whiteside of the Light Dragoons, killed last Wednesday, also by a hidden roadside bomb.

Pictures filmed by the BBC a day or so before his death showed him grinning sheepishly, sitting in the dirt, his rifle beside him, as his comrades made fun of him and the camera. Forty-eight hours later came the bang, the spatter of metal shards, the shock, the shouting, the pain and, for Whiteside, the end.

The total of British dead in Afghanistan is now 184, more than the 179 lost in Iraq. The Americans have lost 103 this year and 657 in all. With the wounded included in the count, the last six weeks have been by far the bloodiest period for the coalition forces in Afghanistan since 2001.

Back then no one thought the West would be still be fighting in Afghanistan nearly a decade later. Now, senior officers and planners privately admit, if we are not still fighting in five years' time it will be because we have lost, and left. In the short term the current violence was not unexpected. Back in the late northern spring Western intelligence officers spoke of a "casualty surge" to match the "troop surge" ordered by US President Barack Obama in a bid to break the stalemate in the battle against the Taleban.

Not only were there going to be thousands more troops pushing into areas where they had never been before but the enemy was more formidable than ever. "They are very much more stood up this year. They have got their tactics sorted out, their logistics and their discipline," said one Western intelligence source in Kabul in April.

Last week the British Prime Minister, Defence Secretary and others all warned the British public to expect further losses.

The emotive images of the coffins of dead soldiers being repatriated have further intensified pressure on ministers to show that the loss of life is for a cause that can be won. "Troop levels are under review. They could go up, depending on events on the ground," said a defence spokesman. It is believed that a maximum extra deployment would be 2000.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: "This is a fight to clear terrorist networks from Afghanistan and Pakistan, to support the elected governments in both countries against the Taleban, to tackle the heroin trade which funds terrorism and the insurgency, and to build longer term stability."

The strategy that the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul are putting into action has been meditated and worked on for at least four years, since senior American soldiers began to understand their failures in Iraq.

Individuals like David Kilcullen, a former Australian infantry officer with a degree in political anthropology, joined the Pentagon's best and brightest to thrash out new ideas. Instead of the primary aim of coalition soldiers being to track and eliminate hostile enemy fighters, effectively raiding the countryside from heavily defended bases, it became protecting the population from the insurgents. It needed more troops, more money and, sceptics say, a lot of luck, but in Iraq the approach was credited with ending a violent downward spiral.

Most of the 15 British soldiers killed in the last 10 days died trying to implement it: out on patrols aimed at reassuring the locals, by showing them that the coalition, not the Taleban, was best placed to assure their security, and win their trust and the elusive "hearts and minds".

Along with the new troops needed to push back the insurgents from zones where government authority was non-existent, known as "clearing" the environment, the strategy places a new emphasis on "holding" the new territory, primarily using the fledgling Afghan National Army.

To the east of Kabul, an empty, dusty plain has been converted into a vast training camp for the forces which, it is now hoped, will reach 130,000 men, or even 300,000 eventually as some suggest. A sign outside the US$92 million centre reads: "Unity starts here."

Elsewhere, police are being prepared - in smaller numbers and with less resources.

Finally comes the third part of the strategy: "build". The new security should allow a "development surge" with hundreds of civilian advisers and much more money available to finally get the schools, clinics, roads and police stations promised to the population built. With the insurgents at bay, it is hoped that voting can go ahead smoothly for the presidential elections, giving a vital boost to the flagging project of building a functioning democracy.

Then there is a political track, looking at restructuring the distribution of power within Afghanistan and possible deals with "moderate Taleban". Finally there is a regional diplomatic initiative with a host of new "special representatives" appointed to try to bring Afghanistan's neighbours on board, to mitigate the harmful effects of Pakistan's instability and to end its security establishment's apparent support for the insurgents. But, though this new comprehensive approach sounds very plausible, making it work is something else.

Though Western politicians have long described the war in Afghanistan as being fought to defend the Afghan people against the Taleban, the tougher truth is that the Taleban, almost exclusively composed of members of the Pashtun tribes who comprise at least 40 per cent of the country's population, are an integral part of the Afghan people.

In part, the Taleban represent the conservative, rural, religious Pashtun Afghanistan; in contrast, the more modern, cosmopolitan, urban Afghanistan of Kabul, the current government and its power base among the country's non-Pashtun ethnic minorities, are the people who stand most to profit from the success of the Western-run "modernisation" of the country.

On the ground certainly, at least in Helmand and across much of the south and east, the Taleban are almost impossible to distinguish from the population.

Locals habitually use Taleban judges because they are more honest and much quicker than their corrupt government counterparts. Some Taleban are local criminals - though less so, following recent purges ordered by the leadership. Often the insurgency attracts teenagers with little else to do.

Development, it is hoped, will drain the reservoir of unemployed Afghans who might join the insurgents. But though popular programmes such as the successful village-based National Solidarity Programme can consolidate government authority where it already exists, it may not actually cut the violence where it does not.

Though some fight for cash, interviews with captured and active Taleban reveal the insurgents to be less motivated by economics than many think. Power, politics, culture, feuds, ethnicity, tribal vendettas and Afghan history also play a big part. Often the Western coalition is unwittingly deepening longstanding divisions in an Afghan society fragmented by decades of conflict and competition for scarce resources. The National Army should bind the country closer together. But its upper ranks are dominated by former communist officers who in the 1980s fought with the Russians against the fathers of many of the new Taleban commanders.

Worse, there is a serious ethnic and geographic imbalance. "There are almost no recruits from the south," admitted General Ali Ahmed, the commander of the training centre and himself a veteran of the war in the 1980s, during which he fought in the auxiliary army created and armed by Moscow. Adding to the image of the national troops as an "army of occupation" in the restive south and east are their new weapons: American-supplied M16s.

Then there are the police who, every one agrees, are key. But they are rarely paid and are often violent and corrupt.

The political track is blocked because the Taleban want to negotiate while they think they are winning and because concessions that might win them over are politically impossible given the Western governments' loud commitment to gender equality, human rights and religious moderation. In sum, there appears little reason to hope for any kind of negotiated breakthrough in the near future.

"[It will take] 10 to 15 years, including at least two years of significant combat up front," said Kilcullen, the senior Pentagon adviser.

The "tipping point is in three to five years," according to a Kabul-based British staff officer. The average successful counter-insurgency campaign takes 14 years, he pointed out, adding ruefully that "the unsuccessful ones are over quicker".

But the problem is that time is not on the side of the coalition. The war in Afghanistan has been unpopular in continental Europe for a long time. Since 10 soldiers died in an ambush last year, French troops travel in heavily armoured vehicles, making friendly relations with locals difficult. German troops cannot move at night.

In the UK, once solid support is slipping fast. Much of the debate has focused on whether its troops are properly equipped to defend themselves, particularly whether they have enough helicopters and if Viking armoured vehicles are effective. The complaints about equipment are genuine but mask a deeper anxiety.

In the US, time is short. "We have two or three years ... If there is no serious progress then, it's over," one US senate staff adviser said last week.

Those running the war are thus caught in a vicious circle. The more Western domestic populations waver, the stronger the Taleban are. Village elders side with those who are going to be around longest and, having seen the Russians leave in haste, they prefer the devil they know will always be around to the devil they think is going to leave. But the stronger the Taleban are, the more unsure Western publics are. In a bid to assuage the public and find an exit, politicians are now frantically "relooking objectives" in Afghanistan, as one London official put it. Having been told that the troops are there to build a better future for tens of millions of people and to liberate Afghan women as well as stamp out the runaway narcotics industry and catch Osama bin Laden, the sudden shift in rhetoric grates.

No one seems very sure what "victory" actually looks like any longer. Winning, an ISAF officer says, "means a viable Afghan governance capacity at provincial or district level" which is hardly what the dead soldiers' families thought that they were fighting for.

- OBSERVER, AP