Emboldened by the news that NATO combat troops will soon leave Afghanistan, the Taliban has established morality squads in some remote Afghan provinces, sending a signal that it wants to reestablish its draconian religious rule over the entire country. Unfortunately for the West, it has the potential to achieve this goal, as LIGNET explains.
The Taliban lacks the money, technology and armaments that the West uses to prop up the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, but it is not without advantages. Fueled by religious extremism, it is feared and respected by ordinary Afghans, most of whom view the corrupt government in Kabul with disdain and see it as the puppet of foreign powers. Once NATO troops leave Afghanistan, the Taliban will face off against a green army of Afghans trained by NATO and its position will inevitably grow stronger as a consequence.
Background
NATO military operations in Afghanistan are winding down and will cease entirely by 2014, according to an Obama administration plan approved at the alliance’s Chicago summit in May. The process of transferring the lead combat responsibility from NATO troops to Afghan security forces has begun and it is hoped will eventually be part of a political solution to end the Afghan conflict that is now over a decade long.
NATO’s drawdown, however, is giving the Taliban an opportunity to reestablish itself as a dominant power in the country. Disrupted but not defeated, it is now taking steps forward in anticipation of NATO’s exit and is joining with other extremist groups that have returned to Afghanistan, including elements from al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Reuters reported last week that the United States had to rush a company of soldiers to the Kamdesh district in the remote and mountainous Nuristan province to defend it against an attack by as many as 1,800 Taliban fighters and other extremists. The aggressive action by the Taliban is seen as part of a larger spring offensive designed to expand its influence in the province, which has grown considerably since NATO troops left the area in 2010.
Remote locations such as Kamdesh along the northeastern border with Pakistan are being used by the Taliban as a beachhead of sorts, which it intends to expand dramatically outward to the rest of the country once NATO leaves Afghanistan.
Emboldened by the news that its greatest enemy will soon disappear from the area, the Taliban has already begun to push forward morality squads of bearded men dressed entirely in black who roam the countryside imposing their ultra-conservative religious code on the population.
According to one recent press account, one of these morality squads gave 70 lashes to a man for failing to grow a beard deemed sufficiently long. Others who fall under the Taliban’s repressive thumb are at similar risk if they listen to Western music, wear colored clothing, smoke tobacco and so forth. Women who do not cover themselves with a burka or nijab are frequently singled out for punishment.
Analysis
Right now, the Taliban’s foothold in Afghanistan is limited to a remote region along the country’s northeastern border with Pakistan. It is telling that the Taliban forces that attacked Kamdesh came from inside Pakistan.
In the near term, the Taliban lacks the power to impose Shariah law beyond the remote areas such as the Kamdesh district in Nuristan. The withdrawal of Western combat forces is in its initial stages, with sizable military capabilities remaining in the country for months to come. It is therefore highly unlikely that there will be a sudden collapse of Hamid Karzai’s regime.
Events in the Kamdesh district are nonetheless an early and troubling indication of the Taliban’s desire to topple the Karzai government and seize power over all of Afghanistan. If it succeeds, the draconian religious codes that were imposed on Afghans in the late 1990s when the Taliban was last in power will quickly be reimposed over much of the country.
The United States acted decisively last week by sending 1,800 troops into Kamdesh to prevent the Taliban from taking over the district. But what happens in 18 months when those forces are no longer available? The Karzai government will have to rely on its own troops, which are much less capable than the NATO troops they will be replacing.
As of today, the Afghan military is not up to the challenge of dealing with Taliban aggression as shown by the complaints of the governor of the Nuristan province, Tamim Nuristani, after the Kamdesh attack, who said he had only a force of 300 or so men and that it was “not enough for the security of the entire district.” Nuristani said he reported the attack to the Afghan defense ministry, “but unfortunately, they didn’t respond to our requests for help on time.”
NATO is now training the Afghan security forces for the day when they will have to operate on their own. But the number trained has been scaled back by about one-third from NATO’s original goal, which was to create an army of 325,000 Afghan soldiers.
This is hardly an ideal development when seen from the perspective that the Afghan police forces are also burdened by unrelenting corruption and deep involvement in Afghanistan’s flourishing drug trade.
The Karzai government, with the West as an ally, has money, technology and armaments on its side, but because it is corrupt and seen as being in the pocket of foreign powers, it is not respected by the Afghan people.
The Taliban is a cruel ruler in Western eyes, but culturally speaking, it is a lot closer to the “hearts and minds” of the people than the government in Kabul.
The Taliban fights for deeply held beliefs, while the Afghan army that NATO is training fights mainly because it is paid to do so. Energized by religious fervor, the Taliban is a fundamentally superior fighting force in terms of its average combat soldier compared to the secular conscript in the Afghan army who is there merely for daily sustenance and led by a government that holds no passionate beliefs beyond self-interest.
There is little doubt that intensive NATO training efforts have created a more capable Afghan military than existed five years ago. But it is still very green and will be doomed to fail if asked to perform well beyond its capabilites. The Afghan army is not likely to see significant improvement by 2014, when its training-wheels will be taken off and the NATO forces have exited.
Conclusion
The reappearance of morality squads in a remote part of Afghanistan underscores the urgent need to better train and equip Afghan forces. But NATO has responded by scaling back the force it originally said it would leave behind by about one-third. This is troubling and will only increase the already difficult challenge the infant Afghan army will soon have to face.
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