Spate of incidents poses risk to Afghan mission
Handoff hinges on winning trust
Barely a month passes lately without some new embarrassment casting doubt on the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
The latest eruption came Wednesday when the Los Angeles Times published photos of smiling U.S. soldiers posing with mangled corpses of dead insurgents in 2010. The Times said it got the photos from an unnamed soldier who was concerned about “a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops.”
Perhaps he’s right. This the fourth incendiary incident this year.
In January, an online video of four Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters deeply offended religious sensibilities and set off an uproar.
In February, the disclosure that U.S. personnel had dumped Qurans into a “burn pit” at Bagram Air Field upped the outrage, sparking a week of violent clashes across the country.
Then last month, in a tragedy of a different sort, an Army sergeant went on a rampage, killing innocent 17 Afghan villagers, including children, in their homes.
Now the new photos once again have U.S. officials scrambling to undo the damage.
Each incident can be seen as a tragic inevitability of war — one act of insanity, three acts of foolishness by young men in combat. But collectively, they pose significant risk to the complex U.S. attempt to withdraw from Afghanistan without recreating the circumstances that led to invasion in the first place.
Step back from events of the moment, and the danger becomes clearer.
There is virtually no chance that the war will be cleanly won or lost on the battlefield before the U.S. completes its planned withdrawal at the end of 2014.
Events over the weekend exposed the Taliban’s military limitations. Synchronized Taliban strikes on seven heavily fortified sites on Sunday drew worried headlines because they showed a new level of sophistication. The insurgents crossed hundreds of miles undetected and scored a propaganda victory.
But on a practical level, the impact was small. The insurgents killed three civilians and eight
Prepared to return fire: A member of the Afghan security force at his station Sunday in Kabul. policeman; 36 of the attackers died. Meanwhile, the U.S. surge has cost them control of traditional strongholds, at least for now, and their military disadvantage should increase. By year’s end, the growing Afghan army will outnumber Taliban fighters by 352,000 to roughly 25,000, even as U.S. forces draw down.
At the same time, however, the U.S. can’t eradicate the Taliban. It is a large, indigenous group, and it isn’t going anywhere. Taliban fighters are trying to wait NATO out, exploiting rising anger at Western troops increasingly seen as unwanted guests who have overstayed their welcome.
That culture clash is the Taliban’s greatest asset, and it is why the recent incidents raise so much concern.
For the U.S. plan to succeed, the growing-but-still-green Afghan army must be made competent enough to maintain security after NATO withdraws. Yet cultural tensions are so intense that since 2006, more than 70 American soldiers have been killed by their Afghan counterparts.
The war’s end is coming. President Obama is committed to the 2014 deadline, and so essentially is presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. But what Afghanistan will look like after the troops leave depends largely on who can win more trust: the Taliban, widely despised for the brutality of its pre-2001 rule, or the increasingly disliked NATO troops.
Embarrassments like the one exposed Wednesday make success much harder to achieve, and with each new revelation it seems clearer that some troops in the field aren’t getting the message.