A series of setbacks for the coalition in Afghanistan

Less to cheer

Afghanistan - Less to cheer | Asia | The Economist

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STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL, the famously self-controlled commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, could be forgiven if he let off an expletive when he heard that soldiers under his command had killed 27 civilians on Sunday February 21st. A missile strike on a three-vehicle convoy in an isolated area on the edge of the southern province of Uruzgan wrecked General McChrystal's vigorous efforts to persuade Afghans that foreigners in their midst are striving to implement a counterinsurgency doctrine of “protecting the people”.

That is not how it looked to Saeed Zahir Zia, a local police chief, who said that he spent all day picking through the devastation to recover body parts and corpses, many of which were so badly mutilated that they were unrecognisable. The victims included women and children and were from the Hazara ethnic group, which is famously anti-Taliban.

The government called the attack “unjustifiable”. General McChrystal promptly issued a video statement apologising to “great people of Afghanistan” and announcing an investigation into how the travellers had been mistaken for insurgents.

But Afghans are not in forgiving mood, having heard many assurances from foreign generals that NATO was doing everything possible to prevent such tragedies. Recent measures have included tightening rules of engagement that prevent troops from using airstrikes unless they are in imminent danger or have at least two sources of trusted information about a target.

Such rules anger some rank-and-file NATO soldiers who object to being put at more risk for the sake of keeping Afghan villagers happy. On Tuesday the total American death toll for the eight-year war in Afghanistan reached 1,000. That number will rise rapidly as the United States ramps up a military campaign conducted under restrictive rules of engagement.

The killing of so many civilians also brought to an end a couple of weeks of apparent good news for the coalition. New optimism among many commentators had been fuelled by a clever communications campaign surrounding the battle for the Helmand town of Marja. General McChrystal and his civilian sidekick Mark Sedwill, a former British ambassador, have been talking up the exercise as an entirely new type of war, as much focussed on rapidly building a legal government in the area as killing insurgents. 

During the early “clearing” stage of the fighting journalists, few of whom have been granted access to the frontlines, have supplied a steady diet of stories about the overwhelming force of American, Afghan and British forces beating back the Taliban. Yet leading NATO generals privately expect fighting to continue for another two to three weeks. Whether it has been a success will not be known for around six months, according to one of them.

The arrest of a number of Afghan Taliban commanders in Pakistan has also been taken as a positive sign. However some pessimists fear that Afghanistan's famously difficult neighbour may only have acted to remove from circulation those insurgent leaders who were keen to pursue peace talks with Kabul without including the Pakistanis.

NATO officials like to talk about a “government in a box” just waiting to be put together in Marjah after the Taliban are cleared out. But on Monday yet more problems with the government in Kabul emerged. The Ministry of Justice at last published its long-awaited election-reform law, passed by decree by Mr Karzai, who has the right to overrule parliament when it is in recess.

It shocked diplomats and election experts because it in effect scraps the foreign, UN-appointed members of the Electoral Complaints Commission. That watchdog enraged the Afghan president during last year's elections by ordering the annulment of nearly 1m votes that had been fraudulently cast for him.

As a result, as Afghanistan prepares for parliamentary elections in September the only aspect of the electoral machinery that worked reasonably well last summer will come under complete control of Mr Karzai, who will now appoint all its members. The prospect of another ballot fiasco that weakens the government and emboldens the Taliban has grown accordingly.

Diplomats have also revealed that Mr Karzai has refused to give way to intense American pressure to pass an anti-corruption decree. That would have given real powers to the country's toothless anti-corruption body and satisfied a promise that the Americans thought they had extracted from Mr Karzai at last month's international conference on Afghanistan in London.

The developments are stark reminders for NATO war-planners of the extreme difficulty of making counterinsurgency doctrine work when the host government is self-interested and reluctant to tackle the graft that fuels the insurgency. General McChrystal could be forgiven another expletive or two.

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Less to cheer

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