Independent overviews of the state of the Afghanistan conflict are hard to come by. So the reports of the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (a project co-funded by the Norwegian and Swiss foreign ministeries, and the EU) are very useful.
Their latest quarterly report doesn’t exactly support the idea of progress by the coalition of the willing, to say the least.
The IEA counter-offensive is increasingly mature, complex & effective. Country wide attacks have grown by 59% (p.10) while sophisticated recruitment techniques have helped activate networks of fighters in the North where European NATO contributors have failed to provide an adequate deterrent (p.11). Some provinces here are experiencing double the country average growth rate (p.12) and their districts are in danger of slipping be-
yond any control. Clumsy attempts to stem the developments, through the formation of local militia’s and intelligence-poor operations, have served to polarize communities with the IEA capitalizing on the local grievances that result. In the South, despite more robust efforts from the US NATO contingents, counterinsurgency operations in Kandahar and Marjah have similarly failed to degrade the IEA’s ability to fight, reduce the number of civilian combat fatalities (p.13) or deliver boxed Government.By contrast the IEA are showing signs of transition to their own ‘hold & build’ phase. Already operating advanced administrations in the rural South & East, local ‘shadow governance’ structures in the North are being buttressed by cadres of loyalists to reinforce the ideological and political cohesion of the movement. Field reports suggest that these efforts are drawing in more conservative recruits from the Uzbek, Turkmen and Tajik communities affording highly valuable opportunities for expansion. Internal factionalism is being addressed with junior opposition partners (domestic and foreign) being slowly subordinated to their command structure, sometimes violently. At the strategic level, leaders are outlining tentative foreign policy, reassuring neighbors of cooperation on narcotics, the environment and commerce, while alluding to ‘the upcoming system of the country’. The sum of their activity presents the image of a movement anticipating authority and one which has already obtained a complex momentum that NATO will be incapable of reversing.
(Via Newshoggers.com).
I really wish they had elaborated on the Taliban’s ‘sophisticated recruitment techniques’. It could refer to intimidation using violence, or to something else. The references in the report to the Taliban using ‘soft power’ suggest it is the latter, reinforcing my concerns expressed the other day that the Taliban has much more extensive support from Afghans than we are given to believe by our government and the MSM.
One would expect this of course. The longer a military occupation continues, the more entrenched will be the hostility of a large chunk of the population to the occupiers, and the more willing they will be to support the forces that are trying to kick the occupiers out of their country.