Tipping Points and the Taliban

By BJ

According to the Telegraph, the Afghan insurgency is on the "brink of defeat".

Missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have "decapitated" the Taliban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a "tipping point", the commander of British forces has said.

The new "precise, surgical" tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.

I'll assume these are the same "precise, surgical" air strikes and drone attacks that made NATO and the US a bigger killer of Afghan civilians than the insurgents for most of last year. Not the sort of thing I'd be bragging about, myself.

Now, Cernig already pointed out that the last month, and the last 12 months, haven't exactly been the greatest as far as US casualties are concerned. For an insurgency on the "brink of defeat", they seem to be doing a pretty good job of killing coalition troops. Maybe it's just a part of their desperate last throes?

As it happens, May of 2007 had roughly the same number of deaths from hostile fire as this May in Afghanistan, 21 to 20. I would call this May far more troubling, though. Not because of how many troops were killed, but where they were killed.

In 2007, 13 of the 21 deaths were in Helmand Province, with seven of those in a single helicopter crash. The other deaths were scattered across five other provinces.

In 2008, only 4 soldiers died in Helmand, and the other sixteen killed are scattered across a dozen other provinces. The insurgents are casting a far wider net than they use to, something reported back at the end of April.

The insurgency in Afghanistan has not been "contained," Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell testified before a Senate subcommittee in February. "It's been sustained in the south, it's grown a bit in the east, and what we've seen are elements of it spread to the west and the north."

A recent study by Sami Kovanen, an analyst with the security firm Vigilant Strategic Services of Afghanistan, echoed this assessment. He reported 465 insurgent attacks in areas outside the restive southern regions during the first three months of 2008, a 35 percent increase compared with the same period last year. In the central region around Kabul there have been 80 insurgent attacks from January through March of this year, a 70 percent jump compared to the first three months of last year.

The numbers are part of a nationwide trend of rising violence. In the southern and southeastern provinces, including the insurgent hotbeds of Kandahar and Helmand, guerrilla attacks spiked by 40 percent, according to Mr. Kovanen's research.

Why do you think General McNeill wants 400,000 troops for Afghanistan? He wouldn't need anywhere near that number were the insurgents contained to a few provinces along the Pakistani border. It is because they have dispersed to cause trouble throughout practically the entire country. (As an aside: When did the US commanders become the level-headed realists and the Brits don the rose-coloured goggles? I could have sworn it used to be the other way around.)

It is possible that, as the British brigadier said, the Quetta Shura leadership in Pakistan has been marginalized. But while chopping off the head may kill a snake, it is somewhat less effective when dealing with a hydra, which is what modern insurgencies most resemble. Defeating it will prove much harder.