Britain’s eyes this week are on southern Afghanistan. US Marines have doubled Coalition troop numbers in Helmand and are moving to clear Taleban base areas as part of Operation Khanjar. A major British offensive is also underway: Operation Panchai Palang, an effort to extend Coalition control along the Helmand River valley, one month ahead of the Afghan presidential elections currently scheduled for 20 August. Though the Taleban seem so far to be mostly melting away before the Marines, they are making a determined stand against the British. They are digging in among the tactically important canal and river crossings of the central valley, where UK troops are fighting hard to dislodge them from the Nad Ali district northwest of Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.
During their own Afghan war, the Soviets called this area the Green Belt. They suffered heavy casualties among its complex, densely vegetated mosaic of farms, fields, villages, orchards and irrigation channels — an extremely demanding environment akin, in some places, to the Normandy Bocage of 1944. For its part, Britain has now lost 184 soldiers in Afghanistan, higher than the 179 killed in Iraq, and a number that will unfortunately rise as operations continue. Taleban deaths are much higher.
For Nato, Afghanistan will remain the military main effort in South Asia. It is an important fight which, despite its grinding difficulty, may be slowly starting to improve due to the combination of American reinforcements and the energetic leadership of the new commander, General Stanley A. McChrystal, a Special Forces officer who genuinely ‘gets’ counter-insurgency. The shift to a strategy of protecting the population, reducing civilian casualties, increasing the size and capacity of Afghan police and military forces, and the planned ‘civilian surge’ of governance and development assistance are all positive, provided the effort can be resourced and sustained. Indeed, some analysts are quietly starting to express a hope that the sharply negative trends of past years — increased violence, higher civilian casualties, a spreading and intensifying insurgency, an intractable narcotics problem and corrupt and ineffective local government — may begin to bottom out at some point in the next fighting season (conflict in Afghanistan, like its agriculture, having a very definite seasonal character). War is a complex human activity, insurgency is its most complex variant. So it is much too early to predict how the campaign will develop. But we can certainly expect continued major fighting over the summer and autumn and into the ninth winter of a very long war.
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Oh no, more waffle about counter-insurgency.
Close all international borders, defoliate this fertile valleys and poppy fields, withdraw the troops and have hundreds of drones flying overhead, killing everything that moves. Otherwise just let them get on with their casual savagery.
I'm sure that id Lord Curzon had aircraft he wouldn't have been indulging in some liberal fantasy about helping these people help themselves.
All of which suggests that job one for the West is disabling Pakistan's nuclear arsenal now, rather than wasting time, lives and money in the Afghanistan sideshow.
Austin Barry;
There’s one word that makes your quite simplistic solution rather difficult; India.
But.
Maybe a rather difficult proactive tight-rope act must be adopted or as a 'last line' contingency would be a 'Port of Oran' (July 1940) type situation to eliminate a (hypothetical at this stage) newly instated Islamic fundamentalist Pakistan's nuclear capability- *if* this nightmare scenario arises.
And that would (i presume) be a bad corner to find oneself in.
As a happy coincidence, i actually live 3 minutes drive from one of the highest concentration of Pakistani diaspora worldwide (it's called Bradford), so events in Pakistan are quite important where we live.
I have yet to understand the link between our inability to bailout pakistan's bankrupt economy, or our failure to build hospitals, roads and schools in Afghanistan with bombs going off in London (that is what a "security risk" is, isn't it?). So in crude terms, if we don't give them money, they'll kill us, is that it?
Poverty is everywhere. Over 80% of Africans, Indians, Latin Americans and South East Asians live below the poverty line – yet we don't concentrate half as much on them as we do on AfPaks. What is so special about their poor?
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