Warnings have been coming for months, publicly from independent commentators, privately from concerned officials and military commanders: the insurgent and terrorist threat is growing and spreading north to what has been, until now, the relatively stable and calm part of Afghanistan.
But the huge death toll from Tuesday’s suicide attack in the northern town of Baghlan is a devastating blow to President Hamid Karzai’s government and to the Nato-led forces his security relies on.
It marked a departure, Amyas Godfrey, military analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, said: ”The stepping up of tactics in an unexpected area shows a level of insurgency and organised terror we haven’t seen in Afghanistan.”
”The Taliban realised that by fighting in the south they are just not winning in terms of tactics.”
Military commanders, including the British, who have nearly 8 000 troops in the region, have expressed surprise at the way the Taliban has been attacking their fixed positions for so long in gunfights reminiscent of former wars. British, American and Canadian troops have fought back, and won, though often at the cost of lives and the risk of injury, because they have superior training and weaponry.
But these, too, look increasingly like short-term successes as the Taliban and their supporters — al-Qaeda-inspired Uzbeks, Chechens, Arabs or Pakistanis — change their tactics, making roadside bombs or recruiting suicide bombers.
The limited mandates of the Nato-led international security assistance force, Isaf, and of the separate US-dominated force going after al-Qaeda hideouts in the mountains bordering Pakistan, has led to a lack of coherence, which meant they were sabotaged right from the start by ”deficiencies at the strategic level”. This is the view expressed in a trenchant briefing paper recently by the think-tank, Chatham House.
”The initial military success against al-Qaeda and the Taliban could not be consolidated,” it said. ”The existing threat could not be eliminated: al-Qaeda and the Taliban were driven to the southern and eastern border provinces where they reassembled in loose networks of smaller groups.
”A security vacuum emerged in areas in which [US anti-al-Qaeda forces] had operated against enemy forces since the newly established Afghan military and police forces were slow to build up and remained too weak to secure gained territory while Isaf was not equipped to fill this security vacuum.
”Vast swathes of the country are undermanned,” said Godfrey, referring to the ”light footprint” of the Nato-led forces.
It is against this background of increasing fragility that Tuesday’s attack took place. It was, said ÂÂGodfrey, a classic al-Qaeda operation of the kind witnessed so many times in Iraq. It was well-prepared against a target — Afghan MPs — which would ensure it would have a big impact, and further destabilise Karzai’s weak government, as incoherent, in the view of independent observers, as the Nato-led international force.
The attack, they say, could be a wake-up call for Nato. It may more likely encourage a growing body of opinion — including British officials and military commanders — to step up their efforts to try to persuade Taliban fighters to give up their arms and pursue more ÂÂrigorously a policy of reconciliation.
For Nato commanders it is a vicious circle. They say there is no military solution to what Karzai and the West are trying to do in Afghanistan. Yet they also recognise that civil reconstruction and development work cannot advance without the kind of security that only the military can provide. Lack of troops means the military is not providing it.
Western governments are as exasperated with the Karzai administration as they are concerned with the situation in Pakistan. One senior Nato military figure said he was inclined to the ”glass being half full approach”. Even so, he said that any progress in Afghanistan would be slow and incremental. It was the time, he said, for ”strategic patience”. — Â