Where now for the West's strategy in Afghanistan?

Every now and then we come upon a fork in the road in strategic affairs, and the current situation in Afghanistan, where Australia maintains a sizeable military presence in Uruzgan province, certainly qualifies.

The United States is currently engaged in a major internal policy review and is drawing up a new National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, by all reports the latest Afghan NIE will paint a "grim picture".

We stand on the precipice of a major expansion of the war in Afghanistan, with a likely increase in troop numbers in the Afghan theatre of operations, the US commander has requested three extra combat brigades, which would include an increase in the operational tempo and the level of firepower deployed.

Most ominously we have seen talk of a possible expansion of the war into Pakistan, much like the expansion of the war in Vietnam into Laos and Cambodia. It has recently been revealed that President Bush had provided authorisation for Special Forces raids into Pakistan. Barack Obama has talked tough on Pakistan.

Decisions taken now will have far reaching consequences. The time for popular intervention in the policy making process is now more urgent than ever. The war is deeply unpopular among Washington's NATO allies, now is opposed by a majority in Australia and attracts significant disquiet in America.

The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, has stated that the US is not winning in Afghanistan. The projected commander of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, has stated that things will get worse before they get better and the commander of UK forces in the region has gone so far as to state that the war is actually un-winnable.

It is assessed by some that the Taliban could have taken Kandahar during the recent prison break, is encroaching upon the outskirts of Kabul and Islamist factions may even credibly threaten Peshawar in Pakistan. Much like the city of Hue, initially captured by the National Liberation Front during the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the Taliban would not be able to hold these cities if they were to take them. We have reached something akin to a strategic stalemate.

Given this there appear to be three broad options. An expansion of the war both in Afghanistan and into Pakistan. A revival of the tribal strategy employed in Iraq to dampen the Sunni based insurgency (which saw former insurgents put on the US pay roll, a programme now under threat) as a counter-weight to the Taliban or the opening up of talks with the Taliban in order to reach an accommodation.

One of the purposes of the US-Australia Alliance for Canberra's policy making elite is that it supposedly gives Australia an important role in drawing up Western strategy on mutual areas of concern. The current Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, however revealed earlier this year that Australia, during the Howard era, was prevented from playing a role in drawing up Western grand strategy in Afghanistan.

We must look askance at any strategy for Afghanistan that is premised upon expanding the war both in Afghanistan and into Pakistan. There are two main reasons why this would be foolhardy. First, an expansion of the war would fuel the insurgency. Second, this solution is based on a false reading of the underlying causes of the insurgency in Afghanistan.

There should be little doubt that the intensity of military operations is partly fueling the insurgency. It is almost daily now that we hear of scores of civilian deaths as a result of both air strikes and ground operations in Afghanistan. Although the recent deaths of up to 90 people following a US air strike, most of them children, have put this fact into the international spot light it remains the case that this has been an on-going issue for quite some time. Hitherto Afghan lives have been considered a cheap commodity.

Quite apart from its obvious moral consequences, which should be the paramount concern, an expansion of the war will increase the civilian death toll, providing the Taliban with much needed support among the domestic population. The most astute ground commanders in Iraq following the invasion quickly came to the view that the "centre of gravity" of post-invasion operations was the attitude of the broader public. A large scale increase in the level of firepower deployed in the Afghan theatre would only further see this centre of gravity fall to the Taliban.

The Taliban initially gained its political legitimacy because the population was sick and tired of the war and corruption that accompanied the Afghan warlords after the resistance to the Soviet occupation turned their guns on each other. Much of the populace now no longer welcomes a situation whereby outside military forces engage in virtually unconstrained military operations while the old corrupt warlords are back in business.

It is the dominant assessment that the Taliban insurgency has reached its current level of intensity because of the sanctuary that the border regions of Pakistan provide and because of the support that the Pakistan military, in particular the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), has provided insurgent groups. Earlier this year the US reportedly provided intelligence assessments of this support to then President Musharraf, especially the support given to Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hikmetyar.

They are both Pashtun based Mujaheddin commanders of long standing and were the favoured recipients of support from the CIA and the ISI during and after the Soviet occupation. Haqqani joined the Taliban in 1995, but Hikmetyar has been in conflict with the Taliban in the past. The insurgency might well be Taliban based but it involves more than just the Taliban.

The toe hold that Jihadi groups have developed in the border region is a legacy of previous US and Saudi support for Pakistan policy, including busing in Jihadi extremists from the Arab world during the 1980s. Moreover, this type of support for conservative Islamists has been a consistent pattern in US foreign policy since the rise of Nasserism and secular Arab nationalism.

It should also be stressed that Pakistani support for the Taliban had its origins with the administration of Benazir Bhutto, with Zardari being a particularly enthusiastic supporter, not the ISI who preferred to support Hikmetyar. It was only after the Taliban demonstrated its superiority on the battlefield, contrasted with Hikmetyar's failure to take Kabul, that the ISI also began to support them.

This demonstrates that for the ISI support for the Taliban does not really reflect a Jihadi agenda by fundamentalist officers. Pakistan has enduring interests in Afghanistan and rivalries with neighbouring states, such as Iran and the former Soviet republics to the north. So long as there is a jockeying for influence by regional powers Pakistan will try and play its trump card - namely the Pashtuni provinces in the south. As an intelligence agency the ISI has an institutional interest in such matters.

In fact, the secular middle and upper classes in Pakistan greatly fear for their standing leading the Pakistani Army to intensify its operations against Islamist groups in the border regions following the Marriott Hotel bombing. However, this offensive is deeply unpopular among the people of the region.

Although Pakistan has supported Pashtun based insurgents, including the Taliban, it would be wrong to attribute the current insurgency in Afghanistan primarily to Pakistani machinations. To appreciate this we need only re-consider how the Taliban rose to power in the first place.

After the Soviet withdrawal and the fall of the Soviet instituted regime of Najibullah the international community washed its hands of Afghanistan. A vicious civil war broke out, which included large scale rocket attacks upon Kabul, when most of the media was transfixed on the relatively minor siege of white and well attired Europeans in Sarajevo.

Nobody really cared much about Afghanistan after the Soviets left, except when it impacted on a new "great game" over the energy resources of Central Asia, much to the suffering of the Afghans.

The Taliban has benefited from this neglect twice over now. Following 9-11 and the over-throw of the Taliban the US essentially left Afghanistan, moving on to bigger and better things. One could see this in the manner in which the Taliban was dispatched.

The US adopted a strategy of bombing from the air, supporting Northern Alliance infantry attacks and using Special Forces to mop up al-Qaida central. The strategy demonstrated that the US was happy to revive the Northern Alliance warlords, institute a powerless figurehead at the top and then basically walk away.

No real meaningful attempt has been made to reconstruct Afghanistan and to improve the lives of ordinary people, despite all the pomp and circumstance. For much of the population the situation has reverted back to conditions prevailing prior to the emergence of the Taliban, a structural condition greatly aiding Taliban activity.

For the West the underlying problem is due to the political weakness of the central administration, which exists because of the neglect for nation building shown after the fall of the Taliban and the support given to Northern Alliance warlords. It is this weakness, plus an almost reflexive reliance on the armed forces to solve global problems, that leads to an over reliance on military firepower which in turn fans the insurgency.

Expanding the war into Pakistan threatens to turn the Afghan war into a broader insurgency based on the Pashtun population both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Moreover, the Pakistani military has stated it will oppose any US incursions into the border regions. Indeed, what appeared to be a recent probe of Pakistani resolve led to a brief fire-fight between these two nuclear armed states.

A current strategy of bombing into Pakistan from drones and aircraft, with the occasional foray by ground troops across the border, is particularly dangerous. This will probably lead to mission creep and inflame Pakistani opinion, thereby undermining the Government and possibly pushing Pakistan over the edge towards collapse.

Raids across the border will eventually lead to a need to take and hold ground, effectively annexing parts of Pakistan by an already over-stretched US Army. Even this would not necessarily be successful, assuming the Pakistani Army could be overcome. Israel sought the same objective in its "security zone" in South Lebanon, without success.

In other words, the best way forwards is to either repeat a tribal based strategy, which it appears cannot be replicated in Afghanistan, or engage with the Taliban in talks. It could be possible to split the Taliban between moderates and hardliners by offering moderates a seat in government. In fact, de-classified Defense Intelligence Agency documents (PDF 565KB) reveal this was a post 9-11 strategy contemplated by Washington (see especially page 10 of this document on moderation and cutting the Taliban/al-Qaida nexus). Indeed, it has been revealed that talks are currently under way with the Taliban. The success of these talks will depend upon the Taliban's price and our willingness to pay it.

The Taliban will likely demand the withdrawal of Western forces. At a minimum this may prove necessary in the Pashtun provinces. In turn, we would demand that the Taliban cut off al-Qaida, possibly leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Quite simply, it's a case of "deal or no deal".

It is interesting to reflect that one of the reasons why al-Qaida has suffered defeats in Iraq is precisely because of the brutality it has unleashed upon the population. To defeat al-Qaida is to drain the swamp in which it operates and cutting it off from the Taliban. Military force only makes that swamp bigger and makes the link with the Taliban tighter.

If Australia is truly providing Washington with advice, as Labor claims can be done, then hopefully the Australian military is counselling for a political solution, a re-configured international presence and some serious nation building.

The war is opposed by the population of Afghanistan and is now pretty much opposed by the population of the West. It is interesting to reflect that, in the war being waged between states and Islamic groups, the actual preferences of the globe's population matters not a jot for all sides to the conflict.