In today's
Guardian of London,
Timothy Garton Ash offers an homage to British cultural power: "People who have never heard of our leaders dote on our footballers, and the SAS is outshone by Quidditch."
Too bad that folks from Jalalabad to Kandahar to Mazar-e-Sharif won't be meeting David Beckham and Harry Potter in 2009 and, instead, will have to settle for the SAS, other British troops, and their American counterparts.
The UK papers are filled with stories today that "
hard-pressed British soldiers in southern Afghanistan will be reinforced by thousands of American troops early next year". Ten thousand US soldiers will go to Helmand, outnumbering the 8,000-strong British contingent that is currently there, and ten thousand will go to "southern and southwestern Afghanistan". And "if US commanders had their way, another 10,000 or so American troops would be deployed to eastern Afghanistan to concentrate on fighting Taliban and al-Qaida supporters crossing the border from the tribal areas of north-west Pakistan".
This isn't a leak of information from the US military; it's a flood. Or, to be precise, it's the start of a protracted public-relations campaign to sell the idea of almost doubling the current US level of 32,000 troops in Afghanistan. Yesterday's statement, by the US commander of the NATO coalition force, General David McKiernan, was designed
to present a "stalemate" with the Taliban insurgents in which the US reinforcement would offer a "defining moment" for the march to victory.
What is amazing is how threadbare both the PR and military strategies are. In effect, it's the equivalent of shaking a fist and throwing the punch, say, six months later. While the US is currently implementing plans for the deployment of 3500 additional troops in southern Afghanistan, the next stage --- troops south of Kabul (which is a delayed counter to reports that the Taliban are endangering routes in/out of the capital) and in northern Helmand province --- won't occur until "early 2009" and the bulk of reinforcements won't occur until later in the year.
Moreover, given the nature of weather and ground conditions in Afghanistan, it's highly unlikely that a US-led offensive against insurgents could be launched until the spring. Until then, it's more a question of trying to check insurgent raids and presenting their spread through villages and, indeed, closer to major cities like Kabul.
The US military may be trying to disguise this rather two-dimensional strategy by calling it "uplift" by it's not even clear that they'll be joined by a significant increase in British forces, let alone those of other NATO and coalition members. British sources have already "
made clear [they do] not plan to transfer the 3,700 troops coming out of Iraq next summer straight into Helmand". While "military planners in London are drawing up contingency plans to deploy perhaps a battle group of 1,500 soldiers" in Helmand, this is "only for a limited period around the Afghan presidential election in September next year". Instead, the British contribution will come through --- are you reading, Mr Garton Ash? --- SAS forces complementing their American counterparts in "targeted operations", i.e., assassinations, of Taliban leaders.
That's great stuff for Boys' Own stories of military derring-do, but it doesn't obscure the reality that the US is proposing to take over the Afghan campaign, with even the British stepping aside except in parts of Helmand. And it shouldn't obscure the reality that "soft power", while it may be fine for tributes in
The Guardian, has little place in the conflict to come.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 16:31