Securing Afghanistan: the Americans keep trying.

Kabul

No sooner did President Bush decide that Iraq required a troop surge than dire warnings about Afghanistan popped up in the news. After visiting here in January, defense secretary Robert Gates promptly extended the tours of 3,200 U.S. combat soldiers. He also requested that Congress provide $8.6 billion over the next two years for Afghan security forces, and $2 billion for reconstruction. This followed repeated warnings from American military officers that both the U.S. and NATO-Europe were falling short in force levels and financial aid.

Gates flew to Brussels and urged the European nations to make good on their pledges of money and troops. Germany and France predictably demurred, but President Bush chided them, and in so doing emphasized the redoubled U.S. effort: "When our commanders on the ground say to our respective countries we need additional help, our NATO countries must provide it ... I've ordered an increase in U.S. forces in Afghanistan."

Is this Afghan surge meant to reinforce success or stave off defeat? That depends on how one defines success and failure. Violence and rebellion are endemic in this restive country with a weak government, yielding data as erratic as the weather.

Press accounts routinely stress indicators of a reconstituted Taliban. Suicide-bomb attacks increased from 18 in 2005 to 116 in 2006, while direct-fire attacks grew from three a day in 2005 to more than ten a day in 2006. Opium production is at record levels, while violence has forced the closure of many schools in southeastern Afghanistan.

Yet here in the north, the scene is strikingly different. The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division is deployed east of Kabul to cover the approaches from Pakistan, while U.S. Embedded Training Teams (ETTs) are advising 21 Afghan battalions. The ETTs praise the fighting spirit of these battalions, which respond to Taliban attacks with vigorous counterattacks. I am accompanying Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis ("Mad Dog" to his admiring grunts), the head of the Marine Central Command, and my conversations are primarily with Marine ETTs.

But it is the spirit of Afghan soldiers that is apparent in my visits to the 201st Corps of the Afghan Army and the Kabul Military Training Center. The Afghan battalions are cohesive, with 90 percent present for duty, a remarkably high figure. They are not without problems, of course. Over 70 percent of the soldiers are illiterate, and the officers scarcely know how to use a computer. The army rushes into fights, doesn't plan, lacks a non-commissioned officer corps, bungles logistics, and fails to coordinate among units. But, given the army's pluck and determination, a long-term advisory effort can overcome these defects (and would face little opposition from the Afghan people--poll after poll shows that they like and appreciate American soldiers).

Both Iraq and Afghanistan face insurgencies, but the differences are stark. In Afghanistan, uniformed soldiers and unarmed police browse the open-air bazaars; in Iraq, soldiers on leave and police wear civilian clothes and hide their identities. In Afghanistan, the Taliban train and mass across the border in Pakistani sanctuaries; in Iraq, Sunni insurgents and Shiite death squads live among local sympathizers. It's true that, in the Kandahar-Helmand area some 250 miles south of Kabul, the Taliban pose as "protectors" (for a fee) of poppy-growing farmers. But for the most part they can't count on popular support to conceal their presence.

Their tactics tend to be conventional. They move in bands that number between six and sixty, and mass more men for attacks. "The Taliban scatter when Afghan soldiers move in," Lt. Col. Robert Manion, a U.S. adviser, says. "Near the border, they prefer to fight from the hills, not get trapped in a village." That's because they would be picked out and seized there, thanks to their distinctive accents, the willingness of village elders to betray them, and the disinclination of Afghan soldiers to read them their Miranda rights. The result is a military seesaw. The Taliban mass in Pakistan and strike along the border, but the deeper into Afghanistan they advance the more vulnerable they are to counterattack.

Most of the 20,000 American soldiers in combat units, plus 6,000 support and training troops, are in the north, where numerous mountain passes from Pakistan offer a short route to Kabul. In late 2001, the Taliban fled east after being routed. About 70 miles south of the fabled Khyber Pass, U.S. forces temporarily trapped them at Tora Bora. But the Central Command under Gen. Tommy Franks failed to block the passes, and bin Laden escaped with the core of his fighters. In the months thereafter, U.S. troops scoured the Afghan side of the border, and as months turned into years the effort morphed into a sustained defense against persistent Taliban probes.

In the south, NATO-Europe units--primarily British, Canadian, Dutch, and Romanian--are stationed around Kandahar. The Taliban spent 2006 focused on infiltrating that area. Kandahar was their tribal home ground; poppy farming in the region provided money; and European troops were less aggressive than the Americans.

Some combat was intense, including a major battle at Panjwayi. The Canadians have lost 44 of 2,500 soldiers, roughly comparable to fatalities in U.S. Marine battalions in Iraq, and a poll found that a majority of Canadians want their troops withdrawn. This reaction is emblematic of an underlying problem: To avoid casualties, many European countries have imposed unreasonable rules of engagement on their soldiers, forcing them to cede territory and initiative to the Taliban and go on defense. The overall pattern in Afghanistan is deterioration of military conditions in the south, where European troops predominate, and improvement in the U.S.- controlled north.

PRUDENCE AND OPPORTUNITY

Why, then, the sudden infusion of American troops and money? There are reasons of both prudence and opportunity. Since summer, U.S. and NATO commanders have been seeking an increase in forces of about 15 percent. While Secretary Gates has taken steps to ensure that the U.S. fulfills this request, it is likely that NATO-Europe will neither add sufficient forces nor permit its commanders to respond vigorously to the Taliban's expected spring offensive. The U.S. may have to compensate for this fecklessness--particularly that of Germany, Spain, and Italy--by redeploying troops to the south. Gates's decision to increase American forces was thus prudent military planning.

He was also seizing a political opportunity, neatly summed up by British general David Richards, who until recently commanded the NATO force. "This is a good war," Richards said. "This is a winnable war." American politicians opposed to Iraq want to show that they are not soft on our enemies. The Taliban is a clear enemy; casualties in Afghanistan have been comparatively light; and the dollar cost of operations here is a fraction of what it is in Iraq. Knowing all this, Gates expects that politicians' self-interest will bring them to back the "good" war.

Where this leads, though, is another question. In 2002, the Taliban retreated to a sanctuary across a porous border, and for the next five years the U.S. and NATO hooked and jabbed to keep them bottled up while an Afghan army was trained. Today there are but 36,000 Afghan soldiers in a country of 30 million, with a thousand-mile border along which the zealous enemy can attack. The Afghan army is pushing to train 70,000 troops by the end of 2008. I ask Maj. Gen. Mohammad Mangal, the commander of the 201st Afghan Corps, when U.S. forces will no longer be needed. He spells out the conditions: "We need good equipment and 70,000 soldiers. And we need honesty by Pakistan to stop the infiltration. It must not allow training bases outside our borders."

The U.S. will provide the equipment, and the soldiers are being trained. The problem is that Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf lacks the internal political support to deprive al-Qaeda and the Taliban of their sanctuary. As long as this sanctuary cannot be eliminated, there are only two strategies for countering its threat.

The first is containment: wearing down the enemy year after year by counterpunching when it attacks at the end of each winter. The hope is that the Taliban, ever more discouraged and exhausted, will eventually disintegrate, despite the large number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan that provide a steady stream of foot soldiers. Building up a capable Afghan army will allow NATO and the U.S. to withdraw ground forces while continuing to provide air support. Any time the Taliban advance over Afghanistan's open terrain in large numbers, they will be vulnerable to air attack.

For five years, NATO has pursued this containment strategy under the assumption that the Taliban's ideology is repugnant to most Afghans. This approach acknowledged that the Taliban could make limited political inroads in the southeast among Pashto tribal villages and in poppy-growing regions, but assumed that the Taliban's intolerance and tyranny would limit its popularity.

But NATO now appears concerned that the Taliban are gaining too much support. Hence containment will be supplemented with, or even replaced by, a second strategy: nation building (also known as counterinsurgency). The main military component of this strategy is to deploy NATO training teams--primarily American--with the local police in about 100 districts. (Advisers will also be embedded in 100 army battalions.) The police will root out Taliban proselytizers recruiting among the unemployed who are disillusioned by the lack of progress since the West swooped in five years ago. The expansion of the U.S. military mission will provide more security for the reconstruction teams that are struggling to modernize the country and introduce alternatives to its heroin-based economy. In theory, economic development will bring with it Western concepts of polity, compromise, equality, and similar ideals. The hope is that this will prevent the Taliban from putting down roots and creeping toward Kabul.

EMBEDDING DEEP

The most significant item in the Gates Plan for Afghanistan is thus not the additional combat forces, but rather the decision to more than double the number of American advisers and to secure funds for police training. Afghanistan currently has about 20,000 fully trained police and 30,000 more who are not qualified to use weapons. They are paid meager wages and scattered haphazardly through 120-odd districts. Yet a recent survey found that 90 percent were at their posts, despite scant supervision and weak linkage to the government in Kabul. They stay alive by accommodation with a local or intermittent Taliban presence, or by abandoning their posts when the Taliban advance.

The embedment plan is more "mission leap" than "mission creep," and will involve great difficulties. The U.S. command does not put advisers anywhere without guaranteeing timely reinforcement. In the northeast, it is common for American special forces and advisers to share combat outposts with Afghan soldiers and, sometimes, police. This provides sufficient numbers for defense. In addition, American reaction forces mounted in helicopters are on call. Providing reinforcement to advisory teams in the southeast will require additional reaction forces, by arrangement either with NATO or with Afghan army units that lack the mobility for quick response.

Our forces have not done well training the Iraqi police--a project that has only recently become a semi-military mission--and techniques and tactics to create nationwide constabularies on the model of the Spanish gendarmerie have yet to be developed. Making command arrangements between the Afghan army and the Afghan police--which, under the plan, are to cooperate--will also be hard, given that they dislike and distrust each other.

Only a few years ago the Bush administration vigorously rejected the idea of involving the Pentagon in nation building, but that is just what getting in the local-police business will require. Afghanistan, with a 20 percent literacy rate among men and 7 percent among women, faces staggering obstacles to its development. The opium trade accounts for at least a quarter of GDP. Working at the local-police level will inevitably force American advisers to deal with payoffs to smugglers and poppy farmers, relations among tribes, judicial proceedings, and other fraught situations. And the size of the overall task is staggering. Last year, for instance, Canada's Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team gave out medication, tools, school supplies, food, blankets, toys, carpets, and radios to 2,000 people living in remote villages, in addition to supplying 1,000 police with uniforms, winter coats, boots, belts, gloves, and flashlights. That barely scratched the surface.

While the decision to train police sends a strong signal of confidence in the Afghan fighting man, its execution will be an enormous challenge and a long-term burden. From the outset, America and NATO-Europe need to be very clear about how many soldiers and advisers, how much money, and how many years they are willing to devote to the new strategy. They also need to decide exactly how progress will be measured. Success will probably involve U.S. forces at the local level for a decade or more.

The "good war" is about to get a lot bigger. Whether it gets better, we will see.

UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY Fifty Years Since Roth v. United States The National Tragedy of the Supreme Court's Misjudgment on Obscenity by Daniel Mark Cohen 

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people."--Samuel Adams

From the commencement of sporting events, to the conclusion of presidential addresses, in times of celebration and in times of peril, Americans, religious and secular alike, by reflex and by ritual, have grown accustomed to reciting the most concise of petitionary prayers: "God bless America." However, considering the wanton patronage of pornography by so many millions of Americans, and the underlying, abasing purpose of that enterprise, considering the vehement even aggressive opposition of Americans to regulation of pornography's distribution via the Internet, and most of all, considering the consequent gratuitous and indelible sexual corruption of the souls of the country's children, practices enshrined in law and unassailably sanctioned by the United States Supreme Court, the question that remains to be answered is how Americans can believe they are, in the collective sense, entitled to God's blessing? In other words, petitioning God to bless America rests upon the underlying, unspoken premise that America comprehensively deserves such blessing. But why should God bless America when, as a nation, she insists, and often aggressively so, on the free, unregulated distribution of the most vile sexual images so that they daily reach the otherwise innocent eyes and chaste minds of countless millions of children, thus arresting their emotional development, prematurely agitating their souls, and in so doing, diminishing their posterity, and so, the greater posterity of the nation?

God bless America?

Under the circumstances, why should God bless America?

Mr. West, a former Marine, was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. He is the author of No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujahand The Village: A Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam.

BING WEST 

Kabul