In recent months, a resurgent Taliban -led insurgency in Afghanistan has expanded the geographic scope, organizational scale, and tactical repertoire of its attacks. The group has mounted larger, more organized, and resolute assaults, featuring suicide bombings, that have expanded from Taliban strongholds in the rural south and east to Kandahar, Qalat, Kabul, and Herat.
Further, the Taliban has consolidated control or influence over large areas in contested provinces despite weathering counteroffensives by Coalition forces and sustaining sizeable losses. Overall, indicators suggest that the Taliban-led insurgency is an entrenched, capable, and determined force?likely with support from sympathetic Pakistani intelligence and militant elements and al-Qaeda ?and will continue to seek to conduct attacks against Afghan forces and government and the Coalition. Robust Coalition counteroffensives will likely impede and degrade Taliban operational capabilities in the near-term, but long-term counterinsurgency success will require a focus on establishing government security for Afghanis against the Taliban and drug lords in contested areas. Winning local support will deprive the Taliban and drug lords of societal support, redouble reconstruction efforts, and reduce corruption among provincial authorities.
WAR Report contributions have highlighted and discussed the trend of the Taliban consolidating control in contested areas and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. Punctuating this trend are reports that the Taliban seized control of both the Garmser and Naway-i-Barakzayi districts in Helmand province. Coalition forces will mount an offensive to wrest back control of the areas. As discussed in these pages, by winning or coercing the support or acquiescence of the local populace, the Taliban has seized a critical strategic and operational asset. Active or tacit societal support offers Taliban guerrillas a base of operations with societal camouflage, intelligence networks, weapons and materiel smuggling conduits, recruits, and potentially civilian shields, all of which may limit the tactics and weaponry Coalition forces are able to utilize. Further, insurgent attacks have featured an emerging trend of suicide bombings , suggesting that the tactics and/or operatives from al-Qaeda and the Iraq battlefield are proliferating into or influencing the Taliban. Coalition forces claimed to have killed four and captured three al-Qaeda operatives in the Khost province, providing further evidence of an al-Qaeda presence amid the Taliban-led insurgency. These developments suggest that rooting out a Taliban presence will prove a lengthy challenge for Coalition troops.
Both the Taliban presence in southern Afghanistan and successes in clashes with Afghan forces underscores the fact that Afghan forces remain ill-trained, ill-equipped, and sparse in many areas. The US commander in charge of training Afghan government security forces said that it will take another three years before the forces are at full strength. The lack of competent security forces has contributed to the Karzai government’s inability to extend its writ throughout contested provinces, particularly in the south. The sparse presence of Afghan forces in contested provinces, coupled with corruption plaguing provincial officials and the enticing or coercive power of drug lords, has created an anarchic environment, which the Taliban will continue to exploit.
Despite the Taliban’s demonstrated tenacity and resiliency, it is unlikely that they can continue to absorb heavy losses at the hands of Coalition offensives and maintain competent fighting cadres without continued support or infusions of fighters. To avoid large assault groupings and head-on confrontations with Coalition forces, it is likely that Taliban tactics will increasingly utilize suicide bombings and small raiding parties to exploit the base of operations and advantageous terrain of urban areas and mountainous hinterland that they control to draw Coalition forces into fights on Taliban ‘turf.’ Thus, major clashes can be expected, as NATO forces take over security and counterinsurgency duties in southern Afghanistan.
While Coalition forces will attempt to fill the security vacuum in contested areas in the near-term and mount offensives to degrade the Taliban, long-term counterinsurgency success and stability will require major improvement in three key areas:
1) Afghan forces able to provide security,
2) winning the support of the people, and
3) reducing corruption.
The critical prerequisite of counterinsurgency and stability initiatives to gain traction is an improved climate of security. This will require the stepped up development and deployment of Afghan government security forces to establish enduring security, with the ultimate intent of cleaving destabilizing actors from their base of societal support. In addition to insulating Afghans from intimidation of the Taliban and drug lords, increased security will also provide the relative sanctuary for government reconstruction initiatives to take root. For example, Some aid agencies are pulling out of Helmand province due to a lack security. Finally, countercorruption initiatives must be redoubled to remove local officials and leaders who abet anti-government militant elements. Until counterinsurgency actions aimed at depriving guerrillas of a permissive area of operations amongst the Afghan populace gain traction, a decisive defeat of the Taliban will prove elusive.
