Insurgent Attacks Reach New High in Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, there’s more evidence that the fighting is intensifying.

According to NATO, the number of “enemy-initiated attacks” has increased by eleven percent compared to a similar period last year. This comes as the US and its allies continue to pull troops out of Afghanistan.

Anchor Aaron Schacter speaks to George Friedman: founder and CEO of Stratfor Global Intelligence.

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Aaron Schacter: In Afghanistan, there’s more evidence that the fighting is intensifying. According to NATO, the number of enemy-initiated attacks has increased by eleven percent compared to a similar period last year. This comes as the US and its allies continue to pull troops out of Afghanistan. We’re joined by George Friedman, founder and CEO of Stratfor Global Intelligence. George, what exactly do these news figures mean, if you would unpack them a bit for us?

George Friedman: Well, it’s very hard to tell what the eleven percent means because you don’t know if you’re referring to a hand grenade thrown inaccurately at a base or an assault by dozens of troops, but the sense is that Taliban is increasing the tempo of it operation and there are good reasons for that. Remember, the American strategy and the Western strategy is to withdraw all troops, but retain our political successes. In other words, we created the government. We want that government to continue; we just don’t want our troops there. Taliban’s goal ultimately is to return to the status quo ante before the intervention in 2001/2002, and therefore their primary goal is not to allow us to withdraw our forces and simply leave the Karzai government in place. So the issue here really is that there are two armies. One is withdrawing, it is getting weaker. The other has not yet achieved its goals and it is going to press this advantage more and more as we drawdown.

Schacter: It sounds like a cycle that can’t be stopped.

Friedman: Well, I mean this is a war that each side wants to win. The definition of victory is the nature of the regime. Somehow everybody has gotten focused on the question of the withdrawal of American forces and the assumption that the other side, who gets a vote, is going to allow us to withdraw our forces in keep our political gains. Now, that may be possible, but it’s not easy.

Schacter: I guess the question then is “Have US troops stabilized the region at all?”

Friedman: Well, they certainly have not created a situation where the Taliban is incapable of fighting, it has not created a Afghan force that is capable necessarily of resisting them, and it reached the limit of the amount of forces it’s prepared to put in there.

Schacter: Well, it sounds like the answer is no.

Friedman: Well, the other way to put it is we had two strategies. One, the disruption of al-Qaeda so it could no longer carry out an attack on the United States. So that part has been enormously successful. Have we managed to create a regime that can survive on its own? No. So partly the mission is successful and partly the mission is failing unless we want to commit more forces for a longer period of time, and there seems to be a consensus on all sides that we don’t want to do that.

Schacter: Now, the official word is authorities from the President [??] will say, “We’re building up the Afghan security forces. They may not be ready this moment, but very soon they will be able to take on the Taliban. They will be able to protect their own country.” Do you believe that?

Friedman: I don’t, and I think a lot of people who say that don’t. And the problem is this: it’s the same thing that happened in Vietnam. We would try to build up the army of Vietnam, ARVN, but the North Vietnamese created an intelligence program to seed ARVN with North Vietnamese intelligence operatives. From the top to the bottom, they knew what ARVN was doing and the Taliban has done the same thing. We have recruited an army. We don’t really know who the members of that army are and we get anecdotal evidence of some soldiers or policemen shooting Western troops. We can assume that that military that we’ve created is unsecure, both in an intelligence sense and reliability because Taliban has worked very hard to make it that way. And that’s the problem with transferring authority to a force you’ve created in the middle of a civil war; the other side gets a chance to penetrate it.

Schacter: So thoughts on what we can expect next in Afghanistan?

Friedman: Well, I think what’s going to happen here is the withdrawal will continue. We will have a face-saving coalition government formed if the Taliban wishes to give it to us, but in due course the Taliban, under the oversight of the Pakistanis, are going to be given responsibility. If we can extract from that the agreement that they will vigorously oppose the creation of organizations such as al-Qaeda, that will be about as much of a victory as we can get. In the meantime, everybody is going to pretend that this is going to be a successful operation, we will achieve our political ends without having to fight war any longer.

Schacter: Considering that, where is America’s image in the world, its prestige in the world, the day after? The year after?

Friedman: Well, we lost the Vietnam War rather badly. By the 1980s it was a forgotten event because in the end the Vietnam War was not of fundamental strategic importance to the United States and it was not the United States that collapsed with the Soviet Union. In the same sense, Afghanistan was critically important in 2001. It’s far less important today. There will be loud declarations of the decline of the United States and the collapse of American power, and in due course, in a couple of years, that will be forgotten. I mean how many of us really worry about the fact that in Korea we reached a stalemate and couldn’t defeat the Chinese?

Schacter: George Friedman, founder and CEO of Stratfor Global Intelligence. George, thank you so much.

Friedman: Thank you for having me.

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