Washington’s Afghan policy, like Alice’s Wonderland, gets curiouser and curiouser. Ever since President Barack Obama took over, Washington has been reiterating that 2014 would be the year US forces would wind up their Afghan War mission. Most post-2014 scenarios assumed an Afghanistan minus the presence of Western military forces. The only speculative part was whether the Taliban would once again overrun that country and re-establish an Islamic emirate.
Washington of course continues to assure Kabul that it would not abandon Afghanistan, but what that would meant in practical terms was never made explicit. Recent comments by Afghan President Hamid Karzai have, however, added a new dimension to the theorising. This month Karzai admitted that his government was engaged in talks with the United States regarding the establishment of a few permanent military bases across the country.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had made a similar suggestion in the beginning of January but nobody had taken him seriously. He had told the Washington media that “a couple of air bases in Afghanistan would allow the Afghan security forces an edge against the Taliban in perpetuity. It would be a signal to Pakistan that the Taliban are never going to come back in Afghanistan. They could change their behaviour.”
While Washington does appear unclear about how to proceed beyond 2014, these signals would suggest that the final call on Afghanistan is yet to be made. President Barack Obama comes up for re-election 2012 and much will depend on who would be the next President. If Mr Obama survives and the US economy picks up, the chances of extended US involvement could be higher. But if the US economy continues to dawdle at low levels, then it will be extremely hard for the US Congress to continue passing large sums of money for the Afghan War beyond 2014. Moreover, for the first time majority American public opinion has swung against the Afghan War. Even Republicans could hesitate to linger in Afghanistan.
Despite all that there is reason to believe that US strategists are still not decided on their post-2014 options. While there is intense pressure on Washington to wind up its Afghan mission, there is also a growing realisation that a complete walkout might not be such a good idea. A unified Pashtun area in Afghanistan and Pakistan, dominated by the Taliban and its anti-American jihadi allies, would, as everybody admits, inevitably become a vortex of global instability. The question therefore is how to prevent the domination of Afghanistan by the Taliban, preferably without US ground forces and without a multi-billion dollar bill.
One solution could be to establish permanent US military bases in strategic locations throughout the country. These bases could be protected by small contingents of US forces along with ANA elements. Kabul and Bagram air base could constitute the centre of this strategic spread. Other bases could be at Mazar-e-Sharif, Helmand (Camp Dwyer), Shindand and perhaps Kandahar. Overwhelming air power could be used to disrupt and destroy significant concentration of Taliban forces and interfere with their offensives. This would obviate any possibility of them overrunning all of the country.
There are some indications that Washington has been thinking along these lines. This could be one reason why President Obama sanctioned $1.3 billion in additional war funds for the construction and expansion of military facilities in Afghanistan during the 2011 financial year. It was reported that at least $100 million was earmarked for the expansion of three air bases at Shindand, Mazar-e-Sharif and Camp Dwyer.
Permanent air bases would be far from a perfect solution. For one, most Afghans would continue to resent foreign occupation; and keeping lines of communications open would be difficult and costly.
Even the most optimistic would have to concede that the Taliban would in all probabilities assume de facto control in large parts of Pashtun dominated east and south Afghanistan. Despite the US surge and the help from local elements, even now the Taliban cannot entirely be suppressed in these areas. Time and again they are engaging Nato forces and hitting targets deep in supposedly protected areas.
Most reports filtering through from Afghanistan suggest that while US and Nato forces might be notching more tactical victories than in the past, the strategic situation remains largely unchanged. A former senior US intelligence officer, John McCreary, released a report last month where he showed that although Taliban casualties doubled in November 2010 as compared to October of the same year, Taliban-Nato clashes actually increased. Relying on open source material, Mr McCreary estimated that the Taliban strength had increased from about 10-15,000 in 2008 to about 25,000 at present.
Given that a much reduced US force post-2014 would find it impossible to enforce its writ in those areas, it would be extremely sanguine to assume that the ANA and local militias could prevail. Thus, even the most optimistic scenario would suggest that pro-US forces would have to fall back to the edges of the Pashtun areas. This would signal the de facto partition of Afghanistan.
Indranil Banerjie is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi