Strategic Panorama 2009 - 2010 - IEEE

The AF PAK scenario
that aiming to physically eliminate the Taliban and other enemies of the
Kabul government has only served to spread the rebellion across a tribal
territory in which vengeance is a basic duty and where the threshold of
pain its inhabitants are prepared to tolerate has been very high for decades.
To quote General McChrystal’s report «the insurgents cannot defeat
us militarily but we can defeat ourselves».
The high number of civilian victims has further contributed to weakening
support for ISAF (although ISAF reckons that 80% of civilian casualties
are caused by rebel action and only the rest by its own forces and those
of Enduring Freedom) and accordingly to damaging the legitimacy of the
coalition. According to the present analysis, ISAF’s methods are politically
more dangerous and harmful than the insurgency itself. The use of firepower
should therefore be limited, especially in situations in which civilian
lives would be endangered or in populated areas, even though this would
pose a greater risk to western troops in the theatre of operations and
mean more casualties, making this option more costly in terms of western
public opinion.
The fact is that the insurgency, in its various forms, has not ceased
to exploit the population’s discontentment with ISAF and Karzai’s government
and has not had to offer anything in the way of development or
social improvements of any kind. It has been sufficient for these insurgent
groups to show their power and armed capability accompanied by the
exercise of terror, intimidation and fast and simple justice based more on
Pashtu tradition than on the Koran even in the unsophisticated version of
the Taliban and similar groups such as Hizb-e-islami.
Any reflection on counterinsurgency efforts brings us to the subject
of the national and local police and to issues relating to the incapacity
and corruption of Karzai’s government, as they are at the root of much
of the dissatisfaction and rejection that it is being attempted to correct. It
would therefore be appropriate to consider corruption almost as a major
rather than a minor cause of the problems the coalition needs to tackle.
This gives an idea of the complexity of the task it faces, which is none
other than to support an unreliable and barely legitimate government even
though what is needed is one that is responsive and responsible.
The relationship between the military chiefs and political and diplomatic
agents of the coalition will thus be one of the keys to progress in
this direction. Civilian-military coordination will need to be more perfect
than it has been up until now because the aim is not only to defend the
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