: On August 1, there was an important security development in Afghanistan. By inducting an additional 8,000 troops in six southern provinces of Afghanistan, the NATO extended its security operations in what is considered to be the most challenging mission in its 57-year-old history. Achieving stability in war-ravaged Afghanistan has been a major effort ever since the fall of the Taliban in November 2001. Although the US-led coalition forces (about 19,000 troops) and NATO’s 10,000 strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have succeeded in achieving some stability in the north and west, the security environment is deteriorating in the south and east.
Over 1,000 civilians have been killed in the insurgency this year — nearly half this in May, when Kabul witnessed the worst rioting in its recent history. Most of the violence occurred in the southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan, the region from where the Taliban rose to take control of nearly 80 per cent of the country. That area continues to see the worst of the insurgency. On July 20 the British commander of the ISAF, Lt Gen David Richards, talking at the Royal United Services Institute, London, described the situation in Afghanistan as “close to anarchy”.
A major problem NATO faces in Afghanistan is of “interoperability’’ and the fast turnover of troops. Currently, 36 European countries are contributing troops. Despite NATO’s reputation for standardisation of equipment and training, which enables diverse forces to work together, the ISAF has “interoperability’’ problems which affect its efficiency. Since the turnover of troops is frequent, operational voids are a problem; the Afghan initiative to disarm illegal groups by end-2007 is behind schedule.
Most armed groups take shelter under the politically vague criterion of “illegal’’. Many of them perform local security functions. The problem here is that the Afghan Government and the ISAF have neither the capacity to disarm all these groups nor the ability to fill a security void that such large-scale disarmament would create. A possible answer could be to absorb benign militias into the provincial police, and to deal pro-actively with those indulging in narcotics smuggling and other criminal offences.
V.P. Malik
