What Does the Taliban Attack on Kabul Portend? (I)

The “spectacular” Taliban attack on numerous venues in Kabul and in three provinces seen in conjunction with the suspension of talks between the Americans and the Taliban in Qatar and the vehement Taliban rejection of talks with the Afghan government has reinforced the apprehensions of the Afghan people that peace and stability in Afghanistan remains a distant dream and exacerbates fears that the completion of the foreign troop withdrawal will not only bring economic hardship but chaotic security and political conditions. These apprehensions and fears are justified but, in my view, they should not have been accentuated by the Taliban attack.

When one examines the details of the Taliban attack what emerges is that the Taliban occupied buildings in the most closely guarded part of Kabul for more than 18 hours but did little material damage. On the government side the loss of life was limited to 8 members of the Afghan Security Forces and some 4 civilians. 36 Taliban, on the other hand lost their lives. The Taliban spokesman could term these admittedly well-coordinated attacks as a “remarkable achievement” but the government and NATO could even more validly claim that the response of the Afghan forces showed that they had acquired the professionalism to handle such attacks and defeat them with minimum loss of life. By and large this assertion could be accepted even though it is clear that the Afghan forces needed to rely on NATO helicopters and their weaponry to finally dislodge the insurgents from their vantage points.

Admittedly the infiltration into Kabul showed that the insurgents had inside support and information which enabled them to smuggle in and store caches of weapons in sensitive locations and thereafter to get themselves into these location to use these weapons. Admittedly it showed that the insurgents have a band of people that can be called upon to sacrifice themselves in suicide attacks. Admittedly it showed that they have some prowess in planning and executing complex operations in accordance with a set plan. But these are attributes that have been known to be part of the Taliban arsenal. In fact it could be argued as some NATO and Afghan officials have done that the relatively small number of insurgents employed and the insubstantial damage caused showed that the Taliban had lost the momentum.

There are some who would also point to the plea posted on a Taliban website appealing for financial assistance as evidence of the fact that the Taliban have really been hurt by the NATO offensives in the South and need fresh sources of money to garner fresh recruits. Perhaps this is too optimistic a reading of the purport of the Taliban plea. After all we are told to believe that much of the financing for Taliban operations comes from taxing Opium cultivations and from contributions that drug traffickers make as “protection money. The truth however is that much of the illicit money made from opium cultivation and drug trafficking lands up in the pockets of corrupt officials- the job of a police chief in a drug transiting province is said to be available only if a bribe of $60,000 is paid and even a district police chief has to pay $25000 for his job and then be prepared to provide monthly benefit to his bosses. In the areas that they control the Taliban levy a tax equal to 10% of the crop but this does not yield the sort of revenue that western sources suggest.

Where is the big opium money? On a recent visit to Kabul one was shown house after house, garish but clearly expensive, almost all owned by beneficiaries of the opium trade and the revenues it generated for politicians and officials and equally importantly for the warlords who had carved out their fiefdoms along the drug trafficking routes. A recent story in the “Economist” magazine about the state of affairs in Tajikistan was revealing. It said that “The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that some 30% of Afghan opiates—including 90 tonnes of heroin a year—pass through Central Asia on their way to Russia, most of them through Tajikistan” and that “researchers believe the industry is equivalent to 30-50% of Tajikistan’s GDP.” Clearly the principal beneficiaries of the opium trade are not the Taliban.

Separately it has been reported that the US Treasury designated Gen. Gholamreza Baghbani, who runs the Revolutionary Guards' Quds force office in Zahedan near the Afghan border, as a narcotics "kingpin" for facilitating Afghan drug runners. Iran is a major consumer of opium itself with some 4 million users and is said to be the conduit for 55% of the Afghan opium crop. The Afghans perhaps share the American belief that the money earned for facilitating the drug trade is also used to finance arms shipments into Afghanistan.

Whatever the Taliban earn from drug trafficking may be insubstantial but opium is a problem for Afghanistan in another sense. At the basic level it provides income for the poor farmer who has not other comparably profitable crop. This is why the UNODC survey shows that the area under opium has grown this year. 15 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces remained poppy free this year but none of the 5 that lost this status in 2011 has regained that status. Little success has attended NATO and American efforts to curb the cultivation of opium. In Helmand and Kandahar, where the “surge” of American troops has chased the Taliban out of many key areas there has been little or no resultant reduction in poppy cultivation this year. The UNODC survey shows that over 63,000 hectares in Helamand and almost 22000 hectares in Kandahar have been cultivated this year reflecting only a marginal change over 2010. Elsewhere there have been substantial increases in poppy cultivated areas in provinces like Nangarhar.

On the other hand it is now evident that opium and heroin addiction has grown in Afghanistan with a million or more users most of them addicts. It can be anticipated that as economic activity slows down following the foreign troop withdrawal, the need for poppy as a cash crop will increase, and with it the number of addicts in Afghanistan and all its neighbouring countries.

This should be the source of genuine apprehension for the Afghan people since, along with indiscriminately spent foreign aid, drug trafficking has been the principal driver of corruption and of the poor governance that more than any other factor has contributed to the present instability in Afghanistan.

A second point of concern should be the planned reduction in the size of the Afghan national Security Forces (ANSF) from the level of 352,000, which will be reached before the end of this year, to 230,000. This will mean a reduction in the cost of maintaining the force from about $6-7 billion a year to about 4.1 billion, which, the Americans say, should be met by a $500 million contribution from Afghanistan, $2.3 billion from America and another $1.3 billion from NATO and other countries. At the recent NATO meeting in Brussels despite the presence of both Secretary Clinton and Secretary Panetta, the only firm pledge came from the UK whose representative committed to providing S110 million from 2015 onwards. Brave words have been spoken about the fact that firm pledges will come before the May 21st Conference in Chicago but so uncertain is the prospect that the NATO Secretary General has already appealed to Russia and China to contribute.

President Karzai himself is so uncertain about the prospect that he has called for the Americans to reduce to writing whatever amount they will provide for the Security forces arguing that even if the amount is lower than the amount the Americans are currently talking about he wanted a written commitment. This, the Americans have rejected with Secretary Panetta explaining that the administration could not make such commitments since appropriating money remained the prerogative of Congress.

This disagreement and the war weariness of the NATO countries suggests that this pledge of $4.1 billion a year for the 2014-2024 period will not be met and an even more drastic reduction in the ANSF will become necessary. But even if this pledge is met it seems difficult to understand how the extra 2-3 billion annually that will be needed to allow for the reduction to take effect gradually until 2017 will be catered for. Some have suggested that the Americans will have no choice but to pick up the slack. The Afghans must worry about whether this will happen.

But even more they must worry about what happens when some 120,000 ANSF personnel knowing little other than how to fire a gun will be accommodated in a shrinking economy. A senior British officer is reported to have said, "Do we really want 120,000 disaffected men – trained to use arms – made unemployed, out on the streets, in an economy highly unlikely to find them other jobs?"

In my next article, I will try to detail the other concerns which, put together, dwarf in every substantive way the apprehensions that may been caused by the Taliban attacks or what is said to be their source.

(To be continued)