US sees potential for wider anti-Taliban uprising

ROBERT BURNS

AP National Secu­rity Writer

AB BAND, Afghanistan — Fed up with the Tal­iban clos­ing their schools and com­mit­ting other acts of oppres­sion, men in a vil­lage about 100 miles south of Kabul took up arms late last spring and chased out the insur­gents with no help from the Afghan gov­ern­ment or U.S. military.

Small-scale revolts in recent months like the one in Kun­saf, mostly along a stretch of desert south of the Afghan cap­i­tal, indi­cate bits of a grass-roots, do-it-yourself anti-insurgency that the U.S. hopes Afghan author­i­ties can trans­form into a wider move­ment. Per­haps it can under­cut the Tal­iban in areas they still dom­i­nate after 11 years of war with the United States and NATO allies.

The effort in Ghazni Province looks like a long shot. The vil­lagers don’t read­ily embrace any out­side author­ity, be it the Tal­iban, the U.S. or the Afghan government.

Amer­i­can offi­cials nonethe­less are qui­etly nur­tur­ing the trend, hop­ing it might become a game changer, or at least a new road­block for the Tal­iban. At the same time, they are adamant that if any­one can con­vince the vil­lagers to side with the Afghan gov­ern­ment, it’s the Afghans — not the Americans.

“If we went out there and talked to them we would taint these groups and it would back­fire,” said Army Brig. Gen. John Charl­ton, the senior Amer­i­can adviser to the Afghan mil­i­tary in provinces along the south­ern approaches to Kabul.

Charl­ton, who wit­nessed sim­i­lar stir­rings in Iraq while serv­ing as a com­man­der there in 2007, said that in some cases the Tal­iban are fight­ing back fiercely, killing lead­ers of the armed upris­ings. In Kun­saf, for exam­ple, the Tal­iban killed sev­eral vil­lage fight­ers in skir­mishes as recently as last month, but the Tal­iban suf­fered heavy losses and have thus far failed to retake the village.

The Amer­i­can gen­eral vis­ited two mil­i­tary bases in the area last week — one in Ghazni’s Ab Band dis­trict that was vacated by a U.S. Army brigade as part of September’s U.S. troop draw­down, and the other in nearby Gelan dis­trict, where Afghan para­mil­i­tary police forces are mov­ing in to fill the gap left by the Amer­i­cans. Charl­ton found far fewer para­mil­i­tary police there than he says are needed; he is nudg­ing the Afghans to get hun­dreds more into the area to put more pres­sure on the Tal­iban in sup­port of the vil­lage uprisings.

Charl­ton said the U.S. and its coali­tion part­ners are tak­ing a behind-the-scenes role — encour­ag­ing the Afghans to court the vil­lagers while find­ing a role for U.S. Spe­cial Forces sol­diers to forge the vil­lagers into a fight­ing force as mem­bers of the Kabul-sanctioned Afghan Local Police.

Some have com­pared the appar­ently spon­ta­neous upris­ings to the Iraq war’s Anbar Awak­en­ing of 2007, in which Sunni Arab tribes in the west­ern province of Anbar turned on al-Qaida in their midst, joined forces with the Amer­i­cans and dealt a blow that many credit with turn­ing the tide of that con­flict. The U.S. armed and paid the tribal fight­ers and sought to inte­grate them into Iraqi gov­ern­ment forces.

By coin­ci­dence, the first local­ized move­ment to draw out­side atten­tion in Afghanistan was in Ghazni’s Andar dis­trict, about 100 miles south of Kabul. Thus some U.S. ana­lysts are call­ing this the Andar Awak­en­ing, draw­ing an Iraq war par­al­lel that even the most opti­mistic Amer­i­can com­man­ders say is a stretch.

“That just builds some false expec­ta­tions,” said Army Lt. Col. Kevin Lam­bert, a 1st Infantry Divi­sion bat­tal­ion com­man­der whose area of oper­a­tions includes Ghazni. He nonethe­less is encour­aged that after ini­tially balk­ing, the Afghan gov­ern­ment is now try­ing to lever­age the Andar unrest. It has installed a new dis­trict gov­er­nor who Lam­bert said is sym­pa­thetic to the upris­ings and made changes in the local secu­rity forces. It also has autho­rized a U.S. Spe­cial Forces team to work with the villagers.

“It’s going to take time, it’s not going to be an Anbar (Iraq) sweep,” Lam­bert said. “It is going to be vil­lage by vil­lage, dis­trict by dis­trict, and we may not see the results of this for some years.”

Senior offi­cers at the U.S. mil­i­tary head­quar­ters sound even more cautious.

“So far what we are not see­ing is a coa­lesc­ing of it into a greater move­ment,” said Aus­tralian Maj. Gen. Stephen Day, the plans chief for the inter­na­tional coalition’s joint com­mand. He said “noth­ing as sub­stan­tial” as the Andar upris­ing is hap­pen­ing else­where in the country.

U.S. offi­cials say there are signs of anti-Taliban resis­tance, or at least sen­ti­ment, in a dozen or more vil­lages in Andar, and at var­i­ous loca­tions in the nearby dis­tricts of Qarabagh, Moqur and Ab Band. There have been small-scale upris­ings also in provinces closer to Kabul, includ­ing Lagh­man and Logar.

The ques­tion Day says he’s ask­ing is, “Is there a golden thread here that we can pull on that will unite them all?”

It is with that pos­si­bil­ity in mind — and an aware­ness that U.S. influ­ence here is likely to shrink as its forces con­tinue to with­draw — that the Amer­i­cans are encour­ag­ing the Afghan mil­i­tary to com­plete a plan dubbed Oper­a­tion Sol­i­dar­ity to make what it can of this unex­pected new open­ing in Ghazni province. Charl­ton, the Amer­i­can adviser to the com­man­der of the main Afghan army group in this region, said this should be a major focus for the Afghans over the win­ter, when harsh weather tends to lessen the pace of com­bat operations.

The three-stage plan, designed with U.S. assis­tance and launched by the Afghan 203rd Corps in Sep­tem­ber, begins with an assess­ment of indi­vid­ual vil­lage upris­ings and their poten­tial for suc­cess. Those deemed wor­thy of pur­su­ing are then approached by the Afghan mil­i­tary, in some cases to pro­vide weaponry. Charl­ton described the third stage as a net­work­ing effort “to stitch these groups together into some­thing larger.”

Charl­ton, who was a cen­tral player in fos­ter­ing the Anbar Awak­en­ing in Iraq as a brigade com­man­der in the provin­cial cap­i­tal of Ramadi in 2007, is notably opti­mistic about the nascent Afghan uprisings.

“Over the course of the win­ter, if this thing works out right, these groups will be sup­ported, they will come together a lit­tle bit more and by the spring­time the insur­gency will not have the pop­u­lar sup­port bases that they are used to hav­ing,” he said.

Charl­ton said he’s not dis­cour­aged by the merely incre­men­tal progress thus far.

“To me, the Tal­iban are doing the same thing that al-Qaida was” in Iraq, he said. “They used these really oppres­sive, vio­lent tac­tics that even­tu­ally alien­ate these pop­u­la­tions. And I see that same dynamic here,” even though that may not be enough to ignite a broader uprising.

“It may not change Afghanistan, but if it can help deny some sup­port bases in Ghazni, we’ll take that. That is some­thing we haven’t had.”

Posted by AP News on Oct 18 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.