The leaks won't stop the Afghan war

Today, The Guardian published a twelve-page exposé of the war in Afghanistan based on the disclosure of 90,000 classified items passed to the paper by the website Wikileaks. The material is sobering. It documents numerous civilian casualties, the use of special forces teams to kill or capture Taliban commanders, and alleged links between the Taliban, the Pakistani intelligence service (the ISI) and Iran. The extent of the disclosure is surprising, and some of the details will be disturbing, especially for those unfamiliar with the campaign. Much of it is also illuminating, providing a rare level of detail.

However, the Guardian’s presumption that this material reveals the Afghan war in a new light cannot be sustained. Since 2001, it has been a matter of public knowledge that coalition forces, especially special forces, have been used on kill-or-capture missions against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The entire rationale of Operation Enduring Freedom was counter-terrorism. Indeed, commanders have repeatedly reaffirmed the importance of these missions. In July 2008, the comments of the then commander of the Helmand task force, Mark Carleton-Smith, were completely explicit. He argued that “precise surgical” strikes against Taliban leadership (including the successful assassination of Mullah Dadullah, a key commander in Helmand), had undermined the insurgency: "I can therefore judge the Taliban insurgency a failure at the moment,” he declared. “We have reached the tipping point." Carleton-Smith did not say it, but it was well known that British and US special forces had been behind these attacks. Even in 2008, it was estimated in public that many of the 7,000 Taliban fighters killed had been the victims of special forces.

In 2009, it was clear that this strategy was continuing. General McChrystal had commanded coalition special operations in and around Baghdad between 2003 and 2008, and, as Mark Urban’s book Task Force Black records, such operations were almost exclusively strike forces going out each night on kill-or-capture missions. With McChrystal’s assumption of command in Afghanistan last June, it would have been naïve to think that the special forces were going to be employed in any other role.

The issue of civilian casualties has also been very well publicised. This has been a problem throughout the campaign and is, indeed, typical during a complex counter-insurgency mission—even with the coalition’s unprecedented ability to target with precision. Civilian casualties have been heavy in places—often in connection with special forces missions—and their necessity has been highly questionable, however regretted they might be afterwards. It is noticeable that recurrent ISAF commanders have emphasised the need to avoid civilian casualties. In 2006, General Sir David Richards had to defend one of his own senior staff officers who publicly stated that in the following year, Nato needed to kill fewer civilians; the same officer was applauded by the Afghans for his honesty. However, it was McChrystal himself who was at the forefront of campaigning about civilian casualties. He repeatedly emphasised that Nato must stop killing civilians and commanded his conventional troops, at least, to prioritise the lives of civilians, even at risk to themselves; the doctrine of “courageous restraint.” Military commanders have not divulged all of the more unfortunate details of civilian deaths, especially the ones where special forces are involved, but they have admitted they happen, and recognised the damage they do to the campaign.

Meanwhile, the revelation that the US believe that the ISI and Tehran may be supporting the Taliban cannot really be said to constitute a leak. It was common knowledge that the Taliban were financially and militarily underwritten by the Pakistan regime, and by the ISI in particular, during their ascent to power in the 1990s. It would be unusual if some links did not continue to this day, especially since what kind of regime is in place at Kabul is a question of domestic politics for Islamabad. Ahmed Rashid emphasised the connections in his book, Descent into Chaos. The Iranian links are more opaque, and complicated by the fact that narcotics trafficking across the Afghan-Iranian border is a major concern to Tehran. Indeed, what might be described as a drug war is taking place along the border between Iranian security forces and Afghan narco-traffickers, including the Taliban.

Considering they are not particularly revealing, the Guardian’s disclosure of these leaks demonstrates an underlying agenda. For the Guardian, the leaks demonstrate the folly and inevitable failure of the Afghan campaign. It is not clear that these inferences need to be drawn. The Afghan campaign is desperately difficult and there is much to criticise about it, especially the special forces operations. Politics has always taken a back seat to force, and it is easier for a Nato commander to kill a Taliban leader than to talk with him. However, none of these leaks necessarily prove the campaign will fail. Civilian casualties are a problem for the west and there is evidence that they aggrieve local Afghans. Yet the Taliban are also inflicting numerous civilian casualties, in many cases quite deliberately. The Taliban hanged a boy of seven in Sangin in June this year because he was putatively collaborating with ISAF. Numerous children, who are paid to make and plant IEDs, report to hospitals with hands and arms blown off by the devices. In many cases, locals are outraged by these quite deliberate deaths; they might usefully be the subject of a similar exposé. Finally, the very fact that the Taliban may be supported by Iran and Pakistan actually gives this mission a strategic rationale which western leaders have been at a loss to articulate.

This mission is not about counter-terrorism. It is about regional stabilisation. The mission will succeed in so far as the coalition builds a regime in Kabul which is broadly acceptable to Afghans as a whole and to the neighbouring states of Iran, Pakistan and India. The one thing the Guardian revelations usefully affirm is that this regime cannot be built just by killing people, be they genuine Taliban or civilians. It is also an unpalatable fact that just because many people have been killed, some unnecessarily, that does not mean that the campaign in the Hindu Kush will fail.