The Nato officers were used to frankness, but this felt a little blunt, even for them. “You know the guy who’s been shooting rockets at your camp?” asked General Zalavar, the police chief, looking evenly at his American and Polish advisers. “I know who he is and I’ll kill him for you.”
By the following day, he had.
Showing off the dead Taliban leader’s pistol, he recounted the night ambush that killed Haji Khial and his three men: “We got an intelligence report from the Poles and acted on it.”
The insurgent leader was said to be responsible for several recent attacks in this violent province south-west of Kabul where, along with much of the country, security has recently been handed over to Afghan government forces. “He is a strong leader – perhaps a little too strong,” said Lieutenant Colonel James Jones of the US army about the Afghan police commander. “Without him, this whole place would come crashing down.”
Jones advises the province’s police forces who, along with a brigade of the Afghan National Army, are responsible for security duties.
Ghazni is a key province in Afghanistan’s south-east, through which runs Highway 1, the road linking the country’s capital to the south. It illustrates some of the trends that will affect the country after the withdrawal of international forces next year: Afghan security forces that seem increasingly sure of themselves and are able to conduct effective operations mostly on their own, a weak civilian government, and a resilient insurgency that may never be suppressed yet probably cannot present a mortal threat to the Afghan state.
Ghazni is deeply affected by the Taliban: in its most recent report, for the last quarter of 2012, the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office recorded 969 insurgent attacks, making it the third most dangerous province in the country. However, American officers say overall violence has fallen somewhat since the security handover. There is also some evidence that with Afghan, rather than foreign, forces in the lead, the Taliban find it more difficult to recruit from the local population.
The Afghan security forces are not ineffective: since the security handover in February, they’ve actually brought more areas under government control, installing checkpoints on either side of the motorway. Their technical shortcomings are to an extent compensated by an aggressive posture. They spend most of their time on operations, to the point where their training suffers. They are also adept at finding ingenious solutions to their problems. One commander, unable to put together a supplies convoy, got a civilian to transport some spare parts to their destination. Another bought fuel for his vehicles with his own money.
But they also continue to suffer from significant problems with the supply of fuel and ammunition, the maintenance of vehicles, the provision of spare parts, air support, medical evacuation and a weak counter-explosives capability.
They recently received new vehicles and some heavy weapons, but less than what’s needed.
“We need more equipment,” said Major Ahmed Mirza, deputy commander of the 6th battalion, 3rd brigade, 203rd corps of the Afghan National Army (ANA), when asked what his main difficulties were.
Logistics is perhaps the biggest challenge the Afghans face.
“A battalion asks for something, and it might get ordered by the army corps [it belongs to], but as they all have their own distribution plans, it might never arrive – it might end up at another battalion,” says Major Jeremiah Hirras, an American logistics adviser for the Afghan battalion.
“Complaining doesn’t help. The system is broken at the national level. Everything has to go through Kabul. Warehouses hold on to stuff for fear of running out of it themselves.”
Obtaining supplies is considered such a big problem that the British military recently said they wanted to stay in Afghanistan and provide extensive logistical support to the army until 2020.
Cooperation between various arms and services of the Afghan security agencies is another challenge. It is hobbled, among other things, by ethnic tension: the officer corps of the army in particular is dominated by northerners, Tajiks mainly, who have been locked in a struggle with the Taliban since the 1990s. Many of these officers don’t even speak the local language, Pashto, reinforcing a perception among many locals that the Afghan state, traditionally weak in the provinces, is an alien institution here. Elite national police units sometimes have no Pashtuns at all, while the Afghan Local Police, a locally recruited paramilitary agency, has not recruited any Hazaras, a Shiite minority despised by the majority Pashtuns. The Taliban itself is an almost exclusively Pashtun movement.
But many of the problems are simply organisational. Sometimes even their American mentors don’t know what the Afghans are up to. At one meeting between Major Mirza and his US advisers, the Americans, whose unit has been here for nearly half a year, ask him to tell them about Afghan operations in advance so they can inform their own chain of command.
“The other night, our special forces got confused because they didn’t know if your guys were there or not,” one American officer tells Mirza. Problems like this can lead to deadly mistakes: at the end of July, five Afghan policemen were accidentally killed by US aircraft who thought they were enemy fighters.
And while the killing of Haji Khial is a success story, only two days previously, the Afghan police chief pleaded in vain with his western allies for helicopters to extricate some of his men under Taliban attack in a mountainous area. His mentors said their helicopter couldn’t fly up there because of the difficult conditions, and anyway the time when Nato would provide constant air support had ended. “It’s your fight now. When you do an operation, you have to go to your own guys in Kabul and ask for helicopter support,” they told him.
Corruption, a key driver of the insurgency, remains a problem: there are reports of policemen shaking down lorry drivers and “asking” villagers for food. Corruption damages the war effort in more direct ways, too: provisions go missing all the time within the army.
“It’s 10 per cent here, 10 per cent there,” says Hirras.
Security remains tenuous. Insurgents continue to regularly attack the convoys on the motorway and the checkpoints of the Afghan forces. Rocket fire is an almost everyday occurrence, even at the biggest Nato camps. They move with ease through the province, using infiltration routes from Pakistan. Most of the province is outside government control. Reflecting their increased role, the Afghan army and police have seen their casualties shoot up by 50 per cent compared with last year. Because they are undermanned, they might have to consolidate their forces and leave some outlying districts to Taliban control following Nato’s withdrawal next year.
They are also practically the only functioning arm of the state. Outside the provincial capital there is little government to speak of. In the district centres, there may be a governor, but no judge or other administrative staff.
“They are afraid to come down from the city. It’s a pretty big blow,” admitted Lieutenant Joseph Dicolandrea, a US army officer responsible for civilian affairs. In some areas of the province, the vacuum is filled by a Taliban shadow government. This allows them to shut down schools, for example, as they did in the district of Ab Band.
Yet it’s difficult to see them taking over. They are tenacious and will probably never be suppressed entirely, short of a political deal. But they seem unable to conduct major operations and are probably not a real threat to the basic security infrastructure of the province. They mostly stay away from the army and their attacks on police checkpoints are often little more than harassment. Despite their regular attacks on the convoys, the motorway remains open. As long as the US continues to pay for the upkeep of the ANA (about US$6 billion a year after 2014), it is unlikely the Taliban can defeat it.
There is also little sign that the Taliban enjoy much popular support, a key factor in any insurgency. Quite the opposite: since last year, several local leaders have risen up against the insurgents in Ghazni, fed up with their violence and their closing of the schools. Many of these pro-government militias have since been incorporated into the local police, an important element in the government’s plan for the province. To be sure, some of these “local leaders” are in fact little more than petty warlords and opium traders who are simply looking for control and want no interference from the Taliban.
Balint Szlanko is a freelance journalist with an interest in conflict, Afghanistan and the Middle East.
