James Carafano, the senior defense policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, said that the Taliban is taking advantage of the administration’s failures to implement a strategy to strike and take out the enemy.
“The enemy can read,” Carafano said. “They read as Obama took months to decide what to do and months more to deploy the troops. So its not like they did not know that this was coming … they were plotting and planning how to respond and since Pakistan has been such a welcoming place they have done it unmolested.”
Michael O’Hanlon, who specializes in national security and defense policy at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, said a main cause for the increase in casualties has to do with NATO’s more aggressive tactics.
“The main thing is we’re moving into a lot more places where the Taliban, the enemy, is rooting itself,” O’Hanlon said. “High casualties are almost inevitable whether we are achieving our goals or not.”
He said “that is a sobering and sad reality but the casualty count itself doesn’t give any indication as to the success or failure of the mission. If it’s like this next year then we can say we’ve made no progress.”
More than 120,000 foreign troops are in Afghanistan from 42 countries, a majority of which are from the United States. By August, troops will increase to 150,000, when the Obama administration is expected to deploy 30,000 more troops, in an effort to break the Taliban’s momentum, particularly in the southern provinces where they have a stronghold.
There are a number of reasons for increased fighting over the past year, experts said.
The increase in troop casualties is on the heels of Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for Sept. 18, when violence is expected to escalate.
Also, the drawdown deadline next July has emboldened the Taliban to increase fighting and recruit new members, while putting Pakistan on the defensive to protect their own nation from an uncertain Afghan future, according to Afghan and U.S. officials.
Complicating matters is President Hamid Karzai’s government, “whose corruption from Kabul to the local villages, and our own support of him, has contributed to a rise in young Taliban recruits fighting us,” a U.S. official said.
The Taliban is “waiting until the NATO forces exhaust themselves,” an official said. “We have put our troops at risk and we are not fighting the enemy to win. The enemy retreats to Pakistan where they receive help from an ally that believes we’re going to bail on them.”
“It is no surprise it has been a tough slog, this is their version of the Tet offense — show the Americans can’t win,” Carafano said. “They know busting the Obama timeline is their goal and that fight back now could cause the Americans to quit later.”
