After nearly nine years in Afghanistan, U.S. and NATO leaders still do not adequately understand or communicate with the Afghan people, according to classified coalition assessments. That cultural disconnect, along with the West’s continued support for a corrupt central government in Kabul, has made it easy for the Taliban to recruit insurgents and prevent NATO from making significant gains, according to classified coalition assessments.
Those assessments, quoted to The Washington Examiner by officials with direct knowledge of their contents, paint a grim forecast for Afghanistan. Violence has escalated dramatically since the beginning of the year as insurgents have planted 94 percent more improvised explosive devices than the previous year, to cite one metric of military failure.
“We’re getting beat up,” said a U.S. military official with direct knowledge of a classified military report titled “The State of the Taliban,” which was published late last year and updated in January. “They [the Taliban] know their own people — they are culturally accurate. We know the facts but we are culturally inaccurate. The main message in the reports is that we don’t fully understand our enemy and we are not clearly communicating our message to the people.”
The report — put together by military intelligence officers who have interviewed high-level Taliban detainees in Afghanistan — recommended that local U.S. commanders mediate cease-fire negotiations with local Taliban commanders.
Taliban commanders are much more effective propagandists than the NATO coalition, the report found. In information-starved Afghanistan, the Taliban has been able to persuade many that the 9/11 attacks were actually a response to the planned invasion of Afghanistan by the United States. And ideas about Islam, including that America does not allow Muslim women to cover themselves and that mosques are not permitted in most American cities, have been easy to sell to potential recruits, the report found.
Afghanistan has grown increasingly deadly for U.S. and coalition forces. Nine NATO soldiers, including five Americans, died in several different incidents in Afghanistan Monday.
Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, spokesman for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, NATO’s top commander in Aghanistan, acknowledged the existence of the sober assessments. He told The Examiner that the International Security Assistance Forces are “stepping up engagements with Afghan media at all levels and are facilitating more meetings in which credible third parties.” The aim is to assure that pro-coalition clerics, teachers and others can address false rumors spread by the Taliban.
Sholtis said negotiations with Taliban commanders are never simple.
“The bulk of insurgents clearly do not see foreign forces as a credible negotiating partner,” he said. “It is likely that the insurgents will be more willing to relax their conditions for discussions with the government as the pressure on them from counterinsurgency efforts increases.”
U.S. military officials consider current operations to be the last phase of the nation’s longest war, leading to a withdrawal planned to begin in about a year. Many military commanders believe that does not allow enough time to turn Pashtun tribal leaders away from the Taliban. And the Afghan army and police forces are years away from providing security for the nation, according to the classified assessments.
Overwhelming corruption in President Hamid Karzai’s government and an ingrained tribal system that has survived thousands of years has made Afghanistan it’s “own monster,” said a U.S. military official.
But Sholtis said the Taliban also is rife with corruption, including “nepotism, bribes in the form of ‘taxation’ and a host of other abuses that are common features of areas that have been controlled by the Taliban.”
“The Afghan government doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the alternative,” Sholtis said.
But some U.S. and Afghan officials said the association of corruption with the Karzai government is an insurmountable obstacle to NATO credibility.
“The U.S. does not hold Karzai responsible for corruption,” said an Afghan official in Afghanistan, who asked not to be named. “The U.S. put Karzai in office — he stole the last election and he uses NATO financing, U.S. money to line his coffers.”
Military officials involved in civil affairs work highlight other issues in Afghanistan: There are not enough civilian workers to help complete promised construction projects, local governments steal project funding, there are not enough Pashtun interpreters, security concerns inhibit local workers from taking coalition jobs.
“We need to reevaluate who the enemy really is,” said a U.S. civil affairs officer in Afghanistan. “We need to leave an Afghanistan where the enemy won’t resurge. Based on the evaluations and interviews in the report, we’re not sure we’re fighting the right war or fighting the war the right way.”
