Who Is Winning the War in Afghanistan? Depends on Which One

By Rod Nordland

Source Link

Rod Nordland has been reporting on Afghanistan’s travails since well before the American-led invasion that booted the Taliban from power in 2001. For the past eight years, he has been a correspondent and then Kabul bureau chief for The New York Times, which has expanded its presence in the country even as many other news organizations have withdrawn. Two wars are convulsing Afghanistan, the war of blood and guts, and the war of truth and lies. Both have been amassing casualties at a remarkable rate recently. The first is that messy war in which, just in the past week, more than 40high school students were blown to pieces in their classroom, hundreds of bodies were left abandoned for a week in the streets of Ghazni city or dumped in a river, and two important Afghan Army units were destroyed, almost to the last soldier.

The other is the war in which most of that, according to official accounts, did not happen — or at least was not as bad as it sounded. Not until late on the third day of the Taliban’s assault on Ghazni did President Ashraf Ghani’s aides even inform him of the desperation level there, two government officials said privately; Mr. Ghani himself later confirmed that publicly. By then the Taliban had control of nearly every neighborhood.

Fighting ceases in Afghanistan's Ghazni, but fear remainsCreditVideo by AFP news agency

Government spokesmen, confronted with a crisis, basically responded by asserting that everything was fine. They repeatedly denied that Taliban fighters were in control of Ghazni. By day six, when the insurgents no longer were in control, official denials converged with the truth.

The American military’s chief spokesman, Lt. Col. Martin L. O’Donnell, insisted there was no big problem — just insurgents looking for “inconsequential headlines.”

Discerning fact from fiction is challenging in any war, of course. But in Afghanistan, where most of the population has known only war, narratives are often total contradictions of one another.

How We Reported

An Afghan soldier at a check point on the highway between Ghazni and Kabul, the capital.CreditMohammad Ismail/Reuters

We had a reporter inside Ghazni, canvassing neighborhoods. Although the country’s cellphone networks failed in Ghazni, making it hard to check the official narrative, we also found people who could get a cell signal on the outskirts or upper floors of Ghazni buildings, or who fled and brought their stories to us.

One of our reporters, Fahim Abed, got through on the phone to the director of Ghazni Hospital, Baz Mohammad Hemat, who spoke from a hospital floor awash in blood, bodies stacked in storerooms because the morgue was full. Dr. Hemat counted 113 dead on day two, and more arriving hourly. Most were in uniform, belying official claims of minimal casualties.

In Ajristan District, our Afghan reporters heard that disaster had befallen an elite Army commando unit defending that remote area. As our reporter Jawad Sukhanyar called around to officials in the surrounding areas, he found that the Ministry of Defense was doing the same thing; they didn’t know what had happened either.

It turned out that insurgent suicide bombers destroyed the commando company’s base, and as the defenders fled, Taliban fighters picked them off. Out of a base force of more than 100 commandos, police and militia fighters, only 22 survived, fleeing into the desert with no water or food.

Jawad reached a surviving commando, Sgt. Eid Mohammad, 30, on the phone. He described how they had drunk one another’s urine while fleeing pro-Taliban Kuchi nomads.

The sergeant also repeated a version of something widely heard in the 25 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces actively at war now: “No one from the government gave us anything. All we got was promises, no action.”

That was true 300 miles north of Ghazni, at a place called Chinese Camp, where an Afghan Army company struggled through three days of heavy Taliban attacks, begging for resupply and reinforcements, and especially air support, which were promised, but never arrived.

Our reporter Najim Rahim had been on the phone every day for a week with the defenders, including their captain, who had become Najim’s friend. On Sunday someone else answered the captain’s phone. “I started crying when I heard he was killed,” Najim said.

By Tuesday the defenders at Chinese Camp were almost out of ammunition, they told Najim. Half were dead or wounded and the rest surrendered except for a lieutenant who escaped. Najim managed to track him down, so we knew what had happened.

Afghan officials at the Ministry of Defense said they could not provide an account of Chinese Camp casualties. “We’re working on figuring out how many soldiers were there and when we do, we’ll share it,” said Ghafoor Ahmad Jawed, a ministry spokesman.

Lots more happened this past week, more than we could cover except briefly. On Monday, Taliban fighters overran an Afghan border police unit defending the frontier with Tajikistan in northern Takhar Province, killing 12. An Afghan National Army unit was destroyed in northern Baghlan Province, where officials admitted that 39 soldiers were killed, two wounded and two escaped.

Who is winning?

Members of the 215th Corps of the Afghan National Army at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province in 2016.CreditAdam Ferguson for The New York Times

This is often the first question arriving diplomats ask. Every year there’s a new group of them — most countries do not allow them to stay more than a year, sometimes two. They are usually well briefed in the official narrative that things are improving. But many spend their entire tours inside a fortified embassy.

On paper, the Afghan government and its 40-plus international coalition allies, predominantly Americans, have all the advantages over the insurgents. The Afghan military and police have an authorized strength of 350,000, their payroll funded by international partners. The American military now number 14,000, a mix of trainers, advisers and Special Operations members.

The Afghans also have their own small air force, and extensive support from American drones, jet bombers and helicopter gunships.

The Taliban have been estimated by American military officials to number 20,000 to 40,000 active fighters, an estimate that has not changed much for years even though the Afghan government claims it has been killing nearly a thousand a month.

The true size of the Afghan military is difficult to assess. The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, an American government watchdog agency, reported in July that the Afghan National Army was at 86 percent of its authorized strength, and that all security forces, police, army and specialized units totaled 310,000. The agency also said the attrition rate for the Afghan National Army was running at 2 percent a month. If confirmed, that would translate into roughly a quarter of the total per year.

Full data on attrition, which includes desertions, failure to re-enlist and casualties, was now secret, the agency said, a decision taken by the American military, which the agency criticized.

Also classified as secret since last year has been the true casualty toll for the Afghan military. When those figures were last released by Afghan government officials, in 2016, more than 6,000 soldiers and police officers were being killed annually. The outgoing American military commander at the end of 2014, Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, called the Afghan government losses, then about 5,000 fatalities a year, “unsustainable.”

Many Afghan officials and military officers say privately that the losses have worsened since then. “Casualties among Afghan forces are higher than they have ever been,” said the retired general Atiqullah Amarkhel, a military analyst in Kabul.

If the death toll of the past week — more than 400 Afghan soldiers and police officers — were to continue for a year, the annual total would be triple the worst known year so far.

The Afghan military and its American allies have officially shifted their strategy to one that emphasizes protecting population centers — places like Ghazni city — rather than holding onto territory — places like Ghormach and Ajristan Districts, where those army units were overwhelmed last week. The military has been slow to make that shift, however.

The Taliban vowed this year to retake cities and provinces, but so far they have taken no provinces and three cities, but only briefly. And most of Afghanistan’s population lives under government, not Taliban, control.

Even by territorial standards, according to the American military’s reckoning, the Afghan security forces have been doing well lately. When the international coalition reduced its 140,000-soldier presence, handing security responsibility to Afghan forces, the insurgents quickly expanded their control throughout the country. But in the past year, the military said, that expansion has been halted.

As of July 30, the government controlled 58.5 percent of the country, the insurgents 19.4 percent, with the remaining 22 percent contested, according to the American military.

Other information raises serious questions about the accuracy of that data. In Ghazni Province, for example, only one of its 19 districts was listed by the American military as under insurgent control. But local officials said last week that only three Ghazni districts were clearly government-controlled.

In northern Kunduz Province, and in southern Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul Provinces, most districts are listed as under government control or contested. But in none of them would it be safe for a government official to leave the provincial capital without a heavily armed escort.