Early one morning in November 2001, two Pakistan Air Force C130s began a mission that would define the course of Afghanistan’s 9/11 war. Leaving their bases in Chitral and Gilgit, the aircraft flew west over the great mountains, before dipping low into the Amu Darya valley. Northern Alliance armies perched on the hills around Kunduz, under the command of Mohammad Daud and Abdul Rashid Dostum, watched the aircraft land — unaware that a secret deal between President George Bush and General Pervez Musharraf was about to deny them victory. “Hundreds of Inter Services Intelligence officers, Taliban commanders, and foot soldiers belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and al-Qaeda personnel boarded the planes,” the author Ahmed Rashid later recorded. “Frustrated US Special Operations Forces who watched from the surrounding high ground dubbed it ‘Operation Evil Airlift’.” Taliban commander Maulvi Abdul Salaam Hanafi, one of the passengers on those flights, stormed back to power in Kunduz on Monday, leading the first jihadist assault to capture an Afghan city since the Islamic Emirate fell. The fall of Kunduz, coming on the eve of the first anniversary of Afghanistan’s National Unity government, could prove to be its graveyard. Taliban’s Kunduz offensive The Taliban had been crafting strategy to take Kunduz since 2014. The districts of Chahrdara and Dasht-e Archi came under their control last year, along with large swathes of Imam Sahib and Aliabad. Then, in April, the Taliban’s Azm spring offensive saw Imam Saheb, Chahrdara, Qala-ye Zal, Aliabad and Kunduz city targeted. Positions in Bagh-e-Sherkat and Gortepe, just kilometres from Kunduz, fell in April. The idea of Maulvi Salaam, a 1969-born Kunduz native, was to target ill-equipped local police pickets guarding villages around the city, and then draw back as the army pumped in forces. He had spent two years in a Pakistani prison after being arrested in a CIA-led raid in 2011. President Hamid Karzai had sought his repatriation to Afghanistan, along with other senior Taliban commanders, to facilitate talks. Pakistan released them from prison — but never sent them home. [related-post] President Ashraf Ghani, who is locked into a high-stakes gamble that Islamabad would rein in the Taliban in return for Afghan concessions to its interests, was caught off-guard by the spring offensive. Further to the west, the Taliban made gains in Faryab, Farah and Kunar — again, targeting police posts to secure surrenders and project power among the community. Although population centres were defended, the army was stretched to the limit by the dispersed strikes. Counter-insurgency conundrum While the Taliban and its affiliates can, like insurgents everywhere, concentrate forces on targets and draw back after striking, government forces have to be able to project power across the nation state’s territory at all times. This can be done if large numbers of troops are available for static deployment, as in India — or, if state forces enjoy a very highly degree of tactical mobility, allowing them to redeploy as threats emerge. The Afghanistan security system has neither. The consequence has been that Afghan forces have been strung out in small numbers across swathes of territory, making them easy targets for assault. Figures released by the United States’ Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) earlier this year show the Afghan National Army’s numbers are in sharp decline — the consequence of problems with pay, morale and record combat fatalities. In November 2014, the army and air force had 1,69,203 personnel, down 8.5 per cent from the force level of 1,84,839 reported in February 2014. “This is the lowest assigned ANA force strength since August 2011,” SIGAR noted in its report. For a sense of what these numbers mean, it is worth contrasting the case of Jammu and Kashmir. In 2007, then Northern Army commander Lt Gen H S Panag revealed that 3,37,000 troops — not counting paramilitary forces — were deployed in J&K, a third of these in a counter-insurgency role. The state, including the large but peaceful province of Ladakh, occupies a little over 1,01,000 sq km. Afghanistan sprawls over 6,62,225 sq km — its terrain far harsher, and less well-connected than J&K’s. Even though billions of dollars have been spent on addressing the Afghan army’s mobility and close air support problems, issues remain. Later this year, the Afghan Air Force will be given A29 Super Tucano turboprops for close air support. However, past western-gifted equipment have been less than useful: 26 C-208 Italian-made light transport aircraft have proved problem-prone at Afghan altitudes, while MD650 helicopters, lacking armour, have not succeeded in close air support roles. The Afghan National Police has 1,56,439 personnel, with the 45,000-odd personnel who make up the Afghan Local Police serving a key territory-holding role guarding their own villages and towns. The lightly-armed ALP, whose officers receive just three weeks’ training and an uniform, has proved unable to resist strikes by massed insurgent formations. In this spring’s battles for Gortepa, the gateway to Kunar, ALP commanders faced a two-front assault by forces led by Taliban commander Maulvi Shamsuddin. Late that evening, the ALP was out of ammunition, and was forced to withdraw. Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, spokesman of the provincial police, said “the light weapons of the ALP are not enough for fierce fighting”. The Taliban withdrew after the army pumped in some 2,000 troops from neighbouring Badakshan, backed by special forces. However, the troops had to be withdrawn soon to deal with problems around their bases — leaving Kunduz undefended. Region’s fraught ethnic politics In the 1920s, largescale irrigation projects led to a transformation in Kunduz’s demography, with ethnic-Pashtun Kuchi nomads being resettled from the south on the region’s arable land. The Kuchis were also given access to pastures that were until then accessed only by the region’s ethnic-Arab and Turkic nomads. The irrigation projects, which accelerated with World Bank funding in the 1960s, made Kunduz Afghanistan’s breadbasket, but also provoked clashes with the Uzbeks, Tajiks, and other ethnicities. President Ashraf Ghani now has a near-impossible task: to prevent panicked ethnic minorities in the region from arming themselves, thus sparking a fullscale communal war with the Pashtuns, along with ensuring that Afghanistan’s battered security apparatus is rebuilt. Ever since 9/11, Afghanistan and the US have bet that Pakistan’s assistance will help evade the gargantuan challenges these problems pose. The fall of Kunduz has shattered that illusion. praveen.swami@expressindia.com
