Coalition finds success elusive in Kandahar

August 1, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan

As the U.S.-led coalition launches its most-critical military operation of the nine-year war in Afghanistan, doubts are growing about whether the United States and its allies can contain the surging Taliban-led insurgency and prevent the country from reverting to an al-Qaida sanctuary or erupting in civil war.

The operation aims to secure Kandahar, the financial, trade and political hub of southern Afghanistan and the seat of Taliban rule of Afghanistan until the 2001 U.S. invasion. Kandahar is the cultural and spiritual center of the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the Taliban are drawn almost exclusively.

U.S. and Afghan troops already have made the first moves to flush the Taliban from their strongholds in the lush Arghandab Valley and other districts around the second-largest Afghan city, but a host of problems plague the long-delayed initiative and the larger U.S.-led war effort.

U.S. troops are fanning out across Kandahar to train Afghan police as part of a counter-insurgency plan refined by Army Gen. David Petraeus, the newly named commander of all allied forces, that will focus more on creating a respected government instead of routing insurgents inside the city.

U.S. casualties are averaging two deaths per day, the highest since the beginning of the war, and U.S. troops suffered their highest monthly death toll of the war in July, with 66 Americans killed.

A Gallup poll published earlier this month found that 60 percent of Americans think things are going badly. That was before the massive leak of secret U.S. military reports on WikiLeaks, which drove home what an uphill struggle Afghanistan has been.

Opposition to the war is growing, especially within President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, amid a slow economic recovery and surging federal deficit. On July 27, 102 Democrats in the House of Representatives, all facing re-election in November, voted unsuccessfully to kill $33 billion in emergency war funding.

With mixed signals from Congress and Obama about how long U.S. troops will remain, Afghan leaders say they’re uncertain of U.S. intentions.

On the ground, in the face of a determined Taliban assassination campaign, the Afghan government’s performance is unlikely to improve. Despite concerted diplomacy and the promise of an enormous new U.S. aid package, the Obama administration can’t persuade Pakistan to close down the Afghan insurgent sanctuaries that border Afghanistan.

Failure in Kandahar could doom the U.S.-led counterinsurgency operation.

“It is from Kandahar that the Taliban attempt to control the hearts and minds of the Afghan people,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, in June. “It is my belief that should they go unchallenged there and in the surrounding areas, they will feel equally unchallenged elsewhere.

“As goes Kandahar, so goes Afghanistan,” he said.

A major obstacle in Kandahar — and across Afghanistan — is a lack of competent and honest administrators and police who can win the loyalty of the city’s estimated 800,000 people and turn them against local warlords and the insurgents.

“Building up formal institutions of government takes a long time,” said a senior Western official in Kandahar who also asked not to be identified so he could speak candidly. “So I would certainly hesitate to declare victory too soon on that one.”