Is Kunduz the beginning of the end for Afghanistan?

By Emile Simpson

America’s deadly hospital strike points up how hard it’s going to be to keep control from the air.

A week ago, Kunduz, a provincial capital of 300,000 in northern Afghanistan, was not considered of particular strategic importance in the war against the Taliban. The Afghan government’s focus has been primarily on the fight in river valleys of southern Afghanistan to protect Kandahar, and in the mountain passes of eastern Afghanistan to protect Jalalabad.
But the fall of Kunduz to the Taliban for two days last week — and the struggle that may still be underway continuing for control of the city — marks a new phase in the war and a critical test for the effort by the United States and NATO to leave the bulk of the fighting to Afghan security forces. Kabul is now threatened from the north, and we are hearing reports of Taliban attacks in adjacent provinces, such as Baghlan, whose capture would cut off Kunduz and other key northern towns from Kabul. So the first consequence of Kunduz is that the already over-stretched Afghan security forces will now need to spread out even more thinly to cover the north. Beyond that, the accidental U.S. strike on a Doctors-Without-Borders hospital that killed at least 19 people — which has prompted calls for a war-crimes investigation by the U.N. — points up how very hard it is to co-ordinate air strikes accurately when there are so few NATO troops on the ground coordinating them.

Kunduz is potentially a game changer because it exposes the gap between the paper plan for the defense of Afghanistan and the reality on the ground, particularly in two key areas: first, the capability Afghan ground forces; and second, the credibility of their NATO back-up. Kunduz is also a test for whether, after more than a decade of war, vastly expensive U.S. military training programs can at last bear some substantial fruit. In Iraq, we learned, such efforts have not been terribly successful, failing to meld Sunni, Shia and tribal differences together in a strong standing army that could resist the invasion of Islamic State forces two years ago. What about Afghanistan? The fall of a major city undoubtedly brings into question the general competence of the Afghan security forces, and the entire model used in Iraq and Afghanistan of training local forces. After all, haven’t we spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of our soldiers building Iraqi and Afghan security forces that don’t have the will to fight?
The paramount problem is not as much the competence of the troops as what is happening at much higher levels — inside the Afghan government. And that is where Western efforts must focus now. The fundamental issue is a corrupt institutional ethos. As in Iraq, the Afghan Army suffers from a senior officer corps who seem more interested in their personal gain than the service of the state, and who are unwilling to share the same risks as their soldiers, and often more concerned with personal gain than fulfilling their mission. Many buy their commission in hopes of making an eventual return on their investment. When their commanders are absent or uninterested in their troops, it’s really no surprise that they don’t fight well.

The bottom line is that this is a political problem without a military solution.

Such morale problems flow directly from moral failures in the Afghan state, not least the massive corruption that has plagued both Iraq and Afghanistan. This translates into a mentality in which many of the regular security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan only join for the salaries, not a wider sense of duty. They will fight when their families are at risk. Thus the predominantly Iraqi forces fought hard once the Islamic State threatened to push into Shia areas. Likewise, the predominantly Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara Afghan army have a strong motivation to fight in the north, as opposed to the Pashtun provinces in the south and east. Interestingly, Kunduz itself an anomalously high Pashtun population (dating back to nineteenth century forced settlement), which may partly explain why the Afghan forces there had less motivation to defend the city.
As in Iraq, the West seems to be out of ideas in dealing with this problem. Sure, NATO could up-scale its training mission in Afghanistan, as the U.S. has done recently in Iraq; but that’s not going to address the structural problems of corruption in the system that destroys soldiers’ confidence in their leadership. The vast equipment losses the Iraqi Army has experienced since the Islamic State attacked Mosul should tell us that a stand-off approach in Afghanistan of simply replenishing a broken logistics chain is just throwing money down the drain: you can’t buy morale. What we’ve seen in Iraq is a tacit U.S. acceptance of the role of militias, who now are performing most of the front line combat against the Islamic State. Of course, this comes with big political trade-offs, which in Iraq is accepting the extent of Iranian influence in Baghdad, given they sponsor most of the Shia militias there. In Afghanistan militias might well be more effective than conventional forces, but they are predatory forces, and accepting them would mean abandoning any pretense of democratic reform in Afghanistan. Of course, if you take the view that Afghanistan is about Western national security, and democratic values are irrelevant, then backing militias may appeal to you. But this is a fantasy: The Taliban came to power from 1994-96 precisely because of popular hatred of militia warlords.
The bottom line is that this is a political problem without a military solution. The best thing NATO can do is use its military power to provide a cast-iron guarantee that the Taliban will not be able to conduct conventional warfare and thus be unable to conventionally taking over the state. That would lead to a balance of power that would set conditions for negotiation. Practically, this would involve keeping some special forces in country to hit open Taliban base areas as well as the provision of air support to isolated Afghan posts, as well as the intelligence resources to enable such operations. The U.S. and NATO must then use that precarious peace to redouble its pressure on the government in Kabul to reform and on neighboring Pakistan to stand down from its support of the Taliban.


The main issue here is that this is already the plan on paper — and what Kunduz exposes is NATO’s inability to execute it on the ground. On paper, we are told that the Afghan security forces stand at 350,000, of which 7000 were supposedly garrisoned in Kunduz itself. Those numbers become hard to believe when Kunduz was captured by a Taliban force numbering only hundreds. In most smaller Afghan outposts, there are no NATO forces at all. NATO was already having difficulty supporting Afghan outposts with air support due to legal complexities surrounding the rules of engagement used to support Afghan forces, in particular how to extend the law of self-defense to third parties. Now the risk of civilian casualties from air strikes in areas without effective co-ordination with NATO spotters on the ground will further complicate the situation, particularly in urban areas.
The Soviet experience in Afghanistan explains why NATO’s ability to offer air support to the Afghan security forces is of such strategic significance. Recall that the mujahedeen failed to topple the Soviet-backed Afghan regime led by President Najibullah for three years after the Soviet main force left in 1988 because each time they massed, like during their failed attempt to take the city of Jalalabad in 1989, they would get decimated by heavy weaponry and Soviet operated air power that would forced back to guerrilla warfare. The skeleton presence of Soviet advisors stopped the mujahedeen from evolving from guerrilla to conventional warfare. When the mujahedeen were only able to control the countryside, not the towns, Najibullah was able to exploit their internal divisions, flipping many to his side. Of course, once the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991 funding ceased, and the whole edifice collapsed.
Until now, NATO’s assumption has been that, analogous to the Soviet back-up for Najibullah, in providing enough air support to Afghan security forces, the Taliban would prove unable to capture major urban centers, and so would eventually have to negotiate. Whether for lack of intelligence, co-ordination with local forces, or asset availability, NATO obviously was unable to break up Taliban formations massing for a conventional attack on Kunduz. Now the insurance policy offered by NATO air support is in doubt, and with it the credibility of all the isolated Afghan positions throughout Afghanistan to resist conventional as opposed to guerrilla style attacks from the Taliban.
So this really is a key moment, and unless the West wants to see more towns fall in rapid succession, NATO needs to evolve its military posture to stop the Taliban being able to mass forces, and this need to happen right now: The Taliban can’t be allowed to build momentum as the Islamic State did in Iraq.

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No doubt parallels might be drawn between Kunduz and the fall of Mosul in Iraq last year, in which the Iraqi forces melted away before a much smaller ISIL force. The comparison is inexact, however, for unlike the Iraqi Army in Mosul, the Afghan security forces have been fighting hard. From 2012 onward they started taking significantly more casualties than the coalition forces, sustaining a staggering 5,000 dead in 2014, and losing almost as many men in the first half of 2015 alone (not to mention the wounded). Bear in mind that the international coalition forces have suffered around 3,500 dead in total from 2001 to today.

Western forces have far less leverage on local sovereign governments than is sometimes assumed.

So it would be unfair to claim that the ordinary soldiers and junior officers in the Afghan security forces are to blame. They have fought hard but have been getting hammered without relief for three years in their outposts, lacking crucial air support and battlefield casualty evacuation support than Western forces would take for granted. Under such conditions, getting wounded often means death.
However, the parallels with Iraq are clearer when it comes to logistics and command. As in Iraq, the Afghan logistics chain is weak and highly vulnerable to corruption, which can render it impossible to get casualties treated and troops rotated out of the front line, putting huge pressure on morale, and consequently leading to a high rate of desertions. Under pressure from the Taliban, and bled white by casualties and desertion while spread thin over innumerable small outposts across the country, the Afghan security forces have been largely fixed in their posts as the insurgency attempts its annual full court press over the summer fighting season. This has left the government unable to free-up forces and effectively take the fight to the enemy, leaving isolated garrisons holding out for months on end (Kunduz itself has effectively been under siege all summer).
On the one hand, we can say that it was a mistake to try to train the Iraqi and Afghan security forces on a Western model, with their heavy logistics tails and formal command structures. After all, the troops doing most of the fighting in Iraq are Iran-backed Shia militias which run on a far more decentralized model and have a lighter logistics footprint, allowing them the flexibility to move fast and exploit tactical advantages more easily.
If there’s a lesson here for Western foreign policy — one that Washington should learn quickly — it is that Western forces have far less leverage on local sovereign governments than is sometimes assumed. Even at the height of the surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan, removing corrupt local commanders or government officials was a perennial problem for Western forces both in terms of the legal and political complexities of so doing, and the fact that corruption was so endemic that corrupt officials would often be recycled through the system. Hands down, corruption in both Iraq and Afghanistan presented, and continues to present, a more serious threat to the survival of the state than the insurgencies they face.
So action now needs to focus on the higher levels of the Afghan security forces and the Afghan state, which is primarily the responsibility of the new President Ashraf Ghani and the oddly titled “CEO” of Afghanistan Abdullah Abdullah. They must act swiftly and ruthlessly to replace incompetent officers in their ranks. Will they? Probably not. Despite all the hype about Ghani’s clean-slate rhetoric and democratic sound-bites, the two have been unimpressive so far, failing even to agree on cabinet posts over a year after the election. Failure to prevent another Kunduz, most likely in the south of Afghanistan, could easily escalate into a full-blown political crisis.
Kunduz is still not at the decisive battlefield; that lies in the south and east, where the Afghan government needs to stabilize the situation enough to negotiate a more autonomous settlement foe the Pashtun provinces where the Taliban have their heartland. If Kunduz downgraded the Afghan government’s credibility, a Kandahar would no doubt mean a full on bank run on its legitimacy. And while NATO airpower can be improved to stop the Taliban going conventional, this can only bed a delaying strategy to buy time for the Ghani government to get its act together. And if this pair can’t deal with corruption at the heart of the state, it won’t be long before white flags are fluttering over Kandahar.