Word: taliban
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Signaling America's resolve to prevail is essential, as Gates notes, because as long as Afghans and others in the region believe the U.S. military's presence in Afghanistan is finite, they'll hedge their bets. And hedged bets right now work in the Taliban's favor because, as General Stanley McChrystal has warned, it is the insurgents who have the momentum. (See "Multimedia: The War in Afghanistan Up Close...
...Taliban knows that time is the indispensable ally of the indigenous insurgent facing a foreign army. Its forces were scattered during the U.S. invasion in late 2001 and only began to reassert themselves almost four years later. Yet today they effectively control vast and growing swaths of territory, making it extremely difficult for the U.S. to turn the civilian population into reliable allies. Given the limits of U.S. control on the ground and the expectation that, sooner or later, like the Russians, the Americans will leave, many ordinary Afghans see little incentive to risk their lives in supporting...
...when responsibility for the war would be transferred to Afghan forces. By doing so, Obama may have pointed to the elephant in the room. On present indications, the Afghan forces are unlikely anytime in the near future to be ready and willing to take over the fight against the Taliban...
...reportedly even higher among forces deployed in combat. Afghan field officers are in short supply, and the top echelon of the officer corps is dominated by ethnic Tajiks who are often viewed with suspicion by Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group and the one in which the Taliban is based. And the recent killing of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman they had been mentoring, who then ran off to join the Taliban, highlights the risk of infiltration in efforts to expand the Afghan security forces...
Even if Karzai did a more effective job of governing, it's far from clear how many Afghans would be willing to fight their fellow Afghans in the Taliban. While poverty and corruption at the local level certainly fuel the resentment on which the Taliban capitalizes, it is not a protest movement against bad governance as much an insurgency rooted in Islamic and nationalist identities that challenges a political order installed and defended by foreign armies...