Traditionally, the campaigning season in Afghanistan starts around Mayday. The snows in the high passes have melted; travel across the FATA/Afghanistan border is easier. The high country cold has retreated and so the armies can advance.
While the winter break this time around has not been as pronounced as in previous years and wars, the tempo of enemy driven operations is expected to increase over the next few weeks. As that happens, as the number of Taliban or Haqqani network suicide bombers grows, as the density of IEDs ticks up, so also will the number of friendly forces killed and wounded. Equally important, as the tempo of operations accelerates, the number of incidents involving collateral non-combatant casualties will ramp up as well.
As the bodies of maimed or dead non-combatants are piled higher and higher, Afghan outrage at the actions of the Americans and other infidel foreigners will escalate as well. It will not matter if the dead die as a result of insurgent actions or those of the US/ISAF/Afghan National Forces, the result will be the same--demands that the Americans stop whatever it is that they are doing. One can be sure that both the Karzai government and Muslim clerics supportive of political Islam will be in full-throated anger over the purported massacres of Afghan women and children.
The combination of religious and political imperatives admits of nothing else. To Muslims, the notion that Muslims kill Muslims is infinitely less unacceptable than is the killing of Muslims by infidels. Even the indiscriminate slaughter by IED is seen by Afghans as less worthy of condemnation than a misguided airstrike or a stray artillery round, or even the nocturnal raid of an insurgent occupied compound by infidel forces.
The single largest advantage enjoyed by the insurgents is the simple fact that they are Muslims and as such are not subject to condemnation under the guiding Islamic stricture of avoiding any appearance of division, of disagreement within the community of believers. The power this particular and very fundamental requirement holds on most Muslims precludes any opposition to even the worst excesses of the tactics of murder practiced by Taliban or any other insurgent group.
At the same time the demands of solidarity within Islam as well as the division of all humanity into the opposing camps of "the House of Peace" (Islam) and the "House of War" (infidels, that is everyone who is not a proper Muslim) assures that all culpability for all casualties within the former is assigned unthinkingly to the latter. As a consequence, the infidels are to blame when one Muslim kills another--particularly when the killing is technically unintentional as is always the case with an IED and is plausibly claimed with respect to suicide bombers hitting soft, civilian targets.
As Taliban et al escalate their efforts this Spring, it is to be expected that Afghan support for a compromise peace will grow with every non-combatant casualty. The Karzai government will be found baying in the van of the "peace now" movement in Afghanistan. Insofar as it can escape its ISI minders so also will much of Taliban. This group has taken very heavy hits at its mid-level ranks as well as among its footsoldiers from the US/NATO/ISAF moves into their former heartlands. The leadership echelon has also been the victim of attrition courtesy of the UAV attacks in the FATA.
The Haqqani network is unlikely to join in any peace oriented conversations as it is joined shoulders and hip with ISI. Frantic to secure its fiction of strategic depth against the Indians, there is no way that either ISI or the Pakistani military will surrender any control over either the Haqqani network or any factions within the badly riven Taliban. Nothing scares the Pakistani military more than the prospect they will lose a seat at the head of the table as Afghanistan enters its endgame phase.
No mistake should be made about this: The Afghanistan war is entering its endgame this spring. Regardless of protestations to the contrary by, for example, NATO foreign ministers, the US and its "partners" will start an accelerating process of disengagement this summer. The political realities within the various countries dictate an exit sooner rather than later and at any cost less than a frank admission of military failure or defeat.
No less an expert on covering the political posterior than Harry Reid in the course of an interview filled with internal inconsistencies has acknowledged the pull-out will be coming with greater certainty than Nancy Pelosi's next injection of Botox. In short compass, the Nevada senator stated that he had "no confidence" in the war coming to a satisfactory conclusion, averred great respect and confidence in the optimistic predictions of General Petraeus, and blamed the upcoming debacle on the American public's "short attention span." To cut to the chase, the Democratic leader expects the minority support for the war to erode further and for the war to be an issue of note in next year's elections which can be addressed successfully only by a withdrawal.
The situation is the same in all the other Western participants. The war has no support among the various electorates. Given the totality of economic and political circumstances, there is no real stomach for continuing the effort anywhere. Even the several combatant forces are not enthralled with going on with a war which is fundamentally one which cannot be won for circumstances far removed from the sphere of military competence.
As night falls in the next few months, the best which can be expected is the infliction of sufficient damage on Taliban and the Haqqani network to force a compromise peace which does not favor the advocates of violent political Islam. Afghanistan will remain a semi-hollow state with much of the real power accruing to Islamabad at the expense of Kabul. The country will remain a cesspool of Shariah in all its reprehensible manifestations. It will exist as an area ripe for exploitation by outsiders including both Russia and China, both of which have an eye on the vast mineral resources proved out by American experts. Once again the biggest losers will be as was the case the last time the US disengaged from Afghanistan the people of the place who desire to live without the oppression of a Ninth Century regime.
The tragedy of it all is that the debacle was a 'preventable accident.' Had the Bush/Cheney administration focused on executing a punitive expedition without any thought of either appeasing Pakistan or playing at nation-building in Afghanistan, the outcome would have been vastly different. Had the military used a more relevant doctrine in the opening months of the war, the outcome would have been vastly different. Had President Obama not given into a momentary snit and fired the only man, General McChrystal, capable of going mano a mano with Karzai--and winning, the outcome would have been vastly different. If General Petraeus could be as good at fighting a war as he is at practicing military (and Congressional) politics, the outcome would have been vastly different. If President Obama had the guts and realism so sadly lacking with President George W. Bush and not given in to the extortion efforts of the Pakistanis, the outcome would have been vastly different.
But, what has happened, happened. The war will soon start fading away to an endstate which will not be fully satisfactory and an accompaniment of whimpers and recriminations. However, if the US and its partners can inflict sufficient losses on the insurgents and keep on with the decapitation strikes in the FATA while coddling Karzai to the fullest extent necessary, it is not too late to retrieve enough of an imitation of victory to make the sacrifices of life, limb, and money almost justifiable.
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