Continuing the discussion on Afghanistan drawn from fragments of text from pages 264-266 of America’s Modern Wars (2015). “Part 6” of this discussion was my blog post “Dueling Surges.”
LESSONS AND OBSERVATIONS
There are five final lessons or observations that we wish to make about this war [Afghanistan].
First, it is clear that the new government did not establish control of the country-side in 2002 through 2004. The Northern Alliance and other armed groups totaled only around 60,000 people, at best. U.S. and international commitment remained at lower levels, below 30,000 troops. The Afghan National Army was slowly developing, also reporting only 8,000 operational troops in December 2004 and the Afghan police forces had less than 30,000 police in 2004, almost all of them raised that year. Both the Afghan Army and Afghan police were newly raised and poorly trained. Part of the reason the reported level of violence against these forces were low up through 2004 was that there was not a whole lot of forces in the countryside to commit violence against. As the Secretary General of the United Nations noted in August 2005: “From 2002 to 2004, powerful commanders and their militias, dominated the security environment. Narcotics trade and related criminal activities also expanded rapidly. More recent, there have been troubling indications that remnants of the Taliban and other extremist groups are organizing.”
In 2005 the Afghan police expanded to over 50,000, and their losses went from 9 in 2003, to 92 to 2004 to 138 in 2005. In 2006 the Afghan police continued to develop and expand and their losses grew to 412 in that year. We see the losses ore than doubled in 2007 (925 killed) and have continued at even higher levels since then. It is clear that police force presence led to increased police force losses, indicating that significant parts of the country were never under control of the central government.
….
(to be continued)Â
