New U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan: War With the Pashtun

For the first time since the war began eight years ago, American combat forces will surge directly against the Afghans who for decades have fought intruders most fiercely: the ethnic Pashtuns who populate the ranks of the Taliban from their homelands in eastern and southern Afghanistan.

The strategy shift, outlined by President Obama on Tuesday night in a speech at West Point, takes a major gamble: that deploying 30,000 additional U.S. troops into the Pashtun heartland will break their fighting capabilities faster than the presence of the American "intruders'' will boost Taliban recruiting among the 6 million Pashtun men of fighting age.

The reinforcements, which Obama said would be sent into Afghanistan "at the fastest pace possible,'' will raise the total U.S. force to 98,000. White House officials said Tuesday they hope the NATO allies will add to the 40,000 European and Canadian troops already there.

At the least, the new strategic direction from the White House, taken after three months of intense deliberation and consultations, promises a significant spike in combat clashes starting almost immediately. The first U.S. reinforcements are already moving. U.S. and NATO forces, backed by airstrikes, are expected to assault Taliban strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, while the Taliban fight back with ambushes, roadside bombs and suicide attacks. Unlike the colder mountainous regions of eastern and northern Afghanistan, there is no pause in the fighting during winter in the warmer desert reaches of the southern part of the country.

U.S. Marines will begin landing in southern Afghanistan almost immediately, U.S. officials said, with Army combat brigades to follow in a sequenced series of 12-month deployments this spring and early summer. The troops could end up marching even sooner, but the pace is contingent on the construction of bases and other support facilities.

Beginning in July 2011, Obama said, U.S. troops will begin their transition out of Afghanistan, handing off responsibility for security to newly trained Afghan soldiers and police. Administration officials said Tuesday the pace and end date of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan would depend on the situation on the ground and cannot be predicted.

"Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground,'' Obama said Tuesday night. "We will continue to advise and assist Afghanistan's security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul. But it will be clear to the Afghan government – and, more importantly, to the Afghan people – that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country."

Further details of the military plan will be disclosed Wednesday morning when Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. But standing between the Obama administration's hopes for its latest war plan and the actual situation 18 months from now are the Pashtun.

Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, they make up the core of the Taliban insurgency, which has taken hold in towns across most of southern and eastern regions of the country since its resurgence in 2006.

They are, a general told me in eastern Afghanistan this fall, "well funded and incredibly smart fighters.''

"When threatened, they tend to stay and fight,'' David Kilcullen, a senior counterinsurgency adviser to the Pentagon, writes of the Pashtuns. "They resist intrusion . . . through violent resistance rather than withdrawal.''

The Pashtuns are notorious for their strict honor codes of revenge and blood feuds, posing a difficult problem for American combat commanders.

"When one noncombatant [civilian] is killed, for a whole family and tribe and the whole Pashtun belt there is a moral obligation to vindicate his death,'' Air Force Brig Gen. Steven Kwast told me in Afghanistan, explaining that his fighters are dropping fewer bombs to avoid putting civilians at risk. "For one person killed, there are 20 people who will pick up rifles and fight against you if they feel that death was wrong."

Or as Winston Churchill once bitterly observed about the Pashtun, after a century of clashes with British forces, "Every family cultivates its vendetta, every clan its feud. . . . Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.''

Chased from power by U.S. and irregular Afghan forces eight years ago, the Taliban regrouped in 2006 and have significantly escalated their attacks on Afghan and allied forces. Armed clashes rose from 180 in July 2007 to 319 in July 2008 to 810 this past July, according to an open source analysis by John McCreary, former intelligence analyst for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The fighting has intensified as U.S. forces increased raids into Pashtun territory.

"The Pashtuns made their point with the Soviets, and they are making it again with us,'' said Gilles Dorronsoro, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "They do not surrender. They fight very, very courageously.''

Until this past summer, U.S. forces had been spread thinly across the eastern region of the country, with British and Canadian troops under NATO command responsible for the southern provinces. But even with the deployment of some 4,000 U.S. Marines, authorized by Obama in March, the allied forces were too few to hold the territory they managed to clear of Taliban insurgents. And American field commanders said that Kabul could provide only 800 Afghan soldiers to work with them.

"Over the past several years, coalition forces have engaged the insurgency through targeted raids, designed to push insurgents out of a given area,'' said Jeffrey Dressler, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, another Washington think tank. "The result has been operations that temporarily clear an area but fail to prevent the return of insurgents.''

Yet the Taliban have been unable to expand their influence much beyond traditional Pashtun regions of the country, said McCreary, resulting in something of a bloody stalemate between the insurgents and U.S., allied and Afghan forces. "The government in Kabul cannot survive without NATO forces,'' said McCreary, because the Afghan security troops are too few and too inexperienced and cannot operate without NATO backup. "They do not look like they can win,'' he said of the Taliban. "They can increase the violence, but that does not equate to enlarged geographic control.''

The war, he added, "remains a Pashtun problem.''