Kabul: Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, NATO is struggling to define a strategy to counter a spreading insurgency in Afghanistan, as a mounting coalition death toll saps public support.
President Barack Obama, voted in to the White House last year after pledging to make Afghanistan one of his top priorities, quickly urged his military top brass to find new ways of enabling US troops to come home.
One was repeating the successful surge in Iraq and sending thousands more US troops, but for a country posing different challenges and a very different enemy, terrain and mission.
In general, there are two schools of thought in Washington.
There are those who favour massive deployment to protect the population, a reduction in air strikes that have killed large numbers of civilians, training the embryonic Afghan police and army, and the emergence of an effective government.
Others back limited deployment and concentration on eliminating Al-Qaeda, conscious that tens of thousands of extra soldiers would reinforce the idea of an army of occupation and sow discontent among Afghans.
With General David McKiernan sacked in May and replaced by General Stanley McChrystal as head of foreign forces in Afghanistan, some see the new strategy as just the old one, only with greater resources.
“You’re going to need to convince me that the new strategy is really new,” one former high-ranking European military officer in Kabul said recently.
“At the moment, we don’t see much of a difference on the ground, apart from the fact that there’s more of everything — more men, more equipment, more money,” he added.
Last month, McChrystal submitted his wish-list for the coming months: a reported 40,000 extra troops, which according to one US military official would be deployed in the north and west, where Taliban attacks are increasing.
The US contingent would then pass the 100,000 mark compared with just a few thousand at its lowest point, as attention switched to Iraq.
There are currently 100,000 US and NATO troops from about 40 member countries stationed in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the US Army is looking to counter the increasing threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which, according to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, account for three-quarters of coalition fatalities.
Washington last week announced it was to supply new armoured vehicles capable of better resisting the bombs, which are often placed on roadsides and have killed around two soldiers a day recently.
The all-terrain vehicles are said to have the same level of protection as those used by US soldiers in Iraq.
The new model is also lighter and designed to adapt better to the rugged, mountainous terrain in Afghanistan.
Obama warned earlier this year that defeating Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and preventing their return would be a long haul.
The West’s worst-case scenario is that nothing changes and that ultimately Afghanistan becomes what it was for the Soviet Union, the British, the Mongols and even Alexander the Great — easy to conquer but difficult to keep.
