[R-G] Germany Faces Taliban Pincer in North Afghanistan

[Anthony Fenton]

BUNDESWEHR UNDER PRESSURE
Germany Faces Taliban Pincer in Afghanistan
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,523805,00.html
By Alexander Szandar and Susanne Koelbl

The mission in Afghanistan is becoming more and more dangerous for  
members of Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr. As large numbers  
of Taliban fighters move northward, NATO officials expect the  
situation to become increasingly precarious.

NATO has so far failed to persuade the Bundeswehr to fight the  
Taliban in the south. But now the Taliban is heading north.
The guest from Afghanistan charmed his German audience with his  
measured words and soft voice. Asadullah Khalid, the 37-year-old  
governor of Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, praised the  
Germans for helping develop Afghanistan shortly after the end of  
British colonial rule in 1919. Six years ago, after the fall of the  
Taliban regime, the "traditional friendship" became "even deeper,"  
Khalid, clearly in an attempt to flatter the Germans. "Your soldiers  
are now fighting for freedom and democracy in Afghanistan," he said.

But the praise Khalid was heaping on Germany last Wednesday in  
speeches to foreign policy experts in the German parliament, the  
Bundestag, at the Foreign Office and to journalists in Berlin was  
merely a polite introduction to a series of concrete requests. The  
Taliban are "not as strong as they were last year" in their former  
stronghold of Kandahar, the governor said. But, he added, "coping  
with" the enemy will require more civilian reconstruction helpers,  
additional ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) troops and  
"especially more German troops."

Khalid's requests had been orchestrated elsewhere. The US government  
arranged his trip, which also took him to the NATO headquarters in  
Brussels, and US diplomats accompanied him every step of the way.  
Meanwhile in Washington, almost concurrently with the Afghan's visit  
to Berlin, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fired a broadside  
against his country's European allies. According to Gates, the  
Europeans' contributions, in terms of troops and materiel, to the war  
against the Taliban and terrorists are "inadequate." "I am not ready  
to let NATO off the hook in Afghanistan at this point," he added.

Washington has long criticized the Bundeswehr for remaining in the  
relatively calm north, while the United States and allies like Great  
Britain, Canada and the Netherlands face high casualties in the more  
volatile south. New British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called  
several times for a fair "distribution of the burden," a reference to  
both troop strength (London, with close to 7,800 troops, has the  
second-largest contingent in Afghanistan next to the United States)  
and casualties. The British have lost 42 soldiers in fighting and  
attacks in Afghanistan this year alone. Meanwhile the Germans, who,  
with their roughly 3,200 troops, have the third-largest contingent in  
the country, have lost only 3 soldiers in 2007.

Could German soldiers soon find themselves fighting in the embattled  
south and east of the country, in explosive provinces like Kandahar,  
Uruzgan and Helmand? So far the government in Berlin has successfully  
managed to avoid sending the Bundeswehr on combat missions in the  
Taliban's strongholds.

"We are concentrating on the north, and that's how we plan to keep  
it," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a brief visit to  
Kabul in November. Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, a member of  
Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has also stood his ground  
when confronted with the demands of Germany's allies and Khalid's  
recent requests. "The question as to whether we will have to expand  
our Bundeswehr contingent is not an issue at this time," Jung said.

But it could become an issue sooner than the minister would like.  
Allies like the Czech Republic, Denmark and Norway are withdrawing  
their units from northern Afghanistan. Because the troops, close to  
400 in number, are unlikely to be replaced anytime soon, the  
Bundeswehr's troops will have to shoulder their responsibilities  
themselves.

According to senior military officials in Berlin, the maximum troop  
strength of 3,500 soldiers approved by the Bundestag is already  
"pushing the limits" and is in fact too low.

To make matters worse, the Taliban is upping the pressure on northern  
Afghanistan. The group's Islamist holy warriors have begun to march  
northward and are already practically at the Bundeswehr's doorstep.

Western intelligence agents have noticed that the Taliban is  
advancing in two directions in a pincer movement. Some Taliban groups  
are moving north from Helmand Province, Afghanistan's center of opium  
poppy cultivation, toward the capital Kabul. Other Taliban units are  
moving away from Helmand and Kandahar and sweeping up westwards  
through provinces like Herat and Badghis, and toward Kunduz, where  
the Bundeswehr maintains a reconstruction team of 400 troops. The  
Germans, as it turns out, are being wedged in on both sides.

Taliban Repeats its 1990s Strategy

The Taliban's strategy reminds military officials of the early 1990s.  
That was when the Taliban movement began in southern Afghanistan,  
almost exclusively home to ethnic Pashtuns. The group's army of  
religious warriors began its campaign in Kandahar in 1994. Three  
years later it was positioned just outside Mazar-i-Sharif, where, at  
Camp Marmal, the Germans now maintain their central command  
headquarters for nine provinces.

Mazar-i-Sharif is the main city in the north. It is home to Tajiks,  
Uzbeks, Hazaras and Turkmen, all traditional enemies of the Taliban.  
But Pashtuns have also settled in Kunduz Province, enabling the  
Taliban to gain a foothold there in the 1990s. In the interplay of  
relations among Afghans, clan membership has traditionally been the  
strongest binding force.

In 1997, with the support of Kunduz's Pashtuns, the Taliban launched  
a successful attack on Mazar-i-Sharif. They captured the city's  
downtown, lost it again for a brief period, but then eventually took  
the city and held it until the Americans and their Afghan allies  
arrived in November 2001.

It appears that the Taliban now plan to repeat their 1990s strategy.  
In October, close to 300 fighters gathered in the border region in  
Faryab and Badghis provinces, both on the western edge of the German  
zone. They overran police stations, occupied several districts and  
blocked the "Ring Road," the country's main road connecting Kabul  
with other cities. They received support from Pashtun settlers and  
poor refugees from the civil war who had returned from Pakistan and  
Iran.

The counteroffensive began in late October. Under the command of  
German General Dieter Warnecke, roughly 900 Afghan soldiers,  
accompanied by about 300 Germans and a rapid intervention force of  
more than 200 Norwegians, set out into Badghis Province.

For the first time since they joined the mission in Afghanistan, the  
Germans, in an operation known as "Harekate Yolo-2," requested air  
support from allied fighter jets. More than a dozen Taliban fighters  
were killed in the bombing attacks, while Afghan forces took many  
others prisoner. But most of the Taliban fighters managed to escape  
into the countryside.

The intelligence agencies believe that the Taliban plans to recapture  
its old base at Kunduz, using tactics that would presumably resemble  
its strategy in the south. It promises poor farmers money and  
protection for their poppy fields, intimidates the local population  
with brutal attacks on supposed ISAF collaborators and attempts to  
weaken the NATO forces with attacks and force them to retreat to  
their fortified military bases.

The suicide attack on a German patrol in the market at Kunduz on May  
19, 2007 may have represented the first step in a strategy meant to  
destabilize the region, which had been relatively quiet until then.  
Three German soldiers and five Afghans were killed in the attack.

The Taliban has since ramped up its attacks, routinely shooting at  
Bundeswehr vehicles and firing rockets and rocket-propelled grenades  
into camps and threatening German soldiers with booby traps and  
mines. Reconnaissance photos reveal that the Taliban fighters have no  
qualms about disguising themselves and their weapons under burkas,  
the traditional women's clothing.