[R-G] The long, hard slog against scrappy Taliban fighters

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/08/12/the_long_hard_slog_against_scrappy_taliban_fighters/

H.D.S. Greenway
The Boston Globe
The long, hard slog against scrappy Taliban fighters
August 12, 2008

'RAGTAG TALIBAN Show Tenacity in Afghanistan," read the headline last  
week. Washington and NATO capitals were reportedly "soul-searching"  
over how a disheveled insurgency had managed to "keep the world's most  
powerful armies at bay." This should hardly have come as a surprise.

There is a certain irony for those of us who were up on the North-West  
Frontier in the 1980s interviewing Islamic fighters who, from their  
safe bases in Pakistan, were making life miserable for the Soviets in  
Afghanistan. I once visited a training camp just over the border where  
insurgents were being trained in guerrilla tactics and in making bombs  
to be smuggled into Kabul. I guess you would have to say they were  
terrorists, but they were our terrorists so we called them freedom  
fighters. As for the Russians, they were always being taken by  
surprise at the tenacity of their ragtag opponents.

The Afghan insurgents were masters of terrain. They knew how to  
flatten themselves on hillsides, their bodies covered by long cloaks  
with not even their fingernails showing lest they reflect light to  
passing helicopters overhead.

The Soviets tried to overwhelm the guerrillas with firepower, bombing  
villages into dust, causing more and more young men to join the  
resistance. The Afghans who had thrown their lot in with the Russians  
seemed evermore isolated in their cities while the insurgents roamed  
the countryside.

Today's insurgents, again from their safe havens in Pakistan, are  
making life miserable for foreigners in Afghanistan, only this time  
the foreigners are Americans and their allies.

Allah has always held a mighty hold over the Pashtuns of the frontier.  
During the Raj, the British fought endless campaigns against this or  
that jihad-driven uprising, right up until World War II drew Britain's  
attention elsewhere.

One such dust-up came when a Muslim captured a Hindu girl and forced  
her to convert. She was rescued, but the tribesmen were furious that  
the girl had been taken away from the embrace of Islam, and the voice  
of jihad was heard in the land.

A Mullah Omar of his time was the Faqir of Ipi, who right up into the  
1950s bedeviled the British and then the Pakistanis trying to carve  
out an independent Pashtun state out of the frontier on both sides of  
the border.

When the British left they bequeathed to Pakistan the same old problem  
of tribal areas that were not fully absorbed into the state. And on  
the frontier soldiers from the Punjab are almost as foreign as  
Englishmen.

Listen to the quandary the British faced fighting on the frontier, as  
described by the writer John Masters, who served with the Prince of  
Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles in the 1935 Waziristan campaign. "The core  
of our problem was to force battle on an elusive and mobile enemy  
(who) tried to avoid battle, and instead fight us with pinpricking hit- 
and-run tactics." Only when the tribesmen tried to hold territory were  
they "pulverized." When they "sniped, rushed, and ran away we felt as  
if we were using a crowbar to swat wasps." America and NATO face the  
same problems today.

Long ago in Vietnam, Americans were constantly being surprised at the  
resilience of their ragtag enemies. The United States unleashed  
unimaginable firepower, tried to win hearts and minds, and reinvented  
counterinsurgency tactics that were learned in the Philippines in the  
19th century but forgotten. Today the country is reinventing  
antiguerrilla tactics it knew in the 20th century but forgot.

The story of the fight for Afghanistan is filled with what-ifs. What  
if the United States had concentrated on Afghanistan when the Soviets  
left? What if resources and attention had not been pulled from  
Afghanistan instead of invading Iraq? What if Omar and Osama bin Laden  
had not slipped through America's fingers to escape into the frontier  
territories?

The Taliban recognize no border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and  
they know all the passes from which we watched a previous generation  
of insurgents slip through to fight the Soviets. The fighters know,  
too, that to win all they have to do is not lose, and eventually the  
foreigners will leave. The fate of Afghanistan will then be up to the  
Afghans. This is how it has always been.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.