Afghanistan Feature: Unprecedented "Civilian Surge" Begins for 468th Time

Forgive the headline, but I have read varieties of this story so often in the past 8+ years that I had to smile when it was framed as a seemingly dramatic change of approach --- "Afghanistan Strategy Shifts to Focus on Civilian Effort" --- by The New York Times for Rod Nordland's story.



I leave it to readers to convert the public-relations spin into political, economic, and military significance, especially given the revised narrative of the Marja "victory" and the apparent delay in the "Kandahar offensive", which had been promised by the US military since early this year:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The prospect of a robust military push in Kandahar Province, which had been widely expected to begin this month, has evolved into a strategy that puts civilian reconstruction efforts first and relegates military action to a supportive role.

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The strategy, Afghan, American and NATO civilian and military officials said in interviews, was adopted because of opposition to military action from an unsympathetic local population and Afghan officials here and in Kabul.

There are also concerns that a frontal military approach has not worked as well as hoped in a much smaller area in Marja, in neighboring Helmand Province.

The goal that American planners originally outlined — often in briefings in which reporters agreed not to quote officials by name — emphasized the importance of a military offensive devised to bring all of the populous andTaliban-dominated south under effective control by the end of this summer. That would leave another year to consolidate gains before President Obama’s July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing combat troops.

In fact, there has been little new fighting in Kandahar so far, and the very word “offensive” has been banished.

“We cannot say the term offensive for Kandahar,” said the Afghan National Army officer in charge here, Gen. Sher Mohammad Zazai. “It is actually a partnership operation.”

The commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, insisted that there never was a planned offensive. “The media have chosen to use the term offensive,” he said.  Instead, he said, “we have certainly talked about a military uplift, but there has been no military use of the term offensive.”

Whatever it is called, it is not happening this month. Views vary widely as to just when the military part will start. General Zazai says it will begin in July but take a break for Ramadan in mid-August and resume in mid-September. A person close to Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar, says it will not commence until winter, or at least not until harvests end in October. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

American officials, on the other hand, say it has already begun, not with a bang, but with a steady increase of experts from the United States Embassy and NATO and aid workers — a “civilian surge” — accompanied by a quiet increase in American troops to provide security for them. The Americans strongly deny that they planned an offensive they are now backing away from.

Whereas in Marja the plan was to carry out a military assault to oust the Taliban, followed by rapid delivery of government services, in Kandahar the approach is now the opposite. Civilian aid workers, protected by an increased military force, will try to provide those services first, before any major military action.

“This is not going to be a door-to-door military campaign,” said one American civilian official, who requested anonymity in line with his agency’s policy. “You’ll see more Afghan National Police checkpoints, but it’s not going to be an aggressive military campaign. They’ve looked at it and realized it wouldn’t work.”

The troops have been arriving on schedule; for the first time, Afghanistan now has more American soldiers than Iraq does. Some 94,000 are here, compared with 92,000 in Iraq, with roughly half of them in Helmand and Kandahar, though the full troop levels will not be reached until August.

The United States Marine Corps assault on Marja that began on Feb. 13 was called Operation Moshtarak Phase II (after the Dari word for “together”), and planners initially called the Kandahar offensive Operation Moshtarak Phase III. Now Phase III has a new name, Operation Hamkari (Dari for “cooperation”).

“I’m not sure exactly what happened at the political level above us, but the very name of the thing changed,” said one NATO official in Kandahar, whose government’s policy requires that his name be withheld.

It is not so much what happened as what did not. Marja did not go nearly as well as hoped, and the area is still not sufficiently controlled for the local government’s activities to resume or take root.

Marja, with 60,000 residents, is far smaller than Kandahar, with more than a million in the city and the surrounding districts. If Marja was hard, planners worried, what might Kandahar be?

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