A two-hour lockdown of the Afghan Defense Ministry in Kabul on Tuesday following a security scare showed the psychological effects of several killings in Afghanistan. Media reports on Monday claimed that nearly a dozen explosives-laden suicide vests had been seized in relation to a plot to attack the ministry. Also on Monday, an Afghan soldier in southern Afghanistan killed two British troops, while a local Afghan policeman killed an American soldier in eastern Afghanistan.
None of Monday's developments constituted an inflection point in the Afghan war. The Afghan Defense Ministry has been attacked, and even breached, before. In February, an Afghan inside a supposedly secure portion of the Afghan Interior Ministry killed two American officers. And so-called “green-on-blue” incidents, in which Afghan security forces attack the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops they work alongside, have become increasingly commonplace in the last year. ISAF casualties have been quite low in 2012 so far; nearly a quarter of hostile fire deaths have been green-on-blue. U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, acknowledged Monday that infiltration is an issue, but he also framed it as a reality common to both the Iraq and Vietnam wars.
Stratfor has long argued that infiltration is an issue bound to emerge within any attempt to resolve a conflict by transferring the operational burden to indigenous forces — essentially a strategy of Vietnamization. This is particularly true when a distant foreign power is the occupying counterinsurgent force trying to screen and monitor a trustworthy indigenous security force under threat from an established indigenous insurgency. This proves to be an enormous challenge. Indeed, many green-on-blue incidents have nothing to do with infiltration (even if the Taliban claim responsibility for an incident or an assailant later flees to the Taliban for safety), and arise instead from ethnic, cultural or national tensions.
The question is not whether Monday's events constitute a turning point. An insurgent force occasionally succeeds in dealing a decisive blow (e.g. Dien Bien Phu in 1954), but more often succeeds by inflicting a thousand cuts that are cumulatively lethal. So the mounting impact of developments in Afghanistan is important. Allen is right to point out that these high-profile killings are unrepresentative and reflect only a small fraction of day-to-day ISAF-Afghan interactions. There are undoubtedly additional force-protection measures in place to manage even an expansion of such incidents.
But it seems to us that green-on-blue incidents in Afghanistan have exceeded those in Iraq, where a radically different power structure was in play both in terms of ethno-sectarianism and foreign sponsorship. So far, U.S. domestic opposition to the Afghan war has not matched the intensity of opposition to the Iraq war — and U.S. President Barack Obama has staked his presidency in part on commitment to the Afghan war. So a radical shift in policy in the near-term is unlikely. But the underlying U.S. strategy is to indigenize the conflict, which entails strengthening indigenous forces until they inspire confidence in the local populace. This strategy cannot succeed throughout Afghanistan, given its rugged terrain and diversity, but its broad effectiveness is critical.
Monday's incidents do not directly impact the existing trends in Afghanistan, but they are part of a chain of events that psychologically impact both ISAF and Afghan forces. The most effective way to undercut the indigenization strategy is to sow distrust between ISAF and indigenous forces at the decisive moment of hand-off — a time period already under way that will continue until drawdown is complete. Critically, Washington has already decided to withdraw, while the Taliban have not yet demonstrated such decisive tactical capability. So the Taliban's challenge is to strike in a way that disrupts the U.S. timetable, while making ISAF's presence significantly more untenable. The Taliban's window of opportunity is closing, however, and so far neither the United States nor its allies have been forced to alter the announced timetable for withdrawal.
