Afghan Army 'Will Lose Helmand'
Updated: 11:52am UK, Tuesday 07 January 2014
By Tim Marshall, Diplomatic Editor
The story of 10-year-old Spozhmai helps us to understand why the Taliban will take Helmand province when Nato troops leave Afghanistan at the end of the year.
The details are sketchy, nothing is proven, but the story still holds as a way of explaining why, after 10 years of training by Nato forces, the Afghan army will not be strong enough to hold on to the province.
It is claimed Spozhmai's brother, a Taliban commander, forced her to wear a suicide vest and ordered her to detonate it at a police checkpoint. Her story is that she became cold and frightened crossing a river and refused to carry out the mission.
Mao Tse Tung said that "the people are the stream in which revolutionaries swim". In this instance the girl appears to have been a very unwilling revolutionary, but she came from the people, and the people, her own family, are said to have ordered her to her death.
The majority of the population in southern Afghanistan are ethnically and linguistically Pashtun. However, most of the Afghan troops deployed to the south are from elsewhere and do not even speak Pashtun.
Afghanistan is not a nation state in the way most Western people understand the concept. Loyalty to country comes a long way down a list which includes family, tribe, and religion.
An Afghan soldier who is ethnically Tajik, or Uzbek, or a Persian speaking Hazara, may not be motivated in defending Pashtun Helmand from the predominantly Pashtun Taliban.
On the other hand the Taliban are operating on home territory, and crucially, are so fanatical they are willing to send children, even relatives, to their deaths as suicide bombers.
Faced with this degree of commitment, the Afghan army is unlikely to hold firm down south without the technical and physical back up of the Nato forces.
Helmand, and Kandahar, may not fall immediately, but within a couple of years it is quite possible the Afghan army will have retreated to defend Kabul and the north.
Nato commanders are fond of issuing statistics about how many tens of thousands of Afghan troops they have trained up to a decent standard and how increasingly "as we step back they will step forward".
A statistic they are less likely to draw attention to is the one which suggests that each year about 25% of Afghan soldiers desert.
President Hamid Karzai is still threatening to ensure that every single American soldier goes home by December 31.
However, he will not be president after this spring's elections, and anyway, his mind may be concentrated by the fate of the president in charge when the Taliban last rode into Kabul in 1996.
His predecessor was dragged out of the Presidential Palace and hanged from a lamp post.
A few thousand Americans near the capital might come in useful in 2015/16.
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