Afghanistan. Southward ho!

Date: 05/11/05

NATO plans a date with the Taliban

ON OCTOBER 29th, a British soldier in northern Mazar-i-Sharif became the first combat fatality of the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan this year. In the same period, 59 American troops serving with an American-led coalition force have been killed by Taliban insurgents in the south and east of the country - as well as more than 1,000 Afghans in fighting there. The contrast between the NATO-led lot and the American-led lot is striking. Whereas the latter force is 17,000-strong and engaged in counter-insurgency, NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) of around 9,000 troops timidly patrols Kabul and a few towns of the north and west, where there is no insurgency. But this will soon change. NATO is headed for the perilous south.

The advance will be co-ordinated by the alliance's expeditionary command headquarters, the British-run Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), which is due in Kabul next April, for a nine-month stay running ISAF. Part of its job will be to take over three small coalition garrisons dedicated to reconstruction - known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) - in three southern provinces: 200 Canadians are already in Kandahar, a similar number of British will go to Helmand, and a combination of Dutch and Australians to Uruzgan.

The PRT model was designed by America as a low-cost way to please Afghans. It has been adopted by ISAF in northern and western Afghanistan, where it has the double advantage of requiring few troops and satisfying European governments that their fighters are unlikely to get killed. In western Herat, for example, ISAF has 150 Italian soldiers. Asked to describe their security provisions, an Italian officer said he had issued the local police with bicycles.

In southern Afghanistan, home to the xenophobic Pushtuns, stiffer provisions are needed. Each PRT there will be protected by a battlegroup of around 1,000 NATO soldiers, also reporting to the ARRC. The British PRT in Lashkargar, for example, will be supported by a beefed-up British battalion, probably of the Royal Anglian regiment, that also will train Afghan troops. In addition, the ARRC will command a mobile reserve of 1,000 British troops, mostly paratroops, based in Kandahar. They will be supported by an American aviation battalion, of the coalition, and 12 NATO Apache attack helicopters, six Dutch and six British.

In typical NATO fashion, more effort has been spent on reaching a consensus to send ISAF south - with, for example, timorous Germany reluctant to leave the north - than on working out what it will do when it gets there. Under real threat of attack in the south, ISAF troops will require less restrictive rules of engagement, though they are unlikely to seek fights in the way the Americans do. And though Britain is leading the effort against opium production in Afghanistan, and talks of giving its troops a counter-narcotics mission in the south, it is unclear what this might be, and whether European governments would let their troops fulfil it.

In theory, ISAF's advance south should lead to a merging of the two forces in Afghanistan. But with most European NATO members still unwilling actually to fight, America will keep charge of the rough stuff, even if its troops are melded into ISAF. Whether the merger happens next year, as America wants, may depend on how many NATO troops in the south the Taliban manage to kill in the interim.