Understanding the Taliban and Insurgency in Afghanistan

Afghanistan is in danger of capsizing in a perfect storm of insurgency that mimics operations and tactics witnessed in Iraq. This article assesses this insurgency and the re-emergent Taliban. The common view of the Taliban as simply a radical Afghan Islamist movement is overly simple, for that organization has been able to build on tribal kinship networks and a charismatic mullah phenomenon to mobilize a critical and dynamic rural base of support. This support, buttressed by Talib reinforcements from Pakistan’s border areas, is enough to frustrate the U.S.-led Coalition’s counterinsurgency strategy. At the operational level, the Taliban is fighting a classic ‘‘war of the flea,’’ while the Coalition continues to fight the war largely according to the Taliban ‘‘game plan.’’ This is resulting in its losing the war in Afghanistan one Pashtun village at a time. A fter nearly thirty years of continuous war in Afghanistan, the country’s American-backed, post-Taliban government is now struggling. President Hamid Karzai’s government is encountering extreme difficulty extending control and mandate outside Kabul into the country’s hinterland regions. Undermining President Karzai’s efforts to build a truly national government with national control is a resurgent Taliban backed by Al Qaeda, which together are mounting an increasingly virulent insurgency, especially in the east and south, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. While then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested in May 2003 that the war in Afghanistan was in a ‘‘cleanup’’ phase, now, nearly five years since 1 Rowan Scarborough, ‘‘War on Terrorism in ‘Cleanup’ Phase,’’ Washington Times, May 2,