NYT : Peacekeeper Commander Mired in Afghan Combat

Peacekeeper Commander Mired in Afghan Combat

By CARLOTTA GALL | October 15, 2006

KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 14 — Leaning against the red webbing that passes for upholstery in a military aircraft, Gen. David Richards, the British commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, scanned a press clip as he flew back to the capital from Kandahar, the center of combat operations in the south.

The article was by a well-known British columnist who had written in The Guardian that he was “baffled by Richards’s naïveté about the Taliban.” The author, Simon Jenkins, contended that NATO could not possibly win against an enemy that could “count on the tacit support of tens of thousands of fighters from tribal militias.”

“I am not naïve; he’s naïve,” General Richards shouted over the roar of the plane engines. He dismissed as “nonsense” the idea that the surge by the Taliban across southern Afghanistan this year was driven by ideology or Pashtun tribal grievances.

“This is not a huge popular uprising,” he added, bristling. “And to distort the truth is so unjust for the people here who want us. And it is unhelpful since it undermines the fabric of what we are doing.”

“People do not want a return to the Taliban,” he said, “but we need time to allow that aspiration to win.”

Already half through his one-year command in Afghanistan, General Richards, 54, does not have much time.

He now commands the 31,000 troops of the International Security Assistance Force, including 12,000 American troops, spread across the whole country.

The British general, who has led NATO’s most elite fighting force, the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, since 2001, served three tours in Northern Ireland, and was commander of British peacekeeping forces three times — in East Timor in 1999 and twice in Sierra Leone in 2000.

When he arrived in Afghanistan in February, he talked like a peacekeeper, too, emphasizing the need to improve security so reconstruction and development projects could take root, to extend the government’s reach, and to win hearts and minds.

He vowed to do things differently than the Americans. He said that NATO soldiers would treat detainees in a transparent way, respect Islam and Afghan culture, and raid houses only if necessary.

But the general was quickly forced to put many of those plans aside and engage in hard fighting, not least to show the insurgents, and the wavering local population, that his troops were a force to be reckoned with.

Even before he took command of the turbulent south, Taliban insurgents were swarming in numbers not seen since 2001. General Richards estimates that his troops now face 4,000 to 5,000 Taliban fighters.

The summer months were consumed by heavy fighting. The general’s forces came under repeated attacks, both on patrol and at their bases, forcing NATO to call in air and artillery strikes that inevitably killed scores of the very civilians he was trying to win over. It was not exactly the hearts-and-minds strategy he had planned. Still, the general insists his forces were fully ready: they had spent nine months preparing for the mission, because the NATO deployment was delayed by several months.

“We knew there was a lot of opposition,” he said, this time in an interview in his headquarters in Kabul, set between the United States Embassy and the presidential palace. “We had been watching it, and the Americans were very forthcoming with their intelligence.”

“There were doubts about NATO and our ability to conduct demanding security operations,” he said. “There are no questions about our ability now.”

The fighting was regrettable, but necessary, he added. “We’ve killed, sadly — because in many respects some of them are just unemployed young Afghan men who need employment and are paid cynically by the Taliban to do their dirty stuff for them.

“But we have killed many hundreds of Taliban in the last month, chiefly in Kandahar and Helmand, and it has put paid to any doubt in anyone’s mind that NATO can do what we were sent here to do.”

Recently, there have, indeed, been some successes. Not least, his forces regained control of Panjwai, a district just 15 miles west of Kandahar, the main southern city, where the Taliban had gathered in large numbers. The victory was vital for its strategic and psychological impact, the general said.

“The Taliban were very cocky about Panjwai,” he said on his visit to Kandahar during the operation. “They think they can face us down. We will prove to them that they are defeatable. It’s very important for people to see that happening, and the rather worried atmospherics will change overnight.”

The general says that about 10 percent of the population in the south may support the Taliban, that 20 percent are opposed to them, and that the rest are stuck in the middle.

“They are straightforward, simple folk who above all want security for their family, and they will go with whichever side can convince them they are going to win,” he said. “And that 70 percent must not be allowed to slip into the hands of the Taliban this autumn.”

That will mean rolling out tangible benefits — in the form of assistance — as soon as security allows, he said.

“It’s a very important psychological, physical, military and wider campaign that we are conducting, and I think this autumn is a critical period,” he said. “And that’s my main focus at the moment, getting those visible improvements, in security, governance and reconstruction and development to start happening in the south so that we can persuade that 70 percent that we will win.”

Yet in his time in Afghanistan, General Richards has seen up close just how weak and ill equipped the Afghan government is to handle a crisis, like the riots that broke out in Kabul after an American military truck plowed into civilian cars, killing at least four people, in May.

He also found a startling lack of coordination among the government, the military and foreign donors, which he described as “anarchy” in his first weeks on the job.

He set to work to help President Hamid Karzai form a kind of privy council to convene crucial ministers and security officials, as well as United States and NATO commanders and ambassadors of leading donor countries, the United Nations and European Union. Called the Policy Action Group, it meets weekly and is designed to bring badly needed coordination to security and aid efforts.

“It’s a pretty powerful structure,” said one NATO official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and who credited General Richards with the idea. “This is his war cabinet; this is the bit he never had.”

There is still a long way to go. He talks of the need to combat corruption, replace bad government officials and persuade international donors to drop their lengthy procedures and tendering rules to help reconstruction aid flow.

“I am not giving the rosy picture,” he said on the military flight. “I’ll be honest. There’s a lot to do.”

Correction: December 20, 2006

An article on Oct. 10 about fighting in Afghanistan misstated the rank of David Richards, the British military officer who commands NATO troops in Afghanistan. (The error was repeated in articles on Oct. 15, Nov. 14, Nov. 17 and last Wednesday.) He is a full general, not a lieutenant general. A NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Nick Grant-Thorold, pointed out the error in an e-mail message on Sunday, saying that General Richards had been promoted on Oct. 7, a day after NATO took over command of eastern Afghanistan from American forces.