Afghanistan: Losing Friends and Making Enemies?

The Senlis Council released a lengthy report yesterday on Afghanistan, 'Losing Friends and Making Enemies', based on 500+ interviews with average locals. I've only managed to scan the bulk of it this morning but the main thrust of it is sobering. As it says in the conclusion:

The International Community needs a reality check: we must fundamentally reassess the status of international community counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan The international community has failed to convince the local population that it is there to help and has failed to increase support for the Afghan government.

This has reinforced a situation in which the local Afghan population sees itself as being alone, faced on the one hand, by the international community and the government, and on the other hand by the Taliban and other insurgent groups.

The support that the international community enjoyed when it first arrived in the country has disappeared and must be rebuilt in order to provide a positive environment for the military to fight in and to build support for the Karzai Government in Southern Afghanistan.

We must acknowledge this reality and take immediate steps to turn around the dynamics between the international community and the local Afghan population. Despite the fact that counter-insurgency theory is normally understood to include many different policy areas, the counter-insurgency strategy used in Afghanistan is dominated by a military approach. The other elements of classic counter-insurgency responses such as humanitarian aid, development cooperation and infrastructure/institution building have been sorely neglected, under-funded and under-prioritized during the five years of international presence in Afghanistan.

This means that despite the significant military success in the south we are not able to establish government control in the south, nor can we establish meaningful security systems.

You can see the Canadian press on the report here which takes the line 'we're waging a losing war' and the British on the BBC here which takes a more equivocal view. My gut feeling is that the report slightly exaggerates the difficulty of the situation. I hear what David Kilcullen, Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism at the US State Department, quoted in the BBC report, is saying 'The fundamentals, the bones of the situation, in Afghanistan are quite sound...Challenges remain and will have to be tackled but the prospect for success remains good.' But I can't help thinking AQ's chief strategist could well be saying exactly the same thing. There's really no room for complacency.