Remember This War?

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But Afghan forces are hardly ready to take up the slack. Retired U.S. General Barry McCaffrey, after an inspection trip in June, calls the Afghan army "miserably under-resourced," with "no mortars, few machine guns, no grenade machine guns and no artillery. Many soldiers and police have little ammunition and few magazines." The police are even worse off. Mohammad Akhunzada, the former governor of Helmand province in the south, says the police "are overwhelmed. They are fighting the Taliban with no support, with one magazine [of ammunition] between them. Sure, they call in the coalition forces, but they take 24 hours to arrive. How are they supposed to provide security under those conditions?" On top of this is a paradox at the heart of ISAF's strategy: a decision to overlook poppy cultivation, even though the opium trade is a central prop of the Taliban. But an eradication program would suck ISAF into a grinding war with locals who have no other way to earn a living.

All that leaves NATO governments in an awkward bind. They have had to acquiesce in the Pentagon's proposed drawdown of some 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan to ease pressure on its forces in Iraq, but their own elastic now seems fully stretched. "The Afghan effort is one people still very much support," says a defense official from France, which has more than 1,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan, "but we've got forces in the Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chad, Congo and Lebanon; there's only so much we can do." Unless NATO members "push this through to a successful end, and all together," says this official, "we may find ourselves back at the drawing board before long." Gianni Vernetti, an Italian Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, praises ISAF as "efficient multilateralism. We have a strong U.N. mandate, and, for us, Afghanistan is a long-term commitment," he says. Prime Minister Romano Prodi's center-left government struggled to keep its majority intact during parliamentary votes in July over whether to reaffirm its existing troop commitments to Afghanistan, but that pledge appears unshaken by Rome's subsequent decision to send a sizable force to Lebanon. Birgit Homburger, deputy head of Germany's Free Democratic Party, joins the European chorus that ISAF's mandate "must be extended. We cannot simply stop halfway through." Nevertheless, a recent poll showed that 56% of Germans want to "withdraw as quickly as possible from the country," with 38% disagreeing. The German parliament is due to vote in September.

Can the accumulation of worrying signs be reversed? During a visit to Afghanistan in July, Homburger was surprised by the optimism expressed by both Afghans and foreign workers despite the Taliban's attacks. "The population is aware they are being helped. They do see progress," she says. However, the awful logic of almost-failed states is hard to escape: without security, development is impossible, and without development, security is impossible. Only outside help can break that dynamic. Afghanistan is about to discover whether it may need a little more from its NATO friends than they're prepared to give.