Taliban Bribe Scandal Shows Need for Unified Strategy

In Afghanistan, on August 18, 2008, an ambush took place in Uzbin, about 10 kilometers from the town of Sarobi, costing the French 10 dead (mostly from the 8th Parachute Regiment). Italian units had been in charge of the sector, east of Kabul, before transferring it to the newly arrived French in 2008.

Earlier this week, an article from The Times gave a shocking explanation for the ambush. According to the article, the reason why the sector was supposed to be quiet was because the Italians had bribed the local Taliban. By transferring thousands of dollars to the insurgents, the Italian intelligence service would have been able to buy peace. Not wanting to disclose that dirty little secret, they would have forgotten to warn the French that their business partners were expecting the payments to keep going. The ambush, then, was essentially a way for the Taliban to express, in their own way, the hope that the previous partnership would continue.

The ambush at Uzbin arrived just in time to make it harder for the French government to secure the necessary parliamentary vote needed to approve the ongoing military presence in Afghanistan. As scheduled, the vote took place a month later. The French public was already, and still is, skeptical about the mission. According to an August 2009 poll, 64% of the French are opposed to French participation.  The political majority was – and still broadly is – on board, which made it easy for Sarkozy to get the parliamentary approval, but the Socialist opposition voted against it, despite the fact that it was decided under Lionel Jospin’s Socialist government, back in 2001. In the meantime, the Socialists had switched to the comfortable “unwinnable war/quagmire” talking point.

In many ways, it’s hard not to love Italy. But when it comes to military performance, Italy hasn’t exactly been a model since at least Vittorio Veneto, while the country has been more often than not associated with stories of corruption and bribery. So it is not surprising to see that country involved in the latest scandal about Afghanistan, however unfair that may be. But if the scandal gets worse, Italy will not be the only victim. The story that the ambush may have been connected to the ending of Italian bribes for the Taliban is strange for several reasons.

If the Taliban wanted money from the French, why didn’t they simply ask for it before setting an ambush that cost them about three times as many dead as their opponents? And if they did ask and were rebuffed, why were the French (who were accompanied by some U.S. Special Forces) not more cautious when they organized the patrol? Why, for instance, did they decline air support?

Things may be more complicated. It is also quite possible that the Italians were too optimistic when they declared Uzbin a safe area. Besides, the French infantry was still re-learning to fight a real war, its previous experiences being mostly limited to peace-keeping missions in the Balkans or relatively easier stabilization operations in Africa. It is also possible that the Taliban knew about the coming vote in the French Parliament, which could, at least in theory, result in an immediate French withdrawal. The upcoming vote was reported by the press, after all.

As for the payments, the Times story is based on testimonies which may look genuine, but may also miss part of the big picture. Indeed, bribing the insurgent does not look like a good way to eliminate them, but bribing the population is fully part of the counterinsurgency book (including General Petraeus’ 2006 manual). But when money is transferred to Afghan locals through the funding of local projects, part of it necessarily ends up in the pocket of local armed groups, provided they have some influence in the area. In other cases, as the Times also reported, payments may facilitate the passage of convoys in relatively quiet sectors.

It must also be kept in mind that the “enemy” in Afghanistan is really several factions more or less opposed to each other, including radical Islamists, drug producers and exporters or simply local warlords. Paying some of them may make it easier to fight others, or even induce them to fight one another. Feudal politics has never been simple, and that particularly applies to Afghanistan. Ahmad Shah Massoud sometimes had to renegotiate deals with allied warlords in the middle of a battle. An Afghan warlord cannot be bought: he can only be rented. If renting the right warlords at the right time makes it easier to reach the coalition’s most important goals – keeping Afghanistan from being a terrorist sanctuary – then it is not necessarily a bad idea.

So overall, the Times story does not in itself prove that the Italians, living up to their military reputation, did nothing and paid the Taliban to pretend they had secured the area. But it does suggest that counterinsurgency, a complicated strategy in itself, becomes even more difficult when it is done by a coalition. Transferring a sector between two units from the same country is complicated enough. Between two countries, it can only get worse.

But the public, which is already hostile to the mission in several countries, might not buy that sort of explanation. The Times suggests, maybe wrongly, that at least one coalition member is unreliable, but what about the others? The French paper Le Monde, reports rumors about similar payments made by Canadian and German troops in other sectors. Does it mean that the situation is even worse than we thought? Are the quiet sectors quiet because we bribe the enemy, and not because we control anything? Is the new recruiting slogan “travel the world, meet interesting people and bribe them”? And what about Iraq? Is the surge nothing but a massive bribery in exchange for a quiet exit? That sort of simplistic view might get mainstream faster than we think and make operations in Afghanistan even harder to explain.

That makes it more urgent for President Obama to settle on a strategy and not waste too much time pondering the different options. Some leadership is needed before the coalition starts melting down. The Times story is an early warning. Maybe we should pay attention to it.