Nato commander probes Helmand lessons

General Stanley McChrystal, the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, has said that the alliance’s next military operation in the south of the country will be delayed for several months as it learns from mistakes made in February’s major military engagement in central Helmand.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Gen McChrystal said planning was still under way for operations to clear out the Taliban from the suburbs of Kandahar city, one of the insurgency’s biggest strongholds. However, he said Nato’s offensive operation in Kandahar would no longer take place this summer, as planned, adding that “you won’t see decisive efforts” until autumn.

Gen McChrystal said Nato would take a “more deliberate” approach on Kandahar city because it was learning lessons from its operation in the town of Marjah, the Taliban stronghold in central Helmand cleared by alliance troops in February.

Speaking in Brussels, where he was attending a meeting of Nato defence ministers, Gen McChrystal said the alliance had provided security for the Marjah area “fairly rapidly”. However, he said efforts to provide police and civic services in Marjah had been insufficiently effective, amid reports that the Taliban are still a presence in the area.

“The biggest lesson we learned from Marjah was that the Afghan governance that we bring in ... needs to be as robust as possible.

“It would have been helpful if we had been able to produce the number of civil servants and other facilities needed. We had that intent, that’s what we . . . tried to do. But we did it less well than we would like to do it for the future.”

He said a major challenge for Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government would be to ensure that an adequate level of governance was established in Kandahar city in the next few months ahead of Nato plans to remove the Taliban from the city suburbs. “I think it’s a tremendous opportunity for them to focus national energy and effort on an area that Afghans consider worthy of that,” he said.

Gen McChrystal, who took over as Nato commander in Afghanistan one year ago, said he was confident that the alliance operation would eventually create a stable and independent Afghan government that could fend for itself.

“I am confident that this [mission] can be done, that success can be achieved,” he said.

He acknowledged “there has to be visible progress by the end of this year,” suggesting that November’s annual summit of Nato heads of government in Lisbon would be a critical moment for an assessment of the campaign.

“We must be able to get indicators that are convincing people that the campaign is making progress,” he said. “At the Nato Lisbon conference, that will be expected of me, and I expect to be able to deliver on that.”

However, the General also acknowledged that the next six months would be demanding for Nato member nations: “Operationally it will be tough to the end of the year, casualties will stay high and may go higher than they are now.”

He conceded that President Karzai’s government faced a tough challenge to establish confidence in his government across the country. “The government has not produced a compelling narrative or demonstrated the capacity to be credible . . . The government is more popular [than the Taliban]. But it does not have the level of credibility that it needs to build the confidence of the Afghan people.”

In Helmand, Gen McChrystal said that, by the end of this year the security situation “will be significantly better than it is today”.

“I think you will find the population being convinced. I don’t claim that in Helmand [security] will be complete. But it will be significantly further along and we will get that sense that this is working.”

However, he said that the situation in Kandahar would be more mixed by the end of this year because the surge there was starting later. “Inside the city security will be significantly better as we increase the police and partnering [with Afghan forces]. Around the city, security will still be in the middle of a difficult struggle . . . Those areas will go from Taliban control to at least being contested.”

Overall, the general said he expected that over the next six months the Taliban effort across the country would be depleted. “I expect that at the end of this year the Taliban will have made a very energetic effort. They will have pushed as much violence as they can. But their ability to come out in 2011 will be less credible than it was in 2010.”