The Islamic State (IS) is establishing “little nests” in Afghanistan, adding to the complex array of threats confronting Afghan forces and their international partners as they try to reverse a serious decline in security, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said on Friday.
Carter was visiting Operating Base Fenty in eastern Afghanistan, where he conferred with General John Campbell, the US commander of the international coalition that is supporting Afghan forces, and Mohammed Masoom Stanekzai, the acting Afghan defense minister.
Campbell painted a sobering picture of the fighting ahead, although he said the US military was trying to help the Afghan forces adapt so that they could limit their casualties.
Photo: AP
“We just went through a very tough fighting season,” Campbell told reporters traveling with Carter. “We don’t even talk in terms of fighting seasons anymore because it is kind of continuous fighting.”
Operating Base Fenty, which has about 600 US troops, is one of the so-called enduring bases that the US intends to keep open after next year, as outlined in US President Barack Obama’s amended plan for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. The base, near Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, was named after Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Fenty Jr., who was killed in a helicopter crash in 2006 while overseeing the extraction of a scout team in the mountains nearby.
A senior Defense Department official described the area as a “gateway” for militant groups seeking to make their way toward Kabul, the Afghan capital, and other critical areas.
“The kind of defensive action that occurs as far out as Fenty is really important for other parts of the country,” said the official, who could not be identified under the Pentagon’s protocol for briefing reporters.
The Taliban have been a formidable adversary, overrunning checkpoints and briefly occupying the northern city of Kunduz as they seek to put themselves in a position of strength in the event of peace talks.
The Haqqani network, based in neighboring Pakistan, presents the greatest threat to Kabul, while an affiliate of al-Qaeda has established a training camp in the Kandahar area. As the fighting has intensified, government forces and the Taliban have suffered more casualties.
“In the second half of this year, the overall security situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, with an increase in effective insurgent attacks and higher ANDSF and Taliban casualties,” the Pentagon said in a report issued this week, using the initials for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.
“From the beginning of January through mid-November, there was a 27 percent increase in Afghan security force casualties compared with a comparable period last year,” it added.
The IS is a new wild card. Western officials initially believed that a breakaway faction of the Taliban in Afghanistan was merely using the Islamic State name, primarily to distinguish itself from other militants.
However, in recent months, the core group of the IS, which has declared a caliphate in much of Syria and Iraq, delivered several hundred thousand US dollars to the Afghan fighters, which has helped them gain ground and recruits.
Campbell said there were 1,000 to 3,000 fighters in Afghanistan from the IS. Over the past five months, they have begun to coalesce in Nangarhar province, sometimes clashing with their Taliban rivals.
The fighters’ goal, he said, is to move into the city of Jalalabad, expand to neighboring Kunar province and eventually establish control of a region they call Khorasan, an old name for an area that includes Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“They haven’t kept it any kind of secret,” Campbell said. The group does not yet have the ability to plan and carry out attacks in Europe or the US, he added, but “left unchecked, it would.”
As the IS’ strength has grown in Afghanistan, rumors have spread that the government is secretly supporting the group.
At a joint news conference with Carter, Stanekzai dismissed the idea as anti-government propaganda and said that he had consulted on Friday with local elders to discuss ways to prevent the group from gaining a larger foothold in Nangarhar province.
Campbell said he was taking a number of steps to help the Afghan forces, including encouraging them to shift personnel away from checkpoints, where they are more vulnerable and less effective, and increasing efforts to train their military leaders.
To help Afghanistan build an air force, the US is also funding the acquisition of A-29 turboprop aircraft, 20 of which are to be provided by 2018. The first eight aircraft are to be delivered early next year.
The trip to Afghanistan was Carter’s first since Obama scrapped his initial troop withdrawal plan as militants gained strength and the new Afghan government looked to the US for more support.
Under the new plan, the Obama administration is to keep 9,800 troops in the country through almost all of next year, at which point the number would be reduced to 5,500.
Stanekzai said Afghanistan wanted a long-term security arrangement with the US and suggested that any troop withdrawal plans should be adaptable enough to deal with changing threats, not based on a rigid timeline.
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