The Taliban at War: Inside the Helmand Insurgency, 2004–2012
The Taliban at war: inside the Helmand insurgency, 2004–2012 THEO FARRELL AND ANTONIO GIUSTOZZI* Ten years ago the Taliban appeared to have been defeated. In retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, the United States had invaded Afghanistan and, in a matter of months, had overthrown the Taliban regime.1 In December 2001 Hamid Karzai had been appointed the interim Afghan president by a loya jirga (grand council), and in January 2002 the international community had agreed to provide extensive assis- tance to stabilize and rebuild the Afghan state. By mid-2002, US and British task forces were chasing the last remnants of the Taliban out of the country and hunting down Al-Qaeda terrorists.2 A decade later, Karzai is still in power and Afghanistan has received massive international developmental and security assistance.3 But the Afghan state is also battling a Taliban insurgency that shows little sign of abating. How did the Taliban return to Afghanistan, and why have they not been defeated? We answer these questions by looking inside the Afghan insurgency, using Helmand province as a case-study. We draw on a large number of original interviews with Taliban field commanders and fighters to produce a uniquely detailed picture of the Taliban at war. The picture that emerges is of a resilient insurgency that has adapted under immense military pressure to become more centralized and more professional. The Taliban have suffered very heavy attrition in Helmand, but they are far from defeated. Up to now, assessments of the war have been primarily based on analysis of western and Afghan government efforts.4 In this article, we examine how the * For feedback on earlier drafts of this article, we wish to thank Mark Beautement, Ryan Evans, Carter Malkasian, Mike Martin and the two anonymous reviewers, as well as audiences at presentations in 2012–13 in the ‘Changing character of war’ programme at Oxford University, the Afghan Studies Group at King’s College London, and the Centre for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark.
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