KABUL, Afghanistan – The U.S. military trainers handed the new recruit, Mohammad Ismail, his AK-47 to defend his remote Afghan village. He turned around and immediately used it, spraying the Americans with bullets and killing two – the latest of nine U.S. service personnel gunned down in two weeks by their supposed Afghan allies.
The shooting in western Farah province was not the only such attack Friday. Hours later a few provinces away in Kandahar, an Afghan soldier wounded two more coalition troopers.
One turncoat attack per month raised eyebrows last year. One per week caused concern earlier this year. But when Afghan forces turn their guns on international trainers twice in a day – as they now have two weeks in a row – it’s hard to argue there’s not something going on. The question is, what is it?
The U.S.-led alliance says it’s too soon to tell what’s behind the rash of insider attacks. The most likely explanations: Either the Taliban are increasingly infiltrating the Afghan police and army, or relations between Afghan and American forces are turning toxic – or both.
“There’s no positive spin on this,” said Andrew Exum, an analyst with the Washington-based Center for a New American Security who has advised the top U.S. generals in Kabul. He said the number of Afghan insider attacks has risen beyond what can be explained as isolated incidents.
That’s bad news for the U.S. exit strategy for Afghanistan, which has seen Washington spend more than $20 billion on training and equipping a nearly 340,000-member Afghan security force on the assumption that it would eventually be strong enough to fight the Taliban on its own.
The coalition has downplayed the insider attacks as anomalies and mostly a result of personal grievances, even as their numbers soared from 11 last year to 29 so far in 2012. The alliance says only about 10 percent of the attacks were related to infiltration by the Taliban insurgency. But that analysis was done before the latest furious spate of seven attacks in 11 days, a frequency that suggests some type of coordination.
“Whether or not these specific events turn out to be insurgent-initiated … we’re just going to have to do the investigations and figure that out,” said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition.
Exum said the insider attacks have “tremendous strategic impact” because they damage morale among international troops and further weaken support for the war in the U.S. and other NATO nations training Afghan soldiers and police to take over security nationwide by 2014.
What’s unclear, he added, is how much influence the Taliban actually have in organizing the increasing numbers of attacks.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told The Associated Press in an interview this week that the attacks may reflect the Taliban’s use of unconventional tactics against a coalition force it cannot defeat on the battlefield.
