By Peter Bergen
"Taliban Now
Winning" declared Monday's headline in the Wall Street Journal based
on its interview with Gen Stanley McChrystal. But the headline was a classic
case of a editor hyping the substance of a story, which the reporters of the
story themselves had already applied a little touch of their own gilding to
when they characterized General McChrystal's position in their interview to be
that the Taliban now had the "upper hand."
In fact, when the WSJ reporters actually came to quote him,
General McChrystal said rather more innocuously of the Taliban, "It's a very
aggressive enemy right now... We've got to stop their momentum, stop their
initiative. It's hard work."
McChrystal added that the Taliban were moving beyond their
strongholds in southern Afghanistan
to threaten formerly stable areas in the north and west. But that's a lot different
than saying either that the Taliban is "winning" or has the "upper hand."
(Would the pre-Murdoch WSJ have headlined the piece in this hyped-up manner?
Just asking.)
McChrystal's views about the
Taliban were more accurately captured by a USA Today article
that appeared on the same day as the WSJ article in which he said "I
wouldn't say we are winning or losing or stalemated... What I would say at this
particular point is that the insurgency has a certain amount of initiative and
momentum that we are working to stop and, in fact, reverse."
That
doesn't sound much like the Taliban are "winning" or gaining the "upper hand"
either.
Aside from the obvious
implausibility of an American four-star general theater commander in the middle
of a war saying that the enemy is "winning" in an on-the-record interview with
a major U.S. newspaper -- short of the Taliban appearing en masse at the gates of
Kabul -- there is another problem with this concept, which is that the Taliban
are not winning or anything close to it.
According to BBC/ABC
polling (24 pp, pdf) only 7 percent of Afghans have a favorable view of the
movement of religious warriors whom many of them had to live under. There is
nothing like actually living under Taliban rule to have a healthy skepticism
about their promises of a 7th century utopia here on earth.
Sure, it may be that the Taliban aren't losing, which for any insurgent
group is part of a strategy to win so as to wait out the domestic political
clocks in the U.S. and other NATO countries. (A new national poll indicates that
support among Americans for the war in Afghanistan has hit a new low: Fifty-four
percent say they oppose the war in a CNN poll released last Thursday.)
But it's worth recalling that the Taliban are a rather small force of up to
perhaps 20,000 fighters that hasn't been able to hold on to towns in the more
than seven years they have been fighting, let alone take cities. There will
never be a Taliban Tet Offensive or anything remotely close to it. The Taliban are
not winning, nor are they enjoying the upper hand.
The movement of religious warriors will try to show the black flag of jihad
around the August 20th election. My bet is that it will not be much of an
impressive effort.
Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know.
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