IN area after area, district after district, province after province, the war between the insurgent Afghan Taliban and Kabul is tilting towards the former. From Lashkar Gah in the south to Kunduz in the north, and from Farah City in the west to a great deal of eastern Afghanistan, the country appears to be spiralling towards a slow collapse of the state. To be sure, the Afghan security forces are fighting fiercely, defending territory and quickly retaking fallen centres. Moreover, the US, though it now has a vastly diminished military presence in the country, is using its still formidable resources, particularly air power, to help the Afghan forces push back against the Taliban. It is a grim situation made worse by the sheer geographical spread of the insurgency hot spots — the pattern of a spring fighting season followed by a winter lull has been broken and there is little semblance of stability in the months ahead. Quite what can be done is not clear. No army, police or security force in the world can simultaneously grow in institutional strength while suffering the kind of high-impact losses and degradation that the Afghan national security forces are presently suffering.

For now, the focus must be on risk-mitigation on the battlefield and quietly improving the possibility of a future political settlement. Inside Afghanistan, this means urgently prioritising some areas for military action — turning around both the perception of a slow state collapse and winning back strategically important terrain. The Afghan forces are fighting bravely, but by all accounts suffer from a confused and weak leadership. Fighting counter-insurgencies and all-out wars depend as much on the material resources as on the quality of leadership. Perhaps with more direct foreign guidance, the situation can be stabilised quickly. Beyond that, the Afghan political government needs urgent in-house reconciliation — with the political leadership so frayed and seemingly at war with itself it surely is affecting the state’s ability to coordinate its fight against the Taliban. For Pakistan, these are also tricky times. Whenever the fight against the Taliban is going poorly, Kabul looks to externalise the blame and the victim of that is usually Pakistan. Policymakers here ought to work to forestall that possibility by ensuring that at least coordination over border management issues continues and that both Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to act against cross-border militancy in each other’s country.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2016