Charge-sheeting ISAF

This week, every columnist worth his salt has expressed his/her opinion on the looming impeachment of the president or Dr Afia Siddiqui's plight. It took a major effort to curb the urge to present my own "two cent's worth" on the topics. Recently, Group Captain Mark D Heffron, a former UK chief of information coordination at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul briefed a selected Muslim and Asian media at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London on ISAF operations in Afghanistan.
Heffron has been brought into the new post of information coordinator following concern that Afghanistan may prove to be an even greater catastrophe for the US and Britain, than the Iraq war. Parallels have already been drawn with the Russian occupation in the 1980s, dubbed as Moscow's Vietnam War. So far the US and UK have been in Afghanistan for approaching seven years, two years less than the Russians.
During his candid briefing, the Group Captain made disclosures regarding the ISAF's performance in the Afghan theatre of war, admitting that ISAF operation is "under resourced." In terms of comparison, he went as far as saying that Afghanistan would need no less than 800,000 troops for what ISAF numbers achieved in the Balkans. ISAF's success in Kosovo was based on the fact that logistically it could be well supported being in the heart of Europe and closer to USA.
Kosovo has a well developed road-infrastructure, and ISAF was up against a regular army, distinguishable by its military attire and the battle lines being clearly demarcated. Afghanistan, on the other hand is spread over a much larger area, with a nightmare terrain lacking transportation and communication infrastructure. The Afghan resistance is fighting a non-conventional guerrilla war, where the face of the enemy is indiscernible, that carries out hit-and-run attacks against ISAF convoys and deployments, melting in the crowd. ISAF has apparently not learnt any lessons from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the eighties, when a 500,000 strong Soviet army, armed to the hilt, supported by sophisticated air power was brought to its knees by the Afghan resistance.
The Group Captain appeared confident with his slick power-point presentation but was at a loss for words when the Q&A session commenced. He was evasive about why so far ISAF had not been able to help the over two million or so Afghan refugees still languishing in the squalid refugee camps in Pakistan from returning home. He lamely blamed the absence of a well-demarcated and mutually recognised Durand Line for the free to-and-from movement of Afghans across the Pak-Afghan border.