Greenville's free alternative weekly

The Tarin Kowt battle represented the first major fighting for the Dutch army in decades. And while the Dutch soldiers emerged victorious, the Dutch government nevertheless ordered an eventual retreat from the battlefield.

By David Axe

On June 15, a suicide bomber struck a Dutch army education delegation in the town of Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan, killing one Dutch soldier and 11 Afghan children. The blast was the opening salvo in a five-day battle pitting hundreds of Taliban fighters against the 3,000-strong Dutch-led Task Force Uruzgan and hundreds of Afghan police and militia. At stake was control of a key valley connecting Pakistan’s Taliban bases to the opium production centers in Helmand province.

The Tarin Kowt battle represented the first major fighting for the Dutch army in decades. And while the Dutch soldiers emerged victorious after days of furious combat against a brutal enemy, the Dutch government nevertheless ordered an eventual retreat from the battlefield, illustrating the major weakness of the international coalition struggling to secure Afghanistan. It’s not battlefield prowess the coalition lacks, but the political will to devote sufficient resources to a tough mission.

It’s a problem with a long history, as the Dutch demonstrate. Since the end of the Cold War, the Netherlands’ armed forces have seen steady cuts in their manpower rolls and combat equipment and increasing emphasis on reconstruction and international peacekeeping operations. This shift away from traditional war-fighting has been marked by some tragic and embarrassing episodes. In July 1995, a Dutch battalion assigned to protect Srebrenica – a U.N.-declared “safe haven” in eastern Bosnia – allegedly stood by as Bosnian Serb fighters murdered thousands of Bosnian Muslims. Though subsequent investigations cleared the Dutch soldiers of any active role in enabling the massacre, the Dutch military still had reputation for squeamishness as it assumed control in Uruzgan last year.

Indeed, the Dutch government’s Afghanistan strategy was to avoid direct confrontation with the Taliban, instead pursuing a “hearts and minds” strategy focusing on education and economic redevelopment. “We are not here to hunt the Taliban,” Dutch army spokesman Major Eric Jonkers said two days before the Taliban attacked.

Around a hundred Taliban died in the Tarin Kowt fighting; many of them killed in Dutch artillery barrages or in airstrikes by Dutch attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets. Task Force Uruzgan lost just two soldiers and a few dozen Afghan police killed; and the task force recaptured several checkpoints surrendered to the Taliban early in the fighting. (A number of Afghan civilians also died – some killed in the airstrikes and others murdered by Taliban reprisals against policemen’s families.) In the heady aftermath of the battle on June 20, Dutch commander Lieutenant Colonel Gino Van Der Voet – who prior to then had denied interview requests – called me into his office to publicly declare victory.

“I’m very proud of the Dutch soldiers who fought here,” Van Der Voet said. “There has been discussion in the past whether we were capable or willing to fight at this scale. I think that discussion is over now.”

But for all the army’s newfound resolve, the Dutch government continued its hand-wringing. In the hours following the June 15 bombing that killed one Dutch soldier, The Hague denied that there was any fighting at all and quietly suppressed reporting by the reporters, myself included, who were embedded with the task force; it wasn’t until a second soldier died (in an accidental mortar misfire on June 18) that the Ministry of Defense held a press conference to announce the fighting and lifted restrictions on the press.

And in the days following the fighting, Dutch defense minister Eimert Van Middelkoop announced that if the Dutch mission in Afghanistan continued past the current commitment through 2008, it would probably be on a smaller scale. This at a time when senior military leaders in Afghanistan are begging for more troops to hold the ground they’ve already won. German Major General Bruno Kasdorf said the 41,000-strong NATO force in Afghanistan would have to grow by 760,000 soldiers to patrol Afghanistan with the same frequency that NATO troops patrol Kosovo. Indeed, Jonkers said on June 13 that the existing 3,000-strong Dutch force in Uruzgan was already stretched to the limit. The Hague’s cuts will likely mean giving up some of the ground its forces fought so hard to defend in June.

Any Dutch withdrawal from Uruzgan will probably meet with protests from the Afghan government. In May, Afghan ambassador to the U.S. Said Tayeb Jawad said that the presence of coalition troops plus thousands of aid workers is the key to a better future for the country. “People are concerned that you may leave, actually. People want the international community to be there and to deliver capacity. The challenge for aid [workers] is that as the fight gets more intense, reconstruction will not continue and the Taliban will say to the people, ‘Look, they’re not here to rebuild.’”

Some U.S. leaders acknowledge the need for a greater effort in Afghanistan. In a draft of his platform national security speech, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. “As President, I would deploy at least two additional brigades to Afghanistan to re-enforce our counter-terrorism operations and support NATO’s efforts against the Taliban.”

“As we step up our commitment,” Obama continued, “our European friends must do the same.”

For this particular article please e-mail comments to talkback@columbiacitypaper.com and we will post them here within a few hours. Most articles have instant feedback and this one doesn’t due to a spammer. We are in the process of installing anti-spam software so this will be fixed soon.