Afghan Journal

UPDATE- A glimmer of hope in Afghanistan

(Amending the article with the correct name of the organisation which conducted the research as also with more details on the survey itself}

The Asia Foundation has released its annual survey of Afghanistan and a key finding is that the Afghan people are a bit more optimistic about their country than the rest of the world is, at this point of time.  The survey found that 42 percent of the people felt Afghanistan was heading in the right direction, up from 38 percent in 2008, and mainly because of better security conditions.

In fact each year the number of respondents who think security has improved has gone up, even though the Taliban insurgency is at its worst in 2009.  Some 44 percent of those surveyed this year said they felt safer, up from 31 percent in 2006. More respondents in 2009 also mentioned reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

It may not be such a disconnect as it seems. Security remains the main worry for the people  of Afghanistan with some 42 percent saying that was the most important reason for pessimism.  It is just that an increasing number of people – and the number is rising very slowly – believe things are starting to get better.

The survey was carried out among 6,408 adult in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan between June 17 and July 6, 2009.

Some more key findings :

An Afghan mission that went wrong

Reuters Kabul correspondent Jonathon Burch is currently on an embed with the U.S. Army’s Stryker brigade in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province. On October 27,  seven soldiers from a platoon of the Strykers, named after an eight-wheel armoured combat vehicle, and an interpreter were killed in a bomb attack on the outskirts of Kandahar city.

Jonathon was accompanying them at the time and here’s his story :

The mission was simple. Some 20 U.S. soldiers were to patrol a riverbed in the dead of night, camp until morning, and provide backup to Afghan troops and their Canadian mentors in a clearing operation in Chahar Bagh village, an insurgent hotbed on the outskirts of Kandahar City.

Less than 12 hours later, seven of the soldiers and their Afghan interpreter would be dead, killed by a massive homemade bomb buried deep under pebbles along the dried-out riverbed.

The attack illustrates how a more aggressive U.S. military strategy of going into Taliban strongholds risks mounting casualties as President Barack Obama weighs whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan. The initial operation this week passed without incident. Around 200 Afghan soldiers and their Canadian trainers pushed through the village of mud houses surrounded by lush pomegranate orchards. A handful of men were arrested for later questioning.

The U.S. soldiers were not needed.”What are you going to write about? This is some boring ass mission,” one 1st Platoon soldier joked with a reporter as the sun rose behind a cragged mountain towering over the village. The soldiers — small groups from three platoons of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion 17th Infantry Regiment Stryker Brigade — had pushed out from their base at around midnight. Not far from Chahar Bagh village, they dismounted from their armoured Stryker vehicles and continued on foot.

Has the “Kabul bubble” burst?

Wednesday’s attacks on foreign U.N. workers at a guest-house in a normally secure area of Kabul shook the nerves of everyone in the city. Rightly or wrongly, the community of Western journalists, aid workers and security contractors often make the crude comparison between working in Baghdad and working in Kabul. All seem to agree that they prefer living in the latter, where they can travel around with relative ease, visit bars and restaurants and go to parties across town.

Kabul is, despite the concrete barriers and armoured vehicles, a beautiful city, nestled among towering mountains. None of the many restaurants and coffee shops frequented by foreigners have been attacked so far. Only the luxury Serena hotel has been hit by Taliban attackers before, the latest also on Wednesday when it was hit with rockets intended for the presidential palace.

Before Wednesday, driving in the Shehrpu or Shahr-e Now districts, which the guest-house straddles, did not require a second thought. It would be laughable actually to think that these areas were high-risk. They are populated by “narco-mansions” a nickname for the gaudy, ostentatious palaces built by powerful Afghans and occupied by governors or foreign companies. Shahr-e Now, or “New town”, is home to bustling market parades, popular Afghan restaurants and bright, colourful street lights at night.

All the mansions have some form of security, mostly private contractors guarding heavy iron barriers or sitting in guard boxes by the front door. Shahr-e Now is where Kabul comes alive and where Afghans socialise.

Most attacks until now have been targetted at military convoys, embassies or government ministries. It’s natural for someone living and working in Kabul to steer clear from a block of U.S. humvees or armoured off-road cars and people try to avoid hanging around the diplomatic buildings, which tend to be surrounded by concrete blast walls.

Guest-houses, however, have never really been seen as target. Perhaps security experts would argue otherwise, but it is safe to say they are not at the top of an insurgent’s list of places to attack. The Bakhtar guest-house is relatively low-key. Many had not heard of it before the attack. It is on a well-known but unremarkable side street, surrounded by other houses. Its green iron door was not distinctive at all.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan’s slow path to salvation in Waziristan

Pakistan's militants have unleashed a guerrilla war in cities across the country in retaliation for a military offensive against them in their South Waziristan stronghold. But while they have seized all the attention with their massive bomb and gun attacks, what about the offensive itself  in their mountain redoubt ?

Nearly two weeks into Operation Rah-e-Nijat, or Path of Salvation,  it is hard to make a firm assessment of which way the war is going, given that information is hard to come by and this may yet be still the opening stages of a long and difficult campaign.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan whose uncharacteristically low profile over the past few weeks has spawned speculation, said at the weekend that it was too early to make a call on the operation. and that he had asked his intelligence officers and they had no definitive information. Pakistan's Dawn quotes him as telling reporters in Washington "‘it’ll take a while before we know whether the enemy they’re fighting has been dispersed or destroyed or some mixture of the two."

Looked at in another way and judging purely by what has not happened so far, this hasn't shaped up into the mother-of-all battles that many had predicted it to be. No major ambushes or a tribal uprising has happened as the Pakistani army inches deeper into the Taliban mini-state,  taking the village of Kotkai, the home of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

As the BBC and the military-focused Strategy Page blog note, the Pakistani army appears to be moving slowly and deliberately.  "This is a campaign of small battles. The soldiers are advancing from three directions, often along a single road,"  the Strategy Page  says.

"The army is advancing slowly, to insure that the troops win all these little battles. It's important for troop morale that the tribesmen do not pull off many of their traditional ambushes and surprise attacks that have, for centuries, killed and demoralized invaders. This has largely been successful, with one soldier dying for every ten or so Islamic radical fighters killed."

Some people think the Mehsud fighters are doing  a tactical retreat to draw the Pakistani military deeper into South Waziristan, an arid land of mountains, dried-up creeks, sparse forests and rocky plains. Local administration officials have told the BBC that the Mehsud fighters are not fighting by holding ground against the military. Instead they are ceding territory to the security forces and then counter-attacking when the military starts to secure the area.

from Tales from the Trail:

Is Afghan war one of necessity for U.S.?

Disengaging from Afghanistan is the option President Barack Obama is the least likely to adopt as he closes in on a new strategy in the eight-year war he calls one of "necessity."

But on Thursday, at one of the countless policy conferences in Washington to discuss the president's choices, some experts suggested withdrawal was the best route -- and they said it would not necessarily impact efforts to fight al Qaeda.

Harvard University's Stephen Walt called the argument for disengagement "fairly compelling," while conceding it was not the most popular.

His tally of the costs: $225 billion since the Sept. 11 attacks, with more than 850 U.S. soldiers killed and thousands wounded.

"The costs are going to be large at a time when the American economy is not exactly robust," he told the Capitol Hill conference organized by the Rand Corporation.

Even if  the United States "won," al Qaeda would still have a safe haven in neighboring Pakistan as well as in Yemen, Somalia or other nations where they like to hang out, Walt said. If U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan, "it is not obvious that it  will significantly enhance al Qaeda's ability to go after us."

The CATO Institute's Christopher Preble was also in the "big skeptic" column when it comes to sending in more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. He said the big question Obama needs to ask is whether the mission in Afghanistan is essential for U.S. national security -- which most experts argue it is.

Choppers, the Achilles’ heel in the Afghan war

Back in 2002 during a reporting assignment in Afghanistan, a U.S. helicopter pilot told me that it was important to send a message early on that “we own the skies, night or day”.  So at any given point of time if you were at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul, you could see aircraft, mostly choppers taking off, landing or simply idling  in the skies above in what became the region’s busiest airfield.

Seven years on, the U.S. military is holding on to the skies ever more tightly as the ground below slips away to a Taliban insurgency at its fiercest level. And because they fly more and because the terrain and weather are difficult, the chances of things going wrong increase, as happened earlier this week when 14 Americans, including 11 soldiers, were killed in two separate chopper crashes.

U.S. soldiers were twice as likely to die in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan than in Iraq, Time magazine reported. It quoted Michael O’ Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who is keeping a rolling count of U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, as saying that it wasn’t hostile fire that was bringing down the choppers. “The main issues have to do with terrain, weather and of course frequency of use,” he says.

While 5% of U.S. deaths in Iraq have been caused by helicopter crashes — 216 out of 4,348 — the total is 12% in Afghanistan — 101 of 866 — even before Monday’s losses, Hanlon says.

Afghanistan, roughly the size of Texas, has few major roads, and they are being increasingly monitored and mined, forcing the U.S. to rely more on aircraft to move troops and supplies. Indeed many of the U.S. outposts in the country can only be reached by helicopters.

Noah Schachtman writes in Danger Room, a blog on national security, that helicopters are the “irreplaceable connective tissue of the Afghanistan war effort — and its potential Achilles’ heel.”  When the U.S. military wants to haul gear, supply outposts, reposition forces, or evacuate wounded troops, the first, best and only option is to do so by helicopter.

Six U.N. foreign workers killed in Kabul attacks

Taliban militants in Afghanistan killed six U.N foreign staff in an assault on an international guest-house in Kabul on Wednesday (Oct 28) deepening concerns about security for a Presidntial election run-off due in 10 days.

A resurgent Taliban have vowed to disrupt the Nov 7. run off as U.S president Barack Obama weighs whether to send more troops to Afghanistan to fight an insugency that has reached its fiercest level since the islamist were outsted in 2001.

In another sign of the growing reach of militants, rockets were were also fired at a foreign-owned luxury hotel near the presidential palace in the the heart of Kabul forcing more than 100 guests into a bunker.

from Tales from the Trail:

Protest resignation over Afghan plans puts Obama team on edge

On Monday, the State Department sent out its no. 2 official to tout how it was managing to get U.S. civilians out into the field in Afghanistan, with nearly 1,000 expected to be in place by year-end.

A day later, it was in damage control mode after the resignation of one of its star employees was plastered on the front page of The Washington Post and on the Internet.

In an emotionally-charged four-page letter dated September 10, Matthew Hoh said he was quitting because he had lost confidence in the war effort and whether it was worth the blood spilled there.

Hoh's letter is notable  because he was seen as just the kind of person the State Department wants in Afghanistan. A former Marine and then Department of Defense civilian, he served in Iraq from 2004 to 2007. On a one-year contract with the State Department, he was serving as the senior civilian representative in Afghanistan's Zabul province.

Just as President Barack Obama is reviewing his approach in Afghanistan, Hoh said he had "doubts and reservations" not only about the current but also future strategy in the eight-year war.

"I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war," said Hoh in his resignation letter to the State Department's human resources director.

In language that must make the State Department cringe, Hoh said the United States was no more than a "supporting actor" in a tragedy and that the U.S. presence had only served to further destabilize the country as well as its neighbor Pakistan.

from Tales from the Trail:

Time to get tough on Afghan fraud, start with the message

What message does it send when the U.N. representative to Afghanistan says it will be impossible to eliminate fraud in the run-off election?

That's what Kai Eide admitted last week, adding, "what we will try to do, is to reduce the level of fraud."

Is that really what Afghans should be hearing on the eve of this crucial vote -- steal a few less votes this time around please?

The second round of the presidential election in Afghanistan is more about credibility than the actual outcome.

And it is not just the credibility of Afghan President Hamid Karzai that is at stake, it is the credibility of the entire international effort to rebuild the country.

As the International Crisis Group says in a new report, the United Nations was closely involved in planning a first round that ended up being plagued by widespread fraud, and the UN then moved too quickly to declare the vote an unqualified success.

That reinforced the impression the international community was more interested in a rubber stamp than a credible process, and "may have cost particularly the U.S., European Union and UN what little credibility they had left with the public."

To send or not to send…

Here’s a transcript of an interview with Senator John Kerry on US policy in Afghanistan from the PBS news show The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  Margaret Warner conducted the interview on October 26 with the influential Democrat after he had delivered a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.

Some pundits have suggested that Kerry, who chairs the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, is ‘running cover’ for President Barack Obama in case the President decides not to meet General Stanley McChrystal’s demand to send more troops to Afghanistan.  

Warner:         Senator Kerry, thanks for joining us. You said in your speech today that General McChrystal’s plan goes too far too fast. Are you talking about the troop levels or his basic overall strategy of counter insurgence.