Afghan Journal

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010: the year of living incrementally?

One of the labels being attached to President Barack Obama is that he is a committed incrementalist - an insult or a compliment depending on which side of the political fence you sit, or indeed whether you believe it to be true.

A couple of articles on U.S.-led strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan fill out what that could mean going into the new year.

Rory Stewart writes in The New York Review of Books that a measured, long-term strategy for Afghanistan could be more effective than either extremes of a drive for victory at all costs and precipitate withdrawal. Here's an excerpt:

"Obama's central - and revolutionary - claim is that our responsibility, our means, and our interests are finite in Afghanistan. As he says, "we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars." Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons—doing "whatever it takes" and "whatever it costs"—we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don't have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.

"The US must husband its resources to meet other strategic challenges. Obama's description of these is still narrowly focused on failed states and terrorism: it does not include the threats posed by states such as China or Russia, still less Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, or Kashmir, and it does not attempt to compare the conflict in Afghanistan to the risks posed by climate change or threats to the supply of food in poor nations. But he names Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as posing challenges. The US responsibility to the Afghan people is only one responsibility among many and "the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own."

 The Boston Review carries a series of articles from experts debating the strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Among them, Andrew Bacevich makes a similar point about the need for the United States to juggle competing challenges and demands on its resources, among them climate change and the economy:

Flying into Kabul

Many friends are surprised that both times I’ve come to work in Afghanistan, I’ve flown into Kabul on ordinary commercial airlines.

Perhaps because the country is so often in the headlines for war, bombings and death, people usually seem to expect visitors to arrive on bare-bones army transport planes or the United Nations-managed flights that originally took diplomats and journalists into the country after the fall of the Taliban.

In fact Afghanistan has no less than four commercial airlines, with flights to countries including China, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Germany, Kuwait, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan.

Ariana is the state airline.  Safi is the most aggressive commercial newcomer and flies to Frankfurt as well as domestically. Kam Air has focused particularly on central Asian destinations while Pamir is more of a domestic contender.

Most Western visitors depart for Kabul from Dubai’s creaky terminal 2 (though Safi have graduated to terminal 1 in the main airport).

It was nicknamed the “axis of evil” terminal by someone back when George W. Bush was in the White House and the departures board read like a list of the regimes slammed by Bush or the cities targetted by United States troops.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Failed airline attack raises fresh questions about battle against al Qaeda

In the absence of a coherent narrative about the failed Christmas Day attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the debate about how best to tackle al Qaeda and its Islamist allies has once again been thrown wide open.

Does it support those who want more military pressure to deprive al Qaeda of its sanctuary on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or suggest a more diffuse threat from sympathisers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa? Should the United States open new fronts in emerging al Qaeda bases such as Yemen and Somalia, or focus instead on the fact that the attempted airline attack did not succeed, suggesting al Qaeda's ability to conduct mass-casualty assaults on U.S. territory has already been severely degraded in the years since 9/11?

The evidence so far about the attempt by 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to set off an explosive device on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit can  pretty much be stacked up in favour of whatever argument you want to make.

Abdulmutallab was from a wealthy family in Nigeria, where al Qaeda and its Islamist allies have been trying to make inroads, by and large unsuccessfully so far. Residents in his family home town said they believed he was radicalised during his studies abroad, which included education at a British boarding school in Togo, followed by a course in engineering at the prestigious University College London.  He would not be the first educated young man to be inspired by Islamist radicalism in London -- among those who came before him was Omar Sheikh, convicted for the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.

Does this mean Britain has been too soft about allowing radicalism to flourish in its universities, as the conservative Daily Telegraph argues?  Or has Britain's own support for U.S. policies, including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a security crackdown at home, so alienated its Muslim community that a tiny minority will turn to terrorism? (If you ask ordinary Muslims in London what should be done, they are just as likely to give you a lecture about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, civilian casualties in Afghanistan, and Washington's failure to insist on an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.)

Abdulmutallab's name had been placed on a British watch-list, suggesting security is already very tight in a country which is on alert for any repeat of the London bombings in 2005.  How much tighter can it get, without a further erosion of civil liberties?

The trail from London then leads to Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral home, and a country which U.S. officials say is emerging as an attractive alternative base for al Qaeda, after it was largely pushed out of Afghanistan and has since come under growing military pressure in Pakistan. In U.S. questioning, Abdulmutallab said al Qaeda operatives in Yemen supplied him with an explosive device and trained him on how to detonate it, according to a U.S. official.

Afghan cleric says give blood for Ashura, don’t spill it

The most fervent believers among Shi’ite Muslims in Afghanistan traditionally take to the streets for the holiday of Ashura to flagellate themselves with knives and chains, but a top cleric wants them to donate their blood instead.

Ashura, one of the Shi’ite calendar’s biggest events, commemorates the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, who was killed in battle in A.D. 680.

For the festival Shi’ite mourners across the Muslim world gather to lament, beat their chests, and cut themselves until blood flows, to express solidarity with Hussein. In Afghanistan believers traditionally flog themselves with chains tipped with steel knives.

“We do not feel any pain right after the beating. When we go home during the night it will be fine and there is no need to go to a doctor, our wounds get better by themselves,” said Katib Alia, part of a group attacking their own backs until they bled outside one of Kabul’s most sacred shrines.

But some leading Shi’ite clerics in Afghanistan have rejected the practice, saying mourners should donate to blood banks rather than mutilating themselves in the street.

Ayatollah Mohammed Asef Mohseni, better known in the West as a sponsor of a law that requires women to satisfy their husband’s sexual appetites, condemned the practice on the eve of the festival, my Afghan colleagues told me.

Speaking on a television station run by his son, Mohseni urged believers to donate their blood to help the injured rather than spilling it in the mesmerising, but alarming ceremony.

Sharing information with the enemy in Iraq, Afghanistan

U.S. military commanders on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only ones watching live video feeds of the battle zone from unmanned Predator surveillance planes. The militants too have been looking at the same images thanks to an off-the-shelf software that allowed them to hack into the data feed from the drones.

“Skygrabber”, originally designed to allow customers to download songs and movies off the Internet, costs barely $26 . It allowed insurgents to tap into the overhead video feeds from the million-dollar surveillance planes, the Wall Street Journal reported recently.

U.S. forces became aware of it only after they captured a Shiite militia member in Iraq, whose laptop had files of the pirated footage saved on it.

While most of the breach seems to have taken place in Iraq, adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials. These intercept techniques could be employed in other locations where the U.S. is using pilotless planes, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, they said. One more example of how America’s enemies have found simple ways to counter its sophisticated military technology.

The Pentagon has since closed the breach, defence officials said, but the question experts are asking is how come it was so easy to penetrate the communications systems. Brookings’ P.W. Singer who has written a book “Wired for War: the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century” says one reason is the rapid proliferation of the unmanned systems in U.S. warfare.  Back in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq there were only a handful of these ‘eyes in the skies” and zero on the ground in the invasion force.

Today, there are more than 7,000 in the air, ranging from Predator to the tiny ones that can fit in a soldier’s backpack.  Most of these systems were not encrypted as pressure increased to push them out as fast as possible. “There was a war on, and these unmanned systems were proving to be far more useful to our troops than what the regular Pentagon acquisitions process had been providing,” he says.

Germans agonise over Kunduz air strike

German soul searching about the September air strike in Afghanistan that killed civilians contrasts starkly with the greater acceptance of what is sometimes called “collateral damage” in other countries, such as the United States.

Politicians here in Berlin have been backing away from their original robust defence of the strike in the last few weeks as more information has come to light about the circumstances of the German order to call in a U.S. F-15 fighter jet to hit two hijacked fuel trucks near Kunduz on Sept. 4.

Afghan officials say the bombardment killed 30 civilians and 69 Taliban.

In the furore about the handling of the strike, cabinet minister Franz Josef Jung, who was defence minister at the time, and the head of Germany’s armed forces, have had to resign. The pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel is mounting and new Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg may yet have to go.

The strike was the most deadly operation involving German troops since World war Two and particularly embarrassing because Berlin has all along stressed NATO‘s mission must focus on reconstruction as well as fighting and said the battle is for hearts and minds.

German soldiers, irritated by a lack of public support and by the political debate going on in Berlin, are deployed mainly in northern Afghanistan and the parliamentary mandate for 4,500 soldiers does not let them fight in the more dangerous South.

Although they are the third-biggest force and have lost some 36 soldiers, there is a broad perception that German soldiers are not taking the heat as much as their U.S. and British counterparts. One of their most deadly encounters came in 2007 when three soldiers were killed not in a fierce firefight but when they went to buy a fridge at a Kunduz market when a suicide bomber hit.

Getting the logistics right for the Afghan surge

With 30,000 more troops on their way to Afghanistan, the United States military has to figure out a way to support them. And this, military experts say, may turn to be the harder part given the logistical difficulties of operating in a landlocked country on the other side of the world.

It costs $400 to get a single gallon of gasoline to Helmand province, if you added the cost of shipping it to the Pakistani port of Karachi, then trucking it up Khyber pass or Chaman toward Kandahar, and finally air-lifting it to feed outlying posts, writes Herschel Smith in the blog Captain’s Journal.

Smith, who has been arguing for a year that the United States was better off routing its supplies to Afghanistan through the Caucasus region running through Georgia, Azerbaijan and then Turkmenistan, instead of Pakistan, says that the Obama administration having ordered the surge is now stumbling over the logistics, the most important element of any military campaign.

Everything from basic building materials, such as concrete from next door Pakistan, to blast-resistant trucks from Wisconsin has to be procured. “At this phase, Afghanistan is a logistics war as much as any other kind of war,” says Ashton Carter, the top Pentagon official in charge of weapons acquisition, technology and logistics.

There is a dangerous side to this too, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton alluded to in a recent testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Afghanistan harder than Iraq?

Afghanistan is going to be a tougher nut to crack than Iraq, some 62 percent of U.S. voters said in a recent Rasmussen poll.

Military generals and experts have said much the same thing.

General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East and Central Asia, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that “achieving progress in Afghanistan will be hard and progress there likely will be slower in developing than was the progress in Iraq.” But he added, “As with Iraq, in Afghanistan hard is not hopeless.”

Hard but not hopeless. But can a population-centric counter insurgency campaign work  as  it did during the Iraq surge? Nir Rosen, writing in the Boston Review, lays bare the differences between the two wars.

Iraq was in the middle of an exhausting sectarian conflict which changed the nature of violence there from an anti-occupation struggle to a civil war when the surge started in 2007. The Sunnis were willing to cooperate with the Americans because the Sunnis knew they had been defeated by the time the “Sunni Awakening” began in Anbar Province in September 2006; the victorious Shias were divided, and militias degenerated into gangsterism.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Afghanistan and Pakistan: on the battle for Kandahar

In the vast swirl of debate about Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is worth taking the time to read this piece in the Small Wars Journal by Michael Yon about the looming battle for Kandahar and the central importance of the Arghandab River Valley (pdf document).

Just as "a tiger doesn’t need to completely understand the jungle to survive, navigate, and then dominate", Yon argues, you don't have to master the full geographical and historical complexity of the Afghan war to grasp the importance of the Arghandab River Valley in securing Kandahar -- a battle he suggests will be crucial in 2010.

Rather than do this very thoughtful piece the injustice of trying to summarise it, I'd recommend reading it in full.

We have got used to hearing that the United States will find it very difficult to succeed in Afghanistan without help from Pakistan in acting against militants based there -- an argument given another airing in the latest New York Times story about Pakistan resisting U.S. demands to move against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan. What Yon's piece does is to give a different perspective on that argument by suggesting the possibility of U.S. military successes on the ground in Afghanistan  -- almost independently of what happens in Pakistan. 

The point here is not to discuss U.S. military strategy and tactics (many others are far better qualified to do so, among them Hershel Smith at the Captain's Journal who has nearly daily entries on this).

 But let's assume for the purposes of argument that Pakistan does not drop its resistance to tackling Afghan militants in its border regions. (Pakistan argues it cannot tackle everyone at once and has its hands full fighting the Pakistani Taliban; its critics say it is hedging its bets ahead of any eventual U.S. withdrawal, when it might want to use groups like the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan.) 

At that point, a major U.S. military success in Afghanistan could be the only way to break the stalemate. An in that light, Yon's focus on the Arghandab River Valley becomes essential reading.

from Blogs Dashboard:

X-factor strikes surreal note in Taliban heartland

Adrian Croft reports on a trip to southern Afghanistan with the British prime minister.

 In a dusty lounge at Kandahar airbase, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Afghan President Hamid Karzai were in the middle of a sombre news conference on how to turn around the situation in Afghanistan, where British forces face mounting casualties in their fight against Taliban insurgents. Brown and Karzai offered heartfelt sympathies to the families of the 100 British soldiers killed this year but then a TV reporter chipped in with the burning issue of the day. "Who did the prime minister think would win the X-Factor final," the hit talent show on British TV.

Unperturbed, Brown interrupted the flow of talk about the need for Afghan forces to take greater responsibility for security. Showing perfect familiarity with the show, despite having being airborne or in Afghanistan for the last 24 hours, he said he was sorry that Stacey had been knocked out and wished Olly and Joe well in the final.

It introduced a jarring and surreal note into Brown's stay. In a change from the usual practice followed by Brown and predecessor Tony Blair of flying in and out of Afghanistan the same day because of security concerns, Brown stayed the night at the sprawling Kandahar airbase in southern Afghanistan. This was despite the fact that the base comes under attack once or twice a week from rockets fired from 5-20 kilometres away. Journalists travelling with Brown were told the drill in case of a rocket attack on the base which houses troops from 20 other nations as well as Britain. If you hear a warbling siren and a loud voice over the tannoy warning of an imminent rocket attack, dive to the floor with your hands over your eyes, journalists were advised. Fortunately the situation did not arise.

Brown said he had stayed overnight because he had wanted to see what it was like working with the troops. He assured journalists he had slept "very well indeed". Brown stayed in "basic, but comfortable" dormitory-style accommodation using a communal toilet and shower, an aide said. But he did better than the average soldier because he slept in a double bed in his own room. There wasn't much luxury in the block where the journalists slept, a sign in the toilets said: "Ship showers were in force." This consists of running the water for 30 seconds, applying soap and then rinsing for 30 seconds. Outside there was plenty of water following heavy rain in the cold Afghan winter. Soldiers seemed cheerful enough as they tucked into a hearty breakfast at the canteen. The main concern there seemed to be fighting the flab rather than fighting the Taliban as posters displayed how many calories each food item contained.  A few Christmas decorations and small Christmas trees showed the time of the year but otherwise there is little to break up the monotony of the dusty desert camp and concrete anti-blast walls. The camp is a hive of activity and a lot of new buildings are being put up presumably to house some of the 30,000 new troops being sent by U.S. President Barack Obama.

There were also stark reminders of the conflict outside. The in memoriam section of the briefing room notice board bears a eulogy for one of the latest soldiers killed : Lance Corporal Adam Paul Drane of the First Battalion Royal Anglian regiment. He was killed in action on December 7.  It was a far cry from the X-Factor.