Afghan Journal

Buying off Afghanistan’s “$10 fighters”

If you can’t beat the Taliban, buy them out. At last week’s conference in London, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s Western backers endorsed his latest attempt to lure away low level Taliban fighters with money and jobs,  committing themselves to a $500 million fund to finance the re-integration plan. The logic is that a majority of the Taliban , 70 percent actually according to some estimates, are the so-called “$10 fighters” who do not share the leaders’ intense ideological  motivation. They are driven to the Islamists because they are the only source of livelihood in a war-ravaged nation. So if you offered them an alternative, these rent-a-day foot soldiers can easily be broken.

Quite part from the fact that several such attempts have failed in the past, the whole idea that members of the Taliban are up for sale  just when the  insurgency is at its deadliest is not only unrealistic but also smacks of arrogance, Newsweek magazine notes in an well-argued article.  It quotes Sami Yousoufsai a local journalist “who understands the Taliban as few others do”  as laughing at the idea that the Taliban could be bought over.

“If the leadership, commanders, and sub commanders wanted comfortable lives,  they would have made their deals long ago. Instead they stayed committed to their cause even when they were on the run, with barely a hope of survival,” the article says quoting the journalist.  Now the Taliban are back in action across much of the south, east, and west, the provinces surrounding Kabul, and chunks of the north.”They used to hope they might reach this point in 15 or 20 years. They’ve done it in eight. Many of them see this as proof that God is indeed on their side.”  Indeed one Taliban member reacted angrily to the idea of a buy-out. “You can’t buy my ideology, my religion. It’s an insult,”he said.

At another level, come to think of it, if theirs is a force largely made of rented foot soldiers,  the Taliban have done exceptionally well  taking control of large parts of the country massed against the world’s biggest military powers. Imagine what it would be like if this wasn’t just a $10 a day army as Karzai and his allies paint it to be and instead a proper fighting force.

So why would they defect ? And just how realistic is this ?  The relatively few Taliban who did accept Karzai’s previous offers to return to society live virtually in self-exile in Kabul, afraid to go to their homes in the countryside where the Taliban won’t spare them. Some of those it had spoken to, Newsweek notes, wanted to go  back  to the Taliban,  but they know they won’t be forgiven. So its a real problem, where do the Taliban go, even after Karzai offers them gobs of money. ” They wouldn’t want to live in expensive Kabul, where people on the streets would make fun of their country ways, huge black turbans, and kohl eyeliner. They hate everything that Kabul represents: a sinful place of coed schools, dancing, drinking, music, movies, prostitution, and the accumulation of wealth.”

Reintegrating the Taliban: where does it leave Afghan women?

At Thursday’s London conference on Afghanistan, some 60 countries will to try flesh out the details for a plan to gradually hand security to Afghans, which involves strengthening and expanding Afghan security forces, improving the way donor aid to Afghanistan is spent and reintegrating Taliban fighters. But where do women fit into these plans, especially if the Taliban are to be involved?

The plan, which has been tried in the past without much success, would involve luring low-level Taliban from the insurgency using jobs and money to re-join Afghan society. There has also been much talk, particularly in the media, about the possibility of dialogue or negotiations with the Taliban.

But many Afghan women, who remember very clearly what life was like under the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, are outraged by the idea.

On Wednesday, groups representing Afghan women warned the international community against pursuing a peace deal with the Taliban. “I have great fears, and I am greatly confused … 2001 was a very clear signal that there is no more room for conservative elements to rule in Afghanistan,”  Homa Sabri of the United Nation’s agency for women, UNIFEM, told Reuters in London.

The women at the meeting, which took place on the sidelines of the conference, also called for greater female representation in any peace process and better access to jobs in the security services and the monitoring of aid which is destined for programmes promoting women’s rights.

The condition of women has improved in the past eight years, but they are still frustratingly far from being able to succeed in public life, even when they are much better qualified than men.

Earlier this month, the rejection by Afghanistan’s parliament of two women who President Hamid Karzai nominated to be ministers in his new cabinet, provided a stark and rather sobering reminder of just how difficult it still is for Afghan women to succeed independently and how, in some ways, little beyond rules about the burqa has changed.

The Afghan conference: a meeting of victors or the vanquished ?

If you listened to some of the rhetoric in the lead-up to Thursday’s conference on Afghanistan in London and followed the coverage accompanying it, you would think it is a meeting of the victors of war.

Here we are, at a meeting attended by representatives from more than 50 countries, offering the Taliban a chance for peace before the “surge” of 30,000 additional U.S. troops hits them. They better grasp it before the tide turns decisively against them, seems to be the message.  Host British Prime Minister Gordon, according to this report, vowed to “split the Taliban” while offering them a full part in the rebuilt Afghanistan if they united behind the government in Kabul.

Britain along with Japan will launch a fund at the conference, expected to total up to $500 million over the next five years, as part of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s plan to lure away mid-to low level Taliban fighters from the insurgency.

The only problem with all this is the “vanquished”  Taliban have not yet taken the bait. Indeed they don’t look like the vanquished, especially after  making 2009 the worst year  for foreign forces since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. As this piece here notes, many of the nations heading to Thursday’s conference attended a similar one, in Bonn, soon after the defeat of the Taliban more than eight years ago. They were victors then; today they are “terribly fatigued and almost bled white.”.  It is not the Taliban but the most powerful nations on earth who are seeking out the insurgents to talk peace.

But can the Taliban give in on the negotiation table what they haven’t lost on the battlefield ?  They rejected again the hand of peace on Thursday, saying all foreign forces must  first leave their land.

Can the Taliban really be bought over with  money asks New York Post columnist Ralph Peters  ? “After almost a decade of open warfare with Islamist militants, thousands of global terror attacks in the name of Allah and even deadly Muslim turncoats in our military, we continue to deny that our enemies might be fighting for their faith — or, in the Taliban’s case, for faith, tribe, tradition and territory.”

The debate over the possibility of a reconciliation with the Taliban really gathered steam after the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley A. McChrystal said he could envision a role for the Taliban eventually  in the political establishment in Afghanistan. But as the New York Times noted the administration neither expects nor is comfortable itself with the idea of dealing with the Taliban’s higher command particularly its leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and other hard core elements described  not too long ago as “not reconcilable.”

Promote peace talks, Afghan war is not a success

By guest writer Hanan Habibzai, an Afghan journalist and commentator based in London

The attack on Kabul on January 17, which took place only metres away from the Presidential Palace, was evidence that not only have the international community and the Afghan government failed to win the people’s hearts and minds, but also they have lost their trust. The military conflict has now reached even the heart of Kabul. It is hard to imagine anywhere safe in the whole country.

But at this time of intensification of conflict, a debate is taking place among Afghan parliamentarians questioning the presence of the US and NATO in Afghanistan. This is the anti-Western sentiment that the Taliban have for long been whispering into the ears of ordinary Afghans in the villages and valleys of the restive regions. Those Afghans who saw their children die, those who watched their women and elders in pools of blood, are increasingly becoming susceptible to this type of rhetoric.  Many are in the process of changing their minds about the international troops.

The military commanders say that they have now made “protecting civilians” their priority, but just last month, 10 children were killed during a night-time raid carried out by US-special forces in eastern Kunar Province. As long as these incidents keep happening public anger against the US presence in Afghanistan will continue to grow.

Military attacks carried out by foreigners and that result in the killing of civilians are an insult to Afghans’ traditions and beliefs. In many instances, when the local population accuse international forces of killing civilians, the troops deny it and often dismiss evidence provided by Afghans. Also commonly heard is that troops were targeting terrorists in a raid, even when the victims are school children, or mothers with young children.

Sadly these tradgedies overshadow the killing of civilians in suicide attacks  by the Taliban – preventing the public mourning of the innocents who lose their lives in such attacks. It has given cover to Taliban attacks that result in civilian killings across the country. Ordinary Afghans are now only talking against US military behaviour and forget attacks by Taliban which have killed hundreds of civilians. 

In 2003 and 2004, I was reporting for international media agencies on clashes between two notorious warlords in the north, Rashid Dostom and Atta Mohammad. At the time I regarded the American presence in Afghanistan as crucial for protecting the country from war criminals and for helping to bring stability to the country. But now, I have begun to lose hope. The international security forces are creating such a terrifying atmosphere that it is hard for people to sleep at night.

America, don’t “leave us in the lurch” in Afghanistan

One of the first things that U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates did during his trip to India last week was to assure Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the United States did not intend to cut and run from Afghanistan.  America was committed to Afghanistan for the long-term, he said, trying to calm Indian concerns over the Obama administration’s stated plans to begin  withdrawing troops from July 2011. 

It struck me as quite remarkable that India, long a prickly nation opposed to superpower presence in the region, had so openly pinned its hopes on a prolonged U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Quite a change from the time  it would rail against the presence of such “extra-regional” powers.

But the world has changed and India like several other countries in the region, feels  more threatened  by the spread of Islamist militants than the long arm of a foreign power. Indeed while nobody likes the idea of foreign troops occupying another country, the very prospect of American withdrawal, still more than 18 months away, seems to be sending jitters. Pakistan has been saying all along its not sure how long the United States will remain engaged in Afghanistan.  It reminds everyone how it was left holding the can once the U.S. turned away from Afghanistan following the withdrawal of the former Soviet Union.

Come  to think of it, it suits quite a few countries nicely that America invests its blood and treasure in Afghanistan while these nations focus on their own development, as some commentators are pointing out. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a piece written from Taipei said he felt quite envious of the leaders of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong who had far more time to focus on building their countries “than my president whose agenda can be derailed at any moment by a jihadist death cult using exploding underpants.”

Indeed, as this piece titled The Spoils of War  notes, while America fights Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents in Afghanistan, China is rapidly expanding investments in the country. In the Afghan province of Logar, the Chinese are mining the Aynak copper deposits, said to be one of the world’s largest, that will feed China’s voracious appetite for raw materials. The Afghan National Army is guarding the area and the roads leading to the mine but this is an army trained and funded by America. While not directly protecting the site, the U.S. army is deployed in Logar. The conclusion is inescapable: American troops have helped make Afghanistan safe for Chinese investment.

“We do the heavy lifting. And they pick the fruit,” the New York Times quotes  S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, as saying. And the Chinese  don’t particularly want to get involved in the security of the nation.

A majority of the Chinese want the government to “steer clear of the quagmire of the Afghanistan War, in which the U.S.-led Western powers have been bogged down for eight years,” writes Li Hongmei, an editor and columnist at People’s Daily Online.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan: ditching “strategic depth”

Kamran Shafi has a column up at Dawn mocking Pakistan's old strategy of seeking "strategic depth" - the idea that in the event of war with India its military would be able to operate from Afghanistan to offset its disadvantage as a small country compared to its much bigger neighbour:

"Let us presume that the Indians are foolish enough to get distracted from educating their people, some of whom go to some of the best centres of learning in the world. Let us assume that they are idiotic enough to opt for war instead of industrialising themselves and meeting their economic growth targets which are among the highest in the world. Let us imagine that they are cretinous enough to go to war with a nuclear-armed Pakistan and effectively put an immediate and complete end to their multi-million dollar tourism industry. Let us suppose that they lose all sense, all reason, and actually attack Pakistan and cut our country into half.

"Will our army pack its bags and escape into Afghanistan? How will it disengage itself from the fighting? What route will it use, through which mountain passes? Will the Peshawar Corps gun its tanks and troop carriers and trucks and towed artillery and head into the Khyber Pass, and on to Jalalabad? Will the Karachi and Quetta Corps do likewise through the Bolan and Khojak passes? And what happens to the Lahore and Sialkot and Multan and Gujranwala and Bahawalpur and other garrisons? What about the air force? Far more than anything else, what about the by now 180 million people of the country? What ‘strategic depth’ do our Rommels and Guderians talk about, please? What poppycock is this?

"More importantly, how can Afghanistan be our ‘strategic depth’ when most Afghans hate our guts, not only the northerners, but even those who call themselves Pakhtuns?"

Pakistan's policy of seeking strategic depth in Afghanistan has been up for discussion since 9/11, when it was forced to abandon the Taliban regime it had backed to try to contain Indian influence there and give itself the space that it felt was so lacking on its eastern border. I have heard Pakistanis saying it was a stupid idea; others saying that even within the Pakistan Army there was a recognition that strategic depth nowadays was best achieved through building a strong domestic economy. Unlike 1971, when Pakistan was cut in two after Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, won independence with Indian military support,  the notion that it might be split in half by an Indian offensive pretty much became outdated when both countries announced they had tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

So is Shafi tilting at windmills? Attacking an idea that belonged to the last century?

Not entirely. Strategic depth has become ingrained in the narrative of relations between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan -- so taken for granted that I remember being rather surprised myself when a subeditor, quite rightly, asked me to explain what it meant. It may no longer apply in the pure military sense of providing a space to which the army can fall back and where reserves and supplies can be stored, but as a theoretical and emotional concept it lingers. (That is presumably why Shafi felt the need to bury it, since he must have heard the various incarnations of the debate on strategic depth far more than most of us.)

The price of greater Indian involvement in Afghanistan

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is heading to India, and one of the things Washington is looking at is how can regional players such as India do more in Afghanistan. “As we are doing more, of course we are looking at others to do more,” a U.S. official said, ahead of the trip referring to the troop surge.

But this is easier said than done, and in the case of India, a bit of a minefield. While America may expect more from India, Pakistan has had enough of its bitter rival’s already expanded role in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Indeed, Afghanistan is the new battleground on par with Kashmir, with many in Pakistan saying Indian involvement in Afghanistan was more than altruistic and aimed at destabilising Pakistan from the rear.  Many in India, on the other hand, point the finger at Pakistan for two deadly bomb attacks on its embassy in Kabul.

Against such a difficult backdrop, what can New Delhi possibly do without complicating things further?

Several proposals are afoot but the one that the Afghans are pushing for and which is equally likely to stir things up further is an expanded training programme of the Afghan National Army by the Indian army. A small number of Afghan army officers have been coming to Indian defence institutions, such as New Delhi’s National Defence College, for training under a programme that India has been running for years for several countries.

But this is a nation at war at the moment, and as retired Indian major general Ashok Mehta points out in this article for the Wall Street Journal, the Afghan army chief General Bismillah Khan is keen on sending combat units for training in India’s counterinsurgency schools.  The Indian army has been battling insurgencies for six decades in terrain as diverse as the hills of Nagaland in the northeast to Kashmir in the north.  None of these have been snuffed out, save for the Sikh revolt in the Punjab in the 1980s, and you could argue about the success of their campaign.  But they have held firm, developed tactics along the way, and rarely ever seemed to be losing ground against insurgents even at the height of the Kashmir revolt. Their experience is obviously something the Afghans would like to draw on.

But isn’t this going to antagonise Pakistan further? Running courses for a few officers is one thing, but training a whole combat unit is another. A deepening military relationship between Afghanistan and India would be an uncomfortable prospect for any security planner in Pakistan. Imagine, for a moment, the Pakistani army training strike formations of the Bangladesh army.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Brzezinski on U.S.-India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China

The Real News had an interview last week with former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski who talks about how U.S. policy is playing out across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and China. The second part of the interview covers his support for the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, but here is what he has to say about Pakistan and the regional dynamics: 

"We are in Afghanistan because we have been there for 8 years, now getting out is easy to say, but by now if we get out, quickly, the question arises, what follows? Is there going to be again a very sort of militant regime in Afghanistan which might tolerate al Qaeda's presence and beyond that is now a new issue, namely the conflict in Afghanistan has come to be connected with the conflict in Pakistan. Pakistan is an important country of 170 million people which has nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons, and delivery systems, delivery systems to the entire region around so we have to think much more responsibly on how to deal with this problem ... "

"We have to find a way of helping Pakistan cope with its problem in Pakistan but also help us cope with our problem in Afghanistan and that raises an extraordinarily complicated question, namely how do we give the Pakistanis the reassurance they want that if we leave Afghanistan there is not a regime in Afghanistan other than the Taliban which is more friendly to India than to Pakistan."

Asked about whether the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the region was based on an alliance between the United States and India:

"Well if it is then I don't understand what the Eurasia strategy is because if that is the alliance, then we are not going to solve the Afghan question and if we don't solve the Afghan question but the conflict continues, how will the relationship between China and Pakistan, which is quite close, be affected by an American-Indian alliance, and what will that do to the prospects for stability on a larger global scale between China and India?"

You can see the full interview here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfikRg2jE6o

Opening up Afghanistan’s trade routes

The United States is pressing Pakistan to allow Afghan agriculture products to pass through its territory to India, the U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a trip to the war-torn country this week. Opening India’s huge and exploding market to Afghan farmers sounds like a perfectly logical thing to do. Their produce of dried fruits, nuts and pomegranates long made its way to India before the partition of  India and Pakistan in 1947, immortalised in Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s classic story for children, Kabuliwallah.

Reviving that trade  from landlocked Afghanistan may well turn farmers decisively away from poppy cultivation, the United States hopes. It would also make agriculture, on which an estimated 80 percent of the population depends,  more worthwhile and make them less vulnerable to the Taliban.  

But this exactly the sort of thing that stirs anxiety in Pakistan. India’s growing presence in Afghanistan since the ousting of the Taliban in 2001 has, after Kashmir, become the single biggest sore point in Pakistan. Islamabad fears that New Delhi’s  vast Afghan aid programme, close ties with President Hamid Karzai’s government and its expanded diplomatic presence is part of a policy of strategic encirclement. It is, in some ways, the coming together of its worst fears.

Despite the U.S. pressure, Pakistan has made clear it  won’t accept such a transit agreement, The Nation newspaper reported late last month, describing it as a  step to restore “some semblance of sovereignty”. Pakistani businessmen are also opposed to granting such rights to India, believing Indian goods will flood the Afghan market and eat into their share, the News said.

But can America be stopped ? As columnist Trudy Tubin points out, the Obama administration regards agriculture as its top non-security priority in Afghanistan. “Restoring the country’s once-vibrant agricultural sector would create jobs that undercut Taliban recruitment. It would give farmers an alternative to growing opium poppies and shrink the Taliban’s profit from the drug trade.”

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Taking on Pakistan’s “military-jihadi” nexus

The fenced border between India and Pakistan

It's the start of a year and there is some path-breaking thinking going on in Pakistan as it seeks to get back on track. This article takes on the so-called "military-jihadi nexus" that some blame for pushing a modern nation of 170 million people with a strong middle class to the edge.  Dr Manzur Ejaz writing in the Daily Times says this may be the year the military takes on the demons within and goes after each and every militant group including those closely nurtured by it. Not because it has had a change of heart, but because circumstances will force it .

The chief is that the state of Pakistan - where the military enjoys immense privileges - is itself under threat.  And it was to safeguard the state, that the military moved against the Taliban and other militant organisations in 2009, not just under U.S. pressure, he argues.

"The military may have realised that if it goes on the same old path, the state may be faced with bigger disasters. Lawlessness and a collapsing economy may affect the military's viability and its own privileges," he says, adding that the military has concluded that a democratic discourse and rehabilitation of the state's basic institutions may be the only way to save the country.

And above all, looming large is the rise of India as an economic power which some in Delhi see as a game-changer in the region  just as China's rise is shaking up the world. Not even India's incompetent politicians and deathly bureaucracy can stop it growing at 8-9 percent for the next few years,  a government official told me, only half-in-jest. It may not be enough to pull up all of India's poor, but the sheer rise of a nation of a billion people will be enough to set off waves in its immediate neighbourhood.

"The (Pakistan)  military knows fully well that if India continues its stunning growth and Pakistan keeps on sinking, it will not remain competitive. Pakistan will thus be conceived as a basket case in the neighbourhood of a giant, India. Therefore, to compete with India, economic growth is absolutely necessary, which in turn depends upon strengthening of state institutions and elimination of lawlessness at all levels of society," writes Ejaz.