Afghan Journal

Saving Afghanistan from its neighbours

Walking into a giant tent at the foothills of Kabul, you are conscious of the importance of jirgas throughout Afghanistan’s troubled history.  These assemblies of tribal elders have been called at key moments in the country’s history  from whether it should participate in the two World Wars to a call for a national uprising against an Iranian invasion in the 18th century.

Next week’s jirga is aimed at building  a national consensus behind Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s effort to seek a negotiated settlement of the nine year conflict now that the Taliban have fought U.S. and NATO forces to a virtual stalemate and the clock on a U.S. military withdrawal has begun.

But the question is how much of an influence Afghanistan’s half a dozen direct neighbours including Pakistan and Iran  and near ones such as India, Saudi Arabia and Russia will exert on any possible settlement of the conflict. At one level Afghanistan  has become a battleground for India and Pakistan  on the one hand, and the United States and Iran on the other.  At another level there is also China’s deepening economic engagement and  Russis’s concerns of the arc of instability radiating from Afghanistan into the Central Asia republics.

Here’s how some of the big regional players are approaching a  U.S. military withdrawal stated to begin from mid-2011 and  Karzai’sbid to seek reconciliation with the Taliban who have  fought U.S. and NATO forces to a virtual stalemate.

PAKISTAN Of all of Afghanistan’s six direct neighbours, Pakistan  arguably has the highest stake in the country. The insurgency is  largely driven by the Pasthun Taliban and there are Pasthuns on  both sides of the Durand Line, the border between the two  countries. Many of the early Taliban, who swept through southern  Afghanistan in the 1990s after years of civil war, grew up in  refugee camps in Pakistan which hosts the largest number.

Above all, Pakistan considers Afghanistan its sphere of  influence, offering it strategic depth against its much bigger  traditional enemy India. It built close ties with the Taliban as they brought the fractious nation under their control and along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was one of the  three countries that recognised the Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001.

It had to cut its ties to the group following the U.S.  invasion but if any of the regional players has any degree of  influence over the hardline Islamists, it is Pakistan. It wants  to be main channel of any peace negotiation withthem; it doesn’t  even want Afghanistan to conduct separate negotiations with them,  says Kamran Bokhari, regional director Middle East and South Asis for global intelligence consulting company STRATFOR.

Can America win in Afghanistan?

Only 41 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that the country can win the war in Afghanistan, a new poll shows, down from 51 percent in December when President Barack Obama announced a new war strategy. The Rasmussen telephone poll conducted last week found that 36 percent of those surveyed didn’t think the United States could win in Afghanistan. Another 23 percent were unsure.

Doubts about the handling of the Afghan war have continuously been growing, except for that spike in hopes soon after Obama announced a surge as part of  his strategy to stabilise Afghanistan and bring the troops home. Indeed, 48 percent of those polled said ending the war now was a more important goal than winning it, reflecting falling confidence in the war effort.

The poll was conducted just as U.S. casualties from the nine-year war crossed the 1,000 mark, pushed by a suicide attack on a NATO convoy in Kabul. That attack, the deadliest against foreign troops since September, was  followed by assaults on heavily-fortified military bases in Bagram, north of Kabul, and in Kandahar.

In the American narrative of the war, comparisons with Vietnam keep coming back, despite strong assertions that the two wars aren’t the same.  Michael Cohen, writing in Democracy Arsenal, joins a growing  army of sceptics questioning the upcoming operation in Kandahar and whether the United States was underestimating the enemy in much the same way as it did the North Vietnamese back in 1965.

Cohen, picking up on a piece in The Washington Post, says the U.S. military plan for Kandahar seems to be predicated on the notion that the U.S. will bloody the Taliban, seize some level of control in the southern province and push the Taliban closer to negotiations.. But what if doesn’t happen?

“What if the Taliban undertake a guerrilla campaign against NATO forces and/or a wave of terror attacks those who collaborate with the U.S. government. What if they decide to bide their time and wait out U.S. military operations? What if local Afghans blame NATO and the U.S. for the violence that will be sure to accompany our military operations there? What if the strengthening of corrupt, government officials like Walid Karzai turns more of the population against the government? And above all, what if escalation in Kandahar makes the Taliban not more inclined to negotiate with the U.S., but less? What if military operations actually slow the move toward political reconciliation?”

“Broken Afghanistan” hits back at Britain

New British Defence Secretary Liam Fox’s remarks describing Afghanistan as a broken 13th-century country have predictably touched off a firestorm of criticism both at home and in Afghanistan.  For a moment, though, if you drove around  Kabul’s dusty hillsides dotted with dirt-poor, crumbling dwellings and saw the war-ravaged capital’s ruins, you could  forgive Fox for thinking he was in a medieval-era country.

Indeed the criticism against him in Afghanistan is not so much about it being a broken country, but that who exactly is responsible.  Mandegar, a local  newspaper, kicked off its reaction with the headline : “Our 13th century society is the result of your colonialism.”  It reminds readers about the British wars in Afghanistan and how each time Afghans succeeded in driving them out of the country.  “We don’t need Britain in Afghanistan,”  the Arman e-Melli daily said.

Referring to Fox’s remarks that troops were not in Afghanistan to promote education, but rather to defend British streets, the newspaper said Afghans were very aware that the British involvement in south Asia throughout history was aimed at protecting its interests, often at great cost to the countries in the region.  It was a pity that Afghans were fighting each other, otherwise they would have lifted the country out of the “13th century”, the newspaper said.

Fox’s characterisation of Afghanistan was raised at a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the weekend, the Times said. It quoted an Afghan source as saying that the remarks showed Britain to be a “colonialist, orientalist and  racist country.”  In his defence,  Fox’s office has pointed to similar remarks made by Karzai in the past about the Taliban leaving behind a 13th or 14th century country.

Some people are saying it’s Britain that’s broken and is looking for a reason to leave Afghanistan.  British  soldiers are horribly over-extended, taking an ever higher number of casualties and the country can hardly afford the financial costs of keeping them there indefinitely, the Independent wrote.   On Monday, the British Defence Ministry announced that the army’s top bomb disposal officer had resigned , a move which the Sun newspaper said was prompted by concerns that a shortage of  trained bomb disposal experts was putting troops in Afghanistan under strain.

Where does Taliban reconciliation leave victims of war?

The United States has signalled that it will gradually start withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, after almost a decade fighting in the country, from July 2011. And so, perhaps driven by a sense of fear over what the absence of tens of thousands of foreign troops will mean for an already fragile security situation, the Afghan government is pursuing a policy of engaging the Taliban and other insurgent factions such as Hezb-i-Islami. It is a policy widely backed by officials and many members of parliament. It is a political means of seeking an end to the conflict, perhaps because the idea that Afghan security forces will be capable of doing the job of 100,000 foreign troops, is still unfathomable to many. But to many other Afghans it also represents a compromise which could see the country paring back the political developments it has achieved since 2001.

Tens of thousands of Afghans were killed in the bloody civil war which was triggered by the collapse of Kabul’s Soviet-backed government — most of them at the hands of warlords and powerful militia leaders who were competing for power. Some of these men are now officials. Some of them are Members of Parliament. Some of them are still fighting.

The Taliban’s reign, which followed the civil war, also victimised thousands of people.

For years these Afghans have lived with memories of being beaten, brutalised, raped or having witnessed the murder of family members, but they have received next to nothing in reparations, not even a simple apology. To them, the thought of their government — after nine years of clumsy nation building and billions of dollars spent on their country by the U.S. — welcoming the Taliban and other insurgent leaders to a Peace Jirga in Kabul next week leaves them feeling angry and hopeless.

I met with a group of victims in Kabul recently. They were gathered in a sparkly hotel ballroom. I hadn’t heard so many shocking stories of brutality in one place before. An audience of war-scarred Afghans heard from women who saw their children being shot dead and fathers whose sons had been kidnapped, imprisoned and executed. A man whose brother was lashed to death with an electrical cable. Teenagers who as toddlers had lost entire families to rockets and mortars and now walked Kabul’s streets, homeless and desperate.

While they were unified in their hatred for the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami (a delegation of which was invited for closed-door talks with Afghan officials last month) they were also fed up and tired of the fighting and poverty. Some of them said if it meant that peace would at last come to Afghanistan — and it would once and for all start a process of rehabilitation which does not involve thousands of foreign fighters fighting Afghans — perhaps talking with these men was worth a shot. But their greatest concern, and what both President Hamid Karzai and U.S. President Barack Obama have been silent over, is whether the people responsible for their pain will be brought to justice. Will there be a war crimes tribunal for Afghanistan? Or will the Afghan government’s fear that the country will regress back to a civil war, once they lose the sagging safety net of NATO forces, force it to compromise and bring the perpetrators of war crimes not only back into the fold of society but into the government?

Is the surge failing in Afghanistan?

Six months into the surge in Afghanistan, Americans and Afghans alike are asking the question whether it has worked and the ugly reality is that it has failed to make a difference, writes Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post.

To be sure, as U.S. President Barack Obama said last week only half the reinforcements he ordered in December have arrived and there is still more than a year to go before the troop withdrawals begin.

But comparisons with Iraq – America’s other war – are hard to push away and they don’t look good at all. Diehl says five months into the Iraq surge in 2007, sectarian violence was dropping, Sunni tribes were turning against al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government was delivering on its promises.

Afghanistan, in contrast, is a failure on all these counts. Violence has gone up and it cannot just be because more troops have been deployed in new areas and there is more fighting. As we wrote earlier, there were 400 attacks in one week in April, a majority of them roadside bombs.

On Tuesday, the Taliban struck in heavily-guarded Kabul, killing 18 people including six foreign troops  in a suicide attack on a NATO convoy. It was the biggest loss for NATO since September and the deadliest attack in the capital since a February raid.

On the same day, across the border in Pakistan a bicycle bomb ripped through the northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan killing 12 people, and you begin to wonder if Obama’s entire regional war strategy policy is at risk of unravelling.

For a panel discussion on Afghanistan organised by the Thomson Reuters Foundation click here

Half a billion dollars for Afghan interpreters

Thousands of U.S. troops are streaming into Afghanistan each month as part of the surge, and among the things critical to their mission are the services of interpreters.

The U.S. army this month extended the contract of an Ohio-based company to provide translators for Afghanistan for another year at a cost of $679 million. U.S. and NATO commander Lt. General Stanley McChyrstal’s strategy for Afghanistan rests on winning the trust of the people and that can’t work if you don’t have enough people speaking any of their languages such as Pashto, Dari, Tajik, Uzbek.

The “terps”, as the soldiers call them in military slang, don’t just do literal translations, they provide insights into local culture and customs that are key to any attempt to win the people over. And above all, their ability to read the situation on the ground can often save lives.

So the military has turned to Mission Essential Personnel to recruit, screen and bring more than 5,000 interpreters into the battlefield. A handful of the translators are American citizens of Afghan descent, writes Noah Shactman on Danger Room blog. If they have the right language skills and can pass a security clearance, they can make up to $235,000 a year plus health benefits and their work is mostly “analysing communications” and “document exploitation” on one of of the big, comfortable U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

But the vast majority of the recruits are local Afghans, earning about $900 a month and their job is to accompany frontline troops into action, Shacktman says. These interpreters are given a week’s month’s worth of training before they’re shipped out to combat. Once there, they’re required to spend a year working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and be on-call during the remaining time.

It can be a gruelling schedule, and obviously dangerous. The danger is not just when they are out in the field with the troops. They are also targeted in their homes by the Taliban for working for foreign forces, and often their families are threatened.

 This weekend the Taliban said they had kidnapped and killed four Afghan interpreters, including one on his wedding day, because they worked for Western troops in Khost province.

from The Great Debate:

Obama, Karzai and an Afghan mirage

Last year, under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan slipped three places on a widely respected international index of corruption and became the world's second-most corrupt country. It now ranks 179th out of 180, a place long held by Somalia.

According to a United Nations report published in January, Afghans paid $2.5 billion in bribes in 2009, roughly a quarter of the country's Gross Domestic Product (not counting revenue from the opium trade). The survey, based on interviews with 7,600 people, said corruption was the biggest concern of Afghans.

On the military front in a war more than halfway through its ninth year, attacks on U.S. forces and their NATO allies totaled 21,000 in 2009, a 75 percent increase over 2008, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) a week before Karzai's visit to Washington. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, noted that Taliban insurgents had set up a "widespread paramilitary shadow government...in a majority of Afghanistan's 34 provinces."

The Pentagon, also in advance of Karzai's visit (in the second week of May), reported that Afghans support his government in only 29 of the 121 districts the U.S. military consider most strategically important.

"The insurgents perceive 2009 as their most successful year," the Pentagon said. "The Afghan insurgency has. ..a ready supply of recruits drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction and lack of governance to grow their ranks." As to corruption: "Real...change remains elusive and political will, in particular, remains doubtful."

In case all this has led you to the conclusion that the Afghan glass is half empty at best, that's not the way President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton portrayed it during Karzai's visit. Yes, there were difficulties ahead, they said, but overall things were looking up. "We are steadily making progress," Obama said. "Progress in Afghanistan is real," echoed Clinton.

Was this a matter of two leaders seeing a mirage, or a 21st century version of the "we see light at the end of the tunnel" assurance Americans heard during the Vietnam war? Or was it simply overdue recognition that Obama is stuck with Karzai no matter how unpopular he might be or how much credibility he lacks?

Pakistanis demand answer, want to take down militant networks

It’s still not firmly established whether any Pakistan-based militant groups were involved in the failed car bombing in New York  this month and there have been renewed suggestions that the suspect Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American,  may have been a lone wolf.

But this hasn’t stopped the soul-searching that Pakistanis have engaged in since the  failed attack on May 1. Indeed, it’s not just the United States or other countries in the west urging Pakistan to act against militants; the Pakistanis are as forthright, if not more demanding that the whole ‘terrorist infrastructure” be taken down.

Here’s an excerpt from an editorial from The Dawn:  “Sadly, our security establishment only acts when Pakistani or Pakistan-based militants attack or threaten to attack others and we, in turn, are threatened with “severe consequences”. These groups pose a danger to Pakistan more than to anyone else. When cornered they have no qualms about turning their guns on the state and its citizens. Created in the Zia era and nurtured by elements in the intelligence agencies, the jihadi infrastructure has spiralled out of control, and action is necessary before matters become even worse.”

The Daily Times said it was time Pakistan took on the Afghan Haqqani network operating out of North Waziristan, which has long been seen to be close to the Pakistani security establishment.  “The Haqqani network, considered an ‘asset’ for Pakistan in its ‘strategic depth’ policy in a post-US Afghanistan, has been given a free hand for far too long now. Haqqani has not only given a safe haven to the al Qaeda leadership in North Waziristan but is also involved in providing assistance to the Punjabi terrorists.”

The  newspaper also attacks the security authorities for failing to deal with the Pakistani Taliban decisively. ”The Pakistani Taliban have already wreaked havoc in our country, but their global terrorist aims should be a cause of concern for the government and the army. In the past we have either not paid much attention to their ties with global terrorist networks or have turned a blind eye to these collaborations. Now that a terror plot has been uncovered in the US and the involvement of our local Taliban is suspected, there should be no procrastination on this front.”

Pakistan must act for its own good, but if it didn’t the United States may well  bomb North Waziristan itself, intensify the drone attacks, bring boots on the ground, or declare war against Pakistan in the worst-case scenario, the newspaper said.  It reminds readers that the U.S. reaction to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York was an attack on Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s violent summer: 400 attacks in a week

U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus last month warned residents of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar of a violent summer ahead as his troops prepared to take full control of the southern province (with the same name) from the Taliban.  He spoke of  the insurgents  taking “horrific action” to stop the military advance into their spiritual centre.

Some of it may already be unfolding although the offensive is still thought to be weeks away. In one week alone toward the end of April there were 400 attacks , 60 percent of them roadside bombs. Which makes it 57 attacks in a day, telling you more than anything else the deteriorating military situation in the country.

Juan Cole, a commentator on Middle East and South Asia issues, writes on his blog Informed Comment that this level of violence is what characterised Iraq in March 2005 before the Sunni-Shiite war. “The year 2005 was a bloody year in Iraq, and nobody but then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld doubted we were mired in a vicious guerrilla war,” he says.

There were 1,000 roadside bomb attacks in April 2010, twice as many as in April the previous year. Last weekend the Taliban announced they would launch an offensive against U.S. and NATO troops beginning Monday, the day Afghan President Hamid Karzai began meetings in Washington to repair ties clouded by mutual recriminations.

The promised offensive hasn’t materialised, at least not on the scale the insurgents seemed to suggest,  but the level of ordinary violence is itself is higher than at any point in the recent past.

from Tales from the Trail:

Frankly, Mr. Karzai, the U.S. does give a damn

When two heads of state stand side-by-side in public, it's all about reading into the words they choose and the body language.

In the case of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. President Barack Obama the word "frank" came up a number of times.

In Washington-speak when political leaders describe discussions as "frank" and "very frank"  it usually means they didn't quite see eye-to-eye. And given the recent tensions between Karzai's government and the U.S. government that the visit sought to ease, the use of the word "frank" showed that not everything was agreeable.

"Obviously, there are going to be tensions in such a complicated, difficult environment and in a situation in which, on the ground, both -- both Afghans and Americans are making enormous sacrifices," Obama said at a joint news conference at the White House. "We've had very frank discussions."

Obama went on to say, "Our job is to be a good friend and to be frank with President Karzai in saying, 'Here's where we think we've got to put more effort'."

When Karzai took his turn at the question, he pointed out that this version of the U.S.-Afghan relationship was in its 10th year. "It's not an imaginary relationship.  It's a real relationship. It's based on some very hard and difficult realities.  We are in a campaign against terrorism together.  There are days that we are happy.  There are days that we are not happy."

"And definitely days have come in which we've had a difference of opinion.  And definitely days in the future will come in which we have difference of opinion," Karzai said.