Afghan Journal

The view from Pakistan: India is a bigger threat than the Taliban, al Qaeda

India may have  a bigger problem in Pakistan than previously thought. More than half of Pakistanis surveyed in a Pew poll say India is a bigger threat than al Qaeda or the Taliban.

It’s not just the Pakistani military that believes a bigger, richer India is an existential threat. A majority of ordinary people share that perception as well. That ought to worry Indian policy planners. Of the Pakistanis polled, 23 percent think the Taliban is the greatest threat to their country, and 3 percent think al Qaeda is, despite the rising tide of militant violence in Pakistan’s turbulent northwest region on the Afghan border, and also in the heartland cities.

One must approach all surveys with caution, especially so in countries such as India and Pakistan with very large populations.  Pew conducted face-to-face interviews with 2,000 adults in Pakistan between April 13 and 28 of 2010. It says the sample was disproportionately urban, and parts of the troubled areas of the northwest and Baluchistan were not covered. For a country with a population of over 170 million, drawing hard conclusions based on a sample size that small  must come with a mandatory health warning.

Still, there were some positive take-aways.  Despite the deep-seated tensions between these two countries, most Pakistanis want better relations with India. Roughly 72% say it is important for relations with India to improve and about three-quarters support increased trade with India and further talks between the two rivals.

But India won’t talk unless Pakistan acts against the militant groups and their patrons. For a large number of Indians, memories of the 11/26 attacks in Mumbai are still too fresh. India has made almost all dialogue with Pakistan conditional, based on the steps it takes to roll up groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based organization that New Delhi has blamed for a series of attacks in India including the Mumbai assault of 2008. But Pakistan won’t act because it doesn’t consider them to be a threat.  So how do you square such a circle?

The Indians can take some comfort in the fact that Pakistanis also gave the United States an equally poor approval rating. Roughly 59 percent of Pakistanis describe the U.S. as an enemy. And President Barack Obama is very unpopular — only 8% of Pakistanis express confidence that he will do the right thing in world affairs, his lowest rating among 22 nations that were polled about their confidence in the U.S. president.

For all the money that has been lavished on Pakistan, the United States seems to be getting nowhere in winning public support. Indeed,  support for the U.S. involvement in the fight against extremists fell last year. “The lesson unlearned in fifty years is that feeding Pakistan cash will not alter a national psychosis of war and hatred for the U.S.,” Dr. Aseem Shukla wrote in the Washington Post.

from Tales from the Trail:

Backlash over WikiLeaks release of Afghan war documents

There may be more shoes to drop from WikiLeaks if it releases another 15,000 documents on the Afghanistan war that the whistleblower website is reviewing. It is already seeing some backlash after releasing 75,000-plus documents on the Internet.

The Times of London reported Wednesday that the leaked documents expose informers helping U.S. forces and have put hundreds of Afghan lives at risk.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange responded in an interview from London with NBC's "Today" show. "We are checking to see whether this is in fact credible. It is probably unlikely. We have taken care to in fact hold back 15,000 for review that should it have this type of material in it. If there are those names in there and they are at risk, this would be because of a misclassification by the U.S. military."

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The group has designed a computer system especially for reviewing the remaining documents, Assange said. "They have not been published and will not be published until they are significantly reviewed."

The fallout over the documents is far from over.

from Tales from the Trail:

Washington Extra

In many ways the documents released by WikiLeaks last night merely underscored the bleak assessment of the Afghan war which General Stanley McChrystal issued last August.

At the time McChrystal warned the overall situation was “deteriorating”, complained of “under-resourcing” and called for not just more resources but a “fundamentally new approach” from NATO forces if failure were to be avoided.

McChrystal, who had access to a whole lot more information than WikiLeaks, said the Taliban were aided by “elements of some intelligence agencies” -- meaning the Pakistanis -- something US officials have been saying for years. He talked of a popular “crisis of confidence” with the government of Afghanistan and warned that the steady stream of civilian casualties had to be stemmed.

The administration is arguing these documents, which date until December 2009, are merely an account of the failures of former President George W. Bush’s policy, and in many ways they have a point.

There is nothing in here remotely as explosive as the Pentagon Papers, which documented systematic lying about the conduct of the Vietnam war. But the Kabul War Diary catalogues the failures and problems of the Afghan conflict in huge detail, often from the perspective of ordinary troops. The documents record a constant stream of engagements in which civilians were killed, and help substantiate the allegations against Pakistan.

All this only serves to reinforce the popular perception that this war is unwinnable.

What is more: many of the problems highlighted in these reports still exist today – especially the allegations the Pakistanis are playing a double game, and the issue of Afghan government and police corruption. Pessimists say there is very little sign of progress on these fronts, or even a coherent strategy to address these problems. Here are our top stories from today:

WikiLeaks: shaking the foundations of U.S. policy toward Pakistan

A Pakistani security official stands near a burning vehicle after it was attacked in Chaman in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, along the Afghan border on May 19, 2010.

On the face of it, you could ask what’s new about the latest disclosures of Pakistani involvement in the Taliban insurgency while accepting massive U.S. aid to fight Islamic militancy of all hues. Hasn’t this been known all along — something that a succession of top U.S. officials and military leaders have often said, sometimes  couched in diplomatic speech and sometimes rather clearly?

It was only last week that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there must be somebody in the Pakistani government who knew Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Coming from America’s top diplomat, it couldn’t be more blunt.

Then why is a trove of over 90,000 classified military documents released by WikiLeaks on the war in Afghanistan causing so much consternation? Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, says  it is now much more difficult to deny or dodge the truths that everyone has been aware of:

Government officials can always deflect news stories simply by crossing their fingers and waiting for the story to sink in a haze of oil spills and Lindsay Lohan extravaganzas. Now, however, “proof” is there in the black-and-white of secret U.S. documents, compliments of anti-war WikiLeaks. Even if one does not believe that the information contained in every one of these reports is accurate (some do sound rather bizarre), and even if little in the reports can be corroborated independently, the very volume of the “secret” material is overwhelming and plausible—and yes, seductively “secret.”

The White House condemned the leak, saying it could threaten national security and endanger the lives of Americans. Islamabad said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible and added that Pakistan had paid in blood fighting militants.

U.S. troops walk a dangerous line in Arghandab

The walk to besieged U.S. Combat Outpost Nolen is only 700 metres in a straight line, but for the soldiers who walk it every day it is an extraordinary feat of fitness and defeating their own fear in one of Afghanistan’s riskiest front lines.

The only road, a dusty farm track known as “Route Phillies”, is blanketed in roadside bombs designed to kill or maim soldiers, and occasional larger bombs make them dangerous too for even heavily armoured trucks.

To skirt that, troops opt instead for a zig-zagging obstacle course across grape fields separated by four metre-high mud walls, walked in full combat gear and in savage 45C heat.

The grape field are nothing like a western vineyard, but instead grow between deep, muddy trenches covered in weeds, and perfect for concealing bombs. The humidity in the trenches is unbelievable, while the narrow space concentrates a blast.

Walking behind a patrol leader and his Squad Automatic Weapon, or SAW, gunner, I completely missed the tiny white wires coming out of a vine and marking the position of a Taliban IED. Luckily they didn’t, and all three of us backtracked to try another way.

Several U.S. soldiers have been maimed and wounded by bombs here. A two kilometre walk can take hours and the troops say the terrain makes Afghanistan a far worse warfront than Iraq.

On the few open fields, troops must give way their caution for pressure-plate bombs and sprint across the flat hard-packed ground favoured by the Taliban for ambushes. They lay behind walls at one end, turning it into a shooting range.

Burying the India-Pakistan dialogue for now

The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan have returned home, licking their wounds from their latest failed engagement.  Both sides are blaming each other for not only failing to make any progress, but also souring ties further, with Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart S.M.Krishna openly sparring at a news conference following the talks in Islamabad.  Qureshi suggested Krishna did not seem to have the full mandate to conduct negotiations because directions were being given from New Delhi throughout the day-long talks, drawing rebuke from India which said the foreign minister had been insulted on Pakistani soil.

Some people are asking why bother  going through this painful exercise  at this time  when the chances of  of the two sides making even the slightest concession are next to zero?  India and Pakistan may actually be doing each other more damage by holding these high-profile, high-pressure meetings where the domestic media and the  opposition  in both the countries  is watching for the slightest sign of capitulation by either government.

It’s the world’s longest running soap opera, made for great television viewing, says a blog on the Indian National Interest. “These events have become the drivers of the process each such opportunity attracting saturated media coverage and intense public scrutiny in both countries.”

And  these are only talks about what to talk about since they can’t even agree on whether terrorism should be front and centre of the dialogue as New Delhi wants or the row over Kashmir be given top billing as Pakistan wants. ”If anything, the precarious relationship between India and Pakistan deteriorated after the countries’ two foreign ministers haggled in day-long sessions on July 15 – not over substance but over what issues they would discuss and when they would discuss them,” argues Michael Hughes in the Huffington Post

That’s pretty much been the the way the implacable foes have approached each public engagement for several decades except for bursts of  high-powered diplomacy such as Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee riding the first bus service between New Delhi to Lahore in 1999 in a dramatic gesture to breach  the walls  of distrust that some compared to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Israel.  Some of us who followed Vajpayee to the impenetrable border thought history was being made and  that the whole India-Pakistan narrative was being transformed.  But, as has happened so often in the past,  Vajpayee’s peace-making ended in spectacular failure when three months later  his government confronted hundreds of thousands of fighters backed by the Pakistani army  who had occupied India’s part of Kashmir.

Two years later,Vajpayee  made a second bold move for peace inviting President Pervez Musharraf for talks in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal,  to try and find a way to end half a century of animosity and get the two countries to live at peace with each other. Those marathon talks, again under the harsh glare of the media camped outside the hotel where they met, ended in failure with a bitterly disappointed  Musharraf - who was equally determined in his pursuit of peace –  leaving for home in the dead of the night with barely a  goodbye. Again, if you were there that night, you couldn’t help thinking tthat the burden of expectations ultimately proved too much for the two unlikely peace-makers – Vajpayee a dyed-in-the-wool Hindu nationalist leader and Musharraf, a military general who had fought Indian forces.

2014: Mark it in your diary

It was with scarcely disguised sarcasm that a foreign colleague murmured ‘2014’, referring to the year, when I told him earlier last week of first reports of the United Nations Secretary-General and his NATO counterpart having to divert landing at Kabul airport to a nearby military base after a Taliban rocket attack on the Afghan capital.

He was referring to a speech made earlier at a major international conference in Kabul, where Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced that 2014 was the target for Afghan forces to take over security responsibility in all areas of the country from the NATO-led foreign army.

The Danish foreign minister who was supposed to have come to Kabul for the event also couldn’t make it because of the attack and diverted to central Asia. Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt who was traveling with the U.N. boss, wrote in his blog that “the rocket attack was not much more than a serious attack on our sleep”.

Bildt and the U.N. chief may have lost only their sleep, but many Afghans believe they lost more with a conference on which millions was spent to discuss issues that had already been agreed or offered little new hope. Promises of better governance, fighting corruption, improving security and the lives of Afghans, and coordination with foreign forces have all been made before.

The conference threw up the tightest security Afghanistan has ever experienced. Kabul’s airport was shut for Monday and Tuesday and both days were declared public holidays. All roads leading to within several kilometers of the site of the conference and the airport were closed to all traffic and even for pedestrians. With no customers, most shops closed. Anyone needing emergency medical treatment was also in trouble as most key hospitals were in the area closed to the public, or key staff couldn’t reach them.

As foreign bigwigs and Afghans officials were discussing the 2014 timetable on Tuesday, an Afghan soldier shot dead two of his U.S. trainers in an area of the secure north, away from the Taliban bastion of support. The incident was the second in a week of an Afghan soldier “going renegade” in a year in which at least 12 foreign troops have been killed by rouge local forces.

They can be a stark reminder of  the perhaps the degree of lack of trust and dislike among the Afghan security forces for the foreign troops and the possible problems for an eventual transition and hand over of security responsibility in 2014.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Richard Haass on Afghanistan – time to scale down U.S. ambitions

Richard Haass, president at the Council on Foreign Relations, has become the latest to urge the United States to change course in Afghanistan and to seek a political settlement to try to bring an end to the war.

"The war the United States is now fighting in Afghanistan is not succeeding and is not worth waging in this way. The time has come to scale back U.S. objectives and sharply reduce U.S. involvement on the ground. Afghanistan is claiming too many American lives, requiring too much attention, and absorbing too many resources. The sooner we accept that Afghanistan is less a problem to be fixed than a situation to be managed, the better,"  he writes in an article in Newsweek.

Haass argues that the United States needs to focus clearly on what it is seeking to accomplish in Afghanistan. "The two main American goals are to prevent al Qaeda from reestablishing a safe haven and to make sure that Afghanistan does not undermine the stability of Pakistan."

This could be achieved, he says, through a political settlement which would include decentralisation of governance in Afghanistan, U.S. support for local Afghan leaders who rejected al Qaeda and did not seek to undermine Pakistan; and talks with the Taliban, along with an acknowledgement that the movement was likely to regain power in parts of the Pashtun-dominated south.

"The advantage of this option is that it works with and not against the Afghan tradition of a weak ruling center and a strong periphery. It would require revision of the Afghan constitution, which as it stands places too much power in the hands of the president," he says.

"Under this scenario, the Taliban would likely return to positions of power in a good many parts of the south. The Taliban would know, however, that they would be challenged by U.S. air power and Special Forces (and by U.S.-supported Afghans) if they attacked non-Pashtun areas, if they allowed the areas under their control to be used to supply antigovernment forces in Pakistan, or if they worked in any way with al Qaeda. There is reason to believe that the Taliban might not repeat their historic error of inviting al Qaeda back into areas under their control. Indeed, the United States should stop assuming that the two groups are one and the same and instead start talking to the Taliban to underscore how their interests differ from al Qaeda’s."

Such ideas are not new - it has long been clear that the United States and its allies had shifted their sights from defeating the Taliban to fighting over the terms of a settlement.  Many analysts, particularly here in London, have been arguing for months for greater provincial autonomy for Afghanistan as a way of easing the strains which could otherwise lead to a renewed civil war or de facto partition in the event of a U.S. withdrawal. But that the suggestion comes from someone of Haass's stature, with a track record inside the U.S. administration, highlights the extent to which American thinking is evolving on Afghanistan.

Taliban rocket attacks rise at Kandahar airbase

AS U.S. and NATO forces ramp up their operation against Taliban centres in southern Afghanistan, insurgents are fighting back with increasing numbers of rockets fired at the biggest coalition base of them all.

Several times a night now sirens blare at the sprawling Kandahar Air Field, known as  KAF, which is home to 30,000 troops and support staff, while loudspeakers scream “rocket attack, rocket attack”.

At that point everyone is supposed to lie on the ground for two minutes to see out any impact, before moving out to sit in the closest shelters.

Such attacks used to occur only once every few weeks, but they are now happening several times a night or at least every few nights.

I rolled from bed in a tented media dorm at around 11pm last night and smacked on the floor, before heading out into the night. Sirens sounded again at almost 5am and a third time at 6am. Only once did I hear a low boom in the distance.

“They fire them from the mountains to the northwest and sometimes they hit pretty close,” an American officer told me while we sat bleary-eyed in a makeshift bunker of mobile concrete walls.

“After the siren sounds you only have a few seconds before the rockets hits and they rarely fire multiples.

Old spectre of partition sparks new jitters

An analysis by a former U.S. envoy to India has touched off a fire storm in Afghanistan where the world’s super power is struggling along with a 150,000-strong NATO force it leads against a resurgent Taliban it thought it had almost defeated with their ousting in 2001.

It has revived a long-held suspicion among some Afghans that the U.S. wants to divide the country as part of  a wider plan to destabilise the middle east and central Asia in pursuit of world hegemony.

The Obama administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan seems headed for failure, said Robert D. Blackwill, who also served as U.S. deputy national security adviser for strategic planning and presidential envoy to Iraq in the administration of President George. W. Bush.

“Given the alternatives, de facto partition of Afghanistan is the best policy option available to the United States and its allies,” he wrote.

Western diplomats and military commanders have not publicly commented on Blackwill’s analysis, nor has President Hamid Karzai, whose government remains unpopular, but some Afghans have reacted bitterly.

One journalist in a late evening radio discussion said Afghans should not remain silent and Karzai had to show that he is a national leader at this critical time.

Ramazan Bashardoost, a lawmaker and former minister in Karzai’s government,  told the same show that Washington eyed broader regional goals,  and Afghanistan’s instability or division suited those aims.