Afghan Journal

Huge natural stone arch new Afghan treasure

Afghanistan surprises most first-time visitors (including many on military transport planes) with stunning natural beauty — there’s little room in column inches taken up with war to describe snow-topped mountains, lush valleys, spring fields scattered with crocus and other pleasures of living here.

The country’s dazzling blue Band-e Amir lakes are almost unique geologically (not the way they are formed, but in their size), there are endangered animals like snow leopards roaming the country’s more remote corners, and now naturalists have discovered one of the world’s largest natural stone arches.

The Hazarchishman arch, which sits over 3,000 metres above sea level, has a span of almost 65 metres, making it the 12th largest known in the world. It has nudged Utah’s Outlaw Arch down one place in the list.

There are also man-made treasures left, despite centuries of war and destruction, and a more recent spasm of archeological looting fueled by the huge market for antiquities, whether legal or not.

Archeologists are working frantically to excavate the remains of a vast, rich and until recently entirely unknown monastery complex just south of Kabul, under which lies a rich vein of copper ore that a Chinese consortium is waiting to start mining.

Hopefully one day Afghanistan will be peaceful enough for more than a few lucky journalists, archeologists and conservation workers to see these things.

Standing on the warfront: when sport divides India and Pakistan

In the run-up to Wednesday’s cricket match between India and Pakistan, passions are running high on both sides of the border and in the diaspora which is following their teams’ progress in the game’s biggest tournament.

How to demolish Pakistan was the title of a programme aired by an Indian television network  where former players and experts discussed ways to win the high-voltage game that will be played in the northern Indian town of Mohali, within, in a manner of speaking, of earshot distance of the heavily militarised  border with Pakistan.     Pakistan television in similarly wall-to-wall coverage ran a programme where one of the guests advised the team to recite a particular passage from the Koran before stepping out to play that day. There is even a story doing the rounds in Pakistan that an enraged Indian crowd put a parrot fortune teller to death for predicting a Pakistani victory, according to this report.

All fair in sport, you would argue, and especially for two countries that take their cricket very seriously. But this contest has an edgy undertone of antagonism that flows from the tension in ties since the Mumbai attacks of 2008 carried out by Pakistan based militants and for which New Delhi seeks greater redress from Pakistani authorities.

The charged atmosphere - and this has very little to do with the players themselves – recalls the fervour and aggression of the 1990s when the people of the two countries treated cricket as essential conflict. Each game was seen as a test of national honour in much the way the border guards  of the two countries strut their stuff in a bitter-sweet ceremony at the Wagah crossing each day at sunset. The winner of the cricket game was feted while the loser slinked away in disgrace.

The drums of war are being heard again as the subcontinent virtually prepares to come to a halt for the game this week. “To many cricket fans its a war, to the Pakistani fans it’s match of revenge as they think that the BCCI  and Indian underground agents have been the criminals in causing all the chaos in Pakistan and its cricket, while India thinks Pakistan as the culprit in creating a zone of terrorism surrounding them,” wrote Faisal Caesar in SportPulse.

But what does Indian batting genius Sachin Tendulkar or Pakistan’s resurgent captain Shahid Afridi have to do with all that, he asks.

from FaithWorld:

Islamic bloc drops 12-year U.N. drive to ban defamation of religion

(U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addresses the Human Rights Council in Geneva and urges it "to move beyond a decade-long debate over whether insults to religion should be banned or criminalised," February 28, 2011/Valentin Flauraud)

Islamic countries set aside their 12-year campaign to have religions protected from "defamation", allowing the U.N. Human Rights Council in Genea to approve a plan to promote religious tolerance on Thursday. Western countries and their Latin American allies, strong opponents of the defamation concept, joined Muslim and African states in backing without vote the new approach that switches focus from protecting beliefs to protecting believers.

Since 1998, the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) had won majority approval in the council and at the United Nations General Assembly for a series of resolutions on "combating defamation of religion". Critics said the concept ran against international law and free speech, and left the way open for tough "blasphemy" laws like those in Pakistan which have been invoked this year by the killers of two moderate politicians in Pakistan. They argued that it also allowed states where one religion predominates to keep religious minorities under tight control or even leave them open to forced conversion or oppression.

(Funeral of Pakistan's Minister for Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti in Islamabad March 4, 2011. Pakistani Taliban assassinated Bhatti, a Catholic, for urging the repeal of the blasphemy law/Faisal Mahmood)

But Pakistan, which speaks for the OIC in the rights council, had argued that such protection against defamation was essential to defend Islam, and other religions, against criticism that caused offence to ordinary believers. Islamic countries pointed to the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed in Denmark in 2005, which sparked anti-Western violence in the Middle East and Asia, as examples of defamatory treatment of their faith that they wanted stopped. However, support for the fiercely-contested resolutions -- which the OIC had been seeking to have transformed into official U.N. human rights standards -- has declined in recent years.

Happy New Year Mr President

U.S. President Barack Obama welcomed the Persian New Year (1390, which started on Monday) with a video message, as he has done every year of his presidency.

Nawroz festival (also spelt nowroz, nowruz and several other ways) falls on spring equinox and is celebrated across a wide swathe of Central Asia and surrounding areas — it is a public holiday in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kashmir and Kyrgyzstan, according to Wikipedia.

But Obama’s message was addressed almost entirely to Iranians. “This is a holiday for the Iranian people to spend time with friends and family,” Obama said, launching a discussion of the country’s past and future challenges, after just a briefest of  “best wishes to all who are celebrating Nowruz in the United States and around the world”.

His choice of words did not go unnoticed in Afghanistan, currently host to almost 100,000 U.S. troops. The popular holiday was once banned as “un-Islamic” by the hardline Taliban — who U.S. troops are fighting — and has been  celebrated enthusiastically again since their downfall in 2001 .

“President Obama’s Nawroz message was very discouraging not a single mention of Afghans. I hope he knows, Afghanistan celebrates,” said BBC journalist Bilal Sarwary in a tweet.

“So Obama thinks Nawroz is only celebrated in Iran? He bypassed Afghan, Tajik, Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen, Kyrgyz STANS & some other non-Stans” said another tweet from user AbasDaiyar.

‘alibomaye’ was even more direct. “Obama gave a Nowroz message to Iran but not Afghanistan and that’s so laaame”.

United States begins a new war, what happens to Afghanistan?

The United States has said the scope of its military intervention in Libya is limited, but it nevertheless raises questions about what happens to the two other wars that it is waging, especially in Afghanistan. The last time Washington took the eye off the ball in Afghanistan was in 2003 when it launched the Iraq war and then got so bogged down there that a low level and sporadic Taliban resistance in southern Afghanistan grew into a full blown insurgency from which it is still trying to extricate itself.

The question then is will the U.S. attention again shift away from Afghanistan and to Libya  and indeed other African and Middle East countries where revolts  against decades of authoritarian rule are gaining ground, and unsettling every strategic calculation.   Already U.S. Republicans are saying they are concerned that U.S. forces may be getting drawn into a costly, long-running operation in Libya that lacks clear goals.  If it ends in a stalemate – a possibility recognized by Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen – how focused can America be on Afghanistan where you can argue that the stakes are arguably less now that al Qaeda has largely been pushed out, and the fight is almost entirely with the Taliban.

Just by way of recap, here’s broadly what happened to Afghanistan when America’s attention and money were drained toward Iraq.  Militant groups reconstituted themselves, more safe havens sprung up, and they were financed by a resurgent opium economy .  Post-war reconstruction was curtailed as blood and treasure was invested in the war in Iraq. In some ways, it was a throwback to another U.S withdrawal from the region when  it almost overnight lost interest following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 after a decade of arming and financing the insurgents against its former Cold War foe

The other unintended consequence of the U.S. military action in Libya is the anger it will stoke in countries such as Afghanistan where many see it as an attack on an Islamic nation, the latest of a string of nations so targeted.  Regardless of its good intentions, the intervention will be depicted as aggressive, predatory and anti-Muslim, as Edward N. Luttwak, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in  the Los Angeles Times.-

Indeed the war may have just become hotter for the troops in Afghanistan, with the Taliban seizing on the intervention in Libya as the latest onslaught in a broader war on Islam. The Taliban in a statement said  the Western intervention was aimed at weakening the Islamic nation and seizing its oil reserves through a full scale invasion. For good measure, the Taliban scolded the Libyans for fighting among themselves and thereby giving an excuse to the West to intervene.

(Photograph of scene at an Afghan army recruitment centre in Kunduz after a suicide attack this month.Reuters/Wahdat.)

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

The “sound and fury” of U.S.-Pakistan ties

With the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, the United States and Pakistan have put behind them one of the more public rows of their up-and-down relationship.  It was probably not the worst row -- remember the furore over a raid by U.S. ground troops in Angor Adda in Waziristan in 2008, itself preceded  by a deluge of leaks to the U.S. media about the alleged duplicity of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in its dealings on Afghanistan.

But it was certainly one which by its very nature was guaranteed to get the most attention - an American who shot dead two Pakistanis in what he said was an act of self-defence, denied diplomatic immunity and ultimately released only after the payment of blood money. Adding to the drama were two intelligence agencies battling behind the scenes.

It was also the first serious row since the Obama administration began to build what it promised would be a new strategic relationship with Pakistan.

As I wrote earlier this month, overall relations between the United States and Pakistan were rather better than they looked (or at least than they appeared at the height of the Davis row).  Compared to two years ago, Pakistan is more likely to talk now about the need for stability in Afghanistan than strategic depth (the extent of this shift is open to debate). The United States has also moved closer towards meeting Pakistan's calls for a political settlement in Afghanistan by holding direct talks with representatives of the Taliban, according to several official sources with knowledge of those contacts.

On the subject of Taliban talks, the New York Times noted that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during a speech to the Asia Society last month, "appeared to recast longstanding preconditions for talks: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda. Instead, she described them as 'necessary outcomes'. "

According to the NYT, "officially, the State Department played down the change in language, but a senior Western diplomat in Washington, who was familiar with the strategy behind Mrs. Clinton’s speech, said: 'It was not intentional to explicitly make preconditions into outcomes. But the text now leaves room for interpretation, which opens doors.'”

The other half of that story is to look at who first suggested that the United States focus on outcomes rather than preconditions for talks  -- Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who wrote a detailed letter to President Barack Obama last year outlining how he saw the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

From Afghanistan to Libya; rethinking the role of the military

In a report this month calling for faster progress on a political settlement on Afghanistan, the influential UK parliamentary foreign affairs committee was unusually critical of the dominance of the military in setting Afghan policy.

"We conclude that there are grounds for concern over the relationship between the military and politicians. We further conclude that this relationship has, over a number of years, gone awry and needs to be re-calibrated  ... we believe that problems in Afghanistan highlight the need for a corresponding cultural shift within Whitehall to ensure that those charged with taking foreign policy decisions and providing vitally important political leadership are able to question and appraise military advice with appropriate vigour," it said.

During its enquiries, based on interviews with regional experts and officials, "we gained the impression that the sheer size and power of the U.S. military ensured that the U.S. military remained largely in control of U.S. Afghan policy," it added.

It also quoted former UK special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, as saying that conversations between the U.S. and British military “end up with things being pre-cooked between the U.S. and the UK militaries before they are subject to political approval back in London ..."

"In Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’s view, the war in Afghanistan gave the British Army a raison d’être it has lacked for many years, new resources on an unprecedented scale and a chance to redeem itself in the eyes of the U.S. following criticisms about the army’s performance in Basra, Iraq."

The comments in the report struck me as interesting, primarily because they were included at all -- "civ-mil" relations are not usually a hot topic for political debate in Britain.  Otherwise they seemed to be largely a reflection of a far more heated discussion in Washington over the extent to which the U.S. military has come to dominate American foreign policy in the years following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and during two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For recent articles on the subject see Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy or Franz-Stefan Gady at the Small Wars Journal (pdf)

For some time now, it has become conventional wisdom that the military has dominated strategy in Afghanistan -- when the army asked President Barack Obama for more troops, they got them.  And the pundit consensus has been that Obama, after sacking two generals, had little room for manoeuvre even if he wanted to challenge the decisions made by his commander, the politically powerful General David Petraeus.

from Russell Boyce:

Asia – A Week in Pictures 06 March 2011

I do enjoy a coincidence. The week after calls for prodemocracy demonstrations under the social media tag of "Jasmine Revolution" and the week before  the National People's Congress (NPC), International journalists (and I of course include photographers under this title) are brought in by the authorities for "chat". During the "chat" they are reminded of the terms of their journalist visas and how quickly these visas can be revoked if the rules are broken on illegal reporting. Also outlined are places that special permission is needed to report from, Tiananmen Square heading the list. Our picture of a member of the PLA leaving the Great Hall in Tiananmen Square appearing to almost step on the photographer with this low angle picture, as I said I do love a coincidence.

A military delegate from the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) leaves the Great Hall of the People after a meeting during the annual session of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, in Beijing March 4, 2011. China said on Friday that its official military budget for 2011 will rise 12.7 percent over last year, returning to the double-digit rises that have stoked regional disquiet about Beijing's expanding strength. REUTERS

Inside the Great Hall Jason shot this fantastic, Daliesque image of the headless conductor who appears to radiate waves from the central red star that has replaced his head. Another picture that caught my eye is the image of the patient watching the national address by China's Premier Wen Jiabao from her hospital bed. I wonder if the remote is within reach as these speeches tend to go on for quite a long time and imagine that if you are in hospital in pain there is only so much economic news you can absorb at one time ? Moving away from Beijing and the NPC I am really drawn to Aly's picture of the construction site which was shot to illustrate the housing inflation story in China (not an easy one at any stretch of the imagination). The metal reinforcement supports look like leafless trees, the solitary figure trudging through a lifeless, snowy landscape. 

The conductor of a military band performs during the rehearsal prior to the opening ceremony of the National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing March 5, 2011. REUTERS/Jason Lee

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

In Pakistan, an assassination and the death of words

When I first heard about Shahbaz Bhatti's assassination, there seemed to be nothing sensible to be said about it.  Not yet another prediction about Pakistan's growing instability, nor even an outpouring of anger of the kind that followed the killing of Punjab governor Salman Taseer in the English-language media.  The assassination of the Minorities Minister did not appear to portend anything beyond the actual tragedy of his death.  And nor could anyone say it came as a  surprise. A loss of words, then. A painful punctuation mark.

Cafe Pyala has now articulated far better than I could what went through my mind when I first heard about the assassination.

"There was a time when some of us would have leapt at the chance to throw words into this maelstrom, to comment on a senseless tragedy like the one today. As journalists, as commentators, as columnists, it would have been like going to the Promised Land. High profile murder? Check. Law and order issue? Check. Spectre of extremism? Check. Possibility of point scoring against toothless government? Check. Energizing, empowering, emboldening feeling of being part of a struggle that is bigger than one’s self? Check, Check, Check and Check!

"That time is long past."

It is that loss of words that is perhaps the most troubling. Everyone already knows that publicly challenging the blasphemy laws in Pakistan can be a death sentence.  Everyone already knows the government appeased the religious right by pledging not to amend the laws after Taseer's death (that appeasement, incidentally, is not unique to the current civilian government -- the Musharraf government was also quite clear the laws could not be touched.) Everyone already knows that Pakistan's minorities are particularly vulnerable (according to The Express Tribune, they comprise almost 10 million people, equal to everyone in Tunisia, or one-and-half times all of Libya. )

Shahbaz Bhatti was a Christian, and wanted a reform of the blasphemy laws. What more was there to say?

And the many bewildering causes of the current state of Pakistan have already been listed and debated so many times. The war in Afghanistan. Pakistan's difficult relationship with the United States and a history of confrontation with India. Pakistan's own troubled history and the challenge of finding an identity for itself as a mainly Muslim country that is not Islamist.  Its economic problems, exacerbated by a global financial downturn. The corruption of its elite.  The political shenanigans of an infant democracy in a country dominated by the military. The desensitisation created by near-daily killings along with a tendency for false moral equivalence - each condemnation of a death too often accompanied by a "but".  What more is there to say?