Afghan Journal

Taliban finding clarity as NATO struggles to deliver message

When almost 500 insurgents crawled their way to freedom this week through a dirt tunnel built by the Taliban under the walls of Kandahar’s main jail, news came fast — from the Taliban. And when an Afghan Air Force pilot shot dead eight American troops and a civilian contractor at Kabul airport on Wednesday, the earliest guide to what would be the eventual casualty count came also from the Taliban, hours ahead of NATO confirmations.

The insurgency seems to be making a concerted effort to improve the quality of its breaking news communications, perhaps recognising that the first word often hits hardest. And NATO, with its vast resources and innumberable media advisers, is struggling to keep up. The insurgency in the past has always cloaked its victories in hyperbole, making nonsensical claims of enemies killed or wounded, destroying the credibility of the message. It still does. But with the mass escape Kandahar, which itself seemed too fantastical to believe at first, the claims in unusually clear English of more than 500 fighters freed proved very close to the eventual security forces mark of around 488. And while it’s still uncertain how the insurgency knew of the pilot’s attack inside the military airport (was someone actually watching?), their early numbers for those killed were far closer than ISAF’s. NATO’s vast media machine feeds out a daily diet of the mundane, and at times vies with the Taliban for Orwellian claims. Try this selection of recent headlines: * “Attack on Ministry of Defence is no threat to transition. Despite public skepticism in light of the insurgent attack on the Afghan Ministry of Defense on Monday, MoD and International Security Assistance Force spokesmen say everything is on track for transition to begin. * “Taliban attacked on multiple fronts. As Taliban fighters increasingly intimidate and launch attacks on civilian populations, village elders and residents, known as Guardians of Peace, are reporting insurgent activities to the Afghan National Security Forces, Afghanistan’s True Protectors.” * “The first step towards a great cooperation. The first-ever Public Affairs meeting of Herat city was held today afternoon at Regional Command-West Headquarters at Camp Arena.” Buts ISAF’s unwillingness to provide timely information on attacks means it is the Taliban’s voice that is often heard first in early stories. NATO information often comes late in the day or even at night, well behind the news cycle. NATO claims often in its daily operational roundups to have killed Taliban or al Qaeda “facilitators”, a bizarrely vague description for insurgent organisers and weapons suppliers. But as the conflict in Afghanistan intensifies ahead of a transition to full Afghan security control from 2014, a little more media facilitation of its own would not go astray to help build international confidence in the course of the war.

Pakistan and Afghanistan: strategic allies or sworn enemies?

The armies of Afghanistan and Pakistan exchanged artillery firing across their border this week in which the Pakistan military said it had lost a soldier while several others including civilians were wounded. Newspaper reports in Pakistan speak of at least three Afghan soldiers killed in the clash near Angoor Adda in Pakistan’s South Waziristan region.

It isn’t new, there was a clash last week when an Afghan militia attacked a Pakistan border post in the Lower Dir district, according to the Pakistani media, in which 14 security personnel were killed besides a large number of the Afghan militiamen. 

But the latest flareup at the disputed border is interesting because it comes at a time when Pakistan is not only trying to mend fences with Afghanistan, but is also said to be seeking a three-way strategic partnership involving Kabul, Beijing and itself and keeping the United States out over the long term.

Indeed as the Wall Street Journal reported, Pakistan’s leaders told their Afghan counterpart this month that America had failed them both and that the only durable relationship could be with its two neighbours – Pakistan and China. Pakistan has rejected the report as groundless, but given the strained ties with the United States, it has gained traction, striking a chord among those who are convinced that the United States and Pakistan are on a path of confrontation.    But if Pakistan is seeking to soften up the Afghans, it looks like it has a mountain to climb.  The leak itself of its overtures to President Hamid Karzai is said to have come from Afghan officials keen to remain on America’s side. Besides embarrassing Pakistan, it can only increase the distrust the neighbours have long held for each other.

And on the ground, incidents such as Wednesday when the Afghan army is said to have lobbed 70 shells at a border post near Angoor Adda causing damage to a market there can only increase anger in Pakistan, which is unlikely to accept such aggression from a neighbour considered part of its sphere of influence. It has called for a flag meeting, reflecting the seriousness of the situation.

Last month there was another incident in what Afghan analyst Joshua Foust calls “The  undeclared AfPAK War.” The Pakistani military fired shells in a residential part of Goshta in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangahar province killing a civilian.

Behind volatile U.S.-Pakistan ties : the Afghan endgame ?

Pakistan’s anger over U.S. drone strikes in its northwest region is unabated and this weekend protesters sat on a highway blocking convoys carrying supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Disrupting supplies, including fuel trucks, can severely impair the huge war effort in Afghanistan and its the sort of escalatory action that will likely draw a swift response from the United States, one way or the other.

The question though is how have the two allies – reluctant partners as they have always been – come to such a stage in their relationship they appear to be inflicting more damage on each other than the Islamist militants they pledged to fight together.

Two Pakistan writers have suggested that this whole fight between the United States and Pakistan may not be about drones, but about Afghanistan and what happens there once America leaves. Pakistan wants the United States to concede to it a coveted role in the Afghan endgame that has been denied to it so far, Time magazine’s Omar Waraich wrote in an article. He argues that the drone campaign targeting al Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwest corridor of the country has been going on since 2004, gathering pace once President Barack Obama took office in  January2009.  Pakistan has either tolerated the covert U.S. campaign or even given its silent approval to the offensive against the militants including those threaten the Pakistani state itself.

But of late it has seized on the drones to whip up nationalist passions to force America’s hand in Afghanistan and secure its interests there, the author says.  The big fear is, as always, India and that it would end up playing a bigger role in a resolution of the Afghan conflict. Pakistan’s generals are paranoid about India’s expanding role in Afghanistan and they feel that the  United States has failed to address those concerns,  says Imtiaz Gul, who heads the independent Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad.

The military believes that the United States and India, helped by the Tajik-dominated Afghan security establishment, are trying to deny Pakistan a central role in Afghanistan despite the shared border and  ethnic ties between the two countries. The worst fear is that India may get key security responsibilities in Afghanistan once the bulk of foreign troops leave., Gul says in a piece for Foreign Policy.   That would complete the Pakistani nightmare of encirclement – an economically and militarily powerful India on the east and a hostile Afghanistan on the west.

from Photographers Blog:

Poppy politics

It's not hard to find a field of poppies in the village of Jelawar, north of Kandahar. Some are hidden discreetly behind mud walls but others have been brazenly planted within sight of the main road. During a recent patrol, I accompanied Afghan National Army Captain Imran (he uses one name) and a group of U.S. civil affairs soldiers on a tour of Jelawar's back roads as they tried to assess the extent of this year's opium production.

The first field we came to was a couple of hundred meters across, filled with pink poppy flowers in full bloom. There were several men working the field and Imran asked them what they were doing. A farmer looked up from pulling weeds and said they were working on their onions. Indeed, in a poppy field the size of a football stadium there were a handful of green onion shoots pushing out of the soil. Not exactly the perfect cover, especially after the farmer admitted to planting the poppies in the first place.

As we walked from one poppy field to the next, Imran was not amused. Finally, he gathered a group of farmers together to give them some bad news. "President Karzai has said it is illegal to grow opium poppies and that they must be destroyed. I give you 48 hours to cut down your plants or I will return with Afghan police and Afghan soldiers and we will force you to destroy these fields."

The farmers protested. What about the money we have already spent to prepare the fields and irrigate the land? Why not let us harvest this year's crop and we will not plant next year? Imran was firm. "My hands are tied", he said. "If I let one farmer harvest his crop then I must let everyone harvest their crops. Everyone must be treated in the same manner."

Afghanistan : The gnawing fear of transition

There is perhaps no word so misunderstood in Afghanistan right now as transition, or one causing as much unease among ordinary Afghans still grappling for a sense of their future.

U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, expected to soon leave the country, is on an urgent reassurance mission, leaping this week onto an open special forces buggy without a flak jacket or heavy escort to tour a former insurgent stronghold in Kandahar’s Khakrez district, hoping to prove safety is on the uptick. ”Just about one year and a half ago it would have been difficult for me to be here. The security would not have allowed me to,” the energetic former general told village elders clustered in sunshine on a lawn walled by roses. Eikenberry has visited probably every province of Afghanistan with his long immersion in the country, including a stint commanding U.S. forces.

But ordinary Afghans, many of whom are resentful of the foreign troop presence in the country and civilian war deaths, also worry about how their own fledgling security forces will cope when they go.

Eikenberry travels to tell turbaned local mullahs and leathery faced elders that he has come to listen to their needs, usually mundane but vital-to-confidence complaints about crumbling roads, poor water access, and non-existant schools and doctors.

And more and more their worries are also about the transition to Afghan security and what happens as foreign troops start to draw down numbers from July and completely hand over control after 2014. ”We want peace and stability in this country. We are worried about what will happen. We have always stood against the Taliban,” said one elder in the village of Darbishan as Eikenberry and his entourage listened intently.

Those concerns are repeated when Eikenberry climbs onto his blue-and-white helicopter, and in a swirl of grit and dust leaves for yet another community shura in Kandahar city with provincial governor Tooryalai Wesa. “Our people are dying here, but we don’t have anyone to look after them, to help them,” one Kandahari literally screams into a microphone at the back of the room. Only days before, the Afghan police chief was killed by a suicide bomber.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Solving Afghanistan and Pakistan over a cup of tea

I have never read "Three Cups of Tea", Greg Mortenson's book about building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I tried to read the sequel, "Stones into Schools" and gave up not too long after the point where he said that, "the solution to every problem ... begins with drinking tea." Having drunk tea in many parts of South Asia - sweet tea, salt tea, butter tea, tea that comes with the impossible-to-remove-with-dignity thick skin of milk tea - I can confidently say that statement does not reflect reality.

So I have always been a bit puzzled that the Americans took Mortenson's books so much to heart. Yes, I knew he boasted that his books had become required reading for American officers posted to Afghanistan; and yes, there is the glowing praise from Admiral Mike Mullen on the cover of  "Stones into Schools", where he wrote that "he's shaping the very future of a region". But I had always believed, or wanted to believe, that at the back of everyone's minds they realised that saccharine sentimentality was no substitute for serious analysis. Just as hope is not a strategy, drinking tea is not a policy.  (To be fair to the Americans, I have also overheard a British officer extolling the virtues of drinking tea in Afghanistan.)

As a result of my scepticism on the miracle powers of tea-drinking, I find I am learning an awful lot more about the thinking of the U.S. administration than I ever did from Mortenson from the fall-out from the allegations of inaccuracies in his books. (Mortenson rejects these allegations in a statement on the website of his Central Asia Institute charity.)

Take for example the detailed account by Jon Krakauer (pdf) charting not only inaccuracies but also alleged irregularities in the finances of the Central Asia Institute. In his opening paragraph, Krakauer notes that President Barack Obama donated $100,000 of the award money from his own Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 2009, to the Central Asia Institute. I had not known about the Obama connection until I read advance stories on Krakauer's piece.

During his presidential election campaign, Obama made Afghanistan and Pakistan his foreign policy priority. So you might expect that he would have had foreign policy advisers who would have questioned the wisdom of associating publicly with one man. After all, it was quite clear -- whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Montenson's philanthropy -- that the narrative used to describe his schools in Baltistan as a bulwark against the Taliban and Islamist militants was a bit awry.

I have only been to Baltistan once, on a brief trip organised by the Pakistan Army to visit the Siachen region, the world's highest battlefield, where Indian and Pakistani troops have faced off against each other since 1984. Yet even under the watchful gaze of my army minder, a group of Balti intellectuals who I met in the regional capital Skardu were able to tell me (over several cups of tea) that they felt neglected by Islamabad and excluded from power in Pakistan. Baltistan is part of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan, and because of its disputed status, the people there have never been integrated into Pakistan and nor have they been given voting rights.

The political and security issues in Baltistan are related to the rivalry between India and Pakistan, to the dispute over Kashmir, and to the electoral dispossession of a people who have been frozen in time since the partition of the subcontinent since 1947. They are nothing to do with the Taliban, militant Islam, or the war in Afghanistan. That should have been easy enough to find out - have U.S. diplomats never been to Baltistan?  Indeed even without going there, the information was available for free on the Internet. Why did nobody ask any questions?

US-Pakistan ties : bleeding America in Afghanistan

U.S.- Pakistan ties are entering an even  more dangerous phase, going  by the language that the two sides are employing ever since a public airing of  differences over covert U.S. activities in Pakistan 

It’s a game of smoke and mirrors and some of it could be bluff and bluster, but there is little doubt that Pakistan and America are  stuck in an unhappy relationship, attacking each other as much as  the militants  they joined forces against ten years ago.

Foreign Policy has a piece which quotes an unnamed official as saying that Pakistani leaders want the United States to “bleed a little like the Soviets “  in Afghanistan just as it prepares to withdraw from the country. America will abandon the region once again, the leaders are convinced,   ending the flow of aid to Pakistan and leaving it in the lurch.

More immediately, the NATO supply line for the troops in Afghanistan that runs through Pakistan is a tempting target, and some in Pakistan are already plotting to use that to get back at the United States for violating Pakistan’s sovereignty with impunity. The Foreign Policy piece says ex-Pakistani servicemen are planning to disrupt the supply line by organising civilians and political groups to block highways that are used by the trucks carrying everything from fuel to water for the troops, if Washington ignores Pakistan’s demands on curtailing its covert war inside Pakistan. These include reducing drone strikes to only high-value targets, greater transparency about CIA activities, and a reduction in the number of U.S. military trainers. If Pakistan adopted such a plan to choke off the re-supply routes, Pakistan can turn Afghanistan into a graveyard for U.S. troops,  former chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence Lt.General Hamid Gul boasted in a TV appearance.

The supply line has been targeted in the past, including last year when the Torkham crossing was blocked in retaliation for a cross-border U.S. helicopter strike in which three members of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps were killed. But Pakistan was forced to reopen them under U.S. pressure and it’s hard to see Islamabad resist Washington beyond a point.

In any case the language from America’s supporters is also getting equally menacing. Here’s an editorial from The Wall Street Journal that says Washington must present Pakistan with a stark choice, in the manner it did immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks when it reportedly threatened to bomb the country into the Stone Age if it didn’t cooperate in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in next door Afghanistan.   Regardless of how Pakistan acts, the United States has a vital national interest in going after al Qaeda and the Taliban who hide in sanctuaries inside Pakistan and that fight must go on, the newspaper said in the editorial titled The Pakistan Ultimatum.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, a deterrent against India, but also United States ?

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have been conceived and developed as a deterrent against mighty neighbour India, more so now when its traditional rival has added economic heft to its military muscle. But Islamabad may also be holding onto its nuclear arsenal  to deter an even more powerful challenge, which to its mind, comes  from the United States, according to Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who led President Barack Obama’s 2009 policy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pakistan and the United States are allies in the war against militancy, but ties have been so troubled in recent years that  some in Pakistan believe that the risk of a conflict cannot be dismissed altogether and that the bomb may well be the country’s  only hedge against an America that looks less a friend and more a hostile power.

Last year  the Obama administration said there could be consequences if the next attack in the West were to be traced backed to Pakistan, probably the North Waziristan hub of al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militant groups.No nation can ignore a warning as chilling as that, and it is reasonable to expect the Pakistan military to do what it can to defend itself.

Riedel  in a piece in The Wall Street Journal says Pakistan’s army chief Ashfaq Kayani may well have concluded that the only way to hold off a possible American military action is the presence of nuclear weapons on its soil and hence the frenetic race to increase the size of the arsenal to the point that Pakistan is  on track to become the fourth largest nuclear power after the United States, Russia and China. 

Last month’s military action in Libya, the third Muslim nation attacked by the United States in the ten years since 9/11, can only  heighten anxieties in Pakistan. Indeed Libya holds an opposite lesson for Pakistan’s security planners. This is a country that gave up a nuclear weapons programme - ironically assisted by Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear scientist A.Q.Khan – under a deal with the West following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.   Suppose for a moment that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had held on its nuclear weapons, would there have been air strikes then ?

Indeed none of the three countries attacked by the United States had nuclear weapons including, as it turned out, Iraq although the whole idea of invading it was to eliminate the weapons of mass destruction.  You could further argue that this perhaps is the one reason why the United States hasn’t taken on North Korea because of its advanced nuclear programme with a bomb or two in the basement.

from Russell Boyce:

Asia – A Week in Pictures April 3, 2011

In case anyone is in any doubt about the volatile situation many of our staff and stringers work under in Afghanistan I want to recount what happened on Saturday. Ahmad Nadeem was covering a demonstration that was sparked by the actions of extremist Christian preacher Terry Jones, who, according to his website, supervised the burning of the Koran in front of about 50 people at a church in Florida. The mood at the demonstration changed very quickly as the crowd sought a focus for their anger. Ahmad, our stringer in Kandahar was targeted. He was beaten with sticks, his gear smashed and his hand broken. Then an armed man instructed the mob to kill him. Ahmad fled for his life escaping into a nearby house where he successfully hid from the mob. Earlier in the day a suicide attack also hit a NATO military base in the capital Kabul, the day after protesters overran a U.N. mission in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and killed seven foreign staff in the deadliest attack on the U.N. in Afghanistan.

Bullet holds are seen on the windshield of a car used by insurgents after an attack at Camp Phoenix in Kabul April 2, 2011. Insurgents clad in burkhas attacked a coalition base in Kabul with guns and rocket-propelled grenades on Saturday, but were killed either when they detonated their explosives or by Afghan or coalition fire outside the entrance, NATO and police said.    REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

Afghans chant anti-American slogans during a demonstration to condemn the burning of a copy of the Muslim holy book by a U.S. pastor, in Mazar-i- Sharif April 1, 2011. Afghan insurgents used mass protests against Koran burning as cover to launch an attack on the United Nations building in northern Mazar-i-Sharif city, in which at least seven foreigners were killed, the governor of Northern Balkh province said. The United Nations death toll in an attack on the U.N. compound in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif could be as high as 20, U.N. officials told Reuters on Friday. REUTERS/Stringer

A U.S. soldier (R) keeps watch as the body of an insurgent lays on the ground after an attack at Camp Phoenix in Kabul April 2, 2011. Insurgents clad in burkhas attacked a coalition base in Kabul with guns and rocket-propelled grenades on Saturday, but were killed either when they detonated their explosives or by Afghan or coalition fire outside the entrance, NATO and police said.    REUTERS/Ahmad Masood