Afghan Journal

Kabul : The hotel on the hill

Taliban suicide bombers staged a dramatic attack on Kabul’s landmark  Intercontinental hotel  late on Tuesday. Here is a piece by two Reuters journalists reminiscing about the imposing hotel on the hill. 

                                                             By Robert Evans and Tom Heneghan

The foreign military gunship hovered low above the hotel and a group of bearded men in flat felt caps on a nearby hill brandished fists and apparently ancient rifles at it.  The pilot obviously saw the men and their weapons, but instead of shooting at them he simply swooped off over their heads — forcing them to dive flat — and flew down over central Kabul in the direction of the airport.

Foreign journalists and some Afghan staff in the forecourt and on balconies of the 6-storey hotel on the north-western edge of the Afghan capital cheered and applauded — their haven of peace had been spared a nearby firefight.

The scene was in February 1980, nearly two months after Soviet forces swept into Afghanistan to prop up a communist government by eliminating a hardline ideologue president and putting a leftist reformer in power. 

The hotel was the Intercontinental, now all but wrecked after an attack by Taliban insurgents and a blasting from a NATO helicopter on Tuesday.    Then it was the local headquarters of the global media corps.  From the first days of the Soviet invasion in the last week of 1979, the Interconti — as it was widely known — became home for dozens of foreign reporters and cameramen and, for some, “a nest of spies.” 

from Russell Boyce:

Asia – A week in pictures 26 June 2011

Last week a series of unconnected bomb attacks across Asia left dozens dead and many more injured.  Thirty-five people were killed in a suicide bombing next to a hospital in Afghanistan's Logar province south of Kabul, at least four police officers were wounded in blast in eastern Pakistan, and suspected Taliban militants stormed a police station in a town in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least five policemen. Four explosions rocked Myanmar's capital, Naypyitaw.  In Thailand a triple bombing by suspected insurgents kills at least two people and wounded nine others in Thailand's deep south.

A victim of a suicide bomb attack yells as medics apply burn cream to his torso after he was brought to the Lady Reading hospital for treatment in Peshawar June 20, 2011. A suicide bomber blew himself up in a market area on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing at least two people and wounded three, police and hospital officials said. This image has been rotated 180 degrees.  REUTERS/Fayaz Aziz

Covering violence and the suffering it causes is a daily diet for the team in Pakaistan so when I saw Fayaz's up-side-down picture on the wire  I asked Adrees Latif, chief photographer Pakistan, why it had been rotated. Visually I was uncomfortable with it.  Adrees' answer made me stop and think about the way I look at these pictures so I thought that I'd share his reply.

"Respect your perspective. I don't normally rotate images and not trying to make it a habit but Fayaz said the victim was yelling and I connected with the subject better from this angle. I feel the image I edited is stronger from the rotation and so not to mislead the viewer, I did clarify the image was rotated 180 in caption. I have viewed them next to each other and they look like two completely different images. I feel one is repetitive, the other is full of impact."

Here are the images next to one another, one rotated and one not.  Here in the office the debate that raged over this image split the camp. What do you think?

An encounter with a paratrooper at Kabul airport

The security at the very large military section of Kabul International Airport has recently been handed over to Belgian paratroopers, from a more relaxed unit of Macedonians .It’s hard to say if this is because NATO-led forces feel they need to step up security after a bloody shooting at the airport and Taliban threats of more attacks, or just the vagaries of NATO staffing.

But the reception they gave me – and some Afghans who arrived at the gate at the same time – was a reminder of why NATO is having such problems retaining Afghan support, despite all the blood and money being spent to secure the country.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” barked the soldier. I got out my media pass, military travel authorisation and said I was going to spend time with the military, for a reporting trip journalists and the military call an ‘embed’. “I do not know what that is.”

I explained and said a media relations duty officer would come and pick me up. “What is their name and rank,” he barked again. I said I didn’t know, as they were a duty officer. “This is a military base, not a market” I was warned. “You say you are a journalist. Who do you work for?” I said Reuters. “What is that?” A news agency, I replied. “What is that? I only know the BBC”.

This went on for some time more. And as a blonde, obviously Western woman, I probably wasn’t top of their profiling list of suspicious visitors.

Afghans coming to a hospital on base were treated even more harshly, with the same barked orders and warning “this is a military base, not a market”, and when the paratrooper waved them in saying “go on, get cured, get help”, they went only with great resentment.

from Russell Boyce:

Asia – A week in pictures, 19 June 2011

Last week a report came out listing which countries are the most dangerous places for women to live; three of them were in Asia -- Afghanistan, Pakistan and India -- and the other two were Congo and Somalia. Afghanistan topped the list. I shamelessly include in this week's highlights a picture shot by Afghanistan-based Ahmad Masood that I think is one of the strongest images ever shot illustrating the harsh life of some women in Kabul. You can almost feel the cold and wet seep into your bones as they beg for money for food for their families.

Women beg on a road as snow falls in Kabul January 13, 2009. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

 As NATO forces prepare to start to pull out of Afghanistan photographer Baz Ratner has been embedded with Canadian forces. During the same week Masood was on set as filming started on a motion picture about violence against women. I love the compositional similarities of the pictures and the fact that only the presence of the cameras in Masood's pictures gives the viewer an insight into which is real and which is make-believe.  The final picture from Afghanistan shows the victim of an attack by insurgents in Kabul who fought their way into a police compound before being shot dead by security forces. The calm of Masood's picture as a scarf is laid over the body of the fighter belies the havoc the man had been creating just moments before.

Canadian soldiers from the 6th Platoon, Bulldog Company, 1st Battalion, 22nd Royal Regiment search inside a barn  during a patrol in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province southern Afghanistan June 13, 2011. Canada will end its combat role in Afghanistan by the end of July, after nearly ten years fighting. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Taliban talks: the new mirage in Afghanistan

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just said in public what many have been saying for months in private, that the United States is holding talks with the Taliban to try to reach a settlement to the decade-long war in Afghanistan.  "Peace talks are going on with the Taliban. The foreign military and especially the United States itself is going ahead with these negotiations," he said in a speech in Kabul.

We have been hearing reports about these talks for months. In the climate of disinformation that threads through the Afghan war, it is hard to say exactly when they started, but I first heard last November that the Americans had begun direct talks with representatives of the Taliban and if that was correct, they must have begun some time before that. 

 Such direct talks have long been promoted by many Afghan experts as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a political settlement. While western countries have argued that political reconciliation must be Afghan-led, the Americans are the power-brokers, and unlike the administration in Kabul, the only ones who have the authority to deliver on any concessions agreed in the negotiations.

And the United States has also shifted its position on the Taliban -- effectively admitting that the movement can be treated separately from al Qaeda by convincing the U.N.  Security Council to split its sanctions list imposing asset freezes and travel restrictions into two.

All that said, there is a danger that the U.S. Taliban talks become the new mirage in Afghanistan by suggesting that a political settlement is on the horizon if only the current strategy is maintained.  According to senior diplomats involved in international discussions on Afghanistan, the talks have yet to gain any serious traction.  One diplomat said the two sides were still "gauging each other's temperature";  another said that, "there are no serious load-bearing talks going on."

And despite U.S. insistence that its military campaign in Afghanistan is -- to use its favourite phrases -  "turning the corner" or "gaining momentum" - one diplomat suggested that the Taliban's ambitions were still as high as they had been before Washington sent an extra 30,000  troops. 

Unlike the role sketched out for them by western governments in which they would folded into a broader political process,  he said the Taliban were still looking for a serious stake in power.  Among their ambitions would be for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to be rehabilitated as "Amir ul-Mu'mineen", or supreme leader of the faithful, even if not directly running the government - an idea talked about back in early 2010.

Ten years on, still trying to frame the Afghan War

U.S. President Barack Obama is in the midst of a wrenching decision on whether to quickly bring home the 100,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan or stay the course in the hope that the situation will stabilise in the country.

The problem is it is still not clear what the huge operation estimated to cost $100 billion a year is intended to do.  Here is what Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said last week when asked what would constitute success : “I think we’ll have a much better fix in terms of clarity towards the end of this year in terms of longer-term … potential outcomes — and when those might occur — than we do right now.”  The military were in the middle of the fighting season and once that ends when winter arrives, they would be in a better position to make a call. But how many fighting seasons has the military gone through already in Afghanistan ? Their logic is that the 30,000 additional troops that Obama sent in December 2009 have started to turn things around in the southern bastions of the Taliban, and more time is needed to extend the gains in the east where the insurgency is just as stubborn.

But isn’t that the way this war has been fought all these years, and indeed even before during the Russian occupation ? You muscle into one part of the forbidding country with men and armour, the insurgents melt away and launch attacks in another part.   You are then left with the option of diverting resources to fight them in a new battlefield, or risk stretching yourself thin holding on to  gains while trying to secure new ground.

One U.S. official, the Financial Times reports, (behind a paywall)   likened  it to an arcade game where the player uses a mallet  to bash a random and increasingly frantic series of moles back into their holes. Or as Senator Richard Lugar, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week : “Despite ten years of investment … we remain in a cycle that produces relative progress but fails to deliver a secure political or military resolution.”

Many aren’t even convinced if it makes any sense fighting the Taliban anymore. If Obama’s core objective in Afghanistan is to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda,   then  that job is nearly done at least in Afghanistan where the CIA says the group’s numbers are down to anything from 50 to 100.  If anything there are more al Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen or even Somalia, and yet they don’t have 150,000 foreign troops deployed to hunt them down. Is Obama now fighting the wrong war as he once blamed the Bush administration for, when they invaded Iraq ? Osama bin Laden’s killing  last month in Pakistan  offers even less reason to be still fighting in Afghanistan, the sceptics argue.

If the reason for staying on in Afghanistan is to ensure that it does not become a safe haven for al Qaeda and other groups all over again, then perhaps  it needs to be fleshed out what constitutes a threat from Afghanistan . Is there a threshold number of al Qaeda fighters that make it necessary for a U.S. invasion ?  Greg Scoblete writes in the Real Compass Blog:

from Bernd Debusmann:

U.S. nation-building in the wrong place?

America's costly efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq came under intense scrutiny this month in critical reports and a gloomy Senate hearing that prompted a memorable assertion. "If there is any nation in the world that really needs nation-building right now, it is the United States."

That came from a Democratic Senator, Jim Webb, who continued: "When we are putting hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure in another country, it should only be done if we can articulate a vital national interest because we quite frankly need to be doing a lot more of that here."

Webb spoke at the confirmation hearing of the veteran diplomat President Barack Obama nominated to be his next ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, who faced questions from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that left no doubt over the growing impatience of U.S. lawmakers with a military and financial commitment that is producing limited progress.

Webb's juxtaposition of spending on Afghanistan and the state of things in the United States - a stalled economy, stubborn unemployment, an aging infrastructure - is made more often in online debates and private conversations than in official hearings. But it is a subtext for a debate likely to grow in the campaign for the 2012 elections and feature both Afghanistan and Iraq as money pits, object lessons for ill-conceived development projects, and lack of foresighted planning.

A report by the bi-partisan Commission on Wartime Contracting issued early in June set the tone. "U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan are scheduled to begin in July 2011, and the U.S. military presence in Iraq is scheduled to end by December 31, 2011. But America will leave many legacies in both countries carrying large sustainment costs long into the future."

The commission, the report said, saw no sign that the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development were making plans to make sure that the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan could operate and maintain, on their own, the vast array of projects built under U.S. government contracts, from schools and clinics to hospitals and power plants.

An examination of a decade's wartime contracting in the two countries, says the report, had identified tens of billions of dollars of waste. Unless the U.S. paid prompt attention to the "how to" of maintaining, operating and paying for the projects it will leave behind, "the United States faces new waves of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Pakistan’s journalists won’t be silenced

The killing of an Islamabad-based Pakistani journalist  ,who went missing a few days ago, has triggered an outpouring of grief and anger.   Pakistani journalists and activists are demanding answers for the murder of Saleem Shahzad, who Human Rights Watch said, told them before he was abducted that he was under threat from the Inter-Services Intelligence, the powerful spy agency.

Shahzad, a reporter for the Asia Times and the Italian news agency Adnkronos International, wrote on security/intelligence issues,  often delving deep into the dangerous world of Islamist militancy . The last story he wrote for the Asia Times  two days before  he was abducted, suggested that a militant attack on the navy’s main base in Karachi on May 22 was carried out because the navy was trying to crack down on cells from Al Qaeda that had infiltrated the force. 

The 16-hour raid on the Mehran base in which the militants destroyed two U.S. supplied surveillance aircraft deep inside the base and killed 10 military personnel has embarrassed the military, coming days after the U.S. operation to take out Osama bin Laden in a garrison town not far from the nation’s capital, without the apparent knowledge of the miitary. The naval raid also raised questions of complicity of base  personnel in helping the militants mount the attack, putting the military further in a spot.

Pakistan’s journalists have been unwavering in their questioning and often withering criticism of the military, more so after the bin Laden raid than at any other time in the recent past. On Tuesday as news of Shahzad’s murder filtered through, sending a chill through anyone connected with the profession , the journalists on the frontlines showed little signs of intimidation. Here’s an editorial from The Daily Times that minces few words :

This should also serve as an eye-opener for those who have been apologising for the military and the Taliban alike. How many more innocents have to die before we realise that our country is a war zone where no one is safe from either our so-called saviours or the terrorists. Mr Shahzad and many others like him paid the price for reporting the truth. We must stop blaming external forces for what we are facing right now. In a country where terrorists, murderers, rapists and criminals roam free, deaths of innocents are all but inevitable. How many more people will have to sacrifice their lives before we finally call a spade a spade? Pakistan is in a deep mess right now and it is all our own doing. Let’s wake up to this reality before our soil turns completely red (if it has not already) with the blood of our citizens. RIP Saleem Shahzad; we cannot condemn or mourn your death adequately in words. Our only salvation now lies in bringing Mr Shahzad’s murderers to book.

The Guardian quoted Pakistan talk show host Quatrina Husain as saying : “We want an answer. We need an answer. We deserve an answer.”  Others directly blamed the spy agencies. Author Mohammad  Hanif tweeted : Any journalist here who doesn’t believe that it’s our intelligence agencies ?”

An official of the ISI was reported to have said that allegations of the agency’s involvement in Shahzad’s killing were absurd.