Afghan Journal

Buying out Taliban foot soldiers a long shot

If a shopkeeper from Quetta impersonating as a Taliban commander made a mockery of President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to seek reconciliation with the insurgent leadership, a parallel programme to lure away foot soldiers  too made little headway last year. A bottom-up reintegration of  low to mid-level fighters back into society was meant to complement the top-down approach of seeking a compromise with the leadership. In the event, while there is little sign of  any engagement, at least in the public domain  ( although it has to be said for a peace process to be meaningful it probably has to be conducted away from the public eye), only a handful of rebels have stepped forward to lay down their weapons.

A year into the reintegration programme, less than 800 insurgents agreed to end the fight, according to  Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman. That makes up for less than 3 percent of the estimated militant strength of 30,000. At this rate it will take a decade to peel away the rank-and file, assuming the overall strength remains constant.  More disappointingly, the men who signed up for the programme weren’t even hard core Taliban. They were mostly low-level community-defense forces, Ackerman quotes British Maj.Gen. Phil Jones, the NATO official in charge of enticing the insurgents, as saying.

Most of them were from the relatively peaceful west and north of the country, and not from the south and east where the insurgency is at its deadliest since the war began in 2001. Again, have to enter a caveat that the north has heated up in recent months as well, so the gains perahps shouldn’t be dismissed altogether.

The big problem in the reintegration process  is lack of trust, says Jones.  The rebels are looking to return to the mainstream with honour and dignity and protection from the Taliban who are sure to seek retribution.. Last year they killed a dozen men who had signed up for the process in the northern province of Baghlan. If the government  cannot guarantee protection, and that is not very easy especially in the south, then all its offers of jobs and education will be meaningless.

Some Afghan experts question the basic premise of the reintegration programme. The programme  rests on the belief that many of the Taliban “grunts” are driven to fight by economic necessity, and not by any ideological fervour.  So you buy them off by offering money and some form of employment backed up by security. Matt Waldman , a Fellow at Harvard University’s  Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, argued in a paper last year that there was a fundamental disconnect between what the insurgents were fighting for and what the government had to offer.

Poverty and unemployment were principle motivating factors for up to half the men fighting, Waldman said, on the basis of conversations with Afghan elders, tribal leaders and three of the seven insurgent commanders he interviewed for his study entitled Golden Surrender and published on the Afghan Analysts Network.  This was linked to the social deprivation and stigma associated with poverty, as opposed to the sense of purpose, status, and comradeship offered by the insurgency.

A kinder, gentler Taliban

Afghanistan’s Taliban have had a change of heart , and are no longer opposed to education for girls, according to the Afghan government. It’s the sort of shift that opens up the possibility of talks with the insurgents whose treatment of women  has in  the past drawn revulsion worldwide and made  a deal that much harder.

Afghan Education Minister Farooq Wardak  told the Times Educational Supplement that the upper echelons of the Taliban appeared to have softened their stance on education including schooling for girls . “It is attitudinal change, it is behavioural change, it is cultural change.” He didn’t say what had led to this profound transformation in the Taliban and how far they were willing to go to grant women rights.

The Taliban, themselves, have made no comment, so we only have the Afghan minister’s word for it.  Kabul has been pressing hard for talks with the insurgents to end the conflict now in its 10th year, and it is quite possible that it is trying to present the Islamist group in  a more favourable light . Indeed Wardak himself is a key player in President Hamid’s Karzai team seeking to persuade the Taliban to hold talks.

Women members of the Afghan parliament have reacted with disbelief to Wardak’s assertion that the Taliban had a new education policy, saying that the situation on the ground remained  just as difficult for women. Roshanak Wardak, a member of parliament from the central-eastern Afghan province of Wardak, told the BBC she didn’t believe any of it because there was no school open for girls in the six Pasthun dominated districts of her province.  The only schools open were in two districts dominated by the Hazaras.  Marman Gulhar, another MP  from the north-eastern province of Kunar said she didn’t think the Taliban would ever change their stance on education for girls. ”In fact they are fighting against that. The girls’ schools are closed and still are closed.”

It’s not the first time such reports have emerged about the  Taliban showing signs of change. Back in 2007  the Taliban announced it would open schools in six provinces in the south that they said were under their control. They also promised to open schools for girls later on. A Taliban commander said they were not opposed to education as such; what they wanted was an Islamic form of education, not the Western model. They wanted schools to return to the textbooks of their era.   One of the problems with those textbooks, though, was that some taught students to count with Kalashnikovs and to subtract by killing off members of rival groups.   You would have to wonder if the Taliban’s change of heart was actually for the better. You could argue that if children are to be taught basic math with guns and kill rates  they might be better off without such an education.

Thomas  Ruttig at the Afghanistan Analysts Network says the situation is a bit more complicated than the  assessment the Taliban was turning over a new leaf. He said there does seem to be a gradual shift in the Taliban’s position but it is not necessarily because they have suddenly realised the value of education for children, boy or girl.  A lot of it has to do with ordinary Afghans who like parents anywhere else in the world want to educate their children including girls, although in large parts of the conservative Pashtun heartland they might not necessarily believe in educating girls to university levels.  But basically they have been sending petitions to the Taliban to let schools open in the areas they control and the Taliban could be responding to that pressure, Ruttig says citing local sources.

US military surge: the view from Kandahar

The U.S. military has stopped the Taliban momentum in southern Afghanistan, and is probably starting to reverse it following the surge, according to a study we wrote about this week here. The view from the ground, though, is much less rosy.

Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy has published a paper under its Afghan Voices series looking at how ordinary Afghans view the current round of military operations centred around Kandahar.

Author Zabih Ullah spoke to people in Kandahar and its surrounding districts and they don’t seem particularly impressed with the surge. Most believe the offensive will end up like so many other operations in the past and that the only people to suffer will be ordinary Afghans. It’s the ordinary people with no links to the Taliban who end up losing lives, getting wounded or arrested in these operations, they believe.

That said, though, the people of Kandahar don’t want the coalition to leave. They see a role for foreign forces in the province, but one that is focused more on stabilisation and peace building rather than hunt down-the-Taliban operations that U.S. military generals have repeatedly mounted in the troubled region.

 Zabih Ullah lists five reasons why the U.S. cannot succeed in Kandahar. One, so long as the Taliban have a sanctuary in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province just over the border, they will be hard to defeat. Taliban commanders live securely in urban areas and there is even a separate hospital for injured fighters in the middle of the Baluch capital, Quetta, the author said.

 In addition, there are thousands of madrassas in Baluchistan where Afghan refugees are being indoctrinated to carry out attacks on Afghan forces seen as slaves of foreign forces. Pakistan, though, has consistently denied the existence of a Quetta shura, the name given to the Taliban leadership council supposedly based there.

from Tales from the Trail:

Training may be the U.S. way out of Afghanistan, but hurdles high

One of the strongest messages that U.S. officials tried to convey during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Afghanistan this week was that the American mission in the war-torn country is changing from combat to training, so that Afghan forces are ready to provide security for their own country after decades of upheaval, invasion and foreign occupation.

Biden made a stop at the Kabul military training center, an expansive site about six miles northeast of the city center, where U.S. forces are teaching members of the Afghan National Army how to be part of a modern military. On 22,000 acres of  bare terrain surrounded by mountains and dotted with cement walls and the ruins of Soviet-era military equipment, Afghan soldiers are learning everything from marksmanship to logistics. The facility has even had two all-women officer training classes, the first in the deeply traditional Muslim country, not for combat but for functions such as finance and logistics.

Biden spoke to trainers, toured the grounds and watched a group of the Afghan trainees storm a building. He spoke to each of the men, who greeted him, in turn, by standing to attention, shouting their names and giving their battalion numbers.

The soldiers are eager. They are paid for their time at the facility. “We don’t have a problem finding recruits,” said Lieutenant Colonel David Simons, director of public affairs for the NATO-Afghan training mission. On any day, there are 11,000 Afghan soldiers at the facility. And training in the more basic skills is already being put into Afghan hands, with international forces focused mostly on more specialized areas. “This is the year we’re really turning that over to Afghans,” said Captain Stefan Hasselblad, another spokesman for the base.

It may seem like wishful thinking to expect a force of newly minted Afghan soldiers to provide security in a country where the world’s largest and most modern military still struggles to control the violence after more than nine years of conflict. President Barack Obama's most recent review of the war -- released last month -- noted improvement but said there is a hard road ahead. Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst level since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

Wishful thinking or not, the training has to go on, not just for Afghanistan’s future but to placate the U.S. public which is weary of a war that is approaching the 10-year mark – at a price tag now well over $100 billion per year. The Obama administration is committed to starting to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan beginning in July. The longer term goal is to hand over all of Afghanistan’s security responsibilities to its government by 2014.

The trainers acknowledge that the Afghan soldiers present challenges almost unknown among American forces. Hasselblad said the biggest challenge is the country’s overwhelming rate of illiteracy. Ninety-five percent of the would-be troops cannot read at a minimum level, he said, and have to be taught enough reading so they can handle what he termed “basic soldier skills,” such as recording the serial number of a weapon or reading a map.

Is the tide turning in southern Afghanistan ?

The American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War  has a new report out that says rather unequivocally that the United States is starting to turn the war around in southern Afghanistan following the surge. Since the deployment of U.S. Marines to Helmand in 2009 and the launch of an offensive there followed by operations in Kandahar, the Taliban has effectively lost all its main safe havens in the region, authors Frederick  W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan argue.  

The Taliban assassination squad in Kandahar has ben dismantled, the insurgents’ ability to acquire, transport and use IED materials and other weapons has been disrupted, and narcotics facilitators and financiers who link the drug market to the insurgency have been aggressively targeted.  Above all,  NATO and Afghan forces continue to  hold all the areas they have cleared in the two provinces, arguably the heart of the insurgency, which is a significant departure from the past.

The war is far from over, large parts of the country remain under insurgent control, and there is limited, if not negligent political  progress in the areas re-taken from the Taliban. But the momentum of the insurgency in the south has unquestionably been arrested and probably reversed, the authors say. 

Is the ground really shifting, and if so, what’s behind this breakthrough ? Part of the reason is the arrival of 30,000 U.S. troops under the surge  which military commanders said was necessary to make a dent in an insurgency at its deadliest since 2001.  Another 1,400  Marines  have just been ordered , all part of efforts to crush the Taliban so America can make an honourable ext from its longest war yet. But it is not just more troops that General David Petraeus has thrown at  the resilient Taliban.

 By all accounts, the war has turned ultra-violent as Danger Room blog called it a few months ago, with Petraeus bringing in the full weight of the U.S.. military to bear on the insurgents.  U.S.  Special Forces stepped up raids, taking out hundreds of militants, surface-to surface missiles were fired to clear the Taliban in Kandahar, and tanks deployed in Helmand to crush them.

Air strikes, the weapon of last choice under previous General Stanley McChrystal’s winning the hearts and minds strategy, rose to their highest level since the invasion in 2011, with 1,000 attacks in one month alone.  U.S. generals are again talking of ”shock and awe” to destroy the Taliban, a far cry from the population -centric-strategy pursued earlier with its stress on avoiding civilian casualties. The level of civil casualties in the past few months, though, doesn’t seem to have risen in proportion to the intensity of the war effort, which means operations are much more accurate probably because of better intelligence,  more involvement of the ANA, and perhaps foreign forces have just gotten better  over a period of time.

Karachi key to Pakistan political dogfight

Pakistan’s Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) party, the dominant power in the nation’s financial capital of Karachi, has agreed to rejoin the federal coalition after Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani agreed to reverse a  fuel price rise mandated under an IMF assistance programme.

The party, which mainly represents the Urdu-speaking descendants of immigrants from India following the creation of Pakistan in 1947,  said it had decided to return to the ruling coalition so as not to trigger a crisis at a time when the country faced many challenges. But it said it would not immediately return to Gilan’s cabinet, indicating it was holding out for more concessions.

The tussle has a lot to do with the MQM ‘s power base in Karachi where a triangular battle between  its supporters who are primarily the mohajirs or the immigrants from India, the Pashtuns who have arrived in droves fleeing the conflict along the Afghan border and the indigenous Sindhis has intensified in recent years.

Indeed, the “civil war” in Karachi  as some call it, has stoked concern that a nation created on the basis of religion was now tearing itself apart on ethnic lines.

Here’s a detailed look at the teeming metropolis of 17 million people and what is at stake here :

 The mohajirs constitute the largest single group in Karachi and are represented by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement(MQM) which quit Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani’s coalition. They are descendants of refugees from northern India, who migrated to Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur in Sindh province, when Pakistan was formed in 1947.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and the enemy within

Steve Coll, the president of the New America Foundation and a South Asia expert, has raised the issue of the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in the wake of the assassination of the governor of most populous Punjab state by one of his bodyguards. It’s a question that comes up each time Pakistan is faced with a crisis whether it a major act of violence such as this or a political/economic meltdown or a sudden escalation of tensions with India obviously, but also the United States.

Pakistan’s security establishment bristles at suggestions that it could be any less responsible than other states in defending its nuclear arsenal, and its leaders and experts have repeatedly said that the professional army is the ultimate guardian of its strategic assets.

But Coll in a blog at  The New Yorker says at some stage in a domestic insurgency when your own people are fighting you, the lines between the guerrillas and the security forces often get  blurred with dangerous consequences. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 incensed by her decision to send the Indian army into the holiest Sikh shrine to flush out militants a few months before. 

 The Pakistani police officer who killed governor Salman Taseer was similarly no Lee Harvey Oswald, but a regular government employee who was apparently angry over the governor’s strident defence of a Christian woman convicted of blasphemy, a case that exposed deep rifts in Pakistani society.  Coll writes :

At a certain point the violence of insurgency and counterinsurgency among people sharing language, geography, faith, and culture becomes so intimate that it is no longer possible to reliably vet friends from foes.

Pakistan’s growing nuclear stockpile – about which we wrote here – is under the lock and key of the military. Coll says the Punjab governor’s killing was a reminder that  one shouldn’t be too dismissive of the possibility of a breach in the nuclear security systems by an insider, however remote.

Taseer’s betrayal should give pause to those officials in Washington who seem regularly to express complacency, or at least satisfaction, about the security of Pakistan’s arsenal.

Graffiti art brightens Kabul

A group of women in burqas rises from the sea to symbolize cleanliness, while further down a factory wall a bus with no wheels and crammed with passengers is a stark comment on war-torn Kabul’s appalling public transport.

A new Afghan art collective called Roshd, or “growth,” has brought street art and graffiti to the conservative Muslim nation’s capital, starting with a mural on a three meter (10 feet) high wall in an industrial park. Soon they hope to take their creativity and commentary to the dusty city center, where blast walls, scrawled advertisements, political propaganda and armed guards are more usual sights.

Using spray paint for the first time, Ommolbanin Shamsia Hassani, 22, who is due to start teaching at Kabul University’s fine art faculty, painted the burqa-clad group. “Water is very clean and I want to show the women are clean too,” said Hassani. “It was the first time I was painting a big wall, I have always painted on small canvas … I have become very tired because it’s so big.”

Hassani and the other artists were working with a British graffiti artist who goes by the name Chu, who has been painting on walls for 30 years and has done projects including painting an entire train. He traveled from London for a one-week workshop. “In this very short space of time they have absorbed all the skills necessary to paint something huge,” Chu said. “It’s just magical what’s been happening before my eyes … The end result is that they just want to paint more.”

Some signed up for the workshop knowing almost nothing about the essence of the art form. “There is one reaction I will never forget and it was a concern that a big painting would be disturbing,” said Chu. “I said, ‘that’s the point’.”

Farid Khurrami, 29, a sculpture artist, painted the bus with no wheels moving past a man firing a gun in a bid to spotlight how bad public transport is in Kabul. “People are suffering very much in Kabul,” he said. “People will be very surprised by this new form of art, it is a better way to communicate with a broader audience.” “My message will be more about the peace and the money which the government is spending more on the military, I want it to be used more on the arts,” he said of his future graffiti plans.

Pakistan’s blasphemy law strikes fear in minorities

 Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy law has been in the spotlight since November when a court sentenced a Christian mother of four to death, in a case that has exposed deep rifts in the troubled Muslim nation of more than 170 million people. While liberal Pakistanis and rights groups believe the law to be dangerously discriminatory against the country’s tiny minority groups, Asia Bibi’s case has become a lightning rod for the country’s religious right.

 On Tuesday, the governor of the most populous state of Punjab, Salman Taseer, who had strongly opposed the law and sought presidential pardon for the 45-year-old Christian farmhand, was gunned down by one of his bodyguards.

Here some facts about the blasphemy law and its fallout.

* The law has its roots in 19th century colonial legislation to protect places of worship, but it was during the military dictatorship of General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s that it acquired teeth as part of a drive to Islamize the state.

 * Under the law, anyone who speaks ill of Islam and the Prophet Mohammad commits a crime and faces the death penalty but activists say the vague terminology has led to its misuse. The law stipulates that “derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo or insinuation, directly or indirectly shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.”

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

In India-Iran oil spat, nuclear row trumps Afghan war

Not too long ago, you could have predicted relatively easily how regional rivalries would play out in Afghanistan.  Saudi Arabia would line up alongside Pakistan while Iran and India would coordinate their policies to curb the influence of their main regional rivals. 

But that pattern has been shifting for a while -- the row over Indian oil payments to Iran is if anything a continuation of that shift rather than a dramatic new departure in global diplomacy.  And as two foreign policy crises converge, over Iran's nuclear programme and the war in Afghanistan, the chances are that those traditional alliances will be dented further. It is no longer a safe bet to assume that rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi'ite Iran will fit neatly into Pakistan-India hostility so that the four countries fall easily into two opposing camps come any final showdown over Afghanistan.

India, which has been working to improve its relationship with the United States for much of the last decade, already earned Iran's wrath by voting against it at the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) over its nuclear programme, first in 2005 and then again in 2009. Though India has since been trying to repair the damage, comments by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei late last year criticising India over Kashmir soured the mood further between the two former allies.

The decision by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last week to suspend payments for oil imports made by Indian companies from Iran that use the Asian Clearing Union (ACU), a clearing house used to process multilateral payments between South Asian countries and Iran, was pretty much in line with that trajectory of slowly deteriorating relations.

As a caveat, it would probably be unwise to read too much into the oil payments row -- Indian media have complained that the RBI decision was not coordinated across government departments and reported that the timing of its announcement came as a surprise even to the foreign ministry.  But extend the trajectory further and the outlook for coordination between India and Iran on Afghanistan does not look too promising.

India, Iran and Russia all supported the then Northern Alliance which opposed the Taliban when they were in power from 1996 to 2001.  But Washington and others have since accused Iran of covertly backing the Taliban -- an allegation Tehran denies -- in order to maintain pressure on the United States.  In the event of an escalation of the nuclear row, it could ratchet up support for the Taliban to make life even harder for the United States. That is anathema to India, which sees the Taliban as a Pakistan-backed movement used by Islamabad to try to maintain its influence in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile India has been cultivating ties with Saudi Arabia, which was one of only three countries along with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates to recognise the Taliban government when it was in power.  In February last year, Prime Minister Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made the first visit to Saudi Arabia by an Indian leader since 1982, seeking to build economic ties and to enlist the kingdom’s help in improving regional security.