Afghan Journal

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:

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.

from India Insight:

LIVE BLOG: Osama bin Laden killed

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed on Sunday in a firefight with U.S. forces in Pakistan, ending a hunt for the mastermind of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Share your views.

from Photographers Blog:

Osama Bin Laden is dead – prove it

When news broke that Osama Bin Laden was dead, the Reuters Global Pictures Desk in Singapore could think of only one thing: We have to see the picture of the dead body. The world needed a genuine photo to confirm that the elusive Islamic militant leader was dead. We also knew that the first news agency to publish a picture of his dead body would lead the way on this historic story. Sending out a fake picture could be very embarrassing.

A few hours later a picture was circulating on the Internet. It appeared to be Osama Bin Laden's bloodied face in a video transmitted by a TV station in Pakistan. But was it really Bin Laden?

Some media claimed that the source of the picture was the U.S. military, but editors on the Global Pictures Desk found inconsistencies in the image that made them suspicious. There was odd pixelation and blurring on his face, which was also darker in some areas. The picture also looked familiar. After a quick search of our pictures archive, we found that the bottom of Bin Laden's face was similar to a picture of the al Qaeda leader speaking at a news conference in 1998. After overlaying the 1998 photo with the picture of the dead Bin Laden we had a perfect match. The mouth, ear and beard were identical. It was a fake and the desk did not transmit it.

However, the fake Bin Laden was used by numerous news websites and even appeared in print in Pakistan.

We're still waiting for the genuine picture of Bin Laden's body.

(See below for the two images overlaid in an animation. Notice the mouth never changes.)

from Russell Boyce:

Osama Bin Laden is dead – prove it

When the news broke that Osama Bin Laden was dead, at the Reuters Global Pictures Desk in Singapore all we could think was one thing: We have to see the picture of the dead body. The world needed the tangible proof of a genuine photo before we could really absorb the idea that the world's most sought and also most elusive Islamic extremist was dead. We also knew that the news agency that was first in sending a picture of his dead body to the world would go a long way to winning this historic story. Sending out a fake picture could be very embarrassing to say the least - a tough balancing act when under such pressure.

A few hours later there it was circulating on the internet: Osama Bin Laden's bloodied face in a video transmitted by a TV station in Pakistan. Under tremendous pressure we could get the picture and fed it into our picture editing system in preparation for transmission around the globe.

But was it really Osama? It was rumoured that the source was US military but the editors on the Global Picture Desk found inconsistencies that immediately made us suspicious. There was odd pixilation and blurring and his face was darker in some areas than others. The biggest problem was that the picture looked familiar somehow. Quickly looking through dozens of our archive pictures we found that the bottom half of Osama Bin Laden's face was identical to a picture of him speaking at a news conference in 1998. After flipping the picture 180 degrees and overlaying it with the picture of the dead Osama Bin Laden we had a perfect match. It was a fake.

The fake picture was locked in our system so that it couldn't be sent out but would be saved for future training exercises. Meanwhile, the fake picture quickly gained momentum in cyber space.

We're still waiting for that genuine picture of the body of Osama Bin Laden.

India, Pakistan and their growing nuclear arsenal

India and Pakistan exchanged a list of each other’s nuclear installations on Saturday like they have done at the start of each year under a 1988 pact in which the two sides agreed not to attack these facilities. That is the main confidence building measure in the area of nuclear security between the two countries, even though their nuclear weapons  programmes  have expanded significantly since then.   Indeed for some years now there is a  growing body of international opinion that holds that Pakistan has stepped up production of fissile material, and may just possibly hold more nuclear weapons than its much larger rival, India.  

Which is remarkable given that the Indian nuclear programme is driven by the need for deterrence against much bigger armed-China, the third element in the South Asian nuclear tangle. The Indians who conducted a nuclear test as early as 1974, thus,may be behind not just the Chinese, but also Pakistan in terms of the number of warheads, fissile material and delivery systems.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in a global report in August 2010 estimated that India had assembled 60 to 80 warheads and produced enough fissile material for 60-105 nuclear warheads. Pakistan is estimated to have assembled 70–90 warheads and produced missile material for as many as 90 warheads. China’s arsenal was estimated at 240 nuclear warheads.  Here’s a PDF of the report prepared by   Robert S.Norris and Hans M.Kristensen.  

The majority of India’s and Pakistan’s warheads are not yet operationally deployed, the researchers said.  Both countries are believed to be increasing their stockpiles although the competition is nowhere near the intensity of the race between the United States and Russia during the Cold War. Indeed even today the combined total of Indian and Pakistan warheads will only be slightly more than the number carried by a single U.S. Trident submarine.

Nevertheless the race to expand nuclear weapons programme as also missile development adds another layer of instability in South Asia, with Afghanistan and Pakistan at the centre of the turmoil and home to al Qaedaand allied militant groups. The question is why now ? Why is Pakistan seeking to expand its arsenal ? Is this a numbers game ?  Are the rivals getting sucked into a nuclear arms race without  intending to ?

Mark Hibbs, a nuclear affairs expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,  told me in a conversation last month there was a “budding arms race” on between India and Pakistan, although nowhere near the scale of the Cold War duel between the United States and the Soviet Union.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Al Qaeda, its branches and Afghanistan

So little is known about al Qaeda that it is can be tempting to see patterns when none exist, or conversely to see only madness when there is method at work.

But with that health warning, it's interesting to see Afghanistan cropping up in recent comments from both al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

By way of background, do first read Leah Farrall at All Things Counter Terrorism arguing that that AQAP, which is threatening to launch more low-cost  attacks on the west after last month's intercepted parcel bombs, should not be seen as either a new threat, or distinct from al Qaeda's core on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.  "AQAP is a branch of AQ,"  she writes in this post.

"It is not an affiliate, not a franchise, and not a network. Rather it is  an operating branch of AQ, which means that while it may have authority  for attacks in its area of operations (the Arabian Peninsula), it comes under AQ’s strategic command and control for external attacks outside of this area of operation.  And it has always done so, right back to 02."  (See also an earlier post here, and subsequent one here.)

In a commentary this month on an AQAP statement, Gregory Johnsen at the blog Waq al-Waq notes a reference to General David Petraeus , the U.S. commander in Afghanistan:

"Now, General Petraeus used to be head of CentCom and as such responsible for Yemen, but that hasn't been the case since General McChrystal self-destructed in a Rolling Stones profile. So why mention Petraeus? Well, by itself I would be willing to overlook this as the overwrought hyperbole of a jihadi calling out a famous US General, but I don't think that is the case. This is the latest in a series of suggestions that I have seen lately that lead me to believe that there is some new talent in the organization. And I am of the early impression that it is coming from Pakistan/Afghanistan."

Then just last week al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) demanded the withdrawal of French forces in Afghanistan in return for the safety of French nationals kidnapped in Niger.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Taliban talks: “an iffy, high-level treaty”

In Obama's Wars, Rob Woodward attributes the following thoughts to U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke on the prospects for a peaceful settlement to the Afghan war:

"He saw reconciliation and reintegration as distinct.  Reconciliation was esoteric, an iffy high-level treaty with Taliban leaders. Reintegration occurred down at the local level in villages and towns..."

It's a good place to start to frame the current wave of interest in the prospects for a deal with the Taliban.  As we wrote in this analysis, for the first time in the nine-year war all the main parties involved -- from the Afghan government to insurgents, from the United States to Pakistan are seriously considering ways of trying to reach a peace deal.

Official sources in different countries interviewed by Reuters said all the main insurgent groups -- the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Omar, the Haqqani network and the Hizb-ul-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar -- were involved in informal talks on how to open a more structured peace process. 

They also said the United States had given a far higher level of endorsement to these talks than before, while Pakistan was showing a slight shift in its approach to Afghanistan as it worries about increasing instability at home.

However, the whole thing came with a huge health warning - the current "talks about talks" are fragile, preliminary and liable to break down at any time.  Analysts and official sources caution that no one should expect an early result in a country which has seen more than three decades of war and many broken promises on all sides. And the whole process -- if indeed "process" is the right word for it -- is bedevilled by contradictions which could bring the whole thing tumbling down.

Here are just a few of them:

How many al Qaeda can you live with ?

A furious debate has raged for several months now whether it makes sense for the United States to throw tens of thousands of  soldiers at a handful of al Qaeda that remain in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre, nine years after launching the global war on terrorism.

CIA director Leon Panetta  told ABC News in June thatal-Qaeda’s presencein Afghanistan was now “relatively small … I think at most, we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100.” And in nextdoor Pakistan, arguably the more  dangerous long-term threat, there were about 300  al Qaeda leaders and fighters, officials separately estimated.

Given that U.S. President Barack Obama has repeatedly said the central mission of the United States in Afghanistan was to “disrupt, defeat and dismantle ” al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan,  is this now a turning point in the war against the group ? Surely it doesn’t make too must sense to deploy 150,000 troops in Afghanistan, now that the al Qaeda has been whittled down to less than a 100 there, argue several experts.

Fareed Zakaria wrote in the Washington Post this week that with ”al Qaeda central” down to 400 fighters worldwide, the group has been unable to execute the kind of high profile attacks that were at the core of its strategy, targeting symbols of U.S.military and politicalpower.  Instead, smaller local groups, self-identified as affiliates of al-Qaeda have launched attacks against much easier sites — the nightclub in Bali; cafes in Casablanca and Istanbul; hotels in Amman, Jordan; train stations in Madrid and London. The biggest casualties in these attacks have been ordinary people, not U.S. diplomats or soldiers, and which has further turned away the local population from Islamist radicals.  Instead of inspiring unstoppable waves of jihadis as some had feared, militant Islam’s appeal has plunged across the Muslim world including in Pakistan where political parties associated with Islamic jihad have performed poorly, he says.

So the legitimate question now is: Have we gone too far? Is the vast expansion in governmental powers and bureaucracies — layered on top of the already enormous military-industrial complex of the Cold War — warranted? Does an organization that has as few as 400 members and waning global appeal require the permanent institutional response we have created?

 

But Bruce Hoffman,  professor at Georgetown University and the director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies,  says its far too early to declare victory against al Qaeda. Terrorism, he says in a piece for The National Interest , is not  a numbers game. It took only 19 men to change the course of history on September 11, 2001. It took only four bombers to shatter Britain’s security on July 7, 2005 in London. Further back, it was a lone gunman who assassinated the heir to the Hapsburg throne in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 and thus set in motion the chain of events that led to World War

Indeed small groups of individuals can often have a disproportionate impact on the countries that are their targets. The  Red Army Faction (RAF or “Baader-Meinhof Gang”) active in West Germany from 1970 to 1998 never numbered more than two dozen or so hard-core terrorists. Yet, they were successful in imposing a reign of terror on that country despite the exertions of its sophisticated police and intelligence and security services for more than a quarter century.

The Taliban, an enigma wrapped in a riddle ?

Anne  Stenersen  of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment has published by far one of the most detailed studies of the Taliban, their structure, leadership and just how they view the world.  Its interesting  because even after all these years  they remain a bit of an enigma beginning with the reclusive founder and supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

As Stenersen notes,  a lot of the attention within NATO has been on defeating the insurgency or how best to manage it. Less attention has been given to trying to understand who the insurgents are, and what they are fighting for. Even the way we describe them is not very defined. The insurgents are often lumped together as “al Qaeda and the Talban” , even though in many fundamental ways they could be vastly dissimilar,  or described as OMF (Other military Forces) as NATO tends to do in militaryspeak, perhaps in the belief that denying them a  proper name  diminishes them.

On the ground, soldiers often describe the enemy as “anyone shooting at us”  making it even more vague. Obviously the nature of the insurgency has something to do with this : the great diversity in Afghanistan’s demography and geography means the insurgency can vary from region to region, or even from one village to the other. You could be fighting a Taliban commander in one, and a warlord linked to them in the other.

But the insurgency in Afghanistan is certainly not a collection of small, locally based militas with no overall leadership or structure. And neither do the insurgents themselves  see it that way and its important to hear their view of themselves, both in the event of trying to seek reconciliation or to crush them militarily.

Today Mullah Omar’s Taliban movement describes itself as a resistance movement with a leadership, organisation structure, a defined goal and strategy and even an official “code of conduct” for its members. And it has made clear repeatedly it  likes to be referred to as The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the official name of the regime which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

A link to Stenersen’s 85-page report is available on jihadica.com but here are some of the other  big  take-aways :

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