Afghan Journal

America in Afghanistan until 2024 ?

The Daily Telegraph  reports that the status of forces agreement that the United States and Afghanistan are negotiating may allow a U.S. military presence in the country until 2024 .  That’s a full 10 years beyond the deadline for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops and handing over security responsibilities to Afghan forces.

The negotiations are being conducted under a veil of security, and we have no way of knowing, at this point at least, if the two sides are really talking about U.S. troops in the country for that long. ( The very fact that a decade after U.S. troops entered the country there is no formal agreement spelling out the terms of their deployment is in itself remarkable)

But it does seem more likely than not that there there will be a U.S. military presence, however small, in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and that is going to force the players involved in the conflict and those watching from the sidelines with more than a spectator’s interest to rethink their calculations.

Indeed, the talk of an extended force deployment may be an attempt to reverse the perception that America was in full retreat following President Barack Obama’s announcement  of a drawdown that many in the military believe has only hardened the resolve of the Taliban insurgents and their backers in Pakistan to wait out the departure.

Now with troops, including a sizeable element of Special Forces, backed by the United States’ aggressive and unparalleled air power, to be based in the turbulent south and east of the country beyond 2014, the  players have to shuffle their cards again. For those elements in the Taliban who may have explored the idea of reconciliation, the plan for a long-term U.S.military involvement in the country has just made their task even more  difficult.

For Pakistan, the country most affected by what happens in Afghanistan, the idea that the United States is not going to walk away, sharpens its dilemma and once again goes to the heart of its role as a conflicted partner in the war against Islamist militancy.  On the face of it, a U.S. military presence next door means continued pressure on Pakistan to act against the militant groups that operate from its soil. It means the drones will continue to fly in its skies and fire missiles at will.

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”.

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.

from Tales from the Trail:

McCain sees India, U.S. teaming up against “troubling” China

As President Barack Obama begins his visit to India, his erstwhile rival John McCain is voicing hope that Washington and New Delhi will tighten up their military cooperation in the face of China's "troubling" assertiveness.

McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate and the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a think-tank audience in Washington on Friday that the two huge democracies were natural allies in the quest to temper China's ambitions.

"While India and the United States each continue to encourage a peaceful rise for China, we must recognize that one of the greatest factors for shaping this outcome and making it more likely is a robust U.S.-India strategic partnership," McCain said.

McCain suggested that India and the United States could increase the level of representation at each other's central military commands and work to make their armed forces more "interoperable" through joint military exercises and sharing of intelligence.

"There's no reason why we can't work to facilitate India's deployment of advanced defense capabilities such as nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, missile defense architecture as well as India's inclusion in the development of the joint strike fighter," the next generation fighter aircraft being developed by the United States, the United Kingdom and others, McCain said.

The United States should also firmly back India's desire for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, he said.

Saving Afghanistan from its neighbours

Walking into a giant tent at the foothills of Kabul, you are conscious of the importance of jirgas throughout Afghanistan’s troubled history.  These assemblies of tribal elders have been called at key moments in the country’s history  from whether it should participate in the two World Wars to a call for a national uprising against an Iranian invasion in the 18th century.

Next week’s jirga is aimed at building  a national consensus behind Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s effort to seek a negotiated settlement of the nine year conflict now that the Taliban have fought U.S. and NATO forces to a virtual stalemate and the clock on a U.S. military withdrawal has begun.

But the question is how much of an influence Afghanistan’s half a dozen direct neighbours including Pakistan and Iran  and near ones such as India, Saudi Arabia and Russia will exert on any possible settlement of the conflict. At one level Afghanistan  has become a battleground for India and Pakistan  on the one hand, and the United States and Iran on the other.  At another level there is also China’s deepening economic engagement and  Russis’s concerns of the arc of instability radiating from Afghanistan into the Central Asia republics.

Here’s how some of the big regional players are approaching a  U.S. military withdrawal stated to begin from mid-2011 and  Karzai’sbid to seek reconciliation with the Taliban who have  fought U.S. and NATO forces to a virtual stalemate.

PAKISTAN Of all of Afghanistan’s six direct neighbours, Pakistan  arguably has the highest stake in the country. The insurgency is  largely driven by the Pasthun Taliban and there are Pasthuns on  both sides of the Durand Line, the border between the two  countries. Many of the early Taliban, who swept through southern  Afghanistan in the 1990s after years of civil war, grew up in  refugee camps in Pakistan which hosts the largest number.

Above all, Pakistan considers Afghanistan its sphere of  influence, offering it strategic depth against its much bigger  traditional enemy India. It built close ties with the Taliban as they brought the fractious nation under their control and along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was one of the  three countries that recognised the Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001.

It had to cut its ties to the group following the U.S.  invasion but if any of the regional players has any degree of  influence over the hardline Islamists, it is Pakistan. It wants  to be main channel of any peace negotiation withthem; it doesn’t  even want Afghanistan to conduct separate negotiations with them,  says Kamran Bokhari, regional director Middle East and South Asis for global intelligence consulting company STRATFOR.

from Tales from the Trail:

Ahmadinejad says bin Laden in Washington

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the answer to the question that has plagued the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. 

He knows where Osama bin Laden is -- in Washington.

In an interview with ABC'S "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, Ahmadinejad rejected reports that the al Qaeda leader was in Iran.

"I heard that Osama bin Laden is in the Washington, D.C.," Ahmadinejad said through an interpreter in a contentious give-and-take with his interviewer, George Stephanopoulos.

"He's there. Because he was a previous partner of Mr. Bush. They were colleagues in fact in the old days. You know that. They were in the oil business together. They worked together. Mr. Bin Laden never cooperated with Iran but he cooperated with Mr. Bush," Ahmadinejad said.

"Rest assured that he's in Washington. I think there's a high chance he's there."

For more Reuters political news click here

The other nuclear summit and the role of Asian regional players

Leaders of more than 40 countries are gathering in Washington for a summit beginning on Monday to control the spread of nuclear weapons. Iran for obvious reasons is not invited, but it has announced a conference of its own soon after the Washington meeting. It’s called ‘Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapons for None, and among those who have agreed to attend  are India, Pakistan and China.  

While the level of representation to the Teheran meeting is not at the same level as Washington for all three countries, the fact that they have chosen to attend seems to be a signal to the Obama administration just as it is trying to isolate Iran for its suspected nuclear weapons programme. India’s presence in particular has raised the question if it is starting to re-assess ties with Tehran that have in recent years been allowed to slip in the pursuit of a strategic relationship with America. 

 As The Hindu newspaper noted the Tehran conference is a “red rag” to Washington and it has been  quietly discouraging countries to attend.  For New Delhi to agree to send its ambassador to the meeting can only be a signal that it is looking to expand its diplomatic space in the region as differences emerge with Washington over its Afghan strategy weighted towards Pakistan, Indian experts say.New Delhi really should be re-energising links with Tehran  if it wants to maintain its reach in Afghanistan, they say. Without a geographically contiguous border and a hostile Pakistan in the middle, Iran remains the only corridor to Afghanistan.

India must join a natural gas pipeline that the Iranians have been pushing for  that will run through Pakistan., argues journalist Atul Arneja  in widely flagged piece also in The Hindu. For years India has resisted Iranian overtures in large part  because of reservations over the pipeline passing through Pakistan, but also because of upsetting Washington. Arneja argues that  India can involve China and Russia too in the project  to increase its sense of comfort over the pipeline traversing through Pakistan. 

So much for India, what about Pakistan ? Why is it going to Tehran to attend the summit at a time  when  ties with Washiugton are on a more even footing than can be said even a few months ago ? Pakistan has actually gone ahead and signed the natural gas pipeline deal with Iran and the foreign office said  this weekend Islamabad will act according to its national interests.  “US diktat on Iran pipeline not to be entertained”,  read a headline  in The Dawnreferring to the U.S. State Department’s remarks that it wasn’t the right time to be conducting such a transaction with Iran. Despite the improved ties,  Pakistan has its own issues with Washington, nuclear energy one of them. Denied a civilian nuclear deal of the kind that the United States has sealed with India,. the Pakistanis are essentially saying theywill explore all options to meet their energy needs.

Shouldn’t be much of a surprise that China is attending the Tehran summit though. It has resisted tougher sanctions against Iran and until almost the final week before the Washington conference  it wasn’t certain if President  Hu Jintao would attend owing to tensions over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Tibet and the yuan .

America, don’t “leave us in the lurch” in Afghanistan

One of the first things that U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates did during his trip to India last week was to assure Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the United States did not intend to cut and run from Afghanistan.  America was committed to Afghanistan for the long-term, he said, trying to calm Indian concerns over the Obama administration’s stated plans to begin  withdrawing troops from July 2011. 

It struck me as quite remarkable that India, long a prickly nation opposed to superpower presence in the region, had so openly pinned its hopes on a prolonged U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Quite a change from the time  it would rail against the presence of such “extra-regional” powers.

But the world has changed and India like several other countries in the region, feels  more threatened  by the spread of Islamist militants than the long arm of a foreign power. Indeed while nobody likes the idea of foreign troops occupying another country, the very prospect of American withdrawal, still more than 18 months away, seems to be sending jitters. Pakistan has been saying all along its not sure how long the United States will remain engaged in Afghanistan.  It reminds everyone how it was left holding the can once the U.S. turned away from Afghanistan following the withdrawal of the former Soviet Union.

Come  to think of it, it suits quite a few countries nicely that America invests its blood and treasure in Afghanistan while these nations focus on their own development, as some commentators are pointing out. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a piece written from Taipei said he felt quite envious of the leaders of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong who had far more time to focus on building their countries “than my president whose agenda can be derailed at any moment by a jihadist death cult using exploding underpants.”

Indeed, as this piece titled The Spoils of War  notes, while America fights Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents in Afghanistan, China is rapidly expanding investments in the country. In the Afghan province of Logar, the Chinese are mining the Aynak copper deposits, said to be one of the world’s largest, that will feed China’s voracious appetite for raw materials. The Afghan National Army is guarding the area and the roads leading to the mine but this is an army trained and funded by America. While not directly protecting the site, the U.S. army is deployed in Logar. The conclusion is inescapable: American troops have helped make Afghanistan safe for Chinese investment.

“We do the heavy lifting. And they pick the fruit,” the New York Times quotes  S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, as saying. And the Chinese  don’t particularly want to get involved in the security of the nation.

A majority of the Chinese want the government to “steer clear of the quagmire of the Afghanistan War, in which the U.S.-led Western powers have been bogged down for eight years,” writes Li Hongmei, an editor and columnist at People’s Daily Online.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Afghanistan, Pakistan and … all the other countries involved

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have questioned before the value of the "AfPak" label, which implies that an incredibly complicated situation involving many different countries can be reduced to a five-letter word.

Having spent the last couple of days trying to make sense of the suicide bomb attack in Iran which Tehran blamed on Jundollah, an ethnic Baluchi, Sunni insurgent group it says has bases in Pakistan,  I'm more inclined than ever to believe the "AfPak" label blinds us to the broader regional context. Analysts argue that Jundollah has been heavily influenced by hardline Sunni sectarian Islamist thinking within Pakistan which is itself the product of 30 years of proxy wars in the region dating back to the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan towards the end of the same year.

This Sunni-Shi'ite faultline is showing up in suicide bombings in Iran, while at the same time Sunni Islamist groups continue to challenge the writ of state inside Pakistan even as the Pakistan Army presses ahead with its offensive in South Waziristan, stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban.

Such is the power of the Sunni Islamist movement, that Pakistan has been forced to close schools for fear of more bombings in its heartland in response to its military offensive in South Waziristan.

So what is the response on the "Af" side of the "AfPak" strategists? After intense diplomatic efforts, President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a second-round run-off in a disputed election. Allegations of electoral fraud had undermined Washington's strategy in Afghanistan, and delayed a decision by President Barack Obama on whether to send more troops to the region.

But how many people believe that a second-round run-off on Nov. 7 will change the dynamics of a region which is getting more, rather than less, unstable by the day? (That is not to say a run-off is a bad idea, but rather that it may be overrated in its significance).

In the meantime India is becoming increasingly worried about instability in neighbouring Pakistan. But it is in a difficult position in working out how to respond, since it wants action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for last year's attack on Mumbai. Yet Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the few militant groups which is not believed to have been involved in attacking targets within Pakistan, potentially pushing it down the priority list for an army already fighting in South Waziristan and facing an assault in the country's heartland from Punjab-based groups.