Afghan Journal

Too many butchers spoil the cow

Several years ago President Hamid Karzai likened balancing Afghanistan’s various internal pressures and the demands of external allies and foes with walking while holding a fragile dish. With no end in sight to the U.S.-led war now in its 10th year, he must feel as if he is juggling the entire dinner service.

For years Karzai has said that peace talks with the insurgents was key to the solution of the Afghan conflict and termed them as a priority since last year, but he also has to take on board the frequently conflicting interests of all the players.

The result is best summed up by an old Afghan proverb: “Too many butchers spoil the cow”.

The key stakeholder is Washington which has the bulk of some 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan fighting a war that Barack Obama has called the country’s top foreign policy priority.

The U.S. insists that insurgent leaders must renounce violence — and al Qaeda — accept the new Afghan constitution and lay down their arms as part of any peace deal. Other players, however, either demand otherwise or oppose any talks — as do their Afghan proxies and other opportunists who see their survival in Afghanistan’s chaos.

They want just enough peace to keep the Americans’ hopes up, but just enough fighting to keep the funds flowing, was a line a Western friend once said about those Afghan warlords.

Corruption’s tentacles reaching across Afghanistan

By Sayed Salahuddin

Petty corruption has more than doubled in Afghanistan since 2007, a new survey shows, and nine years after the fall of the Taliban graft drains at least $1 billion a year from the $11 billion economy.

While it is contract graft involving vast sums that vexes Afghanistan’s donors – a majority of which is the fault of the international community, says President Hamid Karzai — the new report, by Integrity Watch Afghanistan, focused on the sort of petty bribery that affects ordinary Afghans every day.

One in seven Afghans now regularly paid bribes, it said, and the phenomenon was giving further strength to the Taliban fighting to expel foreign forces.

This was brought home in an interview with a former Taliban governor who defected to the government and served as a district chief for several years until recently.

Mullah Abdul Salaam told how had to find a group of bodyguards from the police ranks, but when he found a group he trusted they needed national identity cards – a requirement overlooked by paying a bribe.

Paying a bribe to police in order to join their ranks may sound like a grotesque joke, but because it is so endemic, corruption can sometime be both sad and funny.

Kabul’s “ring of steel” tests patience

If Afghanistan is a fight for hearts and minds, then the war against the Taliban is on shaky ground in central Kabul, where roadblocks and the concrete-encased fortresses of Western countries infuriate near everyone.

A security crackdown in the capital, enforced at so-called “ring of steel” police checkpoints, has turned travel in the capital into a test of patience denting support for President Hamid Karzai’s government just months from parliamentary elections.

“People are furious. They curse the government. They cannot get anywhere on time any more,” said 28-year-old taxi driver Del Agha as he sat beside his small yellow and white cab parked on a dusty Kabul roundabout.

“We have to drive a long way around to get anywhere now, which makes the passengers even angrier,” Agha said.

Over the last few years, much of central Kabul has been walled off after a succession of bloody insurgent suicide and bomb attacks.

Trips that used to be brief have become long and usually circuitous  as the city begins to resemble a Baghdad-like “Green Zone”, and some worry about their ability to reach a hospital or some other critical service in an emergency.

Towering concrete barriers, watchtowers and sandbagged emplacements protect embassies, government offices and courtrooms, while the sprawling U.S. and NATO military bases in the city centre have sharply curbed access to what were once busy traffic arteries.

Potential allies: Karzai, Pakistan and the Taliban?

If you still thought things hadn’t dramatically changed on the Afghan chessboard ever since U.S. President Barack Obama announced plans to begin pulling out from mid-2011, you only need to look at President Hamid Karzai’s recent utterances, or more accurately the lack of it, on the Taliban and Pakistan, the other heavyweights on the stage.

For months Karzai has gone noticeably quiet on Pakistan, refusing to excoriate the neighbour for aiding the Taliban as he routinely did in the past, The Guardian quoted  a source close to the country’s former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh as saying.

Karzai, in fact, has lost faith in the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and is increasingly turning to long-time Taliban supporter, Pakistan, to end the deadly insurgency, it said. Saleh and interior minister Hanif Atmar resigned this week, which Karzai’s office said was because of lapses that led to a Taliban attack on a peace jirga last week in Kabul.

But Saleh himself told Reuters in an interview that he had quit because he opposed Karzai’s orders for a review of Taliban insurgents in detention, part of moves the president has launched to reach out to the hardline Islamists in a bid to end the nine-year war. The jirga, packed with tribal elders and notables considered loyal to Karzai, endorsed his plan to seek negotiations with the insurgents who have virtually fought U.S.-led NATO forces to a bloody stalemate nine years after they were ousted

So is this what a final settlement would look like in Afghanistan as the United States pulls back ? An unlikely partnership between Karzai, Pakistan and the Taliban? Quite a change from the time when Karzai and former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf levelled harsh accusations against each other.

The one problem though in this new game is that the Taliban don’t seem to be playing their part, despite the best entreaties from Kabul.  Indeed they have unleashed a torrid spell of attacks beginning from the time the jirga opened in a big tent in the west of the capital. The Taliban weren’t invited to the peace council; not that they were going to attend even if they were invited. Instead they showed up as a three-men suicide bomber squad dressed as women in a burqa.  The attack was foiled, but not before rockets landed barely 100 metres from the tent just as Karzai was speaking.

Then a suicide bomber killed at least 40 people, a quarter of them children and wounded 77 in a particularly savage attack on a wedding party in southern Kandahar province. That was followed by a report about the public execution of a seven-year-old boy in neighbouring Helmand province. The child was accusing of spying for U.S. forces and hanged from a tree. And on Friday came another attack, this time a roadside bomb blowing up a minibus killing nine people,  mostly women and children, again in Kandahar province. You would have to ask under what law, however orthodox, can you justify the execution of a child?

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.

Afghanistan’s violent summer: 400 attacks in a week

U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus last month warned residents of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar of a violent summer ahead as his troops prepared to take full control of the southern province (with the same name) from the Taliban.  He spoke of  the insurgents  taking “horrific action” to stop the military advance into their spiritual centre.

Some of it may already be unfolding although the offensive is still thought to be weeks away. In one week alone toward the end of April there were 400 attacks , 60 percent of them roadside bombs. Which makes it 57 attacks in a day, telling you more than anything else the deteriorating military situation in the country.

Juan Cole, a commentator on Middle East and South Asia issues, writes on his blog Informed Comment that this level of violence is what characterised Iraq in March 2005 before the Sunni-Shiite war. “The year 2005 was a bloody year in Iraq, and nobody but then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld doubted we were mired in a vicious guerrilla war,” he says.

There were 1,000 roadside bomb attacks in April 2010, twice as many as in April the previous year. Last weekend the Taliban announced they would launch an offensive against U.S. and NATO troops beginning Monday, the day Afghan President Hamid Karzai began meetings in Washington to repair ties clouded by mutual recriminations.

The promised offensive hasn’t materialised, at least not on the scale the insurgents seemed to suggest,  but the level of ordinary violence is itself is higher than at any point in the recent past.

Guest Column: Getting Obama’s Afghan policy back on track

(C. Uday Bhaskar is a New Delhi-based strategic analyst. The views expressed in the column are his own).

By C. Uday Bhaskar

The May 12 summit meeting in the White House between visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his host, U.S. President Barack Obama comes against the backdrop of the mercifully aborted May 1 terrorist bombing incident in New York’s Times Square.

From the barrage of news and commentary that floods various media outlets here in Washington DC, it is evident that the Obama Af-Pak policy unveiled with considerable fanfare last year will be in for detailed and contested policy review.

Immediate U.S. interests apart – including the Obama second term, the stakes for the long-term stability of the entire southern Asian region and the troubled Muslim populace in the scattered diaspora ranging from North America to west Europe are immense and complex.

Afghanistan came into global focus with the tragic enormity of September 11, 2001 when it was under the control of the Taliban and the obscurantist, anti-liberal ideology espoused by this group had earlier impacted India’s security interests in the December 1999 aircraft hijacking episode.

Karzai, the West and the diplomatic marriage from hell

One of my Kabul press corps colleagues once described covering President Hamid Karzai’s government and the Western diplomats who are supposed to be supporting it as a lot like being friends with a couple while they go through a savage divorce. We reporters hop back and forth, from cocktail party to quiet lunch to private briefing, listening to charming Afghans and Westerners -– many of whom we personally like very much — say outrageously nasty things about each other. Usually, the invective is whispered “off the record” by both sides, so you, dear reader, miss out on the opportunity to learn just how dysfunctional one of the world’s most important diplomatic relationships has become.

Over the past few weeks, the secret got out. Karzai — in a speech that was described as an outburst but which palace insiders say was carefully planned — said in public what his allies have been muttering in private for months: that Western diplomats orchestrated the notorious election debacle last year that saw a third of his votes thrown out for fraud. The White House and State Department were apoplectic: “disturbing”, “untrue”, “preposterous” they called it. Peter Galbraith, the U.S. diplomat who was the number two U.N. official in Kabul during last year’s election, went on TV and said he thought Karzai might be crazy or on drugs. Karzai’s camp’s response: Who’s being preposterous now?

Then, like every good marital fight, it was suddenly over. There were Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates assuring Americans that Karzai is, in fact a “reliable partner”. Karzai, without taking back a word of his speech, let it be known that he held no grudges. On Saturday, the Afghan president and the United Nations sealed the deal by agreeing new rules for the next election.

Readers can be forgiven for wondering what on earth is the matter with some of these people.

For the record: I’m no doctor, but I think the Afghan president is probably not a mentally ill drug addict. Nor do I think Western officials were trying to overthrow him by engineering ballot fraud last year. I do think both sides are doing themselves real harm by shouting at each other.

There are still a few diplomats that Karzai likes, and some who like Karzai. And this is Afghanistan, after all, a country where “enemies” are often just the people you are trying to kill until they become your friends. Karzai is a master at working with people he distrusts: many of the members of his cabinet belong to groups that were –- literally — at war with each other at various times. His first vice president was once a rival faction’s security boss who threw him in jail.

While Karzai and the West dueled, Afghans lost

While Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his American backers were having a very public row, 170 people were killed in political violence in Afghanistan last week, foreign affairs expert Juan Cole points out on his blog Informed Comment.

There were 117 incidents according to the Afghan interior ministry, four times the number for the previous week. Most of the violence was in the south casting a shadow over supposed U.S. gains in the region, Cole says. Indeed residents in Marjah, the site of a major military offensive against the Taliban, are complaining of lack of security, he quotes a report by the local Pajwhok news agency as saying.

Residents say there is poor security, that civilians are caught in the cross-fire between U.S./Afghanistan National Army troops and the Taliban, and that it is dangerous to work their fields (Marjah is a set of agricultural villages and scattered farm houses).

They say that the Afghanistan police have not provided even the level of security that the Taliban once had, the report says. Security for villagers remains precarious in Marjah, Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson who led the Marine assault told the Los Angeles Times in an interview this week. The Taliban were still planting explosives and intimidating people.

And all this while Karzai and U.S. officials were having a go at each other with the Afghan leader even threatening to join the Taliban if the West didn’t back off. (It’s another question that the Taliban may not admit him to their ranks straightaway, might put him on trial instead).

Karzai is getting support from an unlikely quarter though. Liz Cheney has attacked President Barack Obama for his cooling relationship with Karzai.

Why Karzai decided to attack the West

It was a strange or at least unusual event. Reuters, other news wires and mostly Afghan journalists were summoned to the presidential palace early in the morning. A frequent and very familiar routine of standing around, waiting and multiple security checks then started .

On this occasion, we were packed onto mini buses with blacked-out windows and told only that we would be leaving the palace and going “some place outside”. The guessing game ended when the buses, flanked by armored Land Cruisers and charging down a busy city highway, honking other vehicles out of the way,  turned into another building very familiar to reporters in Kabul: the Independent Election Commission (IEC).

It is not unusual for President Hamid Karzai to give press conferences elsewhere in Afghanistan (in other cities for instance) but I cannot recall a time when he addressed reporters in Kabul anywhere but the press room of his palace. Not knowing what was in store, I reminded myself it was also April Fool’s day.

We all agreed that we might get a response out of Karzai about the rejection of a presidential decree by the lower house of parliament and possibly something about the reforms that the U.N. has wanted of the IEC.

What we got instead was some of Karzai’s strongest words against the West and the international community. The defiant tone was set by Azizullah Ludin, the Chairman of the IEC, who gave an impassioned and rather rambling speech about how hard he had tried to serve the Afghan people, about how difficult the presidential election in August had been to monitor and how sad he was that the foreigners were interfering so much and manipulating the efforts of the IEC.

Ludin’s deputy, the Chief Electoral Officer, Daoud Ali Najafi, then followed with a much shorter but equally defensive testimony of what he had gone through and the pressures he faced. IEC colleagues and Karzai nodded in support. The whole thing (was it a press conference? An extraordinary meeting? An open exchange of feelings about how last August’s elections went?) started to feel a bit like a rather grandiose cognitive therapy session, in which people who have been scarred by something in their life, in this case an experiment with democracy, “share their pain” with like-minded sufferers as a catharsis.

Ludin and Najafi were heavily criticized by Karzai’s main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah,  the sacked U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, and the media, during and after the elections.