Afghan Journal

from Russell Boyce:

Asia – A week in pictures July 10, 2011

I am not a gamer at all but while looking at the file this week was reminded of a facility on electronic gaming my son showed me that allows you to see a different view point of the action. You can have wide, close and closer still. Two pictures of police beating protesters with batons have been shot as close as you can possibly get to the action but for sure this is no game.  Philippines based Romeo (Bobby) Ranoco picture is actually so close that it has been shot over the shoulder of the soldier, who, judging by the blood on the head of the unarmed protester, seems to have scored at least one direct hit . In India  and shot just slightly wider is Jayanta Dey's picture. The fact that it is shot slightly wider makes sure we are aware that it is actually three soldiers beating a protester and not one. The line of composition created by the baton and the flexed arm creating a perfect compositional triangle - Although I am not sure the protester would actually care about that. 

An anti-riot policeman hits a protester with a baton at a rally against what protesters claim to be U.S. intervention outside the U.S. embassy in Manila July 4, 2011. Filipino and U.S. troops are holding exercises in the Sulu Sea off the western Philippine province of Palawan, which lies near the disputed Spratly Islands. Conflicting territorial claims by several countries over the Spratlys and Paracels are raising tensions in Asia. Besides the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei are claiming the islands as theirs. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco

A policeman wields a baton against an activist of India's Congress party during a protest in Agartala, located in northeastern Indian state of Tripura July 10. 2011. Police used batons to disperse activists on Sunday protesting against the state's alleged discriminatory policies towards reservation of seats in local medical colleges, local media reported. REUTERS/Jayanta Dey

Continuing on the theme of public disobedience and violent confrontation with authority thousands of people massed on the Streets of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to demonstrate for electrial reform.  Malaysia chief photographer Bazuki Muhammad, his colleague Samsul Said and Thailand based chief Photographer Damir Sagolj were on the streeets all day as police fired repeated rounds of tear gas and detained over 1,400 people. Both their pictures make me feeling like gagging with the amount of tear gas that is in the air. An unexpected piece of drama to unfold from the demonstration was the fact that opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was slightly injured in the clashes and that Bazuki managed to get access as Anwar's daughter administered some tender care. Lastly with this week's Asian civil disobedience I have to include Nepal based Navesh Chitraker's picture of a Tibetan woman striding purposely towards a line of riot police as she tries to enter a school. The tension in the picture created by the shape of the stride and the tyre mark lines in the mud all pointing to the open gate. but you already know she is just not going to get past the line of soldiers.

Ahead of Lisbon, soul-searching in Pakistan

For all of former Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf’s faults, the one thing you would have to give him credit for is the emergence of a free press. It’s every bit as fearless, and questioning as its counterpart across the border in India, sometimes even stepping over the line, as some complain.

Indeed east of the Suez, and perhaps all the way to Japan, it would be hard to find a media that is as unrestrained as in India and Pakistan, which is even more remarkable in the case of Pakistan given the threat posed by a deadly militancy.

And so in the run-up to the Lisbon summit where NATO leaders will decide, among other things, the way forward in Afghanistan, a few Pakistanis have spoken forcefully. They touch upon Pakistan’s role as a conflicted ally in the war there and the extreme danger that the state itself  faces now because of its refusal, or inability to break ranks with militant organisations. More striking, they challenge some long-held beliefs relating to India and Pakistan, in ways you would think was unthinkable.

One of them is an influential Pakistani newspaper editor, who according to Arnaud de Borchgrave in a piece carried by the Atlantic Council, has just made the rounds of Washington, delivering a stunning indictment of some of the players involved in the Afghan conflict.  He can’t be named and his comments were off-the-record, but meant for public use, Borchgrave says.

He has listed some of them, and I can do no better than sum them up here, given they speak so directly to the issues at the heart of a troubled region.

-  All four wars between India and Pakistan (1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999) were provoked by Pakistan.

The Afghan media surge — highlighting unpaid salaries

US and NATO forces in Afghanistan recently sent out a news release apparently highlighting that teachers in a school supported by international troops were going unpaid for weeks, or even months.That wasn’t the headline of course — we were told “Uruzgan teachers to begin receiving salaries” but just three paragraphs in was the news that the school reopened on September 23.And the six teachers shouldn’t expect their modest 5,000 Afghanis (just over $100) salary for at least another few weeks it added — mentioning only that pay would arrive “in the coming weeks”.

The military are sending out far more news releases than just a few months ago, with even relatively small operations highlighted, more frequent updates on major operations, and more reports on aid projects and ventures like a children’s day in Bamiyan province. Recent headlines include: “Coalition and Afghan Border Police living on the edge” ,  “Female engagement team builds bridges into Afghan society” , “Afghan National Army honoured at concert” and “Afghan masons ‘build’ sustainability through concrete training”.

We no longer leap to attention quite so fast when we see one of their news releases pop into our inboxes.

They also seem to have taken on a lot of new staff; some of whom are still getting used to the job. Ringing up with a question about another routine news release recently, I was asked to spell out my name and that of the company I work for, and then asked what Reuters does.

Of course we are not universally known, but we do have correspondents in nearly every country in the world, most major news outlets are our subscribers, and our reports, directly and indirectly, reach hundreds of millions of people each day. So if you are in the business of disseminating news, its quite unusual not to have heard of Reuters.

America takes the war deeper into Pakistan

One of the most interesting things in Bob Woodward’s re-telling of the Afghan war strategy in his book “Obama’s Wars” is the approach toward Pakistan. It seems the Obama administration figured out pretty early on in its review that Pakistan was going to be the central batttleground, for this is where the main threat to America came from.

Indeed, the mission in Afghanistan was doomed so long as al Qaeda and the Taliban were sheltered in the mountains of northwest Pakistan straddling the Afghan border. The question was how do you deal with Pakistan?

Like much else, the administration debated long and hard just how far to push Pakistan to cracking down on the militants, some of whom it had spawned as assets in Aghanistan and as a front against its much bigger traditional enemy, India. One of those arguing for a tougher posture inside the administration was Dennis Blair, then the director of National Intelligence who thought there were just too many carrots being handed out and not enough sticks. He suggested the United States bomb targets inside Pakistan without seeking Islamabad’s approval. “I think Pakistan would be completely, completely pissed off and they would probably take actions against us … but they would probably adjust,” he once told Obama.

Josh Rogin, recounting the debate from a piece in Foreign Policy, said that Obama chose a less confrontational path toward Pakistan. A year later, patience is running out. Last week’s repeated incursions by NATO helicopters  from Afghanistan into Pakistan while pursuing militants seemed to signal a new, muscular strategy of the type Blair advocated.

Three Pakistani soldiers were killed in an attack by a NATO helicopter, triggering outrage and prompting authorities to close down a supply route for NATO troops in Afghanistan. Trucks carrying fuel for the foreign troops were set on fire in southern Pakistan in apparent retaliation for the soldiers’ deaths, and on Monday, three guards were killed in an attack on tankers bound for Afghanistan in the nation’s capital.

By choking off NATO supplies, even temporarily, the Pakistanis are saying they have had enough, says Robert Haddick, editor of The Small Wars Journal. While NATO said the helicopter strikes were carried out in self-defense after cross-border firing and in line with the rules of engagement, Pakistan saw it as a flagrant violation of its sovereignty, which is already under sustained pressure from the United States.

A view from the machine gun

By Michael Georgy

An American Lieutenant was doing his best to reassure villagers in the Afghan heartland Taliban Province that U.S. soldiers would protect them from the Taliban, after a roadside bomb killed a father and son who were driving home on a motorcycle. On patrol he asked several people whether they felt safe, and said they should not hesitate to contact the Americans, located a few hundred metres away in their camp.

When night fell, the officer sat down with a group of Afghan men at a tiny shop. Under the light of a kerosene  lamp he again tried to reassure them the United States was here to protect Afghans.

Lots of questions were asked on a range of issues from security to employment. For instance, what job opportunities were available?

But for me, the request that leapt out involved cultural sensitivities — and there are many in Afghanistan.

The men complained that soldiers manning machine guns on top of vehicles had a view of Afghan women in their homes. Something had to be done, they said.

The exchange underscored the complexities of fighting in Afghanistan, and vast cultural differences between Afghans and NATO troops, who have been fighting the Taliban for nine years.

Can NATO troops ever get their message across to Afghans?

I was with Western forces the other day as they tried to persuade a  group of Afghan farmers to come to them for help if they saw  Taliban militants plant an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) or  intimidated them.

A NATO soldier had urgency in his voice. To prove his point,  he told the villagers that a Taliban IED had killed a  five-year-old boy a few days earlier .  Unlike many other NATO  soldiers, he had actually taken the time to learn the local  language. This made him popular. Many people smiled and shook his hand when he walked through villages – although he was constantly on the lookout for suspicious activity.

 He explained why NATO troops had arrived in their troubled  country in the first place – to punish the Taliban for sheltering  Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders after the 9/11 attacks. But the farmers said they did not know why Western forces  were here – after nine years of war.  Perhaps it was because they are used to turmoil and  uncertainty  after three decades of conflict. Maybe  they thought  it just another group of fighters commanded by powerful warlords  who had carved their own fiefdoms.

It seemed they were just nodding politely and making all the  right noises as the Canadian tried so hard to persuade them that  U.S.-led forces can protect them from what he called the bad  Taliban.

 I guess they had good reason to be cautious. One of the farmers  recalled how Taliban militants showed up in Western military  uniforms and slaughtered seven people. So the farmers are likely  to return to their grape fields to scratch out a living and maintain a low profile.

Taking sides has always been a dangerous  game in Afghanistan.

Is the surge failing in Afghanistan?

Six months into the surge in Afghanistan, Americans and Afghans alike are asking the question whether it has worked and the ugly reality is that it has failed to make a difference, writes Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post.

To be sure, as U.S. President Barack Obama said last week only half the reinforcements he ordered in December have arrived and there is still more than a year to go before the troop withdrawals begin.

But comparisons with Iraq – America’s other war – are hard to push away and they don’t look good at all. Diehl says five months into the Iraq surge in 2007, sectarian violence was dropping, Sunni tribes were turning against al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government was delivering on its promises.

Afghanistan, in contrast, is a failure on all these counts. Violence has gone up and it cannot just be because more troops have been deployed in new areas and there is more fighting. As we wrote earlier, there were 400 attacks in one week in April, a majority of them roadside bombs.

On Tuesday, the Taliban struck in heavily-guarded Kabul, killing 18 people including six foreign troops  in a suicide attack on a NATO convoy. It was the biggest loss for NATO since September and the deadliest attack in the capital since a February raid.

On the same day, across the border in Pakistan a bicycle bomb ripped through the northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan killing 12 people, and you begin to wonder if Obama’s entire regional war strategy policy is at risk of unravelling.

For a panel discussion on Afghanistan organised by the Thomson Reuters Foundation click here

Kandahar:It’s not an operation; it’s a process, stupid!

(A U.S. soldier searches an Afghan man in Kandahar. Reuters/Jonathon Burch)

If you believe the official line from U.S. and NATO commanders in Afghanistan, the upcoming offensive in Kandahar involving no less than 23,000 foreign and Afghan troops  will involve a lot of polite words, meeting with tribal elders and “talking” the Taliban out of their spiritual home.

The soft rhetoric over the biggest ground operation of the nine-year war  has even drawn similarities to the infamous comments made by the then British Defence Secretary John Reid, when Britain expanded its mission into Helmand in early 2006. Reid said he hoped Britain’s “peacekeeping” mission, expected to last three years, would be completed without a shot being fired.

Commanders and military officials have certainly been trying their best to play down the military side to the campaign, stressing its political aspect of bringing the Afghan government into the troubled province.

Even the language adopted by officials shows a distinct change.

At a recent news conference in Kabul, the new spokesman for the NATO-led force, a German general, chose his words carefully when describing the operation.

Reporting on the Afghan war: Lies and Truths

“How can you live with your conscience reporting Taliban propaganda?”

This is what a senior German general for the NATO-led force asked my colleague at a recent meeting at the alliance’s headquarters in Kabul, where a few journalists were invited to speak to top brass, including the overall commander, General Stanley McChrystal, about improving relations with the media. The question was echoed by others in the room.

Reporting on the “war” in Afghanistan objectively is difficult, mainly because it is not a war in the traditional sense. It is an insurgency that is present in nearly every part of the country. There are more dangerous places than others of course, but there are no conventional “frontlines”. This makes travel to much of the country, especially the south and the east where the insurgency is strongest, particularly dangerous. A handful of journalists, mainly freelance reporters, do travel unaccompanied to the country’s most dangerous areas and even spend time with insurgents — but at great risk. Journalists have been kidnapped and even killed, some are still missing. Most of us have to rely on the “embed”, where we are attached to a foreign military unit, which obviously comes with its own set of problems in terms of objective reporting.

What is absolutely essential, however, is to present all sides as much as possible regardless of who you agree with or not. With travel in Afghanistan clearly restricted, this often means relying simply on what each side says, which brings us back to the German general’s question.

We are almost in daily contact with the Taliban through two of the group’s spokesmen who answer their mobile phones from undisclosed locations. Their names are most likely not their real names and one of their voices changes from time to time suggesting there are more than two people. We also monitor the group’s websites. As with any source, we treat everything with suspicion and if we are not sure, then we don’t report it. If we did report everything the Taliban said, there would be almost no foreign troops left alive in Afghanistan and the insurgents would be in control of the whole country. An example of what I mean can be seen here.

Some of my Afghan colleagues have even received death threats from the Taliban after their spokesmen felt we had not reported accurately what they had said, when we had. But despite these problems, it is imperative that we report their side as much as is possible under the circumstances. This inevitably means sifting through the exaggerations, fabrications and outright lies.

But while much of what the Taliban say may be propaganda or completely false, the German general may be surprised to know that this does not only apply to the Taliban.

Kandahar trusts Taliban more than govt – US army poll

The people of Kandahar province have greater trust in the Taliban than in the local government and an overwhelming majority consider them to be our  “Afghan brothers” according to a poll commissioned by the U.S.  army ahead of an impending offensive in the Taliban’s spiritual capital.

How is the offensive,  intended to be the turning point in the nearly nine-year war to proceed then, especially when U.S. army commanders have said they need the people’s support before any major operation can be launched in the southern province ?

Danger Room, a military-focused blog, said the unclassified report by the army’s Human Terrain System was a warning that a lack of confidence in the Afghan government “sets conditions for a disenfranchised population to respond either by not supporting the government due to its inability to deliver improvements in the quality of life or, worse yet, by supporting the Taliban.”

The survey draws on a total of 1,994 interviews covering nine of Kandahar Province’s 16 districts. But it leaves out seven crucial districts because they were considered too dangerous for the pollsters to visit. Still as the blog notes the results are telling. Here is a PDF of the report.

Among the findings : Security on the roads is a major issue for residents of Kandahar.  At least half of those polled in eight out of 10 districts said they felt unsafe travelling within their district or around the province.  Worse, they said the  biggest threat to security while travelling in the province were Army and police checkpoints.

A  sudden spike in incidents involving civilian casualties  in recent days has underscored the continuing threat to ordinary Afghans  even though the overall number of civilian casualties has fallen following new guidelines introduced by the commander of  U.S and NATO forces,  General Stanley McChrystal, as part of his strategy to win back the trust of the people.

This week NATO said troops opened fire on a vehicle in southeastern Khost province killing four unarmed Afghans.  The father of two of the victims said three of those killed were teenagers and the fourth was a policeman.  They were returning from a volleyball match.