Afghan Journal

from Tales from the Trail:

Washington Extra

In many ways the documents released by WikiLeaks last night merely underscored the bleak assessment of the Afghan war which General Stanley McChrystal issued last August.

At the time McChrystal warned the overall situation was “deteriorating”, complained of “under-resourcing” and called for not just more resources but a “fundamentally new approach” from NATO forces if failure were to be avoided.

McChrystal, who had access to a whole lot more information than WikiLeaks, said the Taliban were aided by “elements of some intelligence agencies” -- meaning the Pakistanis -- something US officials have been saying for years. He talked of a popular “crisis of confidence” with the government of Afghanistan and warned that the steady stream of civilian casualties had to be stemmed.

The administration is arguing these documents, which date until December 2009, are merely an account of the failures of former President George W. Bush’s policy, and in many ways they have a point.

There is nothing in here remotely as explosive as the Pentagon Papers, which documented systematic lying about the conduct of the Vietnam war. But the Kabul War Diary catalogues the failures and problems of the Afghan conflict in huge detail, often from the perspective of ordinary troops. The documents record a constant stream of engagements in which civilians were killed, and help substantiate the allegations against Pakistan.

All this only serves to reinforce the popular perception that this war is unwinnable.

What is more: many of the problems highlighted in these reports still exist today – especially the allegations the Pakistanis are playing a double game, and the issue of Afghan government and police corruption. Pessimists say there is very little sign of progress on these fronts, or even a coherent strategy to address these problems. Here are our top stories from today:

It’s all mine, says Afghan media

A colleague blogged earlier this week about the report that says Afghanistan is sitting on a veritable fortune in mineral resources – between $1-3 trillion, depending on how optimistic you are.

Although another colleague analysed more critically what enormous difficulties need to be overcome to see even a fraction of that sum, it hasn’t stopped the Afghan media from getting excited.

At one of the busiest news conferences I’ve seen in Kabul for some time — ordinarily you’d have to promise at least tea and biscuits to entice journalists to cover the ministry of mines – Afghans were keen to hear more about these riches and how to get them.

“Will my generation ever be able to benefit from these minerals,” asked one middle-aged reporter.

Mines Minister Mines Wahidullah Shahrani had clearly been asked the question before, and he gave a wry smile before pointing out that it would realistically take 10-15 years of ideal conditions before serious revenues would be generated — but that it was possible in his generation.

The minister also noted that resources could be as high as $3 trillion instead of the $1 trillion noted in the report. “Hmmm!” noted one jaded reporter, “now we don’t have three times as much money as we never had before …”.

The news conference was held at the Afghanistan Geological Survey building, which given the economic potential that minerals offer has benefited greatly from foreign aid and expertise.

Afghanistan’s treasure trove: a reality check

A team of U.S. geologists and Pentagon officials have concluded that Afghanistan is sitting on untapped mineral deposits worth more than $1 trillion, officials said. The deposits of iron, copper, cobalt and critical industrial elements such as lithium are enough to  fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the war itself, the officials said.

Lithium is a key raw material for the manufacture of batteries for laptops and mobile phones, and the potential reserves of the metal are so huge that the country may well become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, a Pentagon memo said.

So is Afghanistan going to mine its way out of its current troubles ? For all the hope the finding has stirred in a landscape of death and destruction, unlocking Afghanistan’s mineral riches may be decades away, experts say.   The country has almost no mining infrastructure, is in the midst of a wrenching war and has a reputation for government corruption.  The risks are far too big for most companies to get involved, however enticing the deposits look.

The curious thing is this is not the first time Afghanistan’s mineral riches have been discovered. Back in  January 1984, the chief engineer of the Afghan Geological Survey Department published a report saying the country had reserves of a wide variety of mineral resources, including iron, chrome, copper, silver, gold, barite sulfur, talc, magnesium, mica marble and lapis lazuli.  The Afghan Chamber of Commerce has details of the report here. The Afghan government in the mid 1980s  was preparing to develop a number of the mineral resources on a large scale with Soviet technical assistance, the chamber said. But the Russians left in 1989 and Afghanistan descended into a war which has, more or less, continued  since then.The report also mentions abundant reserves of natural gas, so don’t be surprised if that too resurfaces as another silver lining in Afghanistan’s cloudy sky.

Even the U.S. military itself has known about Afghanistan’s mineral riches for years, the military-focused Danger Room blog pointed out.  Here’s  a 2007 report by the  U.S. Geological Survey  (USGS) and the navy which says   “Afghanistan has significant amounts of undiscovered non fuel mineral resources,” including ”large quantities of accessible iron and copper [and] abundant deposits of colored stones and gemstones, including emerald, ruby [and] sapphire.”

Politico is quoting a retired U.S. official as saying the latest announcement sounded  a bit silly to old timers. “When I was living in Kabul in the early 1970’s the [U.S. government], the Russians, the World Bank, the UN and others were all highly focused on the wide range of Afghan mineral deposits. Cheap ways of moving the ore to ocean ports has always been the limiting factor,” the offiicial said.

So why is so much being made out of this particular find ? Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy says the timing of the “discovery” is interesting. It comes when the Obama administration is struggling to combat the perception that the Afghan campaign has made little progress despite the deployment of thousands of additional troops. The  drive to oust the Taliban from their spiritual home of Kandahar in the south is stalling and  two top Afghan security officials, widely respected for their integrity, have quit with one of them saying President Hamid Karzai had lost faith in the ability of western forces  to defeat the Taliban. Then comes a report that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence is deeply involved with the Afghan Taliban despite heated denials to the contrary.

Half a billion dollars for Afghan interpreters

Thousands of U.S. troops are streaming into Afghanistan each month as part of the surge, and among the things critical to their mission are the services of interpreters.

The U.S. army this month extended the contract of an Ohio-based company to provide translators for Afghanistan for another year at a cost of $679 million. U.S. and NATO commander Lt. General Stanley McChyrstal’s strategy for Afghanistan rests on winning the trust of the people and that can’t work if you don’t have enough people speaking any of their languages such as Pashto, Dari, Tajik, Uzbek.

The “terps”, as the soldiers call them in military slang, don’t just do literal translations, they provide insights into local culture and customs that are key to any attempt to win the people over. And above all, their ability to read the situation on the ground can often save lives.

So the military has turned to Mission Essential Personnel to recruit, screen and bring more than 5,000 interpreters into the battlefield. A handful of the translators are American citizens of Afghan descent, writes Noah Shactman on Danger Room blog. If they have the right language skills and can pass a security clearance, they can make up to $235,000 a year plus health benefits and their work is mostly “analysing communications” and “document exploitation” on one of of the big, comfortable U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

But the vast majority of the recruits are local Afghans, earning about $900 a month and their job is to accompany frontline troops into action, Shacktman says. These interpreters are given a week’s month’s worth of training before they’re shipped out to combat. Once there, they’re required to spend a year working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and be on-call during the remaining time.

It can be a gruelling schedule, and obviously dangerous. The danger is not just when they are out in the field with the troops. They are also targeted in their homes by the Taliban for working for foreign forces, and often their families are threatened.

 This weekend the Taliban said they had kidnapped and killed four Afghan interpreters, including one on his wedding day, because they worked for Western troops in Khost province.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan’s slow path to salvation in Waziristan

Pakistan's militants have unleashed a guerrilla war in cities across the country in retaliation for a military offensive against them in their South Waziristan stronghold. But while they have seized all the attention with their massive bomb and gun attacks, what about the offensive itself  in their mountain redoubt ?

Nearly two weeks into Operation Rah-e-Nijat, or Path of Salvation,  it is hard to make a firm assessment of which way the war is going, given that information is hard to come by and this may yet be still the opening stages of a long and difficult campaign.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan whose uncharacteristically low profile over the past few weeks has spawned speculation, said at the weekend that it was too early to make a call on the operation. and that he had asked his intelligence officers and they had no definitive information. Pakistan's Dawn quotes him as telling reporters in Washington "‘it’ll take a while before we know whether the enemy they’re fighting has been dispersed or destroyed or some mixture of the two."

Looked at in another way and judging purely by what has not happened so far, this hasn't shaped up into the mother-of-all battles that many had predicted it to be. No major ambushes or a tribal uprising has happened as the Pakistani army inches deeper into the Taliban mini-state,  taking the village of Kotkai, the home of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

As the BBC and the military-focused Strategy Page blog note, the Pakistani army appears to be moving slowly and deliberately.  "This is a campaign of small battles. The soldiers are advancing from three directions, often along a single road,"  the Strategy Page  says.

"The army is advancing slowly, to insure that the troops win all these little battles. It's important for troop morale that the tribesmen do not pull off many of their traditional ambushes and surprise attacks that have, for centuries, killed and demoralized invaders. This has largely been successful, with one soldier dying for every ten or so Islamic radical fighters killed."

Some people think the Mehsud fighters are doing  a tactical retreat to draw the Pakistani military deeper into South Waziristan, an arid land of mountains, dried-up creeks, sparse forests and rocky plains. Local administration officials have told the BBC that the Mehsud fighters are not fighting by holding ground against the military. Instead they are ceding territory to the security forces and then counter-attacking when the military starts to secure the area.

Denying Afghanistan to al Qaeda; is that really the key ?

Much of the rationale for the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has to do with making sure that it doesn’t become a haven for militant groups once again. As President Barack Obama weighs U.S. and NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation for 40,000 more troops at a time of fading public support for the war in Afghanistan, some people are questioning the basic premise that America must remain militarily committed there so that al Qaeda doesn’t creep back under the protection of the Taliban.

Richard N.Haass, the president of the Council for Foreign Relations, kicked off the debate this month, arguing that al Qaeda didn’t really “require Afghan real estate to constitute a regional or global threat”. Terrorists head to areas of least resistance, and if it is not Afghanistan, they will choose other unstable countries such as Somalia or Yemen, if it hasn’t  happened already, he argues. And the United States cannot conceivably secure all the terrorist havens in the world.

Some experts argue that physical space isn’t really the key to militant groups survival anymore in the age of the Internet. Paul R Pillar, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said in a piece for the Washington Post that safe havens were usually used by militants to hold basic training for recruits. The operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not require such a home, and he cites the Sept 11, 2001 attacks as an example. “The preparations most important to the attacks took place not in camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States,” he says.

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens. it’s not that a sanctuary such as Afghanistan will not help al Qaeda; or other militant groups; the issue is whether denying them the space will prevent an attack, and that, Pillar says, is no longer guaranteed.

But Jim Arkedis, director of the National Security Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former Pentagon counter-terrorism official,  argues that the value of physical space cannot be underestimated and that a “homeless al Qaeda is the best guarantee against large-scale attacks.”

It is certainly true that militants can accomplish much online, he concedes in a piece for Foreign Policy. Individuals can maintain contact with groups via chat rooms, money can be transferred over the Web (if done with extreme caution), and plotters can download items like instruction manuals for bomb-making, photographs of potential targets, and even blueprints for particular buildings.

But all the e-mail accounts, chat rooms, and social media available will never account for the human touch. “There is simply no substitute for the trust and confidence built by physically meeting, jointly conceiving, and then training together for a large-scale, complex operation on the other side of the world,” Arkedis, who spent the last five years studying terrorist plots, says.

It’s a counter-insurgency, stupid

On a recent embed with U.S. Marines in a remote spot of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, the Taliban, or Taliban-linked insurgents, seemed so elusive and invisible that it was easy to doubt whether they actually existed.   Only the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) planted crudely under dirt tracks indicated insurgents were lurking somewhere in Helmand’s vast cornfields and desert plains.  Every home or compound that was visited and searched by the Marines I accompanied on foot patrol appeared to be safe or occupied by harmless residents who just wanted to get along with their lives.   The Marines, who had been ambushed by a group of insurgents and successfully cleared a path laced with bombs a day or so before, were by and large convinced that someone, somewhere in these villages, knew where the insurgents were or when they were likely to turn up next.   Patrolling villages in “Taliban country”, is an essential plank of the U.S. military’s counter-insurgency, the strategy championed by General David Petreus in Iraq and largely credited for quelling the insurgency there.   Most U.S. military officers in Afghanistan swear by Field Manual 3-24 (FM 3-24) — the military’s counter-insurgency (COIN) bible. They admit to having “drank the Cool Aid” and most are confident it is the best hope Washington has of gaining the upper hand on the Taliban, securing the support of the population, while trying to keep civilian casualties as low as possible.   But with reports that as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops have been requested for Afghanistan by the commander of foreign forces there, Army General Stanley McChrystal, many are beginning to question whether COIN is too costly, whether it’s misguided and if more troops actually feeds the insurgency.   In his recent assessment of the war in Afghanistan McChrystal said that protecting the population was of paramount importance in efforts to defeat the insurgency. This is one of the core mantras from a French scholar and military officer, David Galula, whose work heavily informs the FM 3-24.   Galula, however, was writing in the 1960s, with reference to France’s struggle against Algeria’s National Liberation Front. As such some scholars such as Thomas Rid at the Woodrow Wilson Institute have said that because counter-insurgency as a military doctrine is the product of a colonial age, rooted in 19th centruy scholarship, it may essentially be outdated or inappropriate for a 21st century war in Afghanistan.   In a recent interview with news channel Al Jazeera, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said that COIN principles were outdated and would not work in Afghanistan. Even the idea of conducting a western-style democratic election was laughable to him and had echoes of how the Soviet Union tried to impose communism on Afghans in the 1980s.   More soldiers will inevitably foster more discontent within the population, Brzezinski said. A few years down the line, the insurgency would have grown leading to another call for more troops, perpetuating a troops-violence-troops cycle.   The supporters of COIN maintain that it’s the only way to ensure that a viable state can be built and supported. This blog post on the AfPak Channel says that what appears to be going on in Washington, particularly after President Barack Obama’s strategy review of Afghanistan back in April, is an attempt to combine COIN with counter-terrorism, something which “threatens to leave the U.S. with no clarity of strategy, doctrine, tactics and objectives.”   Another crucial part of Afghanistan’s future stability is the power of its own security forces. Right now the Afghan army, which is seen as broadly successful and relatively effective, is far too small. Only 650 Afghan troops pushed into Helmand with 4,000 U.S. Marines this summer.   Marine commanders on the ground say the Afghan army needs to significantly expand together with Afghan police. The police are paid between $70 and $100 a month to work one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, as they are often the first target of insurgents. They are also by and large poorly-educated or illiterate and because they are locally deployed, they tend to have loyalties to certain tribes and are known for turning a blind eye on insurgent activities in some areas.   Afghan army officers themselves are sometimes at odds with the U.S. approach. Foreign troops respond to insurgent gunfire using sophisticated weaponry and stronger force. It is a tactic some Afghan officers say is unnecessary and provokes local anger, even before foreign troops can advance into villages. “I think language is the strongest weapon of all, not guns, I think we should do a lot more talking” one Afghan sergeant in Helmand recently told me.   None of the villagers I interviewed in Helmand last week seemed happy to see Marines turning up at their front door, at best some were indifferent. In one shura I observed, the tone of the Marines, who are often decades younger than the wizened, bearded elders they try to communicate with, seemed frustrated and they appeared convinced the local elders were hiding information from them.   The elders are never asked whether they are happy to see their new neighbours, it is taken as a given that they should be grateful for their presence. The line often used to try and turn them into informants is: “you give us information on the Taliban and we will build you a school”.    

(Photos: on a foot patrol with U.S. Marines in Darwishan, Helmand; a U.S. Marine takes a break while on patrol in Mian Poshtay, Helmand; Afghan soldiers search a compound in Mian Poshtay, Helmand. Reuters/Asmaa Waguih)