Afghan Journal

from The Great Debate:

Obama, Karzai and an Afghan mirage

Last year, under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan slipped three places on a widely respected international index of corruption and became the world's second-most corrupt country. It now ranks 179th out of 180, a place long held by Somalia.

According to a United Nations report published in January, Afghans paid $2.5 billion in bribes in 2009, roughly a quarter of the country's Gross Domestic Product (not counting revenue from the opium trade). The survey, based on interviews with 7,600 people, said corruption was the biggest concern of Afghans.

On the military front in a war more than halfway through its ninth year, attacks on U.S. forces and their NATO allies totaled 21,000 in 2009, a 75 percent increase over 2008, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) a week before Karzai's visit to Washington. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, noted that Taliban insurgents had set up a "widespread paramilitary shadow government...in a majority of Afghanistan's 34 provinces."

The Pentagon, also in advance of Karzai's visit (in the second week of May), reported that Afghans support his government in only 29 of the 121 districts the U.S. military consider most strategically important.

"The insurgents perceive 2009 as their most successful year," the Pentagon said. "The Afghan insurgency has. ..a ready supply of recruits drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction and lack of governance to grow their ranks." As to corruption: "Real...change remains elusive and political will, in particular, remains doubtful."

In case all this has led you to the conclusion that the Afghan glass is half empty at best, that's not the way President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton portrayed it during Karzai's visit. Yes, there were difficulties ahead, they said, but overall things were looking up. "We are steadily making progress," Obama said. "Progress in Afghanistan is real," echoed Clinton.

Was this a matter of two leaders seeing a mirage, or a 21st century version of the "we see light at the end of the tunnel" assurance Americans heard during the Vietnam war? Or was it simply overdue recognition that Obama is stuck with Karzai no matter how unpopular he might be or how much credibility he lacks?

U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan set to overtake Iraq

At some point this month or early June, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan will outnumber those in Iraq, writes Michael E. O ‘Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. It’s an artificial milestone but it is worth noting because it tells you a good deal about the two wars and where the United States stands in each.

The cross-over is also a measure of how big and rapid has the shift been in America’s military power toward Afghanistan since President Barack Obama took office last year promising to bring the troops home.

There are currently around 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and just under 100,000 in Iraq. The United States is adding roughly 2,000 more troops each month in Afghanistan as part of a build-up to beat back a resurgent Taliban while drawing down more than 5,000 from Iraq.

By the end of the summer, the troop strength in Afghanistan will hit 100,000 while the number in Iraq would have fallen to half of that. It’s a dramatic shift since Obama was inaugurated as U.S. president in January last year when there were just 35,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The casualty count from the two wars also tells you about which is the hotter theatre, perhaps in part also because more troops mean more fighting.  U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are greater than Iraq by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1, and that imbalance will likely increase over the course of the year, says O’Hanlon.

So is the growing U.S. troop presence making a difference? A progress report issued by the Pentagon this week on the security situation in Afghanistan paints a mixed picture.

Despite the addition of more than 50,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the past year, there still aren’t enough forces to conduct operations in the majority of key areas, it said.

from Global News Journal:

War comes to Germany

Germans have spent the last six decades trying to be as un-militaristic as possible.

Their struggle to make a complete U-turn from their belligerent past has caused many an awkward moment for the country and its NATO allies. In avoiding the mere mention of the word “war” that seemed to be all but banished from their vocabulary, German leaders raised in a post-war era and the motto "Nie Wieder Krieg!" (No more war ever)  have gone through tortuous tongue-twisting excursions about what the increasingly deadly mission in Afghanistan isn’t – a war.

But all that angst about "war" was suspended, at least temporarily, on Friday when Chancellor Angela Merkel went, for the first time, to a funeral service for three German soldiers. They were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan on Good Friday.

Until now Merkel had kept her distance to the increasingly unpopular mission in Afghanistan and the 4,300 German soldiers stationed there. But on Friday she cut short a holiday to attend an emotional ceremony broadcast live on German TV networks, where she defended the country’s involvement despite 39 soldiers killed so far on what was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission. "Most soldiers would call it a civil war or simply war -- and I can well understand that," said Merkel, 55.

"What we experienced on Good Friday would understandably be called 'war' by most people -- and me too," said Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, 38. He offered a moving tribute, using language rarely heard to describe soldiers in post-war Germany.

 “I was trying to explain my sorrow to my daughter on Good Friday and she asked me if the three young men were 'courageous heroes' of our country (tapfere Helden unseres Landes) and whether it was okay to be proud of them,” said Guttenberg, who was close to tears.

“I answered both questions, not politically, but instead simply with ‘yes’.”

from Tales from the Trail:

Public forecast for Afghan strategy – stalemate

Americans have doubts over whether President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan strategy will ultimately result in victory, but a majority say the war is morally justified.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp poll finds that 57 percent said the most likely outcome for the United States in Afghanistan would be a stalemate, with 29 percent predicting victory.

When asked whether a victory was possible or not possible, 58 percent of those surveyed said it was possible, while 41 percent said it was not possible.

But asked the same question about defeat, the responses were quite similar:  60 percent said defeat was possible, while 38 percent said defeat was not possible.

A majority -- 63 percent -- said U.S. action in Afghanistan was morally justified.

A column in The New Yorker says that this time the cliche is true: there are no good options in Afghanistan.

A Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 53 percent of American voters support Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and 47 percent support his plan to being withdrawing in 18 months -- but only 20 percent agree with both parts of the strategy.

Fighting an insurgency: you are only as good as your interpreter

Some of my nastiest moments as a war correspondent in the Caucasus and Central Asia had nothing to do with bullets, explosions or tanks. It is one thing to cover a conflict where you speak the language and quite another when you don’t. Working with a poor interpreter is worrisome at best, downright dangerous at worst.

I got by most of the time by speaking Russian, which is not an option in Afghanistan today. A recent PBS documentary on the conflict showed a U.S. squad in one isolated village having great difficulty making itself understood properly because the interpreter was second-rate.

This set me wondering. How do foreign troops work effectively in a place riven by factionalism and tribal conflicts, a place where interpreters can be threatened and even killed? How do they know the people translating for them are doing an even halfway decent job?

The Canadian military, which has 2,700 troops in the violent southern city of Kandahar, recently issued a large counter-insurgency manual. The Canadians have had a rough time, losing 131 soldiers so far, proportionately more than any other nation involved in combat. The manual is serious, comprehensive and well thought-out, explaining the importance of communication with locals. Nowehere does it mention the possibility that the locals may not always understand what you are trying to say.

I put this to Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie, the head of Canada’s army, when I interviewed him this week. His response was forthright: “You are absolutely, 100 percent, bloody bang on. And I’ll tell you something. If I could turn the hand of time back to 2002, when Canada first went into Afghanistan, with the knowledge that we were going to be there until 2011, language training for officers and NCOs would have had precedence over a whole bunch of other things.”

The army has a couple of hundred people who know their way around Afghan culture. Leslie says they should have thousands. For the most part the military relies on locals to help them navigate a ferociously complicated landscape. Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, Canadian commander on the ground, recently told CBC radio that working “in this theatre is incredibly challenging. It’s very, very complex. The nature of counter-insurgency warfare is hard and it’s a quantum leap harder in Afghanistan for a whole bunch of reasons”.

Leslie says the local interpreters are brave people doing a good job. “The use of interpreters can give you an understanding of local complexity, it can give you someone who can recognize key players, who can — if they’re honest and forthright with you and not intimidated to hell and back — (give) some suggestions on who to trust, who not to trust. The danger is of course that a lot of interpreters know they’re going to be there after we’re gone and you can’t always rely on every interpreter to give you all the info you might need,” he said.