Afghan Journal

from Bernd Debusmann:

U.S. nation-building in the wrong place?

America's costly efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq came under intense scrutiny this month in critical reports and a gloomy Senate hearing that prompted a memorable assertion. "If there is any nation in the world that really needs nation-building right now, it is the United States."

That came from a Democratic Senator, Jim Webb, who continued: "When we are putting hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure in another country, it should only be done if we can articulate a vital national interest because we quite frankly need to be doing a lot more of that here."

Webb spoke at the confirmation hearing of the veteran diplomat President Barack Obama nominated to be his next ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, who faced questions from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that left no doubt over the growing impatience of U.S. lawmakers with a military and financial commitment that is producing limited progress.

Webb's juxtaposition of spending on Afghanistan and the state of things in the United States - a stalled economy, stubborn unemployment, an aging infrastructure - is made more often in online debates and private conversations than in official hearings. But it is a subtext for a debate likely to grow in the campaign for the 2012 elections and feature both Afghanistan and Iraq as money pits, object lessons for ill-conceived development projects, and lack of foresighted planning.

A report by the bi-partisan Commission on Wartime Contracting issued early in June set the tone. "U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan are scheduled to begin in July 2011, and the U.S. military presence in Iraq is scheduled to end by December 31, 2011. But America will leave many legacies in both countries carrying large sustainment costs long into the future."

The commission, the report said, saw no sign that the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development were making plans to make sure that the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan could operate and maintain, on their own, the vast array of projects built under U.S. government contracts, from schools and clinics to hospitals and power plants.

An examination of a decade's wartime contracting in the two countries, says the report, had identified tens of billions of dollars of waste. Unless the U.S. paid prompt attention to the "how to" of maintaining, operating and paying for the projects it will leave behind, "the United States faces new waves of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan."

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Solving Afghanistan and Pakistan over a cup of tea

I have never read "Three Cups of Tea", Greg Mortenson's book about building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I tried to read the sequel, "Stones into Schools" and gave up not too long after the point where he said that, "the solution to every problem ... begins with drinking tea." Having drunk tea in many parts of South Asia - sweet tea, salt tea, butter tea, tea that comes with the impossible-to-remove-with-dignity thick skin of milk tea - I can confidently say that statement does not reflect reality.

So I have always been a bit puzzled that the Americans took Mortenson's books so much to heart. Yes, I knew he boasted that his books had become required reading for American officers posted to Afghanistan; and yes, there is the glowing praise from Admiral Mike Mullen on the cover of  "Stones into Schools", where he wrote that "he's shaping the very future of a region". But I had always believed, or wanted to believe, that at the back of everyone's minds they realised that saccharine sentimentality was no substitute for serious analysis. Just as hope is not a strategy, drinking tea is not a policy.  (To be fair to the Americans, I have also overheard a British officer extolling the virtues of drinking tea in Afghanistan.)

As a result of my scepticism on the miracle powers of tea-drinking, I find I am learning an awful lot more about the thinking of the U.S. administration than I ever did from Mortenson from the fall-out from the allegations of inaccuracies in his books. (Mortenson rejects these allegations in a statement on the website of his Central Asia Institute charity.)

Take for example the detailed account by Jon Krakauer (pdf) charting not only inaccuracies but also alleged irregularities in the finances of the Central Asia Institute. In his opening paragraph, Krakauer notes that President Barack Obama donated $100,000 of the award money from his own Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 2009, to the Central Asia Institute. I had not known about the Obama connection until I read advance stories on Krakauer's piece.

During his presidential election campaign, Obama made Afghanistan and Pakistan his foreign policy priority. So you might expect that he would have had foreign policy advisers who would have questioned the wisdom of associating publicly with one man. After all, it was quite clear -- whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Montenson's philanthropy -- that the narrative used to describe his schools in Baltistan as a bulwark against the Taliban and Islamist militants was a bit awry.

I have only been to Baltistan once, on a brief trip organised by the Pakistan Army to visit the Siachen region, the world's highest battlefield, where Indian and Pakistani troops have faced off against each other since 1984. Yet even under the watchful gaze of my army minder, a group of Balti intellectuals who I met in the regional capital Skardu were able to tell me (over several cups of tea) that they felt neglected by Islamabad and excluded from power in Pakistan. Baltistan is part of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan, and because of its disputed status, the people there have never been integrated into Pakistan and nor have they been given voting rights.

The political and security issues in Baltistan are related to the rivalry between India and Pakistan, to the dispute over Kashmir, and to the electoral dispossession of a people who have been frozen in time since the partition of the subcontinent since 1947. They are nothing to do with the Taliban, militant Islam, or the war in Afghanistan. That should have been easy enough to find out - have U.S. diplomats never been to Baltistan?  Indeed even without going there, the information was available for free on the Internet. Why did nobody ask any questions?

from The Great Debate:

America’s trouble with Islam

Of the many posters held aloft in angry demonstrations about plans for an Islamic cultural centre and mosque in New York, one in particular is worth noting: "All I ever need to know about Islam, I learned on 9/11."

As an example of wilful ignorance, it's in a class by itself. It passes judgment, in just 12 words, about a sprawling universe of 1.3 billion adherents of Islam (in 57 countries around the world) who come from different cultures, speak a wide variety of languages, follow different customs, hold different nationalities and believe in different interpretations of their faith, just like Christians or Jews. Suicidal murderers are a destructive but tiny minority.

But for the people waving all-I-ever-need-to-know posters in front of national television cameras two blocks from "ground zero," site of the biggest mass murder in American history, Islam equals terrorism. No need for nuance, no need for learning, no need for building bridges between the faiths. The mindset epitomized by the slogan mirrors the radical fringe of Islamic thought, equally doubt-free and self-righteous.

Both sides have data to back up their assertions. The Islam-equals-terrorism school of thought can point to 3,000 victims of the attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those who preach that the U.S. is waging war on Islam itself, and terror acts are therefore a form of self-defence, can argue that Christian soldiers have been killing Muslims through history, from the Crusades to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "ground zero mosque" affair began with a dispute over the center's proximity to the hole where the Twin Towers once stood. Too close to hallowed ground, argue opponents, including family members of people who died in the attack. The question of location morphed into a national debate on religious tolerance and prompted demonstrations against planned mosques more than a thousand miles from New York.

Does all this add up to a rising wave of anti-Muslim bigotry? Or is it more of the same, with the volume turned higher in advance of mid-term elections? There are no hard data to answer that question and it is worth looking back a few years at polls on American attitudes towards Muslims. In 2006, a Gallup survey found that 39 percent favoured rules requiring Muslims, including U.S. citizens, to carry special identification to better spot potential terrorists.

Callers to a Washington radio show host who followed up on the ID issue suggested identifying Muslims with a crescent-shaped tattoo on their foreheads, stamps on their driving licenses, passports and birth certificates, or special armbands.

from Russell Boyce:

“Allah-u-Akbar! God is Great!”

Some pictures still shock me. Some make me laugh; many provide an insight or window into a new idea but only a few haunt me with my mind's eye returning to them again and again.

On Wednesday 28th July an Airblue plane crashed  just outside Islamabad in the beauty spot of the Margalla Hills killing all 152 on board. The cause of the crash, as yet unconfirmed, is thought to have been the driving monsoon rain. I edited the pictures shot by Reuters photographers who reached the scene. Images ranging from smoke drifting through the hills, men scrambling in the charred rocky, woodlands, picking through twisted metal and rocks looking for signs of life; tied cloth bags, dripping with the blood  that contained the remains of the passengers, to a severed arm and hand, the fingers still perfectly formed, just lying on the ground. There were no survivors.

Policemen and soldiers raise their hands while shouting "God is great," to lift their spirits as the team worked through heavy rain to search for bodies and a flight data recorder at the site of the Airblue plane crash in Islamabad's Margalla Hills July 29, 2010. Heavy monsoon rains in Islamabad on Thursday hampered recovery efforts at the site of a Pakistani plane crash that killed all 152 people on board a day earlier, a senior police officer said. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

The next day, as relatives identified and claimed the broken bodies of their loved ones, the search continued for the black box and for more human remains. Pakistan Chief Photographer Adrees Latif returned to the miserable scene. Police, ill dressed for the appalling weather, soaked to the skin and cold, were carrying out the thankless task of the fingertip search in the charred and soaked scene. Suddenly a shout "Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-u-Akbar!" God is Great, the officer in charge both recognising fate and trying to raise the spirits of his men. The moment captured by Adrees, their belief in God transcending the misery and seemingly hopelessness of their task, the image and their unfaltering faith, left forever in my mind.

As the week continued driving monsoon rains led to rising flood waters, the worse seen in a generation, taking the lives of an estimated 1100 people with a million displaced from their homes. The "death mask" of cream worn a boy sitting in the flood waters shot by Akhtar Soomro in Karachi seemed to me to herald the coming deaths.

The view from Pakistan: India is a bigger threat than the Taliban, al Qaeda

India may have  a bigger problem in Pakistan than previously thought. More than half of Pakistanis surveyed in a Pew poll say India is a bigger threat than al Qaeda or the Taliban.

It’s not just the Pakistani military that believes a bigger, richer India is an existential threat. A majority of ordinary people share that perception as well. That ought to worry Indian policy planners. Of the Pakistanis polled, 23 percent think the Taliban is the greatest threat to their country, and 3 percent think al Qaeda is, despite the rising tide of militant violence in Pakistan’s turbulent northwest region on the Afghan border, and also in the heartland cities.

One must approach all surveys with caution, especially so in countries such as India and Pakistan with very large populations.  Pew conducted face-to-face interviews with 2,000 adults in Pakistan between April 13 and 28 of 2010. It says the sample was disproportionately urban, and parts of the troubled areas of the northwest and Baluchistan were not covered. For a country with a population of over 170 million, drawing hard conclusions based on a sample size that small  must come with a mandatory health warning.

Still, there were some positive take-aways.  Despite the deep-seated tensions between these two countries, most Pakistanis want better relations with India. Roughly 72% say it is important for relations with India to improve and about three-quarters support increased trade with India and further talks between the two rivals.

But India won’t talk unless Pakistan acts against the militant groups and their patrons. For a large number of Indians, memories of the 11/26 attacks in Mumbai are still too fresh. India has made almost all dialogue with Pakistan conditional, based on the steps it takes to roll up groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based organization that New Delhi has blamed for a series of attacks in India including the Mumbai assault of 2008. But Pakistan won’t act because it doesn’t consider them to be a threat.  So how do you square such a circle?

The Indians can take some comfort in the fact that Pakistanis also gave the United States an equally poor approval rating. Roughly 59 percent of Pakistanis describe the U.S. as an enemy. And President Barack Obama is very unpopular — only 8% of Pakistanis express confidence that he will do the right thing in world affairs, his lowest rating among 22 nations that were polled about their confidence in the U.S. president.

For all the money that has been lavished on Pakistan, the United States seems to be getting nowhere in winning public support. Indeed,  support for the U.S. involvement in the fight against extremists fell last year. “The lesson unlearned in fifty years is that feeding Pakistan cash will not alter a national psychosis of war and hatred for the U.S.,” Dr. Aseem Shukla wrote in the Washington Post.