Afghan Journal

Cold War flashbacks as Americans rebuild Soviet tunnel in Afghanistan

Under blazing June sunshine in the Hindu Kush mountains, U.S., Russian and Afghan officials gathered by the entrance of the Salang tunnel, arguably the most important stretch of highway in Afghanistan, linking the country’s south with its north.

They had come to celebrate emergency repair works carried out by the U.S. government on the 2.6 km (1.6 miles) of concrete passageway that the Soviets built in 1962. Constantly congested and leaking, the tunnel is on the brink of collapse.

But what happened next was a repeat of Cold War dynamics, unfolding in a country where Soviet forces made a dispirited 1989 exit after a decade-long war against U.S.-backed mujahideen.

Twenty-two years later, the United States will soon begin a troop withdrawal from the increasingly unpopular NATO-led war now in its tenth year.

“This tunnel is an example that the American people are committed to working in partnership with the Afghans,” U.S. envoy to Kabul Karl Eikenberry told swarms of local media by the tunnel’s cracked oval mouth.

As reporters and Afghan officials ventured into the mud-lined tunnel to admire the Americans’ repair work, such as lighting and plugging leaks, A Russian official on the sidelines started to grumble.

from Photographers Blog:

Poppy politics

It's not hard to find a field of poppies in the village of Jelawar, north of Kandahar. Some are hidden discreetly behind mud walls but others have been brazenly planted within sight of the main road. During a recent patrol, I accompanied Afghan National Army Captain Imran (he uses one name) and a group of U.S. civil affairs soldiers on a tour of Jelawar's back roads as they tried to assess the extent of this year's opium production.

The first field we came to was a couple of hundred meters across, filled with pink poppy flowers in full bloom. There were several men working the field and Imran asked them what they were doing. A farmer looked up from pulling weeds and said they were working on their onions. Indeed, in a poppy field the size of a football stadium there were a handful of green onion shoots pushing out of the soil. Not exactly the perfect cover, especially after the farmer admitted to planting the poppies in the first place.

As we walked from one poppy field to the next, Imran was not amused. Finally, he gathered a group of farmers together to give them some bad news. "President Karzai has said it is illegal to grow opium poppies and that they must be destroyed. I give you 48 hours to cut down your plants or I will return with Afghan police and Afghan soldiers and we will force you to destroy these fields."

The farmers protested. What about the money we have already spent to prepare the fields and irrigate the land? Why not let us harvest this year's crop and we will not plant next year? Imran was firm. "My hands are tied", he said. "If I let one farmer harvest his crop then I must let everyone harvest their crops. Everyone must be treated in the same manner."

from Tales from the Trail:

Training may be the U.S. way out of Afghanistan, but hurdles high

One of the strongest messages that U.S. officials tried to convey during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Afghanistan this week was that the American mission in the war-torn country is changing from combat to training, so that Afghan forces are ready to provide security for their own country after decades of upheaval, invasion and foreign occupation.

Biden made a stop at the Kabul military training center, an expansive site about six miles northeast of the city center, where U.S. forces are teaching members of the Afghan National Army how to be part of a modern military. On 22,000 acres of  bare terrain surrounded by mountains and dotted with cement walls and the ruins of Soviet-era military equipment, Afghan soldiers are learning everything from marksmanship to logistics. The facility has even had two all-women officer training classes, the first in the deeply traditional Muslim country, not for combat but for functions such as finance and logistics.

Biden spoke to trainers, toured the grounds and watched a group of the Afghan trainees storm a building. He spoke to each of the men, who greeted him, in turn, by standing to attention, shouting their names and giving their battalion numbers.

The soldiers are eager. They are paid for their time at the facility. “We don’t have a problem finding recruits,” said Lieutenant Colonel David Simons, director of public affairs for the NATO-Afghan training mission. On any day, there are 11,000 Afghan soldiers at the facility. And training in the more basic skills is already being put into Afghan hands, with international forces focused mostly on more specialized areas. “This is the year we’re really turning that over to Afghans,” said Captain Stefan Hasselblad, another spokesman for the base.

It may seem like wishful thinking to expect a force of newly minted Afghan soldiers to provide security in a country where the world’s largest and most modern military still struggles to control the violence after more than nine years of conflict. President Barack Obama's most recent review of the war -- released last month -- noted improvement but said there is a hard road ahead. Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst level since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

Wishful thinking or not, the training has to go on, not just for Afghanistan’s future but to placate the U.S. public which is weary of a war that is approaching the 10-year mark – at a price tag now well over $100 billion per year. The Obama administration is committed to starting to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan beginning in July. The longer term goal is to hand over all of Afghanistan’s security responsibilities to its government by 2014.

The trainers acknowledge that the Afghan soldiers present challenges almost unknown among American forces. Hasselblad said the biggest challenge is the country’s overwhelming rate of illiteracy. Ninety-five percent of the would-be troops cannot read at a minimum level, he said, and have to be taught enough reading so they can handle what he termed “basic soldier skills,” such as recording the serial number of a weapon or reading a map.

from Photographers Blog:

Life and death on a medevac helicopter

Taking pictures of people who are suffering and in pain is never an easy experience. From the jump seat in the back of a Blackhawk medevac helicopter, a constant stream of injured, dead and dying men and women passed in front of me during a recent week-long embed. The wounds were as varied as the patients; an Afghan soldier with kidney stones to a Marine whose legs had been nearly severed by an IED blast.

The medevac helicopter crews were part of the 101st Airborne Division based at Camp Dwyer, a dusty Marine base in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.  During my one week embed with Charlie Company, I would generally work from 6am until it got dark around 7:30pm. The busiest times of day seemed to be in the morning and then again in the afternoon, but calls were received 24 hours a day. About 50% of our patients were Afghan nationals, both military and civilians; with injuries ranging from amputated limbs blown off by IED’s to stab wounds from domestic disputes. The military medical facilities offer the same level of care to locals and soldiers alike, in no small part to gain a bit of good will in this hostile and volatile province.

One morning I was in my tent when the call went out over the radios, "Medevac Medevac Medevac” I joined the crew as we sprinted to the helicopter and within minutes we were airborne. The noise inside was deafening, and earplugs brought the level down to a dull roar. After about 15 minutes, the pilot increased our speed to around 175 mph (280 km/h) and we dropped to tree-top level for our final approach. The helicopter rotors kicked up a cloud of dust as we touched down and the flight medic jumped out to help board the wounded.

A group of Marines were already running towards the door carrying a litter with an injured comrade. The soldier was conscious as they placed him onto the floor and one Marine reached out to shake his hand before leaving. A moment later, a second litter arrived with a more serious casualty. The Marine had no vital signs and the flight medic immediately began CPR while the crew chief pumped air into his lungs.  They worked on the wounded man for the entire flight back to the hospital, about 20 minutes, and as soon as they arrived, a nurse jumped onto the gurney and continued to pump his chest.

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.

The agony of Pakistan

It must take a particularly determined lot to bomb a bus full of pilgrims, killing scores of them, and then following the wounded to a hospital to unleash a second attack to kill some more. Karachi’s twin explosions on Friday, targeting Shia Muslims on their way to a religious procession were on par with some of the worst atrocities committed in recent months.

It also came just two days after a bombing in Lower Dir, near Swat, in which a convoy of soldiers including U.S. servicemen were targeted while on their way to open a girls school. Quite apart from the fact that the U.S. soldiers were the obvious targets, the renewed violence along with fresh reports of flogging by the Taliban calls into question the broader issue of negotiating with hard-core Islamists as proposed by the Afghan government just over the border.

The blog, All Things Pakistan, captured the mood of a despairing nation. “Pakistan remains at war. Whether it school girls in Lower Dir or Shia mourners and those waiting outside Jinnah hospital in Karachi. All Pakistanis everywhere are targets for these murderous enemies of Pakistan.”

“It may be true that we do not have many friends abroad. But it is certainly clear that our cruellest enemies are all amongst us. Day in, day out, they kill and maim and terrorize Pakistanis all across Pakistan. No city is safe. No Pakistani is safe.”

No Pakistani is safe. The BBC ran a chilling story this week about life among the Taliban in which a 13-year-old girl talks about how her father and brother tried to turn her into a suicide bomber. They told Meena she would go to paradise long before they would if she carried out a suicide bombing, She said Taliban commanders used to come to their house, and that would-be bombers, most of them children her age or even younger, would be trained in an underground bunker adjacent to her house.  Children were used for this activity because they were too young to know any better, she said.

She watched her own sister being strapped with bombs and sent to die even while she kept crying for her mother. Later her brother told Meena her sister’s attack was in Afghanistan. And when Meena refused to follow suit she was threatened and beaten. She escaped her fate only after a helicopter gunship struck the family house just as she stepped out to run after a goat. Her house reduced to rubble, she never went back and walked until she reached a town. There is no independent confirmation of her account but police believe she is telling the truth, according to the BBC.

Canada’s soured Afghan mission

If you want an idea of just how much the Afghan experience has soured for Canada, look no further than a furore over allegations that officials may have committed war crimes by handing over prisoners to local authorities in 2006 and 2007.

The accusations flying through Parliament — not to mention a cartoon portraying the Prime Minister as a torturer — cannot have been what Ottawa expected when it committed 2,500 troops to Kandahar in 2005 on a mission that has turned out to be much bloodier, longer and expensive that anyone had calculated. At best, Canada’s dreams for Afghanistan are on hold: the Taliban is still strong, corruption is rampant and there is little sign of the major development that Ottawa hoped for.

Canada also stationed troops in Kandahar to underline that the old-style vision of its soldiers as peacekeepers was out. “We’re not the public service of Canada … we are the Canadian forces, and our job is to be able to kill people,” said Rick Hillier, then chief of the defense staff, describing the Taliban as “detestable murderers and scumbags” in 2005.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a similarly uncompromising line in 2006 when he went to Afghanistan and announced “there will be some who want to cut and run, but cutting and running is not my way”.

Fast forward three years and the government has long since stopped trying to sell the merits of a mission that has lost 133 soldiers so far and, according to Parliament’s budgetary officer, will have cost over C$18 billion by the time it ends. For all the talk of not cutting and running, Ottawa says the troops will be home by end-2011 and dismisses talk of an extension.

Indeed, you’d barely know Canada was involved in its biggest conflict since Korea. Virtually the only time the mission makes the headlines is when a soldier is killed and this, as foreign diplomats note, is a rather odd way to persuade people to support the war. A few years ago officials held regular briefings, but those have long since stopped. Ottawa is now content to issue regular progress reports which reveal precious little progress.

Will voters in your town believe Karzai is worth dying for?

In his inauguration speech on Thursday, Afghan president Hamid Karzai promised to combat corruption and appoint competent ministers, heading off the growing chorus of criticism from the West that his government is crooked and inept. Unsurprisingly, the Western dignitaries in the audience declared that they liked what they heard.

We predicted ahead of time that we would hear positive words about Karzai this week. After all, Western governments need to convince their own voters back home that the veteran Afghan leader’s government is worth sending their sons and daughters to die for. This autumn’s election debacle made Karzai look bad – a U.N.-backed probe found that nearly a third of votes cast for him were fake — but now that’s all over and the West needs him to look as reliable as possible.

A “very strong, substantial statement,” declared British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

“An important new starting point” that “set forth an agenda for change and reform” gushed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Let’s encourage and support the president,” said EU envoy Ettore Sequi.

Well, that’s what they said when the cameras were rolling. Behind the scenes the message was: Karzai’s speech was fine, but it’s just a speech.

“We’ve heard all of these sentiments before. If you compare his last inauguration to this inauguration, you’ll see there’s almost a 90 percent overlap,” was how one Western official in Kabul put it.

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.

Pomegranates, dust, rose gardens and war

On a hilltop in central Kabul, the relics of Soviet armoured vehicles sit in the shadow of an incongruously vast and empty swimming pool. A tower of diving boards looks down into the concrete carcass built by the Russians. Boys play football there and on Fridays the basin is used for dog fights; combat is the only option for the canine gladiators, as they cannot climb up the sheer, steep sides. From the vantage point you can see the city’s graveyards, its bright new mosques, the narco-palaces of drug-funded business potentates and the spread of modest brick homes where most Kabulis live. It’s a favourite spot for reporters when they need to escape the press of urgent events and get cleaner air in their lungs. 

For years journalists have sought to tell stories that go beyond the conflict in Afghanistan. We’ve tried to portray this country – the crossroads of central Asia, the summer home of Moghul emperors, the cockpit of clashing empires – as more than a place of blood, deprivation and extremism. Amid the dust and the heat it has its oases of tranquility, its laughter and its charms. From the market stalls of sweet pomengranates that line the road in autumn to the rose gardens newly planted in central Kabul, Afghanistan is a place of thorny history, cultural complexity and spartan beauty.

Alas, we cannot ignore the warfare. Great journalistic energy has to go into counting the casualties, explaining the violence and charting the shifting strategies of the combatants. It’s a conflict whose outcome is uncertain. The bullets and bombs tear through the flesh of ordinary Afghans, fanatical insurgents and Western soldiers with equal awfulness. A blast takes the life of a child, deprives a wife of a husband and faintly furthers some cause. The impact is immediate and local, but it reverberates harshly in Washington, Delhi, London or Paris.

Can we weave together the warp of war and the weft of daily life in Afghanistan? Yes, in this blog, we hope is the answer. In the tradition of the region’s richly patterned carpets, it will be both intricate and stoutly structured, minutely detailed and expansive in scale.

It will gather the impressions, observations and thoughts of our correspondents, video journalists and photographers in Afghanistan, whether they be in Kabul, on embedded assignments with different military units or travelling independently. Infrequent visitors like myself, just returned from Kabul, will contribute. I went to assess the mood, interview officials and see how our large journalistic operation is run. The blog will link our teams in Washington, London, Brussels, Delhi and Islamabad, bringing to bear a unique array of perspectives on the Afghan story.

It should be an intelligent, lively and useful addition to the words, images and video that Reuters already produces to illustrate this dynamic, significant and absorbing story. The blog won’t be complete without your views. Please contribute your comments and become part of the debate on the future of Afghanistan. Be partisan if you wish, but kindly remain pleasant.

Welcome to ‘The Afghan Journal.’