Fight them there or fight them here?

Former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells poses the question in the Guardian in a piece made grimly relevant by Wednesday's shooting dead of  five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman.

Howells says troops should be brought back from Afghanistan and that the billions of pounds saved should be used to beef up homeland security in Britain -- drawing the front line against al Qaeda around the UK rather than thousands of miles away in Helmand province.

He accepts that such an approach would result in "more intrusive surveillance in certain communities," a tacit acknowledgment that Britain's Muslims would be subject to greater scrutiny by police and intelligence services.

His "Fortress Britain" theory takes into account indications that a growing number of experts feel the war against the Al Qaeda's supporters the Taliban in Afghanistan is unwinnable.

It also makes the point that not all Al Qaeda training camps are in Afghanistan anyway.

Howells is Gordon Brown's intelligence and security watchdog and his theory goes counter to the prevailing wisdom in Washington and London, both of which are preparing to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Do you agree with him?

(Amending the article with the correct name of the organisation which conducted the research as also with more details on the survey itself}

The Asia Foundation has released its annual survey of Afghanistan and a key finding is that the Afghan people are a bit more optimistic about their country than the rest of the world is, at this point of time.  The survey found that 42 percent of the people felt Afghanistan was heading in the right direction, up from 38 percent in 2008, and mainly because of better security conditions.

In fact each year the number of respondents who think security has improved has gone up, even though the Taliban insurgency is at its worst in 2009.  Some 44 percent of those surveyed this year said they felt safer, up from 31 percent in 2006. More respondents in 2009 also mentioned reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

It may not be such a disconnect as it seems. Security remains the main worry for the people  of Afghanistan with some 42 percent saying that was the most important reason for pessimism.  It is just that an increasing number of people - and the number is rising very slowly - believe things are starting to get better.

The survey was carried out among 6,408 adult in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan between June 17 and July 6, 2009.

Some more key findings :

- In 2009, Afghans give a more positive assessment of their economic situation than in previous years, although this prosperity is not evenly shared. Considerably more urban respondents (63%) than rural residents (52%) say they are more prosperous today than they were under the Taliban.

- Unemployment continues to feature amongst the most important problems at both national (35%) and local (26%) levels. Other major problems at the local level concern basic infrastructure and services such as electricity (26%), roads (24%), water (22%) and lack of healthcare/clinics/hospitals (20%), as in previous years

- The majority of respondents (71%) support the government’s attempts to address the security situation through negotiation and reconciliation with armed anti-government elements. The high level of support for this approach is likely to be influenced by the fact that a majority of respondents (56%) say they have some level of sympathy with the motivations of armed opposition groups.

- The proportion of respondents who say that democracy is the best form of government available continues to fall, from 84 percent in 2006 to 78 percent in 2009.

- Interestingly, the survey, which was conducted two months before the August presidential election, found that more than 60 percent of the people thought the election would be free and fair. Those who thought otherwise identified a range of potential problems including cheating in the vote count (39%) and buying of votes (33%).

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.

Even in the Sept 11 attack there were preparations that took place along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed put future operatives through a series of training courses. These included physical fitness, firearms, close combat, Western culture and English language.

You can learn lots of things online, but it is still preferable to have a dedicated professor physically present to supervise students and monitor progress, he says.

[Reuters photos of a U.S. Marine in Helmand and a woman  walking past a protest in Kabul]

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.'

[Reuters pictures of diving boards at an empty Kabul swimming pool,a girl on a street and soldiers passing by another ]

A week after suspected Sunni Islamist insurgents attacked the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, a suicide bomber killed six senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and 25 other people in Shi'ite Iran in one of the deadliest attacks in years on the country's most powerful military institution.

Were these two events connected only by the loose network of Sunni insurgent groups based in and around Pakistan? Or are there other common threads that link the two?

Iranian state media said Jundollah, an ethnic Baluch Sunni insurgent group, claimed responsibility for the attack in the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan. The group, led by Abdomalek Rigi, is believed to have bases in neighbouring Pakistan's Baluchistan province.

Jundollah has been linked in some reports to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an anti-Shia sectarian group based in Pakistan's Punjab province, and to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Both the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the TTP are believed to have close ties to al Qaeda, and are suspected of involvement in the attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan Army.

Trawling through published reports about Jundollah, it is not easy to work out how clear its links are to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda. This article in the Asia Times Online cautions that there are two organisations with the same name, one focused on Pakistan and the other on Iran.  Pakistani newspapers, however, have reported links specifically between Rigi's group and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and TTP.

Being fellow travellers in the network of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups does not necessarily mean they are pursuing a common agenda. However, it does raise intriguing questions about how far they are collaborating, and about how far al Qaeda might be directing operations behind the scenes.

According to the Jihadica website, al Qaeda has been publicly cementing its ties with the Tehrik-e-Taliban, whose declared aim is to take over Pakistan.  The TTP is currently under siege in its stronghold in South Waziristan, where the Pakistan Army launched a long-awaited ground offensive on Saturday. A series of militant attacks across Pakistan in the past few weeks have been seen as an attempt by the Tehrik-e-Taliban and its al Qaeda-linked allies to show it can outwit the Pakistani security forces.

So was the bombing in Iran part of that deliberate attempt to spread mayhem across the region? That's almost impossible to tell for now, although the Long War Journal earlier this year quoted an al Qaeda commander as talking about expanding the jihad into neighbouring countries, including Iran.

Of all the many players in the region, al Qaeda probably has the most to gain from the fall-out of the attack in Iran.

The Iranian armed forces, which have long harboured suspicions that Jundollah was funded by the west to weaken Iran, have accused the United States and Britain of involvement in the attack and vowed revenge.  That could torpedo efforts by President Barack Obama's administration to improve relations with Iran and seek its help in stabilising Afghanistan.

It could also raise tensions between Pakistan and Iran, which reacted sharply to the bombing of a mosque in the Iranian city of Zahedan earlier this year. As Pakistan struggles to fight militants within the country and defeat them in South Waziristan, the last thing it needs is trouble on its border with Iran.

So is there an overall plan at work here? Or instead, is it simply that the region has become so destabilised that insurgents are finding it easier to operate both inside and outside of Pakistan?

(Photos: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Pakistani soldiers in Lahore)

An atmosphere of stale defensiveness has sunk over Kabul. The mood has been lowered by the protracted saga of the Afghan election count, almost two months on from the first round August 20 vote. It’s a drama veering towards farce more often than post-modern play, as we wait endlessly for a result, that like Godot, does not want to come.

Winter has not yet arrived in Kabul, though the evenings are cold, quickly taking the heat of the sun out of the day. Afghan politicians are frustrated and twitchy, second-guessing the reasons for the U.N.-backed election watchdog’s plodding. We are being solidly methodological to retain the confidence of all, says the Electoral Complaints Commission, as it examines thousands of dodgy votes. A thankless task, most likely. The ECC officials will be puzzling over whether a box of votes has been mass-endorsed for one candidate, and should not stand, or if the suspiciously similar ticks on the ballot paper are attributable to only one man in the village knowing how to write. Many of the rural voters will never have held a pen in their hand, argued one official. It is natural in such a tribal society for the village to establish a consensus on who to support. Do such ballot papers count? Remember Florida, and how ‘hanging chads’ and the U.S. Supreme Court gave George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore? It’s that kind of agony.

Behind the scenes the whispers are that hesitation and delay are because the outcome is excruciatingly close, too close to call. President Hamid Karzai, once set clear for victory, may find first round success ripped from his grasp by the disqualification of votes stuffed into ballot boxes by his supporters. He’ll likely win a second round, if it happens, against his former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah; but there will have been a loss of dignity, of self-confidence and of an opportunity to stabilise Afghanistan and get on with fighting the Taliban.

Other more fraught scenarios are possible, as outlined by my colleague. Would Karzai gamble that the West has no alternative to him in Afghanistan? And that he can therefore afford to ignore the opprobrium that would follow if he rejected an outcome he did not like? Or are the suspicions of chicanery, back-room pressure on election officials and string-pulling by all involved just a proliferation of nonsense to fill the void left by the lack of a clear outcome?

Eventually the result will be out, perhaps by the time some of you get round to reading this. Most likely I will be back in London, watching from afar. Optimists would have it that clarity will clear the air, the Afghan political mood will lighten and spoils to all will come from the haggling over the shape of the next government.

Meanwhile Afghanistan is Limbo-stan. Obama won’t decide his strategy on Afghanistan until he sees what kind of Afghan partner he has to deal with. At least until then, and possibly longer, he won’t say yes or no to the extra troops that General Stanley McChrystal says he needs to carry out the counter-insurgency strategy that he has prepared. (Though he’ll carry out a different strategy, with no or fewer extra troops, if that’s what he’s ordered to do by his commander-in-chief). So in this limbo - the Washington policy void is filled with echo-chamber exhortations across the political divides; the Taliban is emboldened; Afghanistan’s neighbours are positioning themselves to benefit or at least guard against strategic loss should Washington fold its tent; and Western publics are wondering if there is a real purpose to their boys getting their limbs blown off while trudging through the fields of southern Helmand.

One of the arguments frequently put forward for sending more western troops to Afghanistan is that western failure there will destabilise Pakistan.

Very roughly summarised, this 21st century version of the domino theory suggests that a victory for Islamist militants in Afghanistan would so embolden them that they might then overrun Pakistan - a far more dangerous proposition given its nuclear weapons.

A slightly different but related argument is that the United States needs to show resolve in Afghanistan to convince Pakistan of its commitment to the region and encourage the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to turn against Islamist militants it once cultivated as "strategic assets" to be used against its much bigger neighbour India.

"Many in Pakistan have always believed the Americans are not really serious about Afghanistan. They recall that the U.S. supported Pakistan and the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s only to abandon both once the Soviets left," writes Bruce Riedel at Brookings in a follow-up to this weekend's attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters.

If President Barack Obama "shows resolve in Afghanistan, Pakistanis won’t love us, but they will believe we are serious and determined to stay until a stable Afghanistan and Pakistan emerges," he writes. "If it appears the United States cannot make up its mind about what to do, then Pakistanis will say I told you so and make their own accommodations."

Yet the assault on army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi raises several questions both about the domino theory and argument about the United States needing to show resolve in Afghanistan.

First, does the Pakistan Army still need to be convinced of the dangers from Islamist militants after its commandos, as the Daily Telegraph put it, "were forced to storm their own headquarters" to release hostages seized in an attack on the most powerful institution in the country?

Second, the attack - which in turn raised jitters about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons - appeared to have nothing to do with the main Afghan Taliban group fighting western forces in Afghanistan - the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar, which according to Washington is based in  Pakistan's Baluchistan province.   

As discussed in this post and in this analysis, the gunmen involved in the Rawalpindi raid came from a nexus of militant groups linking up the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in South Waziristan in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and organisations which have taken deep root in the country's heartland Punjab province - including sectarian groups and those originally set up to fight India in Kashmir.

The Guardian quotes Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as saying that five of the attackers came from Punjab while the other five were from South Waziristan. The ringleader, he said, was a Punjabi, while the operation was ordered from South Waziristan. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, but said it was carried out by its Punjab unit.

So if the threat to Pakistan comes not from the Afghan Taliban but from the Pakistani Taliban and the many militant organisations based in Punjab, can you still cite the need to stabilise Pakistan as a justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan?

There may be other arguments for sending more troops to Afghanistan, among them to prevent it again becoming a base for al Qaeda. As Reuters correspondent William Maclean writes here, analysts are still divided on whether the Afghan Taliban can be prised away from al Qaeda.

Pakistan's former ambassador to Kabul argues in this interview with India's Business Standard that they can. "First of all, we have to understand that the Taliban and the al Qaeda have totally different targets; and also that the Afghan Taliban are different from the Pakistan Taliban and there is evidence of this," he says. "We can do business with the Taliban and in order to bring back some normalcy in Afghanistan, the Taliban and the U.S. will have to do business. But we need to have some benchmarks for the conduct of the Taliban government before we do that."

And in this article in the Washington Post, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, suggests looking anew at the Afghan Taliban.

"Change the media theme from attacking the Taliban and calling them the terrorists to concentrating on al Qaeda and 'foreign terrorists'," he writes. "By removing the stigma of terrorism from the Taliban, you can pursue meaningful negotiations with them. Mohammad Omar has never enjoyed the full support of Pashtuns. He is a lowly figure in tribal terms, and he is blamed by many of them for the calamity that has befallen Afghanistan. Reaching out to tribal leaders is what will move negotiations."

Those are big questions about Afghanistan, but are they the same questions as those now being asked about Pakistan? Or is it time to start looking at the two countries separately again, albeit within a broad regional context that acknowledges the very complex links between different Islamist militant groups?

The "AfPak" label has never been popular in the region itself. Is it time to ditch it?

(Reuters file photos: Nuristan in Afghanistan; U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and Pakistani soldiers in the border areas)

It is both fascinating and horrifying to overhear a bad argument between two old friends. The drama is compelling but you shudder at the pain of each wounding criticism.

I doubt Kai Eide, the U.N.’s top man in Afghanistan, will be holidaying again with his former deputy, Peter Galbraith, after a lacerating row between them over electoral fraud. Once the best of friends, the two have fallen out spectacularly over what should have been done to prevent the ballot stuffing, vote rigging and intrigue that Western powers now publicly admit badly marred the August 20 poll in Afghanistan. Were the stakes not so high, the fight could be brushed off as the consequence of clashing egos and the vagaries of human nature. But the dispute has cast doubt on whether any outcome of the vote can be considered legitimate. A second round may still happen, depending on a recount of suspect votes likely to conclude in a few days. On current trends President Hamid Karzai will emerge the winner, but will look like spoiled goods in the eyes of many in the Obama administration. Obama needs a credible political partner in Kabul to help him sell to Americans the cost in blood and treasure of whatever approach he eventually decides to take on continuing the counter-insurgency fight in Afghanistan.

Galbraith had been making the public running in the argument, charging that his efforts to prevent fraud were blocked and that he was muzzled by Eide, a veteran Norwegian diplomat. When he refused to keep quiet, says Galbraith, he was sacked. Eide’s actions or inactions have helped give the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting Western forces, Galbraith has told anyone who would listen, including the op-ed pages of major American newspapers.

When Eide finally bit back in public he lined up a silent chorus of Western ambassadors to sit on a podium beside him in Kabul to demonstrate the solid support of ‘the international community.’ (The British, French and U.S. ambassadors seated beside Eide did not take questions, despite one being tossed deliberately at Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. envoy). The mild-mannered Norwegian roused himself into indignant righteousness and, without ever mentioning Galbraith by name, fought back against the charges of having winked at massive fraud by agents of Karzai and castigated his former deputy for discourteously breaching confidences.

From my chair in the room it seemed Eide was most hurt by what he said was Galbraith’s use against him of remarks made while the former US diplomat was a guest in his house for over two months. “My view is that private discussions around the dinner table should remain private.”

The allegations “have been an attack on my integrity,” said Eide. “It’s not dignifed, not fair and not true,” he said, adding in a resigned finale, “but that’s the way it is.”

While watching the Eide/Galbraith friendship dissolve in such a public train wreck I wondered how Afghans were reacting to the squabble. I’m back in Kabul after a year’s absence. The distance, alienation and distrust between Afghans and their foreign helpmates that I saw last October, and which the Taliban promotes, sustains and thrives upon, has not much eased and will not have been helped by this undignified row.

Afghanistan has wasted little time in accusing Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency of being behind a bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on Thursday.

Asked by PBS news channel whether Kabul blamed Pakistan for the bombing, Afghan ambassador to the United States Said Jawad said: "Yes, we do. We are pointing the finger at the Pakistan intelligence agency, based on the evidence on the ground and similar attacks taking place in Afghanistan."

But what has been more striking is how careful India has been not to assign blame too quickly.  Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, the country's top diplomat, visited Kabul on Friday but said it was too early to say who was responsible for the bombing.

"I think the investigation should be completed," she said when asked if India thought Pakistan was behind the attack. "Whoever is responsible for this attack is against peace, is against democracy, is against people of Afghanistan and against the people of India."

India has in the past accused the ISI of being behind attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan. An attack on the same Kabul embassy last year killed 58 people. And as discussed regularly on this blog, rivalry between Indian and Pakistan over Afghanistan complicates U.S. efforts to stabilise the country no matter how many extra troops it sends.

For a sense of deja vu, see this post from last August on India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan, this post on the United States often conflicted approach in its dealings with the ISI, and this post from December asking whether it still made sense for President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan after last year's attack on Mumbai torpedoed hopes of a regional settlement.

So what is to be expected as a result of this latest bombing on the Indian embassy in Kabul?  Will it automatically lead to a fresh increase in tensions between India and Pakistan, or at the very least stall tentative attempts to repair relations soured by the Mumbai attack?

The answer to that is not as obvious as it might seem.

Pakistan's civilian government, which says its wants to hold peace talks with India, is already embroiled in an awkward stand-off with the Pakistan Army over provisions in the U.S. Kerry-Lugar aid bill which appear to curb the power of the military. So India might judge that now is not the right moment to raise the temperature.

Complicating the picture further is increasing violence within Pakistan itself - as highlighted by Saturday's attack by suspected Taliban militants on the Pakistan Army's headquarters in Rawalpindi, a day after 49 people were killed by a suicide car-bomber in the city of Peshawar. Do also read this chilling BBC account about the growth of militancy in south Punjab, in the heartland of Pakistan.

Add to that uncertainty about Obama's yet-to-be-completed review of strategy in Afghanistan, along with reports that the insurgency there is both growing and becoming increasingly independent of leaders in Pakistan, and you get one of the more fluid and volatile mixes in the history of relations between India and Pakistan.

All that makes it impossible to predict with any certainty the impact of the Kabul embassy bombing on relations between the two countries. One to watch closely in the days and weeks ahead.

(Photos: Site of bomb blast in Kabul; Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao; soldiers take position in Rawalpindi)

An Afghan contractor stitches name badges for German armed forces Bundeswehr and NATO allied forces at his shop at Camp Marmal, in Mazar-e-Sharif, northern Afghanistan April 15, 2009. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

Jean MacKenzie covers Afghanistan for GlobalPost. She is program director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan, which she’s held for four years. This article originally appeared in GlobalPost.
KABUL — It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

At a staff meeting in 2006, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who was then commander of Combined Forces Afghanistan, took a sip of bottled water.

Then he looked at the label of one of the Western companies that were being paid millions of dollars a year to ship bottled water by the container load into Afghanistan.

And Eikenberry, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said, “There must be a way of producing bottled water in Afghanistan.”

Thus was born the concept of Afghan First, a policy of preferential treatment for Afghan-owned companies that steers military aid into the hands of Afghan vendors.

All local procurement from fuel delivery for the Afghan army to the production of winter socks for the Afghan police — everything short of weapons and ammunition — now comes from a variety of local contractors, who are being paid about $800 million per year from the U.S. military. The largesse comes out of the total $1.1 billion budget for local purchases that falls under the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, CSTC-A for short. It is the lead U.S. agency responsible for developing the Afghan army and police.

“We are building this country,” said Sgt. Edward Gyokeres, chief of the public affairs office at CSTC-A, explaining that the program is intended to use the American and coalition aid money in a way that helps construct a national economy in Afghanistan.

But, paradoxically, this well-intentioned policy may also benefit the insurgency, according to those inside the system, who contend that a significant portion of that money going to Afghan vendors trickles down into the hands of the very enemy the U.S. is battling in Afghanistan — the Taliban.

Precise numbers are impossible to obtain in the lawless fringes of rural Afghanistan where there is very little accounting for this money, but those knowledgeable about the process estimate that at least 10 percent, or about $80 million, has in the last year gone to the diverse groupings of Afghan insurgents whom the U.S. military has come to call the Taliban.

Some contractors say as much as 20 percent of the contracts go to paying off the insurgency, which would put the number closer to $160 million a year.

U.S. and Afghan officials tracking where the Taliban gets its funding estimate that the Taliban’s annual take of the poppy crop is about $100 million.

More on Afghanistan:
Life, death and the Taliban: Blowback
Life, death and the Taliban: War of ideas
Life, death and the Taliban: Counterinsurgency
Life, death and the Taliban: Funding the Taliban

Over the last month, GlobalPost conducted a series of interviews with contractors, military personnel and others who work inside the system and confirmed that a flow of money goes from these local Afghan contractors to the Taliban for payoffs and protection in the widening areas of the country that are Taliban controlled.

In fact, GlobalPost found almost no one inside the military procurement and aid community who expressed surprise at the phenomenon, but very few who were willing to discuss the process on the record out of fear of losing their lucrative contracts, their jobs, or their lives.

“There is no line item for bribes,” said CSTC-A’s Sgt. Gyokeres. “That’s not to say it doesn’t happen.”

Procurement officers working for two different companies with large CSTC-A contracts shared their stories and three military officers commented on the procurement process. The head of the non-governmental organization that matches contractors to funders also weighed in, as did numerous ordinary Afghans and foreigners more indirectly associated with the process.

They describe a system in which huge contracts in the tens of millions of dollars are being pushed through in a chaotic and violent environment with too few project managers and accountants. This is happening as the U.S. and coalition partners try to balance the desperate development needs of the country against the knowledge that some of those funds are ending up in the hands of the Taliban.

All agreed: Payoffs to insurgent groups do occur, are almost impossible to track and will be extremely difficult to stop. As with U.S. assistance funds, a percentage of which find their way to Taliban coffers, military procurement money is a major source of financing for the resurgent Taliban.

“ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) is aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring,” said Col. Wayne Shanks, chief of public affairs for the U.S. Forces in Afghanistan (USFOR-A).

“While rigorous contract award and oversight processes exist, the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent,” Shanks added.

His candid assessment of the process and the blind spots in it reflect an age-old struggle in counterterrorism: Money often flows through local businesses to the insurgency. It was a problem that was faced by the British Empire here in the 19th century and later by the Soviet Union when it invaded Afghanistan. The United States encountered the phenomenon in Vietnam and more recently in Somalia, according to aid workers who have been negotiating this terrain for decades.

Paul O’Brien is the director of the aid effectiveness team at Oxfam who has spent many years in Afghanistan. He has deep inside knowledge of the difficulties that aid agencies and the military face in providing assistance in a war zone. He said that some of the funding inevitably ends up in the wrong hands. But he pointed out that imposing overly stringent accounting methods would jeopardize the overall effort and diminish the greater good of helping the Afghan people.

“If we go in there and the first thing we say is, okay, we need to write down your names for accounting purposes and for political purposes to be sure you are not with the insurgency, it is much harder to accomplish the larger goal,” O’Brien explained.

As GlobalPost first reported in its special report “Life, Death and the Taliban,” the insurgents are reaping rich dividends from local contractors who are paid through U.S. and coalition development funding. The story prompted a probe by the USAID inspector general’s office which is now underway.

Large contracts awarded to American firms often have accounting procedures in place, but most U.S. companies engage a variety of Afghan subcontractors to carry out the work. This is where things begin to fall apart for both military and NGOs, or non-governmental organizations that provide development assistance.

“Everything was done in cash,” said one contractor who worked for an Afghan firm with a wide range of CSTC-A contracts. “There is no way of tracking where the money is going. There are no controls on payments. The military does not follow up or check on [Afghan] companies the way they can U.S. vendors.”

This is the rule, rather than the exception, where Afghan companies are concerned, according to those closest to the process. As a result, they say, money can be easily diverted.

“Of course we pay off the Taliban,” said one procurement director for an Afghan company that imports fuel for the military. “What is the alternative?”

There are few viable options for those who work in the widening area of Afghanistan that is under Taliban control. Those who do not pay up-front end up bearing even greater costs in cash or blood.

Contractors often tell the story of one transportation company that refused to pay: It lost 800 trucks before it bowed to the inevitable.

The amounts involved are far from negligible. According to the procurement director, who spoke on condition of anonymity, when fuel comes into the country from Central Asia it costs approximately $1 per liter.

By the time it reaches a military base in Kandahar or Tirin Kot, in the volatile, dangerous, Taliban-controlled south, the price has gone up to $1.60 — billed, of course, to the U.S. military. A modest portion — between 10 and 20 cents — goes to the company as profit. The remaining 40 to 50 cents, or more than 25 percent of the total, goes for “security” — which means handouts to the Taliban or other local insurgents to allow the shipment through.

This money is baked directly into the price of the fuel – legitimate security costs, to private firms that accompany the shipments or guard the fuel storage areas, would be a separate line item in a firm’s budget.

It adds up. According to Mike Capstick, head of Peace Dividend Trust, an organization that matches Afghan companies to international donors, the value of military contracts given to Afghan companies last year alone was $1.1 billion.

If, as insiders say, between 10 and 20 percent is being siphoned off to the Taliban, then CSTC-A funding from the U.S. military would rival the narcotics industry as a source of revenue for the insurgency.

“I think it is important to note that the ISAF and our international partners are taking a broad-based approach to identify and close vulnerabilities that criminals, including the Taliban, use to raise, store and move funds,” said Col. Shanks with USFOR-A.

“We work closely with our Afghan partners to take action against specific people involved in financing of the Taliban, and to build Afghan capacity in strategic areas, like internal audits, to better track budget and procurement flows, as well as to improve overall security conditions with the help of the Afghan National Security Forces,” he added.

Shanks pointed to a series of recent military operations aimed at capturing or eliminating insurgents and their supporters.

Attempts are also being made to track and control the “hawala” system, a traditional financial structure in this part of the world that does not conform easily to regulation.

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars are moved through hawala every day. The procedure is simple, and virtually untraceable. The customer brings his money, in cash, to a hawala trader at a central market. The broker takes a percentage, then makes a phone call to a partner in London, Cairo, New York or Sydney, who dispenses the requisite amount in cash to a designated recipient.

In Kabul, the government has distributed forms to hawala traders, and is requiring that they fill them out for every transaction. This also means that the hawala trader would have to pay taxes on all his profits.

“Of course we do not record everything,” snorted one hawala broker. “We record a percentage — usually for those businesses that are all legitimate and above board. We do not register the rest.”

The major customers for hawala, according to the broker, are those dealing in drug money and those with major international contracts.

Cracking an internal Afghan system from the outside is no easy task.

“Afghans know how to get things done here,” said Capstick, from Peace Dividend Trust. “They can seal a deal with a handshake.”

But the Afghan way is all too often mired in corruption and nepotism, traits that have made the country the fifth most corrupt nation in the world, according to Transparency International’s most recent annual index. In a country where the rule of law is more a distant dream than a present reality, giving the Taliban a cut of the funding is not seen as treason — it is merely expedient.

“We delivered fuel to all the provinces, and the only way of accomplishing that was by greasing the Taliban,” said the contractor from the Afghan firm.

Between 10 and 20 percent of the proceeds were paid out to ensure security, he added. The overall contract amounts were staggering.

“I went to Camp Eggers to collect unpaid invoices,” he said, referring to the U.S. military base in the center of Kabul that houses CSTC-A. “For three weeks we were owed $16 million.”

At that rate, the firm would be making upward of $250 million per year — with a healthy cut going to insurgent groups.

The U.S. military is trying its best to build in checks and balances to keep the process honest.

“All ISAF agencies check potential contractors and organizations to ensure that money is not going directly into the hands of known terrorists,” said Shanks.

But none of the procedures in place can hope to catch or counter the built-in payments to the Taliban.

According to Lt. Col. Mitchell S. Appley, commander of the Kabul Regional Contracting Center, the military keeps a list of close to 4,000 Afghan vendors.

“The policy, basically, is if there is an Afghan vendor available, we should give them preference,” he said. “New rules and regulations allow us to restrict competition to Afghan only.”

The contracting system is long and complex, with multiple layers of bureaucracy designed to ensure transparency.

First a potential vendor is vetted by Peace Dividend Trust, which checks the organization’s registration, does a site visit to make sure that it is a legitimate company, and helps its Afghan officials to negotiate their way through the military procurement system.

“Corruption is a possibility,” said Sgt. Gyokeres. “But our job is to administer the contracts fairly and objectively.”

For those working inside the system, this desire to remain above the fray amounts to a willful refusal to see what is going on.

“They say ‘just get it done,’” said the procurement director. “They do not seem to want to know too many of the details.”

A former international military officer explained why CSTC-A may be feeling a bit overwhelmed.

“Someone from above is pushing on the soft spot in their forehead and telling them to get the contracts out,” he said, speaking privately. “There is a lot of pressure on the military procurement system.”

The contractor definitely agrees.

“That is the way things happen,” he said. “It is not easy to start with nothing and then create a functioning infrastructure; some latitude is required. But this ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy has evolved to such an extent that Taliban funding is fully baked into the system. It stands to reason that the insurgency can now forecast revenue and accurately budget for combat resources based on lucrative contracts from the U.S. military, which were intended to rebuild their war-torn country.”

(GlobalPost’s C.M. Sennott contributed to this story.)