Help Pakistan rein in the ISI
By David Rohde The opinions expressed are his own.
Admiral Mike Mullen’s blunt declaration on Thursday that a Taliban faction known as the Haqqani network acts as a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency is a welcome shift in U.S. policy. After a decade of privately cajoling the Pakistani military to stop its disastrous policy of sheltering the Afghan Taliban, the United States is publicly airing the truth.
Pakistan’s top military spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), supported the Haqqanis as they carried out an attack on the American embassy last week, Mullen said during Congressional testimony. Last year, they arrested a Taliban leader who engaged in peace talks without their permission, according to American officials. And many Afghans suspect ISI involvement in the assassination this week of the head of Afghan peace talks that did not involve Pakistan.
The airing of the ISI’s links to the Haqqanis is long overdue. To me, the ISI is a cancer on Pakistan. It is vital, though, that American officials punish the Pakistani military–not all Pakistanis–for the ISI’s actions.
Dominated by hard-line ultra-nationalists obsessed with defeating archrival India, the ISI has killed Pakistani journalists who openly criticize it, harassed human rights activists and undermined efforts to establish democracy. A shadow government unaccountable to the country’s weak civilian government, the ISI is widely feared by Pakistanis.
The agency is dominated by military officers wedded to a paranoid, antiquated and dangerous mindset the C.I.A. helped foment during the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad, according to American and Pakistani officials. More ultranationalists than jihadists, ISI officers believe they are the true guardians of Pakistan. To them, the U. S. is an untrustworthy and dissolute nation that is in rapid decline. India is Pakistan’s primary threat. And militants are proxies that can be controlled.
Instead of blaming all Pakistanis for the action of the ISI, the United States must help Pakistan reform an out-of-step, out-of-control agency. Military aid to Pakistan should be halted until the ISI stops sheltering the Afghan Taliban. At the same time, civilian aid to Pakistan should be continued and even increased.
Dirty money and the war in Afghanistan
In a long report on the war in Afghanistan for the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations last summer, one sentence stood out: “If we don’t get a handle on the money, we will lose this war to corruption.”
The money in this context meant the funds, from multiple illicit sources, that finance the Taliban who are fighting the United States and its allies in a war that is now in its ninth year. Dirty money is greasing corruption on a scale so monumental that Afghanistan ranks 179 (out of 180) on the latest index compiled by Transparency International, a watchdog group based in Berlin.
Part of the reason for the country’s dismal standing: for much of the war the U.S. military ignored the booming drug trade (Afghanistan accounts for around 90 percent of the world’s opium, the raw material for heroin) and the drug money flowing to the insurgents, estimated at up to $400 million a year. Add kickbacks contractors pay directly to the Taliban to avoid having their projects blown up or their workers kidnapped, add money diverted from development funds and soon you talk about serious money.
“There is a realization now that the best way to stop the conflict is to cut the flow of money,” Gary Haff, the chief financial investigator with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told a conference of anti-money laundering experts in Hollywood, Florida, this week. “We need to identify and disrupt the financial infrastructure that supports the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
That falls under the heading of better late than never and is easier said than done. An important new weapon in the assault on the financial infrastructure was only deployed last summer, initially with a skeleton staff. It is now growing rapidly and by the end of the year, according to Haff, the DEA alone will have 85 agents in the new unit, the Afghan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC), working alongside financial specialists from the Departments of Defense, Treasury and Justice.
That is a big step forward from the days, earlier in the war, when planes were loaded with bales of opium at the Kabul airport in full view of U.S. troops manning the perimeter. It is also a long way from the days when military commanders argued that neither going after the drug lords nor trying to deny financing to the enemy was part of their brief.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?
Is the US army there to fight the afghans or to control their finances and weaponry. Or the new slogan win the mind and hearts of the people there?
Just be brave and fight them, others before you have fought them and did not care about diversios.
If one is worried about the grug trade, just get hold of all the US citizens on drugs and supply them with the mexican and colombian drugs openly or sent all the drug addicts to rehablitation centres in the US. the afghan drug dealers would be soon out of business, and the farmers would restart growing fruit orchards.
Rex Minor
from Afghan Journal:
Afghanistan: the Gods of war
[CROSSPOST blog: 27 post: 4308] Original Post Text: In openDemocracy, Paul Rogers writes that one of the great mistakes of the media is that it tends to assume the only actors in the campaign against Islamist militants are governments, with al Qaeda and the Taliban merely passive players.
"Beyond the details of what the Taliban and its allies decide, it is important to note that most analysis of Barack Obama’s strategy published in the western media is severely constrained by its selective perspective. There is a pervasive assumption - even now, after eight years of war - that the insurgents are mere “recipients” of external policy changes: reactive but not themselves proactive," he writes.
"This is nonsense - and dangerous nonsense. It would be far wiser to assume that these militias have people who are every bit as intelligent and professional in their thinking and planning as their western counterparts. They have had three months to think through the Obama leadership’s policy-development process; and much of this thinking will be about how the US changes affect their own plans - not how they will respond to the United States. Thus they may have very clear intentions for the next three to five years that are embedded in detailed military planning; and what is now happening on their side will involve adjustment of these plans in the light of the great rethink across the Atlantic."
So how will al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamist groups respond?
As discussed before in openDemocracy, and highlighted on this blog more than a year ago, the Taliban has been pretty good at studying the lessons of history, including taking inspiration from the Vietnamese war commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who successfully employed guerrilla tactics against the French before crushing them in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
It is reasonable to assume they have also studied the spillover of the U.S. war in Vietnam into Cambodia where the United States, reluctant to send in its ground troops, resorted to special ops and bombing campaigns to choke off the Vietcong's supply routes - rather as Pakistan now fears the Afghan campaign will spill into its territory as Washington tries to eradicate Afghan Taliban leaders and bases there. The ensuing chaos paved the way for the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge.
It would be a step too far to suggest that the Afghan Taliban and their allies are set on taking over Pakistan. As it is, there is still a fierce debate on how far they are primarily Afghan nationalists who would settle for a return to power in Afghanistan and how far they have bought into al Qaeda's global Islamist agenda.
Anon which is more dangerous, a religious zealot or an empire seeking material gain?
How to finance the war in Afghanistan?
– This opinion piece was written by C.M. Sennot for GlobalPost. The views expressed are his own. It was originally published here on GlobalPost. –
The last time America had to borrow money to finance a war was during the Revolution and a cash-strapped Continental Congress took loans from France to fund a surge against the British.
That worked out pretty well.
But it’s hard to feel the spirit of 1776 in President Obama’s journey to China. He went as a representative of a borrowing nation to its primary lender amid a call for yet another costly military surge in the Long War that is escalating in Afghanistan even if it is hopefully winding down in Iraq.
As the president completes his journey to Asia, he returns to Washington to face what is the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency, a decision that this administration has not yet fully thought through.
That is whether to heed the counsel of his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and call for a surge of 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan.
from Afghan Journal:
Growing beards to tame the Afghan insurgency
If you were on the U.S-led coalition base in Bagram in Afghanistan soon after the 2001 invasion, you couldn't help noticing soldiers with long, Taliban-style beards and dressed in light brown shalwar kamaeez down to the sandals.
They kept to themselves. They weren't the friendly sort and before long you figured out these were the Special Forces who had fought along side the Northern Alliance in small teams to overthrow the Taliban and were then hunting its remnants and members of al Qaeda. The men grew beards to blend in during difficult and isolated missions in the Afghan countryside.
Close up, on the base some people thought looked like a little bit of America with its mountains of food, gym, and the easy banter of men and women soldiers, the Western men with the flowing beards stood out.
Eight years on, the Special Forces ops are still trying to master the disguise. But the men are still no closer to ordinary Afghans. In fact, the locals have grown to be especially wary of the Special Forces as this article on the Foreign Policy website says. The beards apparently only serve to allow ordinary people to distinguish them from regular U.S. and allied military units.
In Kandahar province's Zhari district, elders refer to the "bearded Americans," who they say behave very badly, and the "shaven Americans," who aren't so bad, the article says. Likewise, in Uruzgan province, locals have complained about "bearded Americans" using foul language and manhandling respected community elders and government officials.
Of course not all the members of the Special Forces go around with beards and not all the regular troops are clean shaven. And to paint them as Rambo-types would be equally inaccurate, most of them are probably unassuming men, chosen as much for their mental as their physical aptitude.
If you guys are so clever, perhaps one of you could explain how come the Pushtoons have never been defeated by the invaders. I have a theory but I a’nt going to tell you the secret. Just a small tip, the Pushtoons do not fight a guerrilla war, and do not confuse yourself with the Jehadis who are volunteers from the foreign countries!
from The Great Debate UK:
Brown must create Afghanistan war cabinet
- Col. Richard Kemp is a former commander of British Forces in Afghanistan and the author of Attack State Red, an account of British military operations in Afghanistan published by Penguin. The opinions expressed are his own. -
Disillusionment with the inability of the Kabul administration to govern fairly or to significantly reduce violence played a role in the reportedly low turnout at the polls in Helmand.
It is critical that this changes if we are to avoid another Vietnam. The South Vietnamese Army, well trained and equipped, lost heart once the U.S. withdrew, collapsing at the first push, partly because their corrupt and ineffective administration was not worth fighting for.
That an election was held at all in Afghanistan’s most violent province is an achievement. But despite a major operation to drive out the Taliban, the insurgents deterred large numbers of voters. This illustrates just how steep a mountain NATO has to climb. But it does not mean we cannot prevail against them in Helmand.
As President Obama says: "This isn’t a war of choice; it’s a war of necessity." Home grown British terrorists have only demonstrated an ability to kill our people when they have attended serious training and had face-to-face direction from war-hardened jihadists.
The Al Qaida leadership and their camps were driven into Pakistan in 2001. U.S. pursuit across the border using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes has been remarkably effective, resulting directly in the recent reduction of the UK terrorist threat level.
Al Qaida is not just a “global franchise” but also a solid organization that needs places to meet, to plan and to train terrorists. It cannot all be done on the internet. Substantially unable to function now in Pakistan, the leadership is actively seeking a new base – perhaps in Yemen, Somalia or North Africa. In any of these they would be much more exposed. Their real desire is to return to Afghanistan. NATO forces are preventing that.
Hopefully Mr Brown has the energy and ability to make such decisions. He does a very good impersonation of the “invisible man” and seems to leave Peter Mandleson to do all the talking. It’d be nice to see him taking some kind of leadership role not just in regard to the Afghan war (along with other NATO “leaders”), but the economy as well. The way things seem to be going there won’t be much need for the British born terrorists to destroy anything in the UK, it’ll slowly shrivel up and die all by itself and the winners will be India, China and the other Asian nations.
Obama and the Afghan narco-state
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
To understand why the war in Afghanistan, now in its eighth year, is not going well for the United States and its NATO allies, take a look at two statistics.
One is Afghanistan’s ranking on an international index measuring corruption: 176 out of 180 countries. (Somalia is 180th). The other is Afghanistan’s position as the world’s Number 1 producer of illicit opium, the raw material for heroin.
The two statistics are inextricably linked and, a year ago, prompted Richard Holbrooke, the man President Barack Obama has just picked as special envoy for Afghanistan, to write: “Breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential or all else will fail.”
Holbrooke, who was not in government service at the time, took particular issue with the counter-narcotics strategy the Bush administration pursued in Afghanistan.
“The … program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may be the single most ineffective policy in the history of American foreign policy,” he wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “It’s not just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taliban and al Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan.”
Exactly what the Obama administration intends to do about that, and how it might break the narco-state, has yet to be articulated. Sending more troops to fight a growing insurgency does not necessarily translate into progress towards dismantling the “narco-state,” eliminating corruption or cutting down on the opium production whose proceeds help finance the Taliban.
Bernd, we have been waging a worldwide war on drugs for decades now and it has never worked. I feel that the first and best defense against the worldwide illegal drug trade is for Americans to stop buying illegal drugs. Maybe Mr. Obama can use his magic to convince the American people to stop using. Sadly I don’t see such a thing happening anytime soon. The US government buying the opium crop would surly change the dynamics of the opium market. The purchase would take the existing supplies off the illegal market on the one hand, but the opium producers will have another major purchaser pushing up the price of their product. The higher price will result in more opium production in new areas of the world. I see such a dynamic pushing the cost from $2 billion to $10 billion or more and still not reduce the funding for the Taliban.
I can see the current recession doing more to reduce the demand for opium then any action governments can take.
Obama must redefine success in Afghanistan
– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
Barack Obama says he will make Afghanistan the central front in his fight against terrorism but the incoming U.S. president will have to scale back the war aims he inherits from George W. Bush and redefine success.
Bush ordered the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 to oust a Taliban government that was harboring al Qaeda militants blamed for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
His declared goals were to defeat the Taliban, create a stable democracy and promote economic development, but he turned his attention quickly to Iraq before the task was done.
Since 2005, a revived Taliban insurgency has made growing inroads against understaffed U.S., NATO and Afghan forces, while President Hamid Karzai’s ineffective government has been mired in corruption and a booming illegal drugs trade.
The most Obama can hope to achieve in a mountainous country that wore down British and Soviet invaders is probably an ethnic power-sharing pact, including tribes that now help the Taliban, in hopes of keeping al Qaeda at bay once Western forces leave.
That is far from assured and would require cooperation from a weak Pakistani government transfixed by tension with India.
This may be a case of winning the war, but losing the peace. Vietnam was similar. A growing insurgency, a war-weary American public.
Step 1: We need a massive surge of soldiers, like in Iraq. We need to beat down the insurgency again, to put them on the defensive.
Step 2: Pakistan needs to get its mess in order and establish control of its own borders. Support for the Taliban is coming from Pakistan’s west, cutting into NATO supply routes.
Step 3: The USA needs to grant further assistance to Pakistan, to assist in their domestic insurgency problems.
Step 4: Afghanistan needs to build up an army, trained and capable of taking on the insurgents. Encourage tribal militias, who can defend their homes from Taliban threats.
Step 5: Stamp out the corruption. Get the Afghani government to pass laws against corruption. Burn the poppy fields. Establish farms for food, not heroin. Build mosques and roads. Give the citizens a reason to support their country. Encourage tribal councils to take control of their regions, and make sure they form part of the government.
Step 6: Once the previous steps are complete, the time is right to start making overtures to the Taliban government for a peace agreement.
The blame game continues here as well as everywhere else that such forums exist! I think Obama would do well to start with a clean slate, and India and Pakistan too actually make efforts to solve the vexing problem muddled now beyond recognition. The fact exists that Kashmir has been alienated by India now, but rather than mastering and winning the blame game, the participants in this forum would do well to understand each other’s points of view.
By the way, I am an Indian living in India, and the tortures that someone was talking about in the earlier posts do exist in some places, but it would be wrong to say that there is no democracy. But we Indians are notoriously slow in making decisions in public life..hence often culprits go unpunished.
Haqqani has been and is CIA operator so Mr.David should ask what if CIA did all this. Fabricating evidence is so easy when you plan the event yourself, who knows who is talking to whom and who knows when and where it is recorded. There is no independent evidence of any event, it is all about what you want to hear.
ISI supported CIA covertly so many times and handed over Talibans and Al-Qaida in thousands so why not Haqqani?
In retrorespect do you remember Raymond Davis, where is this sharp shooter “Diplomat” as declared by Mr.Obama in his public speech. Have you tried him in USA as promised by Senator Kerry, after killing two innocents in Lahore. Mr. Raymond Davis(what ever his real name may be) did not even appeared in any court of Law in USA so are the Americans operatives allowed to freely kill some one in other part of World and return home safely with the help of American Consulate and be free?
Pakistanis are very lucky that Raymond Davis was caught and pubic pressure resulted in media led investigation about CIA contractors roaming in Pakistani cities. ISI helped his legal escape but more pleasant results emerged that suicide Bombings have almost stopped in Pakistani Cities after legal eviction of Raymond Davis and similar gang of contractors hired by CIA. Circumstantial evidence and events indicate that these CIA hired security contractors were the culprits behind arranging suicide bombings in Pakistani cities to frustrate the people and to give excuse to Government to keep aligned with CIA. Mr. Raymond Davis event provided the general public deep insight and forced Govt to (unwillingly) evict contractors like him which saved many lives. Do you know ISI role, they provided the lawyer and money to let Mr. Raymond Davis out !!!