Peter Graff

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.

President Barack Obama, who is still considering whether to send tens of thousands of extra troops to join the 68,000 Americans and 40,000 NATO allies in Afghanistan, has a hard sell to his own Democratic party. If the inauguration means it is now time to be nice to Karzai, nobody told Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives. She let Karzai have it with both barrels.

“The president of Afghanistan has proven to be an unworthy partner,” she told NPR’s Morning Edition. “How can we ask the American people to pay a big price in lives and limbs and also in dollars if we don’t have a connection to reliable partner?”

[Above: Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai inspects the guard of honour on his arrival at the presidential palace for his inauguration in Kabul November 19, 2009. REUTERS/Jerry Lampen]

That sure was fast.

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told American TV audiences that Afghan President Hamid Karzai needed to take steps to fight graft, including setting up a new anti-corruption task force, if he wants to keep U.S. support. Less than 24 hours later, there was Karzai’s interior minister at a luxury hotel in Kabul -- flanked by the U.S. and British ambassadors -- announcing exactly that. A new major crimes police task force, anti-corruption prosecution unit and special court will be set up, at least the third time that Afghan authorities and their foreign backers have launched special units to tackle corruption.

There are just a couple of days left before Karzai is inaugurated for a new term as president. Perhaps a few more days after that, U.S. President Barack Obama will announce whether he is sending tens of thousands of additional troops to join the 68,000 Americans and 40,000 NATO-led allies fighting there.

A fraud-tainted election has wrecked Karzai’s reputation in the Western countries whose troops defend him. Support for the eight-year-old war has plummeted over the past few months, even as the death tolls have reached their highest levels yet. For better or worse, Karzai’s Western backers know they are stuck with the veteran leader for another five years, and need to resurrect his reputation fast.

Regardless of how many extra troops Obama sends, the war in Afghanistan is the most important foreign policy issue of his presidency. If he is going to maintain support at home, he needs to show the American people that protecting the Karzai government is a cause worth sending their sons and daughters to die for. That means, after weeks of grumbling about Karzai in public, you should expect to see U.S. officials accentuating the positive in coming days. VIPs who stayed away will be heading to Kabul for the inauguration. Karzai’s new government, expected not to be much different from his old government, will nonetheless be welcomed as an improvement. Hands will be shaken and warm words spoken.

The election was the sort of travesty that can’t be easily swept under a rug. A U.N.-backed probe concluded that nearly a third of votes cast for Karzai were fake. The strong position against vote fraud taken by Peter Galbraith – a former senior U.S. diplomat sacked from his post as deputy head of the U.N. mission in Kabul – showed how deeply divided the Western contingent in Kabul was over the issue. Privately diplomats praise Galbraith for exposing the fraud, but publicly they are struggling to undo the damage to Karzai caused by the debacle.

The ultimate outcome of the election was probably fair. Diplomats say Karzai would probably have won outright in a first round if Taliban threats and rocket attacks had not forced many of his fellow Pashtun voters in the south to stay home on election day in August. He almost certainly would have won in a second round, if his opponent Abdullah Abdullah had not quit six days before it was due to be held.

But the ugly process has yielded only one real winner: the Taliban. An election whose main purpose was to shore up the legitimacy of the Afghan president has instead shredded his reputation and rattled the resolve of his allies. Exactly what the militants hoped for when they sent rockets raining down on voters three months ago.

How can you tell when U.S. forces in Afghanistan are operating alone?

When they call it "the coalition".

That’s not a joke. It's just how things work in Afghanistan, where two separate forces with two separate command structures -- one completely American, the other about half American -- operate side by side under the command of the same U.S. general.

 "When we say 'coalition', basically that means it's just us," a helpful U.S. military spokeswoman explained last month to a reporter who had just arrived in country after being away for a couple of  years. "Otherwise, it's the 'alliance'."

And it's not just words.

"The alliance" and "the coalition" maintain completely separate press offices, each of which is often allowed to give only bits and pieces of detail about the same incident. The result can be a bit confusing.

First, some history.

The "coalition" refers to Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. (or, as they like to say, "U.S.-led") mission ordered by President George W. Bush back in 2001 to catch Osama bin Laden and overthrow the Taliban.

Occasionally over the past eight years it has actually operated as a coalition, with contributions from Britain and other countries.

But these days, it's strictly an American mission, with thousands of U.S. troops engaged in hunting insurgents, training Afghans and providing air support. (Well, maybe not quite strictly American: there could be a handful of British or Australian special forces in there too. But that's a secret.)

"The alliance", meanwhile, refers to NATO, which now leads the International Security Assistance Force, set up by the United Nations to provide a small number of mostly European peacekeepers for the capital after the fall of the Taliban, also back in 2001.

ISAF's role gradually expanded until 2006, when it spread throughout the country, got a lot bigger and began fighting the Taliban, especially in the south and east. ISAF now includes contributions from around 40 nations, but these days the force is about half American and getting more so by the week as thousands of U.S. reinforcements arrive.

Since last year, ISAF and "the coalition" have both been commanded by the same U.S. General, David McKiernan, who is about to be replaced by another, Stanley McChrystal.

Because ISAF -- unlike "the coalition" -- actually IS a coalition, it has stringent rules on what its members let it say. When its troops are involved in an incident, ISAF won’t say what country they come from, or precisely where in Afghanistan the incident took place.

The defence ministry of each country is supposed to reveal that information back home, but that can take hours or even days. And if troops from more than one Western country are involved -- not to mention Afghan soldiers and police -- piecing details together can require the skills of Sherlock Holmes.

Here's an example: a few weeks ago, "the coalition" said one of its soldiers was killed in an incident. NATO said four of its soldiers had died. Neither said where: somewhere in eastern Afghanistan. It took several hours and phone calls throughout Afghanistan and Riga to determine that three of the soldiers were Americans, two were Latvians, and that the incident was the same as one Afghan troops had already reported in Kunar province.

The investigation ended with a conversation that went like something like this:

    Reuters: You've said one American was killed, right?
    U.S. military spokeswoman: That's what we've said, yes.
    Reuters: And four NATO soldiers were also killed, right?
    U.S. military spokeswoman: Yes, that's what ISAF has said.
    Reuters: And two of those NATO soldiers were also American?
    U.S. military spokeswoman: Yes, I can confirm that.
    Reuters: So actually three Americans were killed, yes?
    U.S. military spokeswoman: Yes, that's correct.

 Confused? Join the coalition...

U.S. nuclear weapons in Britain - out with a whimper, not with a bang?

It was once one of the most contentious issues in Europe, inspiring mass demonstrations, "peace camps" and a movement that shaped the politics of a generation. After more than half a century, there are no more U.S. nukes in Britain.

On Thursday, the Federation of American Scientists, a group set up by former Manhattan Project scientists alarmed by the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reported that the United States had removed the last of its nuclear bombs from the Royal Air Force base at Lakenheath in eastern England.

The move had more to do with changing U.S. strategic imperatives and military technology than with a sudden outbreak of global harmony. Dropping nuclear bombs out of airplanes is an old-fashioned way to deliver them in an era of accurate ballistic missiles. Washington now considers its main threat to come from the area south of the former Soviet Union, and is still keeping nuclear bombs in bases in Italy and Turkey and other parts of Europe. Britain has its own nuclear weapons and has decided to replace the submarines that carry them with a more modern fleet.

If the removal of American nukes from Britain really happened, it happened on the sly. A spokewoman for the U.S. forces in Lakenheath said Washington never talks about the
location of its nuclear bombs. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's spokesman had not read reports on the subject and had nothing to say about it, and the Ministry of Defence had no comment.

But the event, if confirmed, marks the end of an era for thousands of British protesters who defined themselves by their opposition to U.S. nukes, camping outside bases like Lakenheath throughout the 1980s.

The head of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the biggest single-issue campaign group in Europe, welcomed the news that the bombs were gone and said it would be good if the government would announce it publicly. She also said the fight would continue against U.S. plans to set up an anti-missile defence, perhaps with base stations at the same location in Lakenheath.

Those who pine for the days of "peace camps" may still get their chance to break out their muddy tents.

Have your say. Twenty years after the Cold War, should the United States still have nuclear weapons in Europe?

 Forget the day off and the good news. We were back in Kabul and it may as well have been Baghdad.
 A suicide bomber had completely hollowed out a bus that was carrying police trainers into a compound. Officials said more than 35 people died.
 I was being jostled by a crowd in front of the Jamuriat hospital in the centre of the Afghan capital, pressed up against an iron fence. Eighteen bodies and ten wounded patients had arrived here. Doctors had run out of room inside and were handling the wounded and the dead at a makeshift triage station in the courtyard. Ambulances were pushing through the crowd.
 Through the bars, I saw a corpse under a sheet, next to a pair of bloody shoes. All I could see of the body was his feet, with cuffs of a police uniform. A male relative was wailing into a mobile phone, being restrained and consoled by friends.
 Sundays bomb was the deadliest such strike in the Afghan capital since the Taliban fell in 2001. The attack played out the greatest fear of Afghans, that the tactics that have caused such mayhem in Iraq would be imported here.
 The Taliban claimed responsibility for a very, very successful suicide attack and announced plans for more. In four smaller suicide attacks over the past two days, they killed at least 14 other people. At the scene of one of those strikes, American troops opened fire and shot one civilian dead.
 I had finished my embed and returned to Kabul on Saturday in a Hercules military cargo plane, a solemn flight accompanied by three coffins draped with Afghan flags containing the bodies of Afghan soldiers killed in the south.
 I had missed my flight back to London, but was initially secretly glad. It would mean two extra days in Kabul. Local resident Masood had offered to host me in the Panjsher valley for a barbecue, and I was looking forward to a relaxing day in that beautiful mountain valley, breathing fresh air and eating roast goat by the river.
 I also wanted to get there to write a "good news" story. Whatever else has happened over the past five years, the Panjsher and neighbouring Salang valleys are areas that have dramatically improved since the fall of the Taliban. The valleys had been cut-off from the capital by an impenetrable frontline during the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, and when I first visited them they were packed with desperately poor refugees, many hungry. Today, Masood explained to me, life in those valleys is much easier, with a newly paved road allowing people to bring goods to market in Kabul and move there for work. I hoped to write a simple, good story, while enjoying my own relaxing day out.
 Sunday morning I was drinking coffee in the Reuters office when I heard of the bombing. Instead of heading out into the countryside, I hit the streets of the capital to report.
 Speeding through the town, rushing to the hospital with our Kabul TV camera crew, I could see the contradictions of contemporary Kabul. We raced through a wealthy street where endless rows of enormous, brightly coloured marble-clad palaces are being built. At a nearby corner, a tiny beggar girl wiped our window with a dirty cloth.
 For now, much of Afghanistan is still at peace, or the closest thing to peace the country has seen since the 1970s. But the war in the south has escalated sharply over the past year. And the Taliban are now bringing the sort of carnage to the city streets that caused the meltdown of Iraq. At the end of our trip, I remain hopeful, just, that improvements will still come faster than the violence worsens. But Ill have to wait until my next trip for that chance to relax in Afghanistans quiet valleys.

 We went out into town today to meet local Afghan journalists attending a training course run by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting a wonderful, serious organisation that supports and trains journalists in war zones around the world. I recommend the blog of its Afghanistan country director, Jean MacKenzie. The IWPR programme in Afghanistan is partly funded by Britain, and James, the spokesman for the British Foreign Office here, warned us with some pride: Ever since we set up these courses for journalists, its made our lives much harder, frankly. We used to just read out our press releases. Now they ask all kinds of difficult questions.
 When we arrived at the classroom, the local reporters were having a discussion about an American majors outburst at a council of elders that I happened to have written about last week in Sangin. As predicted, the journalists did indeed ask me all kinds of difficult questions.
 When I covered the elders council meeting why didnt I talk to more people in the town? Why did I think I knew enough to write about Afghanistan on a short trip with British troops? How do I know that the British arent hiding the truth? They kept at me for about an hour. I did my best. If this is the future of Afghanistans media, Im impressed.

After three days in the Spartan field conditions at the outpost in Sangin, we said goodbye to the soldiers of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Forester Regiment and were flown in a Chinook helicopter to Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of
Helmand Province.

Suddenly we found ourselves inside the heavily fortified diplomatic and military compound in the centre of the city, in the luxury of an air-conditioned dormitory room. The
soldiers shop was having a 20-percent-off sale, so I found a bargain on a set of ipod speakers and switched on some jazz.

Decent showers and a cooked meal. Ah. This compound has come quite a long way in the year since I first visited, when it was still mainly tents. Theres a gym, a volleyball court and high-speed internet in the rooms. Many of the military and
civilian people who work here do get out into the field often, but I wonder if the comfortable compound will inexorably produce the sort of "Emerald City" isolation of the Green Zone in Baghdad.

 After our night in comfort we went out on patrol yesterday with another company of Worcester and Sherwood Foresters, this group tasked with patrolling the provincial capital. I was bundled into the back of an armoured Land Rover, drenched in sweat, nauseous and constantly smashing my helmet into the roof as we bounced off road. The two soldiers slinging machine guns out of the roof hatch were polite to this soft city-slicker civilian when I asked if we could pull over so I could vomit.But it wasnt safe to stop so I had to hang on.

    We visited Mukhtar, a camp of mud huts containing thousands of people displaced from Taliban-controlled areas in the north of the province over the past five years or so. The neighbourhood was desperately poor even by Afghan standards, little more than mud-and-straw huts, including the only functioning school, and the people we met told of their struggles with local landlords for the right to stay on the land where they have settled. Many of the recent arrivals were Hazaras -- linguistically, culturally and ethnically far removed from the Pashtuns of the area. The locals want them off the land so they can reclaim it. We visited a school made of mud brick, a scene which I later worked into a story on dangers still faced by women and girls who want to teach and learn.

 
     The locals, or at least the children, did seem at ease with the British troops, who dismounted from their armoured vehicles, took off their helmets and mixed it up. One non-commissioned officer especially surrounded himself with kids and kept them
giggling and repeating his gestures and noises. A year since they arrived, the British troops do seem to be doing a good job of engaging with the locals in the friendlier parts of town. One wonders if the goodwill is more than skin deep.

 A few days ago I wrote in this blog about how the Helmand
River valley was rendered fertile by an ancient irrigation
system built by the Pashtun tribes in the area. As diplomats
here have pointed out to me, thats only part of the story.

 A look at a map of Lashkar Gah shows the extent to which the
contemporary geography of the entire province is a far more
recent creation. The provincial capital was in fact designed and
built by the Americans in the 1960s, complete with an
American-style grid layout of streets, about 20 kilometres from
the mediaeval commercial centre Gereshk. At the height of the
Cold War, when Washington and Moscow were competing for
influence in Afghanistan, U.S. engineers built one of the
biggest overseas development projects in history, the giant
Kajaki dam at the top of the Sangin valley, and the Helmand
River Valley Project below, which extended the ancient
irrigation system with a vast network of modern canals and
aqueducts.

    Thirty years later, securing the dam and the road leading to
it are now the main objectives of U.S. and British forces in the
area. Theres a lesson about the extent to which massive
aid projects and military interventions, since the British and Russians
first plotted and counterplotted here in the Great Game of the
19th Century, have never yet succeeded in buying the long-term
political influence that planners in foreign capitals intended.

Those words, spoken by Captain Jim Bewley, our British Army media operations chaperone, are the worst you can expect to hear when embedded with forces in the field. This was the third time I have heard such words while out with British troops.

Deaths are part of war, and soldiers are trained to accept them. But for a reporter, they can test your relationship with the men and women around you.

Perceptions matter. Suddenly, some of the people who may have tolerated a journalist as a harmless civilian in their midst are bound to see you as a pest, or worse: a ghoul out to
make a fast buck off a widows tears. (For the record, I get paid a salary, not by the story. I earn just as much if everyone comes home safely.)

In this particular case, the man who was killed in an ambush near our town was not part of our unit. The men around us, rather than preoccupied with mourning a loss, were driven by efforts to hunt down the Taliban fighters responsible.

The British Ministry of Defence, like most Western militaries, becomes very sensitive when someone has been killed. Rules bar embedded reporters from disclosing any details until
family members have been notified: that is to ensure people dont learn about their loved-ones deaths from the newspaper.

In this case, the facts of the incident were relatively straightforward, and I was able to limit myself to publishing official material at the time it was released, without missing
any important part of the story.

Six months ago I was with a British unit when a marine was killed. Eyewitnesses told me they were certain he had been hit by a U.S. air strike, news that was potentially explosive in Britain. I agreed with the British Ministry of Defence that I would delay reporting that fact for 24 hours while they responded. They eventually confirmed that friendly fire was
one of the possibilities that they were investigating.

A word on embeds.

The concept of embedded journalists is a source of much controversy both inside and outside of the profession. I can understand why: saying a reporter is in bed with his sources is about the worst insult you can hurl. At a conference in 2003, I heard one speaker declare that the term embedded journalist was a contradiction in terms.

But although I understand why people are suspicious, I think much of the concern is based on a misunderstanding of what it means to be embedded.

I first heard the term embed in early 2003 to refer to the plans the British and Americans were devising to send reporters with their troops to invade Iraq. It sounded ominous, but the concept was hardly new. The issues that arose from accompanying
fighting men into battle were pretty much the same ones that I first encountered when I went to my first war zone with Chechen separatists in 1994.

I have long since learned that it is possible to work in close quarters with people who fight, and even develop a close personal bond with them, while still questioning the war they are fighting or the way they fight it. They, in turn, often appreciate the view of an outsider.

Of course, we accept reporting restrictions on embedded assignments. The British and Americans both make you sign up to a complicated document drawn up by lawyers. But if the embed is run properly, the purpose of the restrictions is solely to make sure you dont disclose military secrets. No soldiers are going to let a journalist come anywhere near them if they think you are going to reveal to the enemy where they are and what they are planning to do next. Fair enough.

Journalists outside war zones make similar promises all the time. We keep somebodys secrets in return for information - whether it is agreeing to withhold the name of a source or to refrain from publishing market-sensitive economic data until the embargo time when it can be officially released. In war zones, the stakes are higher: the soldiers around you are trying to kill people, and someone is trying to kill them (and possibly trying to kill you too). But the ethical ground rules are exactly the same as in any other situation journalists face every day. Find out as much as you can. Dont pick sides. Dont lie.

You have to stand your ground. Lord knows, I have written stories while on embeds with both American and British forces that have, shall we say, not entirely pleased my hosts. But they have never succeeded in preventing me from writing anything that was true.

Lastly, of course it is important to remember that the viewpoint of soldiers on one side cannot possibly represent an entire conflict. Embedded reporting can be great, but it should never be your only source of news. This should be obvious.

During the invasion of Iraq, for example, Reuters had reporters embedded with British and American troops. We also had reporters in Baghdad working under restrictions imposed by the authorities there, and brave teams operating as unilaterals, on their own on the battlefield in armoured cars, working with no restrictions at all. Finally, we had journalists in Washington, in London and at CentCom headquarters in Qatar. Only when you put all that information together can you begin to get something approaching a full picture of a war.

Here in Afghanistan, we have a fantastic bureau of mostly Afghans with a single foreign correspondent in Kabul. They in turn have a network of Afghan stringers, non-staff journalists scattered throughout the country. Our reporting from a trip like this one alongside NATO troops is hardly the entire picture we produce from Afghanistan, but it is an important part of the story and one we are committed to covering as best we can.

Stuart McDill, a Reuters cameraman embedded alongside Peter and photographer Ahmad Masood, has sent a couple of eyewitness accounts from the field -- 'On patrol in Afghan killing fields' and 'Troops and locals - an Afghan scene'.

Stewart shook me awake around dawn in the small room where they barracked us on the base in Sangin. The squaddies had made fresh porridge, a rare break from rations. It was in the headquarters building across the canal that runs right through the compound. You arent supposed to go more than 20 metres on the base without helmet and body rmour, so I suited up and hurried over.

Bellies full of oatmeal, we were given a briefing by the company commander, Major Jamie Nowell, and his staff, then sent out into the ruined town on a patrol with a young captain and a group of Afghan police. The battles fought here by British paratroops last summer have become legendary, and the first few hundred metres outside the base were lined with ruined buildings blown to smithereens in the months of fighting. But when we turned a corner onto the main road, we saw the largely intact bazaar coming back to life in the few weeks since peace has returned.

In all we marched just a few kilometres over three hours, but it was gruelling work in the hot noonday sun. On our way back, we saw most of the shops shut and the shopkeepers sleeping in the shade: no one works in such heat. Masood bought a dozen cold sodas and we gave some to the soldiers on our patrol.

We arrived back at the base, exhausted and sweaty, and stripped down for a swim in the canal. The water rushes through the base, clear-blue and cool, out of a brick archway. Its safe to bathe in. But one of the soldiers joked that you have to hang on: if you are swept off your feet you will end up in Taliban country in your underwear before you know it!