The widespread problem of official and unofficial corruption in Afghanistan is not a new topic. But it is an ongoing problem that has not been fixed or even reduced according to investigative reports over the past year or so. In my old New World Dictionary, “corruption” is defined in a number of ways. For example, it is defined as “evil or wicked behavior; depravity…bribery or similar dishonest dealings….”
Specifically, in the context of the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan, corruption may be a way to divert money from its intended purpose for personal gain or influence. Or, in violation of a contract, it may involve cost cutting measures that produce shoddy or unfinished projects. It may entail the exploitation of workers, often brought in from other countries. Often it involves bribes or payoffs to government officials or police.
American corporations that receive big contracts from the US government are often at the center of corrupt dealings, subcontracting much of the work to Afghan or other national enterprises, suspected of putting profits over the expected work. The same is true when the Afghan government receives assistance from the US or the UK. Keep some and pass the rest on.
In many cases, the problem of corruption results in poor planning or inadequate vetting of contractors or sub-contractors by the funding source. Political favoritism is a factor. Too often little or none of the contracted work being done is up to even minimal standards. And through the process, local leaders or communities are not given the opportunity to participate.
The results of corruption are to enrich a few, undermine development projects, alienate Afghans from the government and its representatives, and keep too many Afghan citizens and their children, many of them dirt poor, from gaining opportunities that were intended for them – like jobs, a working infrastructure, effective schools, access to health care, housing, and a government that represents their interests and provides them with security in their lives and communities.
To illustrate some of these points, I draw on five articles and organize them chronologically, with the first article reported at an earlier date than the next ones, and so on. The thrust of the articles is that corruption and waste continue to be massive problems in Afghanistan.
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ARTICLE #1: “The report reveals that in 2006-07, more than half of the department’s large projects, in which millions of pounds were invested, were deemed likely to fail.”
Deborah Haynes, Defense Correspondent for RAWA (Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association) provides an of corruption in an article titled “Public millions fail to provide wells, schools and clinics in Afghanistan. [You can see the URL at the end of the article.]
Haynes’ article, reported May 22, 2009, focuses on British funded projects carried out in Afghanistan in 2004-2007 and an assessment of these projects by the Department for International Development.
“Millions of pounds in taxpayers’ money have been wasted on failed reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, according to an internal assessment by the Department for International Development.
“An evaluation by independent consultants criticized the department’s approach to planning, risk management and staffing, and said poor co-ordination with the rest of Whitehall meant that the department was slow to shift strategy as the military effort moved to counter-insurgency.
“The report reveals that in 2006-07, more than half of the department’s large projects, in which millions of pounds were invested, were deemed likely to fail, excluding money put into a fund run by the World Bank. Only a quarter of state building projects were rated successful in 2006, with 4.5 per cent of them rated value for money.
“Among the failed projects singled out in the Country Programme Evaluation is the Afghanistan Stabilisation Fund, designed to ‘establish basic security and good governance in the district and provinces of Afghanistan’. This was begun in 2004 with a £20 million payment to the Afghan Government but ended three years later with “little evidence of tangible benefit’.
“The department’s own review in 2005 warned of ‘potentially catastrophic consequences’ if weaknesses in the programme were not corrected. Beset by poor planning, a lack of transparency and failed delivery, it was abandoned in March 2007. Only 639 people received training. Commentators criticised the “disastrous” project.
“In another programme in Helmand, the department paid for 300 wells to be dug in an area prone to drought, without carrying out a geological survey. Some of the wells have since run dry as the water table retreated. The report finds that the department’s risk assessment ignored the absence of the rule of law and corruption in the region.
“A survey of Afghan opinion in Helmand found local residents complaining about poor construction, a lack of monitoring and unhappiness with the role of interpreters, while the department rated its own projects there a success. It took until late 2007 for the department to recruit a conflict adviser even though British troops started operating in Helmand in 2006.
Staffing levels in Kabul were described as ‘wholly unrealistic’. Until 2006 the development department attempted to run its programmes with only six non-Afghan staff in Kabul.
[….]
“Only one person is overseeing a massive, $404 million Afghan reconstruction contract -- and is thousands of miles away in Maryland, auditors say. The contract's supervising officer in Maryland hired someone else to work in Afghanistan, but that person didn't have much experience and wasn't able to visit many of the actual work sites, the audit said.”
[….]
“Some projects were a success, including a £20 million initiative to give small loans to the poor and an £18 million programme to build and repair roads, schools and clinics. By 2007 the department’s portfolio in Afghanistan contained 58 projects with a value of about £520 million, including £317 million for the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, administered by the World Bank.
[….]
http://www.rawa/org/temp/runews/2009/05/22/public-millions-fail-to-provide-wells-schools-and-clinics-in-afghanistan.html
Read more: http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2009/05/22/public-millions-fail-to-provide-wells-schools-and-clinics-in-afghanistan.html#ixzz1D6OaqfnN
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ARTICLE #2: American taxpayers lose when billions of dollars in development funds from US to Afghanistan wasted
Sara A. Carter, “Commission tracks billions of contracting dollars wasted in Afghanistan, The Washington Examiner, August 23, 2010.
“American taxpayers have picked up the tab for billions of dollars worth of shoddy schools, phantom health care clinics and government buildings abandoned before completion in Afghanistan, according to members of a U.S. team that arrived in Kabul on Monday to document the waste and fraud.
“The Commission on Wartime Contracting will look into charges ranging from massive contracting fraud to abandoned foreign laborers on U.S. military installations that have left American taxpayers ripped off and the people of Afghanistan disappointed by broken promises.
“Christopher Shays, a former Republican congressman from Connecticut who co-chairs the commission, said the allegations warrant a full investigation and that the scams involving foreign workers are presenting security risks on the bases as well as human rights abuses.
"’We are looking into cases of some contractors or outright scam artists who charge people from other countries to fly them to supposed jobs in Dubai but instead dump them with no jobs or documents on airbases in Afghanistan. That's a human-rights abuse that cannot be tolerated,’ said Shays, who heads a four-man team.
“Foreign workers -- many from the Philippines -- paid up to $2,000 dollars to contracting companies for airfare and housing "only to be left alone on the bases without identification and no way home," said one official who asked not to be named.
"’The bigger problem is that we don't know who they are but they are inside our installations without identification or jobs, and this presents a security risk for the troops on base, civilians, as well as the innocent victims of the scams," the official said.
“The commission, which will issue a semi-annual report in December to Congress and a final report next July as the administration begins a troop draw-down from Afghanistan, is investigating a host of other problems.
“Abandoned and substandard school projects, unfinished government buildings and health care facilities without management staffs are among the reported failures being reviewed by the commission.
[….]
“Other projects paid for by American taxpayers that will be examined by the commissioners include military bases, power plants, office buildings, fuel storage, schools and training centers for Afghan security forces. Many times these projects are abandoned before completion or the supplies needed to sustain their operations never arrive.
“Examples are evident throughout Afghanistan. Last October, in the small village of Hutal, American soldiers set out to get school supplies from local contractors in Kandahar. Money was made available, the supplier was contacted and the village elders were promised that the thousands of dollars in educational materials would arrive in three weeks. The supplies never arrived. It is uncertain how much money was lost on the project.
[….]
"Construction contracting in a war zone half a world away involves real challenges on cost, quality, timeliness, suitability and sustainability," commission co-chair Michael Thibault said.
‘The government needs a clearer view on the way these projects are planned, contracted and supervised. We often don't know how many people are working on U.S. bases, whether prime contractors are effectively managing their subcontractors, whether employee vetting and access control are adequate and whether Afghans can sustain projects like the $300 million Kabul power plant after U.S. personnel leave.’”
Sara A. Carter is The Washington Examiner's national security correspondent. She can be reached at scarter@washingtonexaminer.com.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/commission-tracks-billions-contracting-dollars-wasted-afghanistan
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ARTICLE #3 – Billions contracted with US corporations for “development” projects in Afghanistan unaccounted for and open up massive opportunities for corruption.
Iman Hasan, “Afghans point finger at US: Who’s corrupt now?” The Express Tribune with the International Tribune, November 2010.
“Many Afghans, from government officials and parliamentarians to the common man are disgruntled with the US officials relentlessly accusing them of being corrupt – while ignoring their own government’s fraud and misappropriations in the $56 billion development budget approved by the Congress for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Afghans deem US responsible for corrupting their society.
“For Obama’s administration, ‘corruption warnings’ are a new blackmail tool to use against the Karzai government. There has been constant rhetoric to ‘eradicate corruption’ and ‘stop misusing US tax payers’ money,’ without realising that only 20% of the allocated funds are at the disposal of the Afghan government while 80% are utilised by the US Department of State, Defence and USAID. These three departments rely extensively on private contractors for the implementation of various projects, ranging from reconstruction of Afghanistan, eradicating drugs, training of Afghan security forces and officials and providing security to Nato supply convoys.
“Since 2001, the US congress has appropriated nearly $56 billion for the reconstruction funds of Afghanistan, which cannot be tracked down. It has either been wasted, stolen or abused.
Missing records
“There is absolutely no record of the amount utilised from 2001 to 2006 except for the vague documentation of $17.7 billion spent during the financial year 2007 – 2009, which only identifies the 7000 contractors hired to implement the projects – but does not evaluate the projects. Therefore, there is no guarantee if the US tax payers’ money amounting to $56 billion is fairly spent or abused.
“Bush’s government after eight years of engagement in Afghanistan established the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) in 2008 ‘to conduct independent and objective audits, inspections, and investigations on the use of taxpayer dollars and related funds’.
“Even the Office of the Special Inspector General is unable to track down the money spent during 2001 to 2006. It recently released a report on the ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ of $17.7 billion (spent during the financial year 2007 – 2009) of the total reconstruction fund of $56 billion.
“The report is essentially a document holding the US responsible for the corruption in Afghanistan. ‘The large US investment in Afghanistan remains at risk of being wasted or subject to waste, fraud and abuse,’ reads the document.
Who benefits from America’s wars?
“65 per cent of the $17.7 billion has been channelled through the Department of Defence, which hired largely those companies who are essentially part of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). These huge corporations depend mostly or entirely on the Pentagon for their profits and have hugely benefited from the US wars.
[….]
“Some of the largest defense contractors belonging to the Military Industrial Complex hired by the Defence Department, for Afghanistan are DynCorp, Black Water (Xe Services), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Louis Berger and Bearing Pont.
[….]
“Besides the Military Industrial Complex, there is also the intelligence complex which has been playing a greater role in corrupting the Afghan society since 2001, whose billions of dollars of expenditure has never been accounted for.
“The intelligence complex’s profligate distribution of boxes and suitcases of cash amongst the different segments of Afghan society – Afghan media, NGOs and allegedly government officials – has also encouraged other countries. India is one of the countries which has taken a leaf out of the CIA’s book.
[….]
Lack of transparency
“This is still not the complete picture of US corruption and lack of oversight of reconstruction funds – meant for achieving long term goals in Afghanistan. There is no transparency even in the salary support provided to the Afghan government employees and technical advisors since 2002. The US government is unable to determine the amount it has been paying, the identity and the total number of recipients. Since the number and identity of the recipients is not clear the salaries can go to anyone in anyone’s name.
[….]
http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/2955/afghans-point-finger-at-us-whos-corrupt-now
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ARTICLE #4: Another report on the missing billions of US taxpayer development funds for Afghanistan
Michael Tennant, “Afghanistan Reconstruction: Billions Spent, But No One Knows Just How,” New American, Dec. 29, 2010
[….]
“In Iraq, for example, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction found over $5 billion had been wasted on various projects, including hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects such as a $40 million prison, a $5.7 million convention center, and a roughly $100 million wastewater treatment plant. In addition, the special inspector general discovered that the Pentagon could not account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi funds set aside for reconstruction.“To no one’s great surprise, the situation in Afghanistan, site of another undeclared U.S. war, is no better. David Francis of the Fiscal Times reports:
'In its bid to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan’s teeming population, the United States has spent more than $55 billion to rebuild and bolster the war-ravaged country. That money was meant to cover everything from the construction of government buildings and economic development projects to the salaries of U.S. government employees working closely with Afghans.Yet no one can say with any authority or precision how that money was spent and who profited from it. Most of the funds were funneled to a vast array of U.S. and foreign contractors. But according to a recent audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), there is no way of knowing whether the money went for the intended purposes.'
[….]
“The reason for these agencies’ inability to say where taxpayers’ money is going is simply that the government hasn’t demanded any sort of accountability from its recipients. ‘The money,’ Francis writes, ‘flows from Washington to Afghanistan, with little oversight and accountability, and at every step along the way someone else takes a cut.’[….]
From Francis article:
“Another report found that the United States has spent nearly $200 million on Afghan security service buildings that cannot be used. SIGAR also found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) couldn’t account for nearly $18 billion that was paid to some 7,000 U.S. and Afghan contractors for development projects. Afghan contractors often pay kickbacks to local warlords, like Ahmad Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and the so-called “King of Kandahar.” Their actions often undermine the work of the coalition."
[….]
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/foreignpolicy/5695-afghanistan-reconstruction-billions-spent-but-no-one-knows-just-how
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ARTICLE #5: The head watchdog against the massive corruption in Afghanistan resigns because of weakness of enforcement authority.
Jason Ditz, “US Watchdog for Afghan Projects Resigns,” Antiwar.com, Jan 10, 2011
“Special Inspector General Arnold Fields, the Obama Administration’s top watchdog against the massive corruption in Afghanistan, followed up last week’s pledge not to resign with a formal announcement of his resignation.
“Fields has been regularly presenting reports on the corruption surrounding US aid programmes in occupied Afghanistan, and has cautioned that there are virtually no controls in place and that much of the aid is being stolen or wasted as a result.
[….]
http://news.antiwar.com/2011/01/10/us-watchdog-for-afghan-projects-resigns
Showing posts with label reconstruction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reconstruction. Show all posts
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Where do ordinary Afghan citizens fit in the future of the US/NATO occupation
The US/NATO strategy in Afghanistan is based mostly on some mixture of counter-terrorism (killing Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan) and counter-insurgency (forcing insurgents out of targeted areas and winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan residents). Nir Rosen and Marika Theros refer to evidence of the failure of the strategy up to now. (You can access the full article at http://www.commondreans.org/view/2011/01/18-8.) I’ll identify some of their central points with quotes from their article and few statements.
First, Rosen and Marika challenge Obama’s recent cautious but upbeat annual review of purported military progress and improved Afghan security in 2010. Their cogent summary doesn’t support Obama’s views.
“The year 2010 witnessed a significant spike in violence both in the south, with offensive military operations triggering greater Taliban intimidation [2] and assassinations of civilians, and in the north [3] in heretofore ‘stable areas’ where international neglect and government abuse provide fertile ground for insurgent expansion. Real progress has been further complicated by the increasingly poisonous relationship between the Afghan government, the international community, and the Afghan people, aggravated by a potentially catastrophic electoral crisis [4], even more predatory government corruption and brazen war-profiteering [5], and near total disregard for the average Afghan citizen. As American and NATO forces enter their tenth year in Afghanistan, Afghan communities find themselves increasingly caught in a complex system of violence generated by insurgents, criminal gangs, drug lords, corrupt officials, US-allied local strongmen, and aggressive international forces.”
Second, the US military strategy during 2010 resulted in continuing and extensive damage to the Afghan population, property, and environment. They write:
“In Kandahar, the US is bombarding populated areas with smart rocket launchers and guided warheads, razing orchards, destroying homes, and partnering with people like the brutal commander [8] Colonel Abdul Razik and his militia. This increase in offensive operations, night raids, drone attacks, and use of irregular local forces remain precisely the tactics that provoke civilian outrage [9] even as they increase Taliban losses. Even more problematic, the international community never developed a complementary and much-needed political strategy that reinforces Afghan national unity and builds trust between state and society through genuine political reform and reconciliation at all levels of society.”
Third, Rosen and Marika provide evidence on the views of ordinary Afghan cities, focusing on their own experiences and future prospects. The evidence comes from a study sponsored in 2009 by LSE Global Governance at the London School of Economics and the Civil Society Development Center in Afghanistan. Rosen and Marika
“engaged a range of selected Afghan citizens - community, religious, and tribal leaders; NGO and community activists; teachers and educators; and, students and youth leaders – in seven regions to capture their experiences of insecurity and their views on how to secure Afghanistan’s future, including the provinces of Balkh, Baghlan, Herat, Kabul, Kandahar, Khost, and Nangarhar.” They identify three themes from the first rounds of interviews.
“ Firstly, the Taliban movement is a symptom of larger ills, and the continued focus on defeating them obscures the fact that the post-2001 political and economic order the international community helped create is the fundamental driver of instability, violence, and recruitment into the insurgency. Secondly, the current strategy with its near exclusive focus on government and armed actors as partners in the war effort perpetuates a system of personalized politics, power-grabbing and profiteering that fosters insecurity, corrupts Afghan society, and prevents the emergence of alternative political forces…. [while continuing] more as a mutual business enterprise in which belligerents – the political and economic elites, the internationals, and the insurgents – use insecurity as a cover for personal political and economic ambitions. They point to the massive amounts of international aid underwriting a perverse political economy that has created a nexus of financial interests between corrupt government officials, warlords, international contractors, and even the Taliban….”
“Finally… most Afghans want a rational outcome that produces a participatory system of governance rooted in Afghan values and able to provide minimally adequate services of justice, health, and education. Most Afghans do not challenge the existence of the state itself and support a unified Afghanistan…. In assessing the current struggle, Afghans look to progress on questions of justice, representation and allocation of resources rather than to kill-and-capture rates or announcements of new programmes in Kandahar or Helmand that link the populace to the government.”
In short, the situation in Afghanistan remains mired in conflict, corruption, destruction, and extensive human casualties and death. A major part of the problem is that the US and its allies are out-of-touch with or are misreading the views of ordinary Afghan citizens. Rosen and Marika believe that the situation can be ameliorated, though “not all of it can be undone.” Nonetheless, they can imagine policies that would be in the interests of the broad range of Afghan citizens they have interviewed.
First, with respect to the international aid coming into the country, the interviewees say that it must be better targeted, designed, and overseen, as well as making sure “that aid produces tangible results on the ground.”
Second, the international community could use the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to “crack down on corruption.” And, further, the “US Government should seriously consider prosecuting those Afghan-Americans who have participated in corrupt practices.”
Third, “the international community – particularly the US – must do more than pay lip service to a political solution and de-escalate the conflict….This requires more emphasis on issues of governance, justice, and representation; a reconsideration of the exclusive partnerships developed with the pro-government local strongmen; a genuine effort to defend the Afghan population from predatory political and economic elites (and not only insurgents); and, increased checks on impunity and marginalization.”
Unfortunately, there is little in US history that would justify much hope in seeing US foreign and military policies transformed in ways to give humanitarian and democratic values priority over the interests of those in the US who dominate the economic and political systems. It’s not out of the question, though there is no recent precedent. We’ll see. It depends in part on how the following questions are answered. Will we witness the Obama administration and the US Congress reduce the allocation of money and resources to the US military in Afghanistan? Will there be a withdrawal of a large number of troops over the course of the year? Will the US and her allies, along with other concerned nations and the UN, find ways to support the reconstruction of Afghanistan that are consistent with the views of the majority of the Afghan people?
First, Rosen and Marika challenge Obama’s recent cautious but upbeat annual review of purported military progress and improved Afghan security in 2010. Their cogent summary doesn’t support Obama’s views.
“The year 2010 witnessed a significant spike in violence both in the south, with offensive military operations triggering greater Taliban intimidation [2] and assassinations of civilians, and in the north [3] in heretofore ‘stable areas’ where international neglect and government abuse provide fertile ground for insurgent expansion. Real progress has been further complicated by the increasingly poisonous relationship between the Afghan government, the international community, and the Afghan people, aggravated by a potentially catastrophic electoral crisis [4], even more predatory government corruption and brazen war-profiteering [5], and near total disregard for the average Afghan citizen. As American and NATO forces enter their tenth year in Afghanistan, Afghan communities find themselves increasingly caught in a complex system of violence generated by insurgents, criminal gangs, drug lords, corrupt officials, US-allied local strongmen, and aggressive international forces.”
Second, the US military strategy during 2010 resulted in continuing and extensive damage to the Afghan population, property, and environment. They write:
“In Kandahar, the US is bombarding populated areas with smart rocket launchers and guided warheads, razing orchards, destroying homes, and partnering with people like the brutal commander [8] Colonel Abdul Razik and his militia. This increase in offensive operations, night raids, drone attacks, and use of irregular local forces remain precisely the tactics that provoke civilian outrage [9] even as they increase Taliban losses. Even more problematic, the international community never developed a complementary and much-needed political strategy that reinforces Afghan national unity and builds trust between state and society through genuine political reform and reconciliation at all levels of society.”
Third, Rosen and Marika provide evidence on the views of ordinary Afghan cities, focusing on their own experiences and future prospects. The evidence comes from a study sponsored in 2009 by LSE Global Governance at the London School of Economics and the Civil Society Development Center in Afghanistan. Rosen and Marika
“engaged a range of selected Afghan citizens - community, religious, and tribal leaders; NGO and community activists; teachers and educators; and, students and youth leaders – in seven regions to capture their experiences of insecurity and their views on how to secure Afghanistan’s future, including the provinces of Balkh, Baghlan, Herat, Kabul, Kandahar, Khost, and Nangarhar.” They identify three themes from the first rounds of interviews.
“ Firstly, the Taliban movement is a symptom of larger ills, and the continued focus on defeating them obscures the fact that the post-2001 political and economic order the international community helped create is the fundamental driver of instability, violence, and recruitment into the insurgency. Secondly, the current strategy with its near exclusive focus on government and armed actors as partners in the war effort perpetuates a system of personalized politics, power-grabbing and profiteering that fosters insecurity, corrupts Afghan society, and prevents the emergence of alternative political forces…. [while continuing] more as a mutual business enterprise in which belligerents – the political and economic elites, the internationals, and the insurgents – use insecurity as a cover for personal political and economic ambitions. They point to the massive amounts of international aid underwriting a perverse political economy that has created a nexus of financial interests between corrupt government officials, warlords, international contractors, and even the Taliban….”
“Finally… most Afghans want a rational outcome that produces a participatory system of governance rooted in Afghan values and able to provide minimally adequate services of justice, health, and education. Most Afghans do not challenge the existence of the state itself and support a unified Afghanistan…. In assessing the current struggle, Afghans look to progress on questions of justice, representation and allocation of resources rather than to kill-and-capture rates or announcements of new programmes in Kandahar or Helmand that link the populace to the government.”
In short, the situation in Afghanistan remains mired in conflict, corruption, destruction, and extensive human casualties and death. A major part of the problem is that the US and its allies are out-of-touch with or are misreading the views of ordinary Afghan citizens. Rosen and Marika believe that the situation can be ameliorated, though “not all of it can be undone.” Nonetheless, they can imagine policies that would be in the interests of the broad range of Afghan citizens they have interviewed.
First, with respect to the international aid coming into the country, the interviewees say that it must be better targeted, designed, and overseen, as well as making sure “that aid produces tangible results on the ground.”
Second, the international community could use the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to “crack down on corruption.” And, further, the “US Government should seriously consider prosecuting those Afghan-Americans who have participated in corrupt practices.”
Third, “the international community – particularly the US – must do more than pay lip service to a political solution and de-escalate the conflict….This requires more emphasis on issues of governance, justice, and representation; a reconsideration of the exclusive partnerships developed with the pro-government local strongmen; a genuine effort to defend the Afghan population from predatory political and economic elites (and not only insurgents); and, increased checks on impunity and marginalization.”
Unfortunately, there is little in US history that would justify much hope in seeing US foreign and military policies transformed in ways to give humanitarian and democratic values priority over the interests of those in the US who dominate the economic and political systems. It’s not out of the question, though there is no recent precedent. We’ll see. It depends in part on how the following questions are answered. Will we witness the Obama administration and the US Congress reduce the allocation of money and resources to the US military in Afghanistan? Will there be a withdrawal of a large number of troops over the course of the year? Will the US and her allies, along with other concerned nations and the UN, find ways to support the reconstruction of Afghanistan that are consistent with the views of the majority of the Afghan people?
Sunday, September 26, 2010
How to foster economic development in a post-war Afghanistan
David Waldman and Phyllis Bennis have written a highly useful book for those interested in getting a basic and comprehensive understanding of the Afghanistan war, from why it has been seen as a “good war” by US leaders, media, and many in the general public, to “what will it take to change US policy in Afghanistan so that US military forces will be soon withdrawn. The title: Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer. The book is organized around informative and thought-provoking answers to 35 questions, organized into six topics or “parts.”
The thirty-third question is: “What would a responsible plan to end the US war in Afghanistan look like?” Waldman and Bennis want the war and occupation to end and US troops brought home, but this, for them, is not the end of US obligations. They write: “…it was true in Iraq and is equally true in Afghanistan that the US debt to the people of those beleaguered countries is far greater than just getting the troops out.” They continue: “After years of war, abandonment to brutal US-armed warlords, invasion, occupation, more war – the US owes a huge debt to the Afghan people. Pulling out the troops is only step one” (179). It is here that they specify eleven potential provisions of a “responsible plan.”
Their proposals amount to “good ideas” that might serve to give US readers of the book and others a notion of what it will take to bring post-US-led-war Afghanistan and its people back to some minimal but meaningfully satisfactory economic level of development.
One thing that stands out in their sketch of a “plan” is that it will take the cooperation and support of many regional governments and the [financially strapped] UN to pull it off. If such collaboration was ever to be achieved, it would mark a stunning and unprecedented historic event in Afghanistan and this region of the world - or just about anywhere. Nonetheless, good ideas are better than no ideas or bad ideas. Waldman and Bennis get us thinking of possible alternatives to the ongoing hapless and destructive policies of the Bush-Obama administrations and the military chiefs.
Here are the proposals.
First, they write that it is of utmost importance to recognize that the war is counterproductive, as US and allied troops kill Afghan civilians and thereby increasing support for insurgents. It's vicious cycle.
Second, “Immediately end troop escalation and all combat and counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan…halt drone attacks…in Pakistan; close all US military bases…begin the full withdrawal of all US troops….”
Third, “remove all humanitarian, development, infrastructure, or other assistance programs and personnel from control [by the US, or Afghan] military.”
Fourth, “close Bagram Airbase prison” and help the Afghan government to develop cash, job training, and jobs programs for former detainees.
Fifth, develop a multifaceted program for Afghan refugees, including “financial assistance for returning refugees to Afghanistan and assistance to main refugee centers (Iran, Pakistan); accept more refuges into US.”
Sixth, cease “all anti-poppy fumigation programs; invest significant funds in infrastructure and financial assistance for alternative crop cultivation.”
Seventh, foster “and support…ceasefire, reconciliation, and negotiation processes involving all parties including Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan….”
Eighth, confront the widespread “corruption and illegitimacy in the US-backed government” by stopping “uncritical political and financial backing.”
Ninth, distribute small-scale financial assistance “to local, regional, tribal and other leaders for job creation, aiming particularly at reaching and recruiting young unemployed men who are vulnerable to militias offering pay….”
Tenth, facilitate or support – not control – of “separate negotiations including all neighboring countries, with leadership of UN, the Organization of Islamic Conference )OIC), the Shanghai Cooperation Alliance (which groups China, Russia, and five resource-rich Central Asian states, [and] other regional organizations. The negotiations should “exclude NATO, CSTO, and other military alliances.”
Eleventh, and finally, shift “the majority of Afghanistan military budgets [much of it from US assistance?] into UN and regional funds for Afghan-chosen, Afghan-planned, and Afghan-implemented construction and reconstruction….”
The thirty-third question is: “What would a responsible plan to end the US war in Afghanistan look like?” Waldman and Bennis want the war and occupation to end and US troops brought home, but this, for them, is not the end of US obligations. They write: “…it was true in Iraq and is equally true in Afghanistan that the US debt to the people of those beleaguered countries is far greater than just getting the troops out.” They continue: “After years of war, abandonment to brutal US-armed warlords, invasion, occupation, more war – the US owes a huge debt to the Afghan people. Pulling out the troops is only step one” (179). It is here that they specify eleven potential provisions of a “responsible plan.”
Their proposals amount to “good ideas” that might serve to give US readers of the book and others a notion of what it will take to bring post-US-led-war Afghanistan and its people back to some minimal but meaningfully satisfactory economic level of development.
One thing that stands out in their sketch of a “plan” is that it will take the cooperation and support of many regional governments and the [financially strapped] UN to pull it off. If such collaboration was ever to be achieved, it would mark a stunning and unprecedented historic event in Afghanistan and this region of the world - or just about anywhere. Nonetheless, good ideas are better than no ideas or bad ideas. Waldman and Bennis get us thinking of possible alternatives to the ongoing hapless and destructive policies of the Bush-Obama administrations and the military chiefs.
Here are the proposals.
First, they write that it is of utmost importance to recognize that the war is counterproductive, as US and allied troops kill Afghan civilians and thereby increasing support for insurgents. It's vicious cycle.
Second, “Immediately end troop escalation and all combat and counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan…halt drone attacks…in Pakistan; close all US military bases…begin the full withdrawal of all US troops….”
Third, “remove all humanitarian, development, infrastructure, or other assistance programs and personnel from control [by the US, or Afghan] military.”
Fourth, “close Bagram Airbase prison” and help the Afghan government to develop cash, job training, and jobs programs for former detainees.
Fifth, develop a multifaceted program for Afghan refugees, including “financial assistance for returning refugees to Afghanistan and assistance to main refugee centers (Iran, Pakistan); accept more refuges into US.”
Sixth, cease “all anti-poppy fumigation programs; invest significant funds in infrastructure and financial assistance for alternative crop cultivation.”
Seventh, foster “and support…ceasefire, reconciliation, and negotiation processes involving all parties including Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan….”
Eighth, confront the widespread “corruption and illegitimacy in the US-backed government” by stopping “uncritical political and financial backing.”
Ninth, distribute small-scale financial assistance “to local, regional, tribal and other leaders for job creation, aiming particularly at reaching and recruiting young unemployed men who are vulnerable to militias offering pay….”
Tenth, facilitate or support – not control – of “separate negotiations including all neighboring countries, with leadership of UN, the Organization of Islamic Conference )OIC), the Shanghai Cooperation Alliance (which groups China, Russia, and five resource-rich Central Asian states, [and] other regional organizations. The negotiations should “exclude NATO, CSTO, and other military alliances.”
Eleventh, and finally, shift “the majority of Afghanistan military budgets [much of it from US assistance?] into UN and regional funds for Afghan-chosen, Afghan-planned, and Afghan-implemented construction and reconstruction….”
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The case for withdrawal from Afghanistan
Nick Turse is the editor of a new book on the US-led Afghanistan war/occupation, the title of which is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Turse “is an award-winning journalist, historian, essayist, and the associate editor of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The Complex and has written “for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, In These Times and the Village Voice.”
The Case for Withdrawal includes an introduction by Turse, followed by 22 articles written by “leading commentators, politicians, and military strategists.” The articles are organized into four “parts”: “The Wars for Afghanistan”; Incompetence, Corruption, and the War on Women”; “Facts on the Ground”; and “The Case for Withdrawal.” While there are some differences among the contributing authors, they all agree, “some tacitly, some explicitly,” that there is a need to build “a solid case for a foreign troop withdrawal from Afghanistan” and to make Americans cognizant of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan as a serious option (xviii).
In this post, I want to outline major points from the book’s concluding article, “How to Get Out,” by Robert Dreyfuss. Of the authors included in this collection, Dreyfuss offers the most comprehensive view, in broad outline of how the goal of withdrawing US and NATO troops can be achieved without leaving the country even worse off than it is. His proposals identify major challenges and make logical sense. At the same time, they seem highly idealistic and politically improbable both with respect to US domestic politics and in relevant international relations. There is also some confusion on the role that the UN will play. In the end, the US military involvement in Afghanistan may be more like the end of the Vietnam War.
,
First, Dreyfuss joins a host of other critics and contends that the Karzai government is an obstacle to real change. He writes: “The corrupt government of President Karzai and his cronies is no long sustainable, whether or not there is a second round the fraud-marred election” [and this is true as well regarding the election that was just held].
Dreyfuss then offers his views on (1) creating a new government structure, (2) the US government as a facilitator in the transition to a new Afghan government and (3) in seeking international and regional support to buttress a new government, and (4) the need for the withdrawal of US/NATO troops.
#1 – “A new government in Kabul must emerge, in the process accommodating Pashtun nationalists, the Taliban, and other insurgents,” including as well “tribal and ethnic leaders, various warlords, and representatives of Afghanistan’s myriad political factions.” The national accord that results from this process “will probably not be a strong central government but rather a decentralized federal system, in which provinces and districts retain a significant degree of autonomy.”
“To secure international support, the United States must defer to the United Nations to convene a conference in which Afghans themselves hammer out the new way forward.”
#2 – The US government as a facilitator.
“…the president [Obama] should encourage the convening of an international Bonn II conference involving the UN, the major world powers, and Afghanistan’s neighbors – including Iran, India, and Pakistan – to support the renegotiation of the Afghanistan compact….
“In advance of that, the United States should join other nations and the UN to persuade President Karzai, his main electoral opponents, and other Afghan politicians to form a coalition that would create an interim caretaker regime until the establishment of a more broadly based government.”
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are key parts of the problem “[T]he Afghan Taliban are” in effect “a branch of Pakistan’s army and its intelligence service.” Saudi Arabia channels large sums of money to insurgent groups. Therefore, “Obama must strongly encourage Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to bring key elements of the three interlinked insurgency movements – the Taliban, the Hezb-i-Islami ofGulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the Haqqani network to the bargaining table….China, Pakistan’s ally, which has a vital interest in Central America, should be willing to use its influence in Pakistan to make sure Islamabad and Rawalpindi are on board.”
“…Obama will have to work to get Iran, India, and Russia to help persuade the remnants of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance (most Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras) to make room in Kabul for an enlarged Pashtun role, including the Taliban, in which could become a stable power-sharing arrangement.”
#3 – International support - “The world community must pledge its support of Afghanistan financially for years to come.”
#4 – These steps must be accompanied by “an unconditional withdrawal of US and NATO forces” and the recognition that a military victory in Afghanistan is not feasible.
In addition, “the Obama administration will have to give up its massive nation-building project, dismantling the empire of US departments, agencies, provincial reconstruction teams, and the rest….”
“With the agreement of the Afghan government, a limited US intelligence and counterterrorism mission designed to monitor the remnants of al Qaeda can remain in Afghanistan.”
The Case for Withdrawal includes an introduction by Turse, followed by 22 articles written by “leading commentators, politicians, and military strategists.” The articles are organized into four “parts”: “The Wars for Afghanistan”; Incompetence, Corruption, and the War on Women”; “Facts on the Ground”; and “The Case for Withdrawal.” While there are some differences among the contributing authors, they all agree, “some tacitly, some explicitly,” that there is a need to build “a solid case for a foreign troop withdrawal from Afghanistan” and to make Americans cognizant of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan as a serious option (xviii).
In this post, I want to outline major points from the book’s concluding article, “How to Get Out,” by Robert Dreyfuss. Of the authors included in this collection, Dreyfuss offers the most comprehensive view, in broad outline of how the goal of withdrawing US and NATO troops can be achieved without leaving the country even worse off than it is. His proposals identify major challenges and make logical sense. At the same time, they seem highly idealistic and politically improbable both with respect to US domestic politics and in relevant international relations. There is also some confusion on the role that the UN will play. In the end, the US military involvement in Afghanistan may be more like the end of the Vietnam War.
,
First, Dreyfuss joins a host of other critics and contends that the Karzai government is an obstacle to real change. He writes: “The corrupt government of President Karzai and his cronies is no long sustainable, whether or not there is a second round the fraud-marred election” [and this is true as well regarding the election that was just held].
Dreyfuss then offers his views on (1) creating a new government structure, (2) the US government as a facilitator in the transition to a new Afghan government and (3) in seeking international and regional support to buttress a new government, and (4) the need for the withdrawal of US/NATO troops.
#1 – “A new government in Kabul must emerge, in the process accommodating Pashtun nationalists, the Taliban, and other insurgents,” including as well “tribal and ethnic leaders, various warlords, and representatives of Afghanistan’s myriad political factions.” The national accord that results from this process “will probably not be a strong central government but rather a decentralized federal system, in which provinces and districts retain a significant degree of autonomy.”
“To secure international support, the United States must defer to the United Nations to convene a conference in which Afghans themselves hammer out the new way forward.”
#2 – The US government as a facilitator.
“…the president [Obama] should encourage the convening of an international Bonn II conference involving the UN, the major world powers, and Afghanistan’s neighbors – including Iran, India, and Pakistan – to support the renegotiation of the Afghanistan compact….
“In advance of that, the United States should join other nations and the UN to persuade President Karzai, his main electoral opponents, and other Afghan politicians to form a coalition that would create an interim caretaker regime until the establishment of a more broadly based government.”
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are key parts of the problem “[T]he Afghan Taliban are” in effect “a branch of Pakistan’s army and its intelligence service.” Saudi Arabia channels large sums of money to insurgent groups. Therefore, “Obama must strongly encourage Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to bring key elements of the three interlinked insurgency movements – the Taliban, the Hezb-i-Islami ofGulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the Haqqani network to the bargaining table….China, Pakistan’s ally, which has a vital interest in Central America, should be willing to use its influence in Pakistan to make sure Islamabad and Rawalpindi are on board.”
“…Obama will have to work to get Iran, India, and Russia to help persuade the remnants of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance (most Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras) to make room in Kabul for an enlarged Pashtun role, including the Taliban, in which could become a stable power-sharing arrangement.”
#3 – International support - “The world community must pledge its support of Afghanistan financially for years to come.”
#4 – These steps must be accompanied by “an unconditional withdrawal of US and NATO forces” and the recognition that a military victory in Afghanistan is not feasible.
In addition, “the Obama administration will have to give up its massive nation-building project, dismantling the empire of US departments, agencies, provincial reconstruction teams, and the rest….”
“With the agreement of the Afghan government, a limited US intelligence and counterterrorism mission designed to monitor the remnants of al Qaeda can remain in Afghanistan.”
Sunday, June 20, 2010
U.S. for nation-building from the bottom-up - another potential reason for extending occupation
Carlotta Gall reports in the New York Times about a U.S. effort in Afghanistan to build democracy from the bottom up in the form of elected district councils in some of the most unstable parts of the country. The article was published on June 19, 2010, with the title "U.S. Hopes Afghan Councils Will Weaken Taliban." Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Here is a summary of key points from the article and some quotes.
The council in Nadali, are, Gall writes, "part of a pilot program to set up 100 district" by July 2011 "to provide representative government in places where government has largely been absent...[and] convince people that there is a viable option to the Taliban."
The project runs up against Afghan populations that have "suffered at the hands of predatory officials and repeated military operations by foreign forces in recent years."
Another key element of the project is a "National Solidarty Program," designed to "set up small development councils...[and] to undertake small reconstruction projects in every village."
The process take times. Aside from insurgents or Taliban, "it takes six months just to elect and train community councilors and two years to complete a village project."
Even prior to reaching the stage where there are elections, it may take a year or more "of visiting villages and persuading people to cooperate with the government...."
Gall does not make clear how a village's representatives are "selected" for a district's council. Once selected, though, they elect the councilors. Thus, the plan is to have only local people participating in these local governance structures.
Another task is "to persuade local insurgents to give up the fight and return to a peaceful life in the community." One district chief who is quotes, says: "It takes time; you have to go and talk a lot and spend money."
Two questions:
(1) Can a locally-focused program succeed, given a continuing occupation by foreign troops, a weak central government, along with weak government at other levels and warlord domination in many districts, and insurgents or Taliban who have yet to be defeated or reconciled?
(2) My impression is that the whole idea will take many years to implement. If it is taken seriously by the Obama administration, the Pentagon, and the generals in the field, then the U.S. occupation may well continued beyond the summer of 2011, the scheduled time for the "beginning" of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
NADALI, Afghanistan — More than 600 men, most of them farmers with weathered faces and rough hands, sat on the ground under an awning, waiting all day to deposit their ballots in plastic boxes. They had braved Taliban threats and road mines to come here to select a district council, part of a plan to strengthen local government in the most unstable parts of Afghanistan.
“The important thing is we are trying to build trust between the people and the government,” said Qari Mukhtar Ahmad, a senior cleric attending the election last month. “This district was under fighting for a long time, but now there is peace and we have to listen to the people and bring them together.”
Peace is a relative term in Nadali, a district in the southern province of Helmand with one of highest levels of roadside bombs per square mile. Government officials still have to fly by helicopter from the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, rather than risk the 20-minute drive.
The district encompasses Marja, a Taliban stronghold where United States Marines have been battling insurgents since February. Marja remains largely ungovernable, but the operation broke the hold of the Taliban in the rest of the district, making it stable enough to try to set up some local representation.
The election here, an exercise in nation-building from the ground up, is part of a pilot program to set up 100 district councils to provide representative government in places where government has largely been absent. But the councils, backed by the British and American governments, also represent a critical element of counterinsurgency strategy: if they succeed, the hope is they will convince people that there is a viable alternative to Taliban rule.
Since the beginning of the year, 35 such councils have begun work in nine provinces, and the American and British governments have pledged financing to establish 100 by July 2011, officials said. The ultimate goal is to have directly elected councils nationwide.
“It is a vital, basic element of administration,” said Christopher Demers, an adviser for the Agency for International Development in Kandahar. “Building a people’s body like this is important; it is giving people an opportunity to speak with the government.”
Military officials in the United States-led coalition have often expressed frustration at the inability of the Afghan government to move quickly into secured areas and start governing. Yet Afghan officials say that it is a lengthy task to build an administration from scratch and gain the trust of a population that has suffered at the hands of predatory officials and repeated military operations by foreign forces in recent years.
In many districts, like Nadali, there is little government presence, often only a district chief and a police chief, both appointed by the central government in Kabul. They have few resources or personnel. Most district chiefs have no official car and an official budget of only $12 a year, the United Nations said last year.
One of the successes of the Afghan government over the past eight years has been the National Solidarity Program, which set up small development councils across the country to undertake small reconstruction projects in every village. Yet it takes six months just to elect and train community councilors and two years to complete a village project, said Wais Ahmad Barmak, deputy minister in the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, who has 30 years experience in community development.
In the most insecure areas, like Helmand, the ministry has had to suspend its work, he said.
In Nadali it has taken a year of visiting villages and persuading people to cooperate with the government to get them to the point of electing the district council, said the district chief, Habibullah Shamlani, a former police academy instructor.
After several gatherings around the district, 600 representatives were selected to come and vote for 45 councilors, all of whom must live in the district, a change from the absentee landlords or tribal chiefs who have traditionally made the decisions.
“This district council should make all the decisions which affect the life of the district,” said Jelani Popal, who leads the local government directorate, an arm of the national government that is running the program. “We will use them for security reasons, like reintegration; they will be very active in deciding about development, but also governance; they can communicate or channel the grievances of the people to the governor and district governor.”
Those who took part in the selection said they were taking the risk because they needed representatives to intercede with the government and the foreign forces on a variety of problems, from securing the release of detainees and compensation for war damage to resolving tribal and land disputes and winning development assistance for their areas.
“We hope the government will do something for us if we have this district council and we can share our problems with the higher authorities,” said Feda Muhammad Khan, an elected councilor. “We are fed up with the fighting, and there is a drought, and we are hoping peace will knock on our door.”
One of the main tasks of the council will be to persuade local insurgents to give up the fight and return to a peaceful life in the community, or if not to move away and stop destabilizing the area, Mr. Shamlani, the district chief, said. Already 40 people who were with the Taliban have been persuaded to quit fighting, he said.
“We are working step by step,” he said. “We cannot put too much pressure on the people to reject the Taliban. Gradually now, people have found some courage to point out who are Taliban. If things are sustained the same as now I am hoping by next year we will know who is behind it all.”
The key has been to deliver on promises of assistance and treat the people well, he said. “It takes time; you have to go and talk a lot and spend money,” he said.
But there is already evidence that the Taliban are fighting the councils much as they have resisted other government initiatives.
Some of the participants said they risked assassination if the Taliban in their area discovered that they were cooperating with the government. At least five councilors have been killed and one has been wounded since the four councils were formed in Helmand Province, officials said, presumably by the Taliban.
And the representatives choosing the council here included Taliban members, several participants said. They, too, wanted representation to help win the release of their people who have been detained.
Maj. Abdul Salam, who runs the police criminal department in Nadali, said the fact that 600 representatives showed up was itself a vote of confidence in the process.
“These people are here because they have some hope that the government is gaining strength and they are hoping they can defend themselves,” he said. “But you are right, they are in some danger.”
The council in Nadali, are, Gall writes, "part of a pilot program to set up 100 district" by July 2011 "to provide representative government in places where government has largely been absent...[and] convince people that there is a viable option to the Taliban."
The project runs up against Afghan populations that have "suffered at the hands of predatory officials and repeated military operations by foreign forces in recent years."
Another key element of the project is a "National Solidarty Program," designed to "set up small development councils...[and] to undertake small reconstruction projects in every village."
The process take times. Aside from insurgents or Taliban, "it takes six months just to elect and train community councilors and two years to complete a village project."
Even prior to reaching the stage where there are elections, it may take a year or more "of visiting villages and persuading people to cooperate with the government...."
Gall does not make clear how a village's representatives are "selected" for a district's council. Once selected, though, they elect the councilors. Thus, the plan is to have only local people participating in these local governance structures.
Another task is "to persuade local insurgents to give up the fight and return to a peaceful life in the community." One district chief who is quotes, says: "It takes time; you have to go and talk a lot and spend money."
Two questions:
(1) Can a locally-focused program succeed, given a continuing occupation by foreign troops, a weak central government, along with weak government at other levels and warlord domination in many districts, and insurgents or Taliban who have yet to be defeated or reconciled?
(2) My impression is that the whole idea will take many years to implement. If it is taken seriously by the Obama administration, the Pentagon, and the generals in the field, then the U.S. occupation may well continued beyond the summer of 2011, the scheduled time for the "beginning" of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
NADALI, Afghanistan — More than 600 men, most of them farmers with weathered faces and rough hands, sat on the ground under an awning, waiting all day to deposit their ballots in plastic boxes. They had braved Taliban threats and road mines to come here to select a district council, part of a plan to strengthen local government in the most unstable parts of Afghanistan.
“The important thing is we are trying to build trust between the people and the government,” said Qari Mukhtar Ahmad, a senior cleric attending the election last month. “This district was under fighting for a long time, but now there is peace and we have to listen to the people and bring them together.”
Peace is a relative term in Nadali, a district in the southern province of Helmand with one of highest levels of roadside bombs per square mile. Government officials still have to fly by helicopter from the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, rather than risk the 20-minute drive.
The district encompasses Marja, a Taliban stronghold where United States Marines have been battling insurgents since February. Marja remains largely ungovernable, but the operation broke the hold of the Taliban in the rest of the district, making it stable enough to try to set up some local representation.
The election here, an exercise in nation-building from the ground up, is part of a pilot program to set up 100 district councils to provide representative government in places where government has largely been absent. But the councils, backed by the British and American governments, also represent a critical element of counterinsurgency strategy: if they succeed, the hope is they will convince people that there is a viable alternative to Taliban rule.
Since the beginning of the year, 35 such councils have begun work in nine provinces, and the American and British governments have pledged financing to establish 100 by July 2011, officials said. The ultimate goal is to have directly elected councils nationwide.
“It is a vital, basic element of administration,” said Christopher Demers, an adviser for the Agency for International Development in Kandahar. “Building a people’s body like this is important; it is giving people an opportunity to speak with the government.”
Military officials in the United States-led coalition have often expressed frustration at the inability of the Afghan government to move quickly into secured areas and start governing. Yet Afghan officials say that it is a lengthy task to build an administration from scratch and gain the trust of a population that has suffered at the hands of predatory officials and repeated military operations by foreign forces in recent years.
In many districts, like Nadali, there is little government presence, often only a district chief and a police chief, both appointed by the central government in Kabul. They have few resources or personnel. Most district chiefs have no official car and an official budget of only $12 a year, the United Nations said last year.
One of the successes of the Afghan government over the past eight years has been the National Solidarity Program, which set up small development councils across the country to undertake small reconstruction projects in every village. Yet it takes six months just to elect and train community councilors and two years to complete a village project, said Wais Ahmad Barmak, deputy minister in the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, who has 30 years experience in community development.
In the most insecure areas, like Helmand, the ministry has had to suspend its work, he said.
In Nadali it has taken a year of visiting villages and persuading people to cooperate with the government to get them to the point of electing the district council, said the district chief, Habibullah Shamlani, a former police academy instructor.
After several gatherings around the district, 600 representatives were selected to come and vote for 45 councilors, all of whom must live in the district, a change from the absentee landlords or tribal chiefs who have traditionally made the decisions.
“This district council should make all the decisions which affect the life of the district,” said Jelani Popal, who leads the local government directorate, an arm of the national government that is running the program. “We will use them for security reasons, like reintegration; they will be very active in deciding about development, but also governance; they can communicate or channel the grievances of the people to the governor and district governor.”
Those who took part in the selection said they were taking the risk because they needed representatives to intercede with the government and the foreign forces on a variety of problems, from securing the release of detainees and compensation for war damage to resolving tribal and land disputes and winning development assistance for their areas.
“We hope the government will do something for us if we have this district council and we can share our problems with the higher authorities,” said Feda Muhammad Khan, an elected councilor. “We are fed up with the fighting, and there is a drought, and we are hoping peace will knock on our door.”
One of the main tasks of the council will be to persuade local insurgents to give up the fight and return to a peaceful life in the community, or if not to move away and stop destabilizing the area, Mr. Shamlani, the district chief, said. Already 40 people who were with the Taliban have been persuaded to quit fighting, he said.
“We are working step by step,” he said. “We cannot put too much pressure on the people to reject the Taliban. Gradually now, people have found some courage to point out who are Taliban. If things are sustained the same as now I am hoping by next year we will know who is behind it all.”
The key has been to deliver on promises of assistance and treat the people well, he said. “It takes time; you have to go and talk a lot and spend money,” he said.
But there is already evidence that the Taliban are fighting the councils much as they have resisted other government initiatives.
Some of the participants said they risked assassination if the Taliban in their area discovered that they were cooperating with the government. At least five councilors have been killed and one has been wounded since the four councils were formed in Helmand Province, officials said, presumably by the Taliban.
And the representatives choosing the council here included Taliban members, several participants said. They, too, wanted representation to help win the release of their people who have been detained.
Maj. Abdul Salam, who runs the police criminal department in Nadali, said the fact that 600 representatives showed up was itself a vote of confidence in the process.
“These people are here because they have some hope that the government is gaining strength and they are hoping they can defend themselves,” he said. “But you are right, they are in some danger.”
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Counterinsurgency is destined to fail in Afghanistan, just as it did in Vietnam
William R. Polk argues in the following article that US counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing - and will fail - just as it did in Vietnam and as it did when the Russians attempted it in Afghanistan back in the 1980s. Counterinsurgency doctrine says that a combination of military force and civil aid is necessary. Polk contends that you cannot lay the basis for providing civil aid until all groups in the society come to believe that the aid is not being used to consolidate a foreign military occupation and the continuation of associated corruption in the government and among warlords.
Polk's plan would start with the US giving a firm and comprehensive date for the withdrawal of US troops. This is a first step. He contends that, once this is accepted as authentic, civil aid will be welcome by "traditional [village] councils, who "will begin to seek those things that will heal their sick, feed their hungry, repair their destroyed and decayed infrastructure and generally make their lives easier." The Taliban already have agreed, he says, to negotiate once foreign forces are withdrawn. Once aid is offered and being delivered, and with foreign troops leaving the country, it will be hard for the Taliban to continue their warfare, given the great needs of the people. Polk implies that this aid would go directly to villages rather than through a central government.
Polk's analysis squares with our own and maintains that the US-led war should come to an end. He does not address how the political system, particularly the central government, will be reconstituted. He does not address how a national army, if there is one, can be organized in a way that it is not dominated by the Tajiks. And he does not address how the warlords and their militias can be marginalized or phased out. But the implication of his article is that all of these challenges will more easily reconciled or overcome in the absence of the US-led military occupation.
Bob
----------------------------
Missteps on Afghanistan
By William R. Polk
http://www.hnn.us/articles/122319.html - History News Network
William R. Polk was Professor of History at the University of Chicago. During the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administrations, he was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Among his books are Understanding Iraq, Violent Politics and Understanding Iran. He is now at work on a book to be entitled Afghanistan: Descent into Unending War. He is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation.
In his final report on January 6, 2009 to the Security Council, the senior UN representative to Afghanistan, Ambassador Kai Eide of Norway, highlighted two issues that will determine events far into the future. The first of these was development aid and the second is building a military capacity for the central government. He and others have argued that failure to accomplish one or both is likely to result in what General Stanley McChrystal called “mission failure.” Eide may be right, but history suggests that even more danger may result from success.
The Vietnam war tells us why. Then, as now, we engaged in the “civic action” programs Eide urges that we increase. Also then, as now, our adversaries regarded them as hostile moves. The Viet Minh deliberately destroyed not only the beneficial contributions – clinics, schools, bridges – but also targeted those Vietnamese and foreign aid workers who were trying to help the people. If proof were needed for the diabolical nature of the Communist guerrillas, this was surely it. At least that was what many of my government colleagues then thought. It is also what many people today think of the Taliban and their similar actions. What could have made them act in this way?
The obvious, but rarely mentioned, reason is that insurgents see civic action programs as a counterinsurgency tactic. In Vietnam they were designed to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese and so win them away from the insurgents. The insurgents regarded our civil aid as more dangerous to their cause than our bombs.
Ironically, they were partly wrong. Neither we nor the Viet Minh recognized a fatal side effect of our program: because the South Vietnamese government was hopelessly corrupt, any aid we turned over to officials was apt to be stolen or even sold to the Viet Minh. So we took on ourselves the task of delivering the aid direct to the villagers. Since our officials were honest, the program worked.
But, without realizing it, we sidelined the very government we were dedicated to supporting: by our intervention, we literally became the government of South Vietnam. Of course, we remained foreigners – indeed a study made during my time in government showed that many villagers thought we were a new batch of French colonialists, perhaps Foreign Legionnaires. But, since we were doing the “good things,” and the Saigon government continued to do the “bad things,” in part through our aid efforts, we further weakened its claim to legitimacy.
How does this experience in Vietnam relate to Afghanistan? Those who point out that there are major differences are right, but the general context, dealing with a hopelessly corrupt government, is what we now face. Few competent observers think we can reform that government. So, while we at least talk about trying, we effectively by-pass it just as we did in Vietnam. Consequently, while history does not exactly replay, knowing it can sometimes stimulate our thinking. What might Vietnam teach us to question Ambassador Eide’s recommendations that we increase our civic action program?
Like the Viet Minh, the Taliban understand the purpose of civic action. Simply put, it is a counterinsurgency weapon. Indeed, we told them it was. As General David Petraeus said, “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.” To implement this tactic, the U.S. Army published “the Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System” (Handbook 09-27 April 2009) which tells officers how to use money and civic actions programs to defeat insurgents. This is the basis of a training program at the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth, Kansas.
Our civic action program not only was informed by the Vietnam War, but mirrors the large-scale program undertaken by the Russians in Afghanistan. (It is odd that in his manual on counterinsurgency, General Petraeus never mentions the Russian program. Did he or the actual authors of the manual not know of it? As the philosopher George Santayana warned, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps that explains the manual.) During their occupation of Afghanistan, the Russians poured in hundreds of millions of dollar-equivalents to civic action. It did not win Afghan hearts and minds.
Will ours? After conducting some 400 interviews, Andrew Wilder of Tufts University concluded that “Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative.”
This background and these findings explain, I think, both why the Taliban blows up the facilities we build and why the general population allows them to do so: what we see as generous help to needy people, they see as part of a campaign by foreigners to subdue them.
But it is clear that the Afghans need help. Without aid from abroad, the future of the people of Afghanistan would be grim and the chances for the reforms we have set as our goal would be unlikely. So can civic action programs be configured in a way that would make them acceptable? I believe they can. This is how:
Once we set a firm and believable date for actual withdrawal, the psychology of the war will change. This was not, of course, accomplished by President Obama’s vague statement that the process will begin in July 2011, particularly after what he announced was further weakened by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s definition of “withdrawal” as amounting only to a “handful” of the occupation forces. To be effective the date must be firm and comprehensive -- and be believed. Then, particularly if they can at least partly be made multi- or inter-national, aid projects will gradually cease to be seen as “ammunition in this war.” At that point, the traditional councils (known in various parts of the country as jirgas, ulus and shuras) that exist in, and essentially govern, virtually every one of Afghanistan’s approximately 23,000 villages) will begin to seek those things that will heal their sick, feed their hungry, repair their destroyed or decayed infrastructure and generally make their lives easier.
Hopefully, by that time, negotiations with the Taliban – which even President Hamid Karzai has called vital and which he promised in September 2009 he would launch -- will begin. On his side, the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Umar, has also agreed to negotiate once the foreign forces are withdrawn. He, too, should be driven by the announcement of a firm date. In December he even “signaled” that the Taliban would not allow aggressive action by al-Qaida on other states from Afghanistan. We have said, essentially, that we are not interested.
If we get interested and the war winds down, the Taliban will cease to oppose a redefined form of civic action. The Taliban will have to permit it because, if they continue in the new context of the winding down of the war to destroy what the villagers want, they will lose their most important asset, the support of the people. And without that support, as Mao Zedong memorably put it, they will become like fish stranded without supporting “water.”
So the setting the date of withdrawal is absolutely crucial. It must be the first step.
Now what about the call Ambassador Eide, almost everyone in the American and British governments, and our military leaders have sounded to create a much expanded security apparatus for the central government?
I do not believe this is in either ours or the Afghan national interest. Again, consider what history can teach us.
For many years before the Russian invasion in 1979, Soviet training missions worked with the almost entirely Pashtun Royal Afghan Army and took many officers and trainees to Russia for advanced instruction and indoctrination. By world standards, the army was not an impressive force, but it existed, had coherence and was disciplined. So when the Russians invaded and occupied the country, they and their puppet government “inherited” a standing army. To it, they added approximately 100,000 well-paid militiamen. These forces actually performed reasonably well for the Russians during at least the early part of their occupation. But they did not enable the Russians to “win.”
Contrast this with our current position: we have not inherited an existing army. The old royal army was compromised by its relationship with the Russians and virtually disappeared in the aftermath of their withdrawal in 1989. Thereafter, the resistance forces, particularly the “Northern Alliance,” the Tajik-based guerrillas who had operated from the Panjshir valley under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, and their Hazara and Uzbek rivals fought one another for dominance all over the country. They had nearly destroyed Afghanistan when the Taliban moved in and defeated them. Most of their leaders, the “warlords,” ran away. When the United States invaded in 2001, and defeated the Taliban, it began to rebuild the power of the warlords as the cheapest way to control the country. Helped by America, these warlords decimated what remained of the Taliban. Out of this turmoil, the local winners were mainly the Tajiks.
Today, Tajiks, who number about one in four Afghans (roughly half as many as the traditionally dominant Pashtuns), hold most of the key positions in the government, including intelligence and political police, and command seven in ten of the army’s battalions. Unwittingly, therefore, we may have laid the basis for a civil war. That is a long-term potential danger, but other aspects of what Ambassador Eide has recommended and General McChrystal intends to implement are more immediately worrying.
Because today’s soldiers are without a background of training and, according to NATO advisers, nine in ten are illiterate and three in ten are drug addicts, turning them into an army will justify – indeed require, as both the American and British military commanders agree – our forces to remain in Afghanistan for years, or more likely, decades. Such a program on such a timetable will not only convince the Afghans that we have become a colonial power but will also serve to convince the adherents to the party line of al-Qaida that Usama bin Ladin is right to target America and Britain.
The second effect is that emphasizing the army will inhibit the negotiating process that nearly everyone is beginning to see as the only hope of ending the war on acceptable terms.
The third result is that the army will become a major drain on the limited resources of the country. Pentagon planners are already calculating how soon we can off-load the costs onto the Afghans. Pursuit of this objective necessarily will clash with the plan we must also try to implement of making Afghanistan reasonably secure and reasonably prosperous. Today they can barely feed themselves: an estimated 42 percent live on the equivalent of about 7¢ a day. It will be decades, if ever, before they can shoulder the sort of war we want them to fight.
The fourth result is (mercifully perhaps) a future danger: it is that since balancing civil institutions are weak and will take years to become strong, a military force on the scale General McChrystal is beginning to build is likely to lead once again to a dictatorship of the kind that destroyed the earlier attempts in the 1920s and 1960s to build a reformist, modern state.
Thus, it seems to me that the message Ambassador Eide has delivered and which many of the new “experts” on Afghanistan also espouse would lead us in precisely the wrong direction – toward a period of greater threats of terrorism, further damage to our society, economy and legal system, and will result in virtually unending war.
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Polk's plan would start with the US giving a firm and comprehensive date for the withdrawal of US troops. This is a first step. He contends that, once this is accepted as authentic, civil aid will be welcome by "traditional [village] councils, who "will begin to seek those things that will heal their sick, feed their hungry, repair their destroyed and decayed infrastructure and generally make their lives easier." The Taliban already have agreed, he says, to negotiate once foreign forces are withdrawn. Once aid is offered and being delivered, and with foreign troops leaving the country, it will be hard for the Taliban to continue their warfare, given the great needs of the people. Polk implies that this aid would go directly to villages rather than through a central government.
Polk's analysis squares with our own and maintains that the US-led war should come to an end. He does not address how the political system, particularly the central government, will be reconstituted. He does not address how a national army, if there is one, can be organized in a way that it is not dominated by the Tajiks. And he does not address how the warlords and their militias can be marginalized or phased out. But the implication of his article is that all of these challenges will more easily reconciled or overcome in the absence of the US-led military occupation.
Bob
----------------------------
Missteps on Afghanistan
By William R. Polk
http://www.hnn.us/articles/122319.html - History News Network
William R. Polk was Professor of History at the University of Chicago. During the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administrations, he was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Among his books are Understanding Iraq, Violent Politics and Understanding Iran. He is now at work on a book to be entitled Afghanistan: Descent into Unending War. He is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation.
In his final report on January 6, 2009 to the Security Council, the senior UN representative to Afghanistan, Ambassador Kai Eide of Norway, highlighted two issues that will determine events far into the future. The first of these was development aid and the second is building a military capacity for the central government. He and others have argued that failure to accomplish one or both is likely to result in what General Stanley McChrystal called “mission failure.” Eide may be right, but history suggests that even more danger may result from success.
The Vietnam war tells us why. Then, as now, we engaged in the “civic action” programs Eide urges that we increase. Also then, as now, our adversaries regarded them as hostile moves. The Viet Minh deliberately destroyed not only the beneficial contributions – clinics, schools, bridges – but also targeted those Vietnamese and foreign aid workers who were trying to help the people. If proof were needed for the diabolical nature of the Communist guerrillas, this was surely it. At least that was what many of my government colleagues then thought. It is also what many people today think of the Taliban and their similar actions. What could have made them act in this way?
The obvious, but rarely mentioned, reason is that insurgents see civic action programs as a counterinsurgency tactic. In Vietnam they were designed to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese and so win them away from the insurgents. The insurgents regarded our civil aid as more dangerous to their cause than our bombs.
Ironically, they were partly wrong. Neither we nor the Viet Minh recognized a fatal side effect of our program: because the South Vietnamese government was hopelessly corrupt, any aid we turned over to officials was apt to be stolen or even sold to the Viet Minh. So we took on ourselves the task of delivering the aid direct to the villagers. Since our officials were honest, the program worked.
But, without realizing it, we sidelined the very government we were dedicated to supporting: by our intervention, we literally became the government of South Vietnam. Of course, we remained foreigners – indeed a study made during my time in government showed that many villagers thought we were a new batch of French colonialists, perhaps Foreign Legionnaires. But, since we were doing the “good things,” and the Saigon government continued to do the “bad things,” in part through our aid efforts, we further weakened its claim to legitimacy.
How does this experience in Vietnam relate to Afghanistan? Those who point out that there are major differences are right, but the general context, dealing with a hopelessly corrupt government, is what we now face. Few competent observers think we can reform that government. So, while we at least talk about trying, we effectively by-pass it just as we did in Vietnam. Consequently, while history does not exactly replay, knowing it can sometimes stimulate our thinking. What might Vietnam teach us to question Ambassador Eide’s recommendations that we increase our civic action program?
Like the Viet Minh, the Taliban understand the purpose of civic action. Simply put, it is a counterinsurgency weapon. Indeed, we told them it was. As General David Petraeus said, “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.” To implement this tactic, the U.S. Army published “the Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System” (Handbook 09-27 April 2009) which tells officers how to use money and civic actions programs to defeat insurgents. This is the basis of a training program at the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth, Kansas.
Our civic action program not only was informed by the Vietnam War, but mirrors the large-scale program undertaken by the Russians in Afghanistan. (It is odd that in his manual on counterinsurgency, General Petraeus never mentions the Russian program. Did he or the actual authors of the manual not know of it? As the philosopher George Santayana warned, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps that explains the manual.) During their occupation of Afghanistan, the Russians poured in hundreds of millions of dollar-equivalents to civic action. It did not win Afghan hearts and minds.
Will ours? After conducting some 400 interviews, Andrew Wilder of Tufts University concluded that “Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative.”
This background and these findings explain, I think, both why the Taliban blows up the facilities we build and why the general population allows them to do so: what we see as generous help to needy people, they see as part of a campaign by foreigners to subdue them.
But it is clear that the Afghans need help. Without aid from abroad, the future of the people of Afghanistan would be grim and the chances for the reforms we have set as our goal would be unlikely. So can civic action programs be configured in a way that would make them acceptable? I believe they can. This is how:
Once we set a firm and believable date for actual withdrawal, the psychology of the war will change. This was not, of course, accomplished by President Obama’s vague statement that the process will begin in July 2011, particularly after what he announced was further weakened by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s definition of “withdrawal” as amounting only to a “handful” of the occupation forces. To be effective the date must be firm and comprehensive -- and be believed. Then, particularly if they can at least partly be made multi- or inter-national, aid projects will gradually cease to be seen as “ammunition in this war.” At that point, the traditional councils (known in various parts of the country as jirgas, ulus and shuras) that exist in, and essentially govern, virtually every one of Afghanistan’s approximately 23,000 villages) will begin to seek those things that will heal their sick, feed their hungry, repair their destroyed or decayed infrastructure and generally make their lives easier.
Hopefully, by that time, negotiations with the Taliban – which even President Hamid Karzai has called vital and which he promised in September 2009 he would launch -- will begin. On his side, the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Umar, has also agreed to negotiate once the foreign forces are withdrawn. He, too, should be driven by the announcement of a firm date. In December he even “signaled” that the Taliban would not allow aggressive action by al-Qaida on other states from Afghanistan. We have said, essentially, that we are not interested.
If we get interested and the war winds down, the Taliban will cease to oppose a redefined form of civic action. The Taliban will have to permit it because, if they continue in the new context of the winding down of the war to destroy what the villagers want, they will lose their most important asset, the support of the people. And without that support, as Mao Zedong memorably put it, they will become like fish stranded without supporting “water.”
So the setting the date of withdrawal is absolutely crucial. It must be the first step.
Now what about the call Ambassador Eide, almost everyone in the American and British governments, and our military leaders have sounded to create a much expanded security apparatus for the central government?
I do not believe this is in either ours or the Afghan national interest. Again, consider what history can teach us.
For many years before the Russian invasion in 1979, Soviet training missions worked with the almost entirely Pashtun Royal Afghan Army and took many officers and trainees to Russia for advanced instruction and indoctrination. By world standards, the army was not an impressive force, but it existed, had coherence and was disciplined. So when the Russians invaded and occupied the country, they and their puppet government “inherited” a standing army. To it, they added approximately 100,000 well-paid militiamen. These forces actually performed reasonably well for the Russians during at least the early part of their occupation. But they did not enable the Russians to “win.”
Contrast this with our current position: we have not inherited an existing army. The old royal army was compromised by its relationship with the Russians and virtually disappeared in the aftermath of their withdrawal in 1989. Thereafter, the resistance forces, particularly the “Northern Alliance,” the Tajik-based guerrillas who had operated from the Panjshir valley under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, and their Hazara and Uzbek rivals fought one another for dominance all over the country. They had nearly destroyed Afghanistan when the Taliban moved in and defeated them. Most of their leaders, the “warlords,” ran away. When the United States invaded in 2001, and defeated the Taliban, it began to rebuild the power of the warlords as the cheapest way to control the country. Helped by America, these warlords decimated what remained of the Taliban. Out of this turmoil, the local winners were mainly the Tajiks.
Today, Tajiks, who number about one in four Afghans (roughly half as many as the traditionally dominant Pashtuns), hold most of the key positions in the government, including intelligence and political police, and command seven in ten of the army’s battalions. Unwittingly, therefore, we may have laid the basis for a civil war. That is a long-term potential danger, but other aspects of what Ambassador Eide has recommended and General McChrystal intends to implement are more immediately worrying.
Because today’s soldiers are without a background of training and, according to NATO advisers, nine in ten are illiterate and three in ten are drug addicts, turning them into an army will justify – indeed require, as both the American and British military commanders agree – our forces to remain in Afghanistan for years, or more likely, decades. Such a program on such a timetable will not only convince the Afghans that we have become a colonial power but will also serve to convince the adherents to the party line of al-Qaida that Usama bin Ladin is right to target America and Britain.
The second effect is that emphasizing the army will inhibit the negotiating process that nearly everyone is beginning to see as the only hope of ending the war on acceptable terms.
The third result is that the army will become a major drain on the limited resources of the country. Pentagon planners are already calculating how soon we can off-load the costs onto the Afghans. Pursuit of this objective necessarily will clash with the plan we must also try to implement of making Afghanistan reasonably secure and reasonably prosperous. Today they can barely feed themselves: an estimated 42 percent live on the equivalent of about 7¢ a day. It will be decades, if ever, before they can shoulder the sort of war we want them to fight.
The fourth result is (mercifully perhaps) a future danger: it is that since balancing civil institutions are weak and will take years to become strong, a military force on the scale General McChrystal is beginning to build is likely to lead once again to a dictatorship of the kind that destroyed the earlier attempts in the 1920s and 1960s to build a reformist, modern state.
Thus, it seems to me that the message Ambassador Eide has delivered and which many of the new “experts” on Afghanistan also espouse would lead us in precisely the wrong direction – toward a period of greater threats of terrorism, further damage to our society, economy and legal system, and will result in virtually unending war.
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Three issues: tribal forms of gov, jobs,Afghan expats
Spiegel Online
01/26/2010 05:04 PM
A New Look at Afghanistan
'Civil Society Is Very Much Alive'
Can civilian reconstruction efforts help win Afghan "hearts and minds"? In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Afghanistan expert Almut Wieland-Karimi discusses why tribal forms of government may be more suitable to Afghanistan, the wisdom of using employment rates as a benchmark for success and how expat Afghans can help the reconstruction effort.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: NATO foreign ministers are gathering in London on Thursday to discuss the path forward for the Western alliance's engagement in Afghanistan. You have advised the conference's participants to listen to the Afghans more. What does that mean?
Wieland-Karimi: Afghanistan's civil society is very much alive. We just finally have to listen to the ongoing debates. In the country's big cities, in particular, intellectuals, journalists and tribal representatives are debating how Afghanistan should best be governed and organized.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What proposals are currently being discussed?
Wieland-Karimi: Western powers always present free elections as the most desirable outcome. But the latest presidential elections -- with all their irregularities and reports of fraud -- have disillusioned many Afghans. From people close to President Hamid Karzai and even Taliban representatives, we are currently hearing suggestions to hold a loya jirga, the traditional tribal gathering, in addition to elections. The possibility of such a convention is even mentioned in the Afghan Constitution.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What would such a gathering look like?
Wieland-Karimi: In the 18th century, a loya jirga formed the basis for the modern Afghan nation. Nowadays, it would most likely be a mix of traditional and more modern elements, with regional representatives and tribal leaders participating. One of the issues they could debate is the question of whether a presidential system can really work in a traditionally decentralized nation like Afghanistan. One potential alternative would be a more federal system and the chance for Afghans to elect their governors directly. They are currently appointed by the president in Kabul.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Would President Karzai ever support an idea like this, given that it could reduce his power?
Wieland-Karimi: That depends on the framing of such a proposal. Would Karzai perceive it as a project of the Western powers intended to drive him out of power? Or would he have to see it as a proposal made by Afghan civil society, which would be much harder for him to dismiss?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Once again, the Americans are floating the idea of negotiating with Taliban fighters directly. How could that work?
Wieland-Karimi: Everyone talks about the Taliban, but it's not a homogenous group. Sure, we see Taliban fighters with an ideological agenda determined to transform Afghanistan into a safe haven for terror groups, such as al-Qaida. But many of the current Taliban fighters are Afghan men aged 25 or less -- and out of work. The Taliban offers them money, work and food. That is a very attractive offer to many young people. However, such fighters could be considered "moderates" since they lack of an ideological agenda. They could be open to concrete offers made by the Afghan government or the Western powers.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Could you estimate how many Taliban fighters could be seen as "moderates"?
Wieland-Karimi: Serious estimates are difficult to make, but we know that roughly 70 percent of the Afghan people are under 25 years old. Our goal should be to win the "hearts and minds" of this group, particularly of the young men. They need work, and getting them to work should be the key focus of our dialogue. We are used to measuring progress in miles of streets or hospitals being built, but it would make much more sense to use the level of employment for young male Afghans as an essential benchmark.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: In 2002, at the beginning of the NATO mission, there was a huge amount of enthusiasm in the local civil society for Western aid. Has it all evaporated since then?
Wieland-Karimi: Not necessarily. Young Afghans desire work and good prospects, just like their contemporaries in other countries. But it's true that this enthusiasm has declined considerably over the past eight years. People in Afghanistan have simply had to deal with too many setbacks.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Will your proposals be placed on the agenda for discussion in London?
Wieland-Karimi: There are many good ideas on the table. As always, the problem lies in the implementation. Afghan civil society needs to become the focus of our activities. Once a local village has been pacified, civil aid workers need to start the reconstruction effort. Still, the big question remains: What group of civilians can fulfill this mission?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Couldn't the military help out? For instance, soldiers who have been specifically trained to interact with Afghan natives?
Wieland-Karimi: I don't think that's a good idea. We need close coordination between the military and civilian helpers. But both sides should focus on what they do best. A good proposal, however, is to get more Afghan expats involved in the civilian aid project. The Americans -- with their Afghan expat community of almost 500,000 -- have relied on this group heavily. A civilian aid worker who speaks the native language and is familiar with the cultural attitudes of the country is an invaluable asset. We have about 100,000 Afghan expats living in Germany. We should try much harder to make them a part of our civilian effort in Afghanistan. But, so far, our government has hardly tried this.
Interview conducted by Gregor Peter Schmitz
URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,674080,00.html
01/26/2010 05:04 PM
A New Look at Afghanistan
'Civil Society Is Very Much Alive'
Can civilian reconstruction efforts help win Afghan "hearts and minds"? In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Afghanistan expert Almut Wieland-Karimi discusses why tribal forms of government may be more suitable to Afghanistan, the wisdom of using employment rates as a benchmark for success and how expat Afghans can help the reconstruction effort.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: NATO foreign ministers are gathering in London on Thursday to discuss the path forward for the Western alliance's engagement in Afghanistan. You have advised the conference's participants to listen to the Afghans more. What does that mean?
Wieland-Karimi: Afghanistan's civil society is very much alive. We just finally have to listen to the ongoing debates. In the country's big cities, in particular, intellectuals, journalists and tribal representatives are debating how Afghanistan should best be governed and organized.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What proposals are currently being discussed?
Wieland-Karimi: Western powers always present free elections as the most desirable outcome. But the latest presidential elections -- with all their irregularities and reports of fraud -- have disillusioned many Afghans. From people close to President Hamid Karzai and even Taliban representatives, we are currently hearing suggestions to hold a loya jirga, the traditional tribal gathering, in addition to elections. The possibility of such a convention is even mentioned in the Afghan Constitution.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What would such a gathering look like?
Wieland-Karimi: In the 18th century, a loya jirga formed the basis for the modern Afghan nation. Nowadays, it would most likely be a mix of traditional and more modern elements, with regional representatives and tribal leaders participating. One of the issues they could debate is the question of whether a presidential system can really work in a traditionally decentralized nation like Afghanistan. One potential alternative would be a more federal system and the chance for Afghans to elect their governors directly. They are currently appointed by the president in Kabul.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Would President Karzai ever support an idea like this, given that it could reduce his power?
Wieland-Karimi: That depends on the framing of such a proposal. Would Karzai perceive it as a project of the Western powers intended to drive him out of power? Or would he have to see it as a proposal made by Afghan civil society, which would be much harder for him to dismiss?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Once again, the Americans are floating the idea of negotiating with Taliban fighters directly. How could that work?
Wieland-Karimi: Everyone talks about the Taliban, but it's not a homogenous group. Sure, we see Taliban fighters with an ideological agenda determined to transform Afghanistan into a safe haven for terror groups, such as al-Qaida. But many of the current Taliban fighters are Afghan men aged 25 or less -- and out of work. The Taliban offers them money, work and food. That is a very attractive offer to many young people. However, such fighters could be considered "moderates" since they lack of an ideological agenda. They could be open to concrete offers made by the Afghan government or the Western powers.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Could you estimate how many Taliban fighters could be seen as "moderates"?
Wieland-Karimi: Serious estimates are difficult to make, but we know that roughly 70 percent of the Afghan people are under 25 years old. Our goal should be to win the "hearts and minds" of this group, particularly of the young men. They need work, and getting them to work should be the key focus of our dialogue. We are used to measuring progress in miles of streets or hospitals being built, but it would make much more sense to use the level of employment for young male Afghans as an essential benchmark.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: In 2002, at the beginning of the NATO mission, there was a huge amount of enthusiasm in the local civil society for Western aid. Has it all evaporated since then?
Wieland-Karimi: Not necessarily. Young Afghans desire work and good prospects, just like their contemporaries in other countries. But it's true that this enthusiasm has declined considerably over the past eight years. People in Afghanistan have simply had to deal with too many setbacks.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Will your proposals be placed on the agenda for discussion in London?
Wieland-Karimi: There are many good ideas on the table. As always, the problem lies in the implementation. Afghan civil society needs to become the focus of our activities. Once a local village has been pacified, civil aid workers need to start the reconstruction effort. Still, the big question remains: What group of civilians can fulfill this mission?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Couldn't the military help out? For instance, soldiers who have been specifically trained to interact with Afghan natives?
Wieland-Karimi: I don't think that's a good idea. We need close coordination between the military and civilian helpers. But both sides should focus on what they do best. A good proposal, however, is to get more Afghan expats involved in the civilian aid project. The Americans -- with their Afghan expat community of almost 500,000 -- have relied on this group heavily. A civilian aid worker who speaks the native language and is familiar with the cultural attitudes of the country is an invaluable asset. We have about 100,000 Afghan expats living in Germany. We should try much harder to make them a part of our civilian effort in Afghanistan. But, so far, our government has hardly tried this.
Interview conducted by Gregor Peter Schmitz
URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,674080,00.html
Sunday, January 24, 2010
US and UK put pressure on Karzai government
Here are the principal points from an article found in today's Independent newspaper (UK, on-line).
The US and UK administrations are putting pressure on President Karzai to expedite efforts to ban a key ingredient used in "improvised roadside explosives.
Karzai is also being asked to meet certain deadlines with respect to the number of Afghans sent to the British and US trainers for police and military training. General McCrystal wants training to be completed by October 2011 for a total of 171,000 troops and 134,000 police.
Bob
--------------------------------
On the eve of a London conference on his country, Afghanistan's President bans key ingredient used in insurgents' bombs
By Jane Merrick
Sunday, 24 January 2010 - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/karzai-takes-on-the-roadside-bombmakers-1877279
President Hamid Karzai has banned a key ingredient in the roadside bombs that have killed hundreds of British, American and Nato soldiers in his country as he moved to reassure the international community that he is acting against terrorism ahead of a major conference on Afghanistan this week.
The Afghan government outlawed the use of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, used by the Taliban in 90 per cent of improvised roadside explosives, on the eve of the London conference to set out a political and military plan for the region. President Karzai will join US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gordon Brown for the one-day meeting, chaired by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, on Thursday. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and foreign ministers of Afghanistan's leading regional partners will also attend.
It will follow an emergency conference on Yemen in London on Wednesday, prompted by the heightened threat of terrorism following the attempted airplane attack on Christmas Day, which it is suspected was hatched in the country.
The Afghanistan conference will set out a strategy for the next 12 months, including milestones for President Karzai's government to pass before the eventual handover of military control and political governance to Kabul.
At the London gathering, President Karzai will propose a plan, funded by Western governments, to offer money and jobs to rank-and-file Taliban fighters, who are not members of al-Qa'ida or other terror groups, in an attempt to persuade them to switch sides and bring an end to the fighting. Taliban commanders pay their foot soldiers higher rates than government forces, but wages for Afghan forces would rise from $120 (£75) a month to $165 a month.
Mrs Clinton unveiled a plan last week, to be presented in London, for the stabilisation of Afghanistan, also including bringing low-level fighters back into mainstream society. Taliban leaders have been excluded from the reintegration plans, but yesterday Pakistan's foreign ministry said it was reaching out to "all levels" of the Taliban in an attempt to bring peace to Afghanistan.
The British government wants the conference to approve a timetable for transferring power to Afghan security forces and government.
At the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in November, Mr Brown called on Kabul to identify within three months from the date of the conference additional Afghan troops to be sent to Helmand for training. By six months, there should be a clear plan for police training, including tackling corruption, while within nine months some 400 provincial and district governors should be appointed. Within a year, the Prime Minister said, 50,000 additional Afghan troops must be trained, taking the total number of soldiers to 134,000. At least five out of 34 provinces should be under Afghan control within a year.
US General Stanley McChrystal, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, wants the London meeting to set a target of 171,000 Afghan soldiers by October 2011, and police numbers to increase from 94,000 to 134,000 by that date.
The scale of the task facing world leaders was underlined on Friday with another death of a British soldier from an explosive device in Helmand. The soldier from A Company 4 Rifles was the 250th to be killed in the country.
Nato troops have seized tons of ammonium nitrate fertiliser over the past five months in southern Afghanistan, but the new ban is designed to send a message that the government is doing everything it can to curb the insurgency. President Karzai banned the use, production, storage, purchase or sale of the fertiliser and farmers have one month to turn in their stocks or face prosecution.
The Afghan president is under intense pressure to act against terrorism and corruption following his disputed second-term election last year. Mr Miliband last week said the Afghan government needed to show it was taking steps. Writing in the New Statesman, the Foreign Secretary said: "To remain resistant to Taliban intimidation, Afghans need to know that their government can provide basic justice and maintain order."
Mrs Clinton said on Thursday: "What [Afghans] want is a government that can and will function, and we are expecting a lot from President Karzai and his new government."
US President Barack Obama has set a timeline of July 2011 for the start of a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, echoed by Mr Brown.
The Independent on Sunday has led calls for a withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan within a year, while leaders in other EU countries are under pressure to demand a speeded-up withdrawal. Germany is among those said to be frustrated at the lengthy commitment.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who will not attend the talks at Lancaster House, central London, but who is instead sending her foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, yesterday stressed her country's commitment to training Afghan troops. She will hold talks in Berlin with President Karzai this week before he travels to London for the conference.
The meeting will also highlight the effort needed by Pakistan to tackle terrorism in its country and border areas with Afghanistan.
Pakistan's foreign ministry said yesterday that the government was reaching out to "all levels" of the Afghan Taliban to end the insurgency against Kabul.
The talks on Yemen on Wednesday will bring together the foreign ministers of the country's main development partners, including the US and Saudi Arabia. Britain arranged the conference to coincide with the Afghanistan meeting after a Yemen-based al-Qa'ida group claimed it was behind the failed bid to blow up the Amsterdam to Detroit plane on 25 December.
The talks will focus on security and development funding to prevent Yemen becoming a failed state and being used by al-Qa'ida to launch further attacks. The Yemen government is also contending with a Shia revolt in the north and separatist movement in the south.
Underscoring the fragility of the its authority over the country, the bodies of 20 of 26 Saudi soldiers reported missing were yesterday found on the border after fighting against Shia rebels.
US General David Petraeus, who discussed military co-operation with Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh earlier this month, pledged a doubling of aid from Washington to the country, taking it to $140m (£87m).
Saudi Arabia is believed to be spending between $200m and $300m a year on helping Yemeni security authorities conduct counter-terrorism work. Britain launched a £7m five-year justice and policing programme in the country in 2008, and earlier this month Mr Brown agreed funding with President Obama for a counter-terrorism police unit.
The US and UK administrations are putting pressure on President Karzai to expedite efforts to ban a key ingredient used in "improvised roadside explosives.
Karzai is also being asked to meet certain deadlines with respect to the number of Afghans sent to the British and US trainers for police and military training. General McCrystal wants training to be completed by October 2011 for a total of 171,000 troops and 134,000 police.
The article also notes that President Obama has set a deadline of July 2011 for the start of a withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
In addition, President Karzai will propose a plan, financed by Western governments, to offer money and jobs to rank-and-file Taliban fighters who are not affiliated with terrorist groups. The wages are designed to be higher than the Taliban commanders pay their "foot soldiers."
UK and Britain also expect the Karzai government to extend its control over provincial and district governments and to root out corruption in the government.
Comment: It remains to be seen whether these goals will be met. Past experience justifies some skepticism. It's not clear what types of jobs will be proferred to Taliban soldiers. There is nothing explicit here about rebuilding the economy or economic support for Afghan villages and towns. Obama's goals for the withdrawal of US troops, beginning in July 2011, offer few details about how many troops will be withdrawn or over what period of time. Many such pledges are qualified by "conditions on the ground."Bob
--------------------------------
On the eve of a London conference on his country, Afghanistan's President bans key ingredient used in insurgents' bombs
By Jane Merrick
Sunday, 24 January 2010 - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/karzai-takes-on-the-roadside-bombmakers-1877279
President Hamid Karzai has banned a key ingredient in the roadside bombs that have killed hundreds of British, American and Nato soldiers in his country as he moved to reassure the international community that he is acting against terrorism ahead of a major conference on Afghanistan this week.
The Afghan government outlawed the use of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, used by the Taliban in 90 per cent of improvised roadside explosives, on the eve of the London conference to set out a political and military plan for the region. President Karzai will join US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gordon Brown for the one-day meeting, chaired by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, on Thursday. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and foreign ministers of Afghanistan's leading regional partners will also attend.
It will follow an emergency conference on Yemen in London on Wednesday, prompted by the heightened threat of terrorism following the attempted airplane attack on Christmas Day, which it is suspected was hatched in the country.
The Afghanistan conference will set out a strategy for the next 12 months, including milestones for President Karzai's government to pass before the eventual handover of military control and political governance to Kabul.
At the London gathering, President Karzai will propose a plan, funded by Western governments, to offer money and jobs to rank-and-file Taliban fighters, who are not members of al-Qa'ida or other terror groups, in an attempt to persuade them to switch sides and bring an end to the fighting. Taliban commanders pay their foot soldiers higher rates than government forces, but wages for Afghan forces would rise from $120 (£75) a month to $165 a month.
Mrs Clinton unveiled a plan last week, to be presented in London, for the stabilisation of Afghanistan, also including bringing low-level fighters back into mainstream society. Taliban leaders have been excluded from the reintegration plans, but yesterday Pakistan's foreign ministry said it was reaching out to "all levels" of the Taliban in an attempt to bring peace to Afghanistan.
The British government wants the conference to approve a timetable for transferring power to Afghan security forces and government.
At the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in November, Mr Brown called on Kabul to identify within three months from the date of the conference additional Afghan troops to be sent to Helmand for training. By six months, there should be a clear plan for police training, including tackling corruption, while within nine months some 400 provincial and district governors should be appointed. Within a year, the Prime Minister said, 50,000 additional Afghan troops must be trained, taking the total number of soldiers to 134,000. At least five out of 34 provinces should be under Afghan control within a year.
US General Stanley McChrystal, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, wants the London meeting to set a target of 171,000 Afghan soldiers by October 2011, and police numbers to increase from 94,000 to 134,000 by that date.
The scale of the task facing world leaders was underlined on Friday with another death of a British soldier from an explosive device in Helmand. The soldier from A Company 4 Rifles was the 250th to be killed in the country.
Nato troops have seized tons of ammonium nitrate fertiliser over the past five months in southern Afghanistan, but the new ban is designed to send a message that the government is doing everything it can to curb the insurgency. President Karzai banned the use, production, storage, purchase or sale of the fertiliser and farmers have one month to turn in their stocks or face prosecution.
The Afghan president is under intense pressure to act against terrorism and corruption following his disputed second-term election last year. Mr Miliband last week said the Afghan government needed to show it was taking steps. Writing in the New Statesman, the Foreign Secretary said: "To remain resistant to Taliban intimidation, Afghans need to know that their government can provide basic justice and maintain order."
Mrs Clinton said on Thursday: "What [Afghans] want is a government that can and will function, and we are expecting a lot from President Karzai and his new government."
US President Barack Obama has set a timeline of July 2011 for the start of a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, echoed by Mr Brown.
The Independent on Sunday has led calls for a withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan within a year, while leaders in other EU countries are under pressure to demand a speeded-up withdrawal. Germany is among those said to be frustrated at the lengthy commitment.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who will not attend the talks at Lancaster House, central London, but who is instead sending her foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, yesterday stressed her country's commitment to training Afghan troops. She will hold talks in Berlin with President Karzai this week before he travels to London for the conference.
The meeting will also highlight the effort needed by Pakistan to tackle terrorism in its country and border areas with Afghanistan.
Pakistan's foreign ministry said yesterday that the government was reaching out to "all levels" of the Afghan Taliban to end the insurgency against Kabul.
The talks on Yemen on Wednesday will bring together the foreign ministers of the country's main development partners, including the US and Saudi Arabia. Britain arranged the conference to coincide with the Afghanistan meeting after a Yemen-based al-Qa'ida group claimed it was behind the failed bid to blow up the Amsterdam to Detroit plane on 25 December.
The talks will focus on security and development funding to prevent Yemen becoming a failed state and being used by al-Qa'ida to launch further attacks. The Yemen government is also contending with a Shia revolt in the north and separatist movement in the south.
Underscoring the fragility of the its authority over the country, the bodies of 20 of 26 Saudi soldiers reported missing were yesterday found on the border after fighting against Shia rebels.
US General David Petraeus, who discussed military co-operation with Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh earlier this month, pledged a doubling of aid from Washington to the country, taking it to $140m (£87m).
Saudi Arabia is believed to be spending between $200m and $300m a year on helping Yemeni security authorities conduct counter-terrorism work. Britain launched a £7m five-year justice and policing programme in the country in 2008, and earlier this month Mr Brown agreed funding with President Obama for a counter-terrorism police unit.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Give the Afghan people a choice on whether the occupation should continue
Published on Thursday, January 7, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
What If The People Of Afghanistan Could Choose?
by Cliff Kindy & Neil Wollman
After an intense review, President Obama recently ordered about thirty thousand more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The question is, should this decision have been made by the U.S. government? The goals for the United States are to prevent an Al Qaida threat in the homeland and to stabilize the Afghan situation, allowing for some level of central government control and a face-saving withdrawal. But who else could or should have weighed in on this decision, and what are their motivations?
The Afghan government realizes that any downsizing of the U.S. presence could threaten its hold on political power. President Karzai recently stated that he expects the U.S. military presence to continue until 2024. The U.S. public is split, mainly along party lines, between those who want an early withdrawal of troops to prevent a quagmire, and those who support the U.S. military presence and fear that withdrawal would squander the investment already made.
The missing voice among these acknowledged players is that of the Afghan public. No country can impose on another a decision that country cannot abide. History is filled with attempts by strong powers to force actions upon weaker ones. This has worked sometimes in the short run, but usually crashes in the long term. The power of democracy is its dependence upon the will of the people who are impacted by a decision.
Indeed, the Afghan citizenry seems to have no say, yet is the group that stands to gain or lose the most from the U.S. occupation. Modern warfare kills and wounds more local civilians than armed actors (about 80 percent, compared to 20 percent). Yet those civilians have little or no ability to choose their own participation.
What if Afghani citizens were to determine whether the U.S. military continues a surge or withdraws troops? Certainly this is a fitting step in encouraging democracy. It would also provide the incentive for Afghanis to really own and support a chosen policy on the ground. And perhaps the Afghanis themselves know best how to create a stable nation that does not house terrorists.
In January 2010, Iraq was to hold a referendum on withdrawing the remaining U.S. troops. This plan was scrapped when it became clear it would only reduce U.S. presence by a few months and so was not worth the logistic and financial costs. If a referendum on U.S. troop presence is of merit for Iraqi citizens, is it not also for Afghans, before U.S. troops become more firmly entrenched there?
Who knows what the Afghans would decide if the choice was theirs. Poll results in Afghanistan have varied by region and ethnicity, with a fairly large margin of error. But Afghanistan could hold a national binding referendum on U.S. military presence at the same time as planned parliamentary elections in May. (Given the experience of their last public vote, for president, improved preparations and precautions are needed.) First, the U.S. President or Congress must assert their intent to open a space to hear the voice of the Afghan people. They could encourage Afghan lawmakers to consider such a referendum as a way of respecting the will of the people and of seeking the support of their own citizens.
Would a referendum change the dynamics of the war? If the Afghanis voted to keep troops there, then the U.S. could expect better cooperation from the public (in both Afghanistan and the U.S.) and would be confident it is respecting the will of the citizens. (This is especially so if there is strong voter participation and the results show a wide margin.) It might also convince mainly skeptical world opinion and governments to provide more military and other aid. If the Afghanis voted against the troops remaining in Afghanistan, and the U.S. honors that, again we are respecting what Afghanis want for their own country. Then U.S. options might include undertaking training of police and military personnel; providing support for building the country’s economic, political, and educational systems; and making payments to militia in the same way that the U.S., perhaps in large part, bought its way out of an insurgency in Iraq. Significant resources could be made available in all these ways if there was no combat presence to financially support.
Our nation asserts that it sends its military overseas to protect freedoms at home and promote freedom and democracy elsewhere. The United States can take another step toward democracy in the world by encouraging it in Afghanistan—and it might even bring other benefits, as well. The United States can let the people of Afghanistan choose.
Cliff Kindy is an organic market gardener and has for the last twenty years worked frequently with Christian Peacemaker Teams in the war zones of the world. kindy@cpt.org [1]
Neil Wollman is Senior Fellow, Bentley Alliance for Ethics and Social Responsibility, Bentley University, and the author of a 2005 op ed suggesting that Iraqis hold a referendum concerning U.S. troop presence. NWollman@Bentley.edu [2]Note to readers: Please direct all communication to the Neil Wollman.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/07-8
What If The People Of Afghanistan Could Choose?
by Cliff Kindy & Neil Wollman
After an intense review, President Obama recently ordered about thirty thousand more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The question is, should this decision have been made by the U.S. government? The goals for the United States are to prevent an Al Qaida threat in the homeland and to stabilize the Afghan situation, allowing for some level of central government control and a face-saving withdrawal. But who else could or should have weighed in on this decision, and what are their motivations?
The Afghan government realizes that any downsizing of the U.S. presence could threaten its hold on political power. President Karzai recently stated that he expects the U.S. military presence to continue until 2024. The U.S. public is split, mainly along party lines, between those who want an early withdrawal of troops to prevent a quagmire, and those who support the U.S. military presence and fear that withdrawal would squander the investment already made.
The missing voice among these acknowledged players is that of the Afghan public. No country can impose on another a decision that country cannot abide. History is filled with attempts by strong powers to force actions upon weaker ones. This has worked sometimes in the short run, but usually crashes in the long term. The power of democracy is its dependence upon the will of the people who are impacted by a decision.
Indeed, the Afghan citizenry seems to have no say, yet is the group that stands to gain or lose the most from the U.S. occupation. Modern warfare kills and wounds more local civilians than armed actors (about 80 percent, compared to 20 percent). Yet those civilians have little or no ability to choose their own participation.
What if Afghani citizens were to determine whether the U.S. military continues a surge or withdraws troops? Certainly this is a fitting step in encouraging democracy. It would also provide the incentive for Afghanis to really own and support a chosen policy on the ground. And perhaps the Afghanis themselves know best how to create a stable nation that does not house terrorists.
In January 2010, Iraq was to hold a referendum on withdrawing the remaining U.S. troops. This plan was scrapped when it became clear it would only reduce U.S. presence by a few months and so was not worth the logistic and financial costs. If a referendum on U.S. troop presence is of merit for Iraqi citizens, is it not also for Afghans, before U.S. troops become more firmly entrenched there?
Who knows what the Afghans would decide if the choice was theirs. Poll results in Afghanistan have varied by region and ethnicity, with a fairly large margin of error. But Afghanistan could hold a national binding referendum on U.S. military presence at the same time as planned parliamentary elections in May. (Given the experience of their last public vote, for president, improved preparations and precautions are needed.) First, the U.S. President or Congress must assert their intent to open a space to hear the voice of the Afghan people. They could encourage Afghan lawmakers to consider such a referendum as a way of respecting the will of the people and of seeking the support of their own citizens.
Would a referendum change the dynamics of the war? If the Afghanis voted to keep troops there, then the U.S. could expect better cooperation from the public (in both Afghanistan and the U.S.) and would be confident it is respecting the will of the citizens. (This is especially so if there is strong voter participation and the results show a wide margin.) It might also convince mainly skeptical world opinion and governments to provide more military and other aid. If the Afghanis voted against the troops remaining in Afghanistan, and the U.S. honors that, again we are respecting what Afghanis want for their own country. Then U.S. options might include undertaking training of police and military personnel; providing support for building the country’s economic, political, and educational systems; and making payments to militia in the same way that the U.S., perhaps in large part, bought its way out of an insurgency in Iraq. Significant resources could be made available in all these ways if there was no combat presence to financially support.
Our nation asserts that it sends its military overseas to protect freedoms at home and promote freedom and democracy elsewhere. The United States can take another step toward democracy in the world by encouraging it in Afghanistan—and it might even bring other benefits, as well. The United States can let the people of Afghanistan choose.
Cliff Kindy is an organic market gardener and has for the last twenty years worked frequently with Christian Peacemaker Teams in the war zones of the world. kindy@cpt.org [1]
Neil Wollman is Senior Fellow, Bentley Alliance for Ethics and Social Responsibility, Bentley University, and the author of a 2005 op ed suggesting that Iraqis hold a referendum concerning U.S. troop presence. NWollman@Bentley.edu [2]Note to readers: Please direct all communication to the Neil Wollman.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/07-8
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
What does the US government owe the Afghan people and why this debt will go unpaid while the occupation continues?
Regarding Afghanistan, Jon Wiener offers his views below on what the US government can do to make up for the devastation and human losses for which it is directly and indirectly responsible over the last three decades. There are three parts of his proposal, namely, that we support a democratic government, fight a different kind of war, and stay in the country for an indefinite number of years. By "a different kind of war," he means that "we stop killing civilians, work locally, disown corrupt officials, emphasize social and economic construction."
Wiener says we are not achieving any of what he would like to see us achieve, with the implication that we are failing the Afghan people, likely to continue to fail them, as the mis-conceived and mis-directed US-led occupation compounds the damage. He emphasizes that we have been working with a corrupt, undemocratic government, fighting a war that kills and maims civilians and that spends far more on the military occupation than on re-building the social and economic structures of local villages.
On this blogsite, we have taken the position, given the circumstances, that the Afghan people can best be served by the withdrawal of US troops and an end of the occupation. Malalai Joya and many other authors whose articles we have printed call for a withdrawal of foreign troops as well. The thrust of how we differ from Wiener is that the reconstruction of Afghan should not be expected from US leadership but should come from regional governments, international support through the UN, and from some experienced NGO and independent efforts on the ground. Most importantly, however, is that the Afghan people in the villages and towns that criss-cross Afghanistan play the major role in defining the specific reconstruction that is undertaken in their various parts of the country. None of this now seems likely.
Thus, we hold to the position that the war in and occupation of Afghanistan should be stopped, hopefully while plans are developed with true Afghan leaders that will support the reconstruction goals and improve the lives of the Afghan people themselves.
Bob
----------------------------------
The Best Argument for the Afghan War - and What's Wrong with It
posted by Jon Wiener on 12/17/2009 @ 10:40pm
http://www.thenation.com/notion/507353/
For those of us on the left, the best argument in favor of the Afghan war is not Obama's claim that we need to stop Al Qaeda from returning to its bases in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda doesn't need to be in Afghanistan, the 9-11 plot was hatched by Saudis in Hamburg and Miami, and they can relocate to Somalia or Yemen or someplace else if they need to. (They have already relocated to Pakistan.)
The best argument is that we have an obligation to the Afghan people – especially to the feminists, secular teachers, labor organizers, health workers, democrats, all those working to build a secular, civil society. We encouraged them to help create a real alternative to religious fundamentalism. It would be wrong now to abandon them to the Taliban.
That argument is made by Michael Walzer at the Dissent magazine website, where he writes that "a version of democratic politics has emerged" in Afghanistan -- "radically incomplete but valuable still. And all the people involved in these different activities would be at risk--at risk for their lives--if the United States simply withdrew."
That is an argument that Obama did not make.
If we accept the argument that we have incurred an obligation to protect democratic activists in Afghanistan, what exactly do we owe them? First of all, we owe it to them not to support an undemocratic government there. The Karzai government exists only because the US created and sustained it, despite massive election fraud, monumental corruption, and myriad failures to win popular support.
If we accept the obligations argument, we also owe it to the Afghans to fight a different kind of war – to stop attacking and killing large numbers of civilians. The way we have been fighting the war creates more enemies than are killed. Walzer is hopeful that Obama has "replaced the people who did everything wrong with people who are trying to do everything right." That means the US military must "stop killing civilians, work locally, disown corrupt officials, emphasize social and economic reconstruction." They have not been doing this for nine years, partly because that kind of careful, close-in fighting creates more American casualties than bombing suspected enemy locations.
And this commitment to Afghan democrats is not going to end in July 2010; it is open-ended. As long as the Afghan army and police are unable to protect teachers, feminists, health care workers, etc., we seem to have obligation to protect them – for as long as the Taliban fights to create their own Islamic state.
So: we owe it to the Afghans to support a democratic government, to fight a different kind of war, and for an indefinite number of years.
"One of the key criteria of a just war," Walzer writes, "is that there be a realistic possibility of achieving a just peace." He knows that "it may be too late" for that. But we need to ask: Is there a realistic possibility the US will abandon Karzai in favor of a democratic government? that the US military will fight the right kind of war? That the American people will be willing to keep paying for this war for many more years? What's wrong with the obligations argument is that the answer to each of these questions is "no."
Wiener says we are not achieving any of what he would like to see us achieve, with the implication that we are failing the Afghan people, likely to continue to fail them, as the mis-conceived and mis-directed US-led occupation compounds the damage. He emphasizes that we have been working with a corrupt, undemocratic government, fighting a war that kills and maims civilians and that spends far more on the military occupation than on re-building the social and economic structures of local villages.
On this blogsite, we have taken the position, given the circumstances, that the Afghan people can best be served by the withdrawal of US troops and an end of the occupation. Malalai Joya and many other authors whose articles we have printed call for a withdrawal of foreign troops as well. The thrust of how we differ from Wiener is that the reconstruction of Afghan should not be expected from US leadership but should come from regional governments, international support through the UN, and from some experienced NGO and independent efforts on the ground. Most importantly, however, is that the Afghan people in the villages and towns that criss-cross Afghanistan play the major role in defining the specific reconstruction that is undertaken in their various parts of the country. None of this now seems likely.
Thus, we hold to the position that the war in and occupation of Afghanistan should be stopped, hopefully while plans are developed with true Afghan leaders that will support the reconstruction goals and improve the lives of the Afghan people themselves.
Bob
----------------------------------
The Best Argument for the Afghan War - and What's Wrong with It
posted by Jon Wiener on 12/17/2009 @ 10:40pm
http://www.thenation.com/notion/507353/
For those of us on the left, the best argument in favor of the Afghan war is not Obama's claim that we need to stop Al Qaeda from returning to its bases in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda doesn't need to be in Afghanistan, the 9-11 plot was hatched by Saudis in Hamburg and Miami, and they can relocate to Somalia or Yemen or someplace else if they need to. (They have already relocated to Pakistan.)
The best argument is that we have an obligation to the Afghan people – especially to the feminists, secular teachers, labor organizers, health workers, democrats, all those working to build a secular, civil society. We encouraged them to help create a real alternative to religious fundamentalism. It would be wrong now to abandon them to the Taliban.
That argument is made by Michael Walzer at the Dissent magazine website, where he writes that "a version of democratic politics has emerged" in Afghanistan -- "radically incomplete but valuable still. And all the people involved in these different activities would be at risk--at risk for their lives--if the United States simply withdrew."
That is an argument that Obama did not make.
If we accept the argument that we have incurred an obligation to protect democratic activists in Afghanistan, what exactly do we owe them? First of all, we owe it to them not to support an undemocratic government there. The Karzai government exists only because the US created and sustained it, despite massive election fraud, monumental corruption, and myriad failures to win popular support.
If we accept the obligations argument, we also owe it to the Afghans to fight a different kind of war – to stop attacking and killing large numbers of civilians. The way we have been fighting the war creates more enemies than are killed. Walzer is hopeful that Obama has "replaced the people who did everything wrong with people who are trying to do everything right." That means the US military must "stop killing civilians, work locally, disown corrupt officials, emphasize social and economic reconstruction." They have not been doing this for nine years, partly because that kind of careful, close-in fighting creates more American casualties than bombing suspected enemy locations.
And this commitment to Afghan democrats is not going to end in July 2010; it is open-ended. As long as the Afghan army and police are unable to protect teachers, feminists, health care workers, etc., we seem to have obligation to protect them – for as long as the Taliban fights to create their own Islamic state.
So: we owe it to the Afghans to support a democratic government, to fight a different kind of war, and for an indefinite number of years.
"One of the key criteria of a just war," Walzer writes, "is that there be a realistic possibility of achieving a just peace." He knows that "it may be too late" for that. But we need to ask: Is there a realistic possibility the US will abandon Karzai in favor of a democratic government? that the US military will fight the right kind of war? That the American people will be willing to keep paying for this war for many more years? What's wrong with the obligations argument is that the answer to each of these questions is "no."
Friday, December 11, 2009
An alternative to escalation - Development projects for selected local communities
I found the following testimony by Rory Stewart on a Harvard Kennedy School website. Rory Stewart is one of the experts highlighted on the video Rethink Afghanistan. He has spent a considerable period of time in Afghanistan. You can see a short biography of Stewart at the end of the article. He takes the position that a large foreign military occupation of the country is doomed to failure and a waste of resources. He thinks that a better policy would be to start small, by assisting selected local communities with the resources to meet specific needs. Such projects could be protected from insurgents by relatively few troops and limited counter-terrorism, and implicitly by the support of local tribal leaders. He also suggests that when successful they can serve as attractive models for other communities and be mulitiplied. In the meantime, his advice, like that of others presented in Rethink Afhanistan, has been ignored or overshadowed by President Obama's decision to escalate the number of US troops being sent to the country.
Bob
-----------------------------
Testimony of Rory Stewart, Senate on Foreign Relations Committee HearingSeptember 16th 2009The Future in Afghanistan
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/testimonies/rory-stewart-on-afghanistan
The administration’s new policy on Afghanistan has a very narrow focus – counter-terrorism – and a very broad definition of how to achieve it: no less than the fixing of the Afghan state and defeating the Taliban insurgency. President Obama has presented this in a formal argument. The final goal in the region is ‘to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future’. A necessary condition of the defeat of al-Qaida is the defeat of the Taliban because ‘if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban, that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.’ He, therefore, proposes a counter-insurgency strategy, which includes the deployment of more troops ‘to take the fight to the Taliban in the south and the east’ and a more comprehensive approach, which aims to ‘promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government . . . advance security, opportunity and justice . . . develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.’
This policy is rooted in the pre-set categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, state-building and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that policy-makers appear to put them in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don’t have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, ‘If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists.’ These connections are global: in Obama’s words, ‘our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others.’ Indeed, at times it seems that all these activities – building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al-Qaida and eliminating poverty – are the same activity. The new US army and marine corps counter-insurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank policy document, replete with commitments to the rule of law, economic development, governance, state-building and human rights. In Obama’s words, ‘security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project.
The fundamental problem with the strategy is that it is trying to do the impossible. It is highly unlikely that the US will be able either to build an effective, legitimate state or to defeat a Taliban insurgency . It needs to find another way of protecting the US against terrorist attack.
We claim to be engaged in a neutral, technocratic, universal project of ‘statebuilding’ but we don’t know exactly what that means. Those who see Afghanistan as reverting to the Taliban or becoming a traditional autocratic state are referring to situations that existed there in 1972 and 1994. But the international community’s ambition appears to be to create something that has not existed before. Obama calls it ‘a more capable and accountable Afghangovernment’. The US, the UK and their allies agreed unanimously at the Nato 60th anniversary summit in April to create ‘a stronger democratic state’ in Afghanistan.’
Whatever this state is, it could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. As we have seen over the last seven years – and most starkly in the recent election – Afghan government is certainly unlikely in the next five years to reflect US ideas of legitimacy, legal process, civil service function, rights, economic behavior or even broader international assumption about development. Even an aim as modest as ‘stability’ is highly ambitious. Afghanistan is a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values. A centralizing constitution may well be combined with de facto local independence and Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. And Pakistan clearly still does not have whatever mixture of state-formation, legitimacy, accountability or effectiveness that is apparently necessary to prevent the Taliban and Al Qaeda from operating.
Nor is it clear that even if stronger central institutions were to emerge that they would they assist US national security objectives. Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely becausePakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.
Secondly, it is highly unlikely that the US will be able to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. The ingredients of successful counter-insurgency campaigns in places like Malaya – control of the borders, large numbers of troops in relation to the population, strong support from the majority ethnic groups, a long-term commitment and a credible local government – are lacking in Afghanistan.
Nor is Afghanistan, comparable to Iraq. There are no mass political parties in Afghanistan and the Kabul government lacks the base, strength or legitimacy of the Baghdad government. Afghan tribal groups lack the coherence of the Iraqi Sunni tribes and their relation to state structures: they are not being driven out of neighbourhood after neighbourhood and they do not have the same relation to the Taliban that the Sunni groups had to ‘al-Qaida in Iraq’. Afghans are weary of the war but the Afghan chiefs are not approaching us, seeking a deal. Since the political players and state structures in Afghanistan are much more fragile than those in Iraq, they are less likely to play a strong role in ending the insurgency.
A strategy of ‘clear, hold and build’ seems particularly implausible in Afghanistan. In Iraq – which is a much more urban society –it was possible for US and Iraqi security forces around Baghdad to ‘clear and hold’ ground because the geographical area was relatively limited. Afghanistan has an overwhelmingly rural population scattered through an inhospitable terrain, the size of Texas and encompassing perhaps thousand villages. Even a hundred thousand US troops would be far too few to hold or garrison even a fraction of such a vast area. In Iraq, a tradition of strong central government and a much more educated population with an indigenous resource base at least allowed for the possibility of ‘building’, following the ‘clear and hold.’ In Afghanistan the lack of the most basic education and capacity and will in governmental structures (and even in the private sector) means that very little of substance could be ‘built’ during the time that the US and its allies attempted to ‘hold’.
Meanwhile, the Taliban can exploit the ideology of religious resistance that the West deliberately fostered in the 1980s to defeat the Russians. They can portray the Kabul government as US slaves, Nato as an infidel occupying force and their own insurgency as a jihad. Their complaints about corruption, human rights abuses and aerial bombardments appeal to a large audience. They are attracting Afghans to their rural courts by giving quicker and more predictable rulings than government judges. They can now easily exploit the corrupt practices in the election to portray the Kabul government as fraudulent and illegitimate. But our inability to inflict a final defeat on the Taliban may not be as dangerous as policy-makers imagine.
If the administration cannot create an effective, stable, legitimate state and cannot defeat a Taliban insurgency it must find another method of protecting US national security and fulfilling our obligations to the Afghan people. And if it is impossible to build a state or defeat the Taliban, there is no point in deploying a hundred thousand troops or spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan.
The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state or winning a counter-insurgency campaign. A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. Even a light US presence could continue to allow for aggressive operations against Al Qaeda terrorists, in Afghanistan, who plan to attack the United States. The US has successfully prevent Al Qaeda from re-establishing itself since 2001 (though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.). The US military could also (with other forms of assistance) support the Afghan military to prevent the Taliban from seizing a city or taking over the country.
These twin objectives will require a very long-term presence, as indeed is almost inevitable in a country which is as poor, as fragile and traumatized as Afghanistan(and which lacks the internal capacity at the moment to become independent of Foreign aid or control its territory). But a long-term presence will in turn mean a much lighter and more limited presence (if it is to retain US domestic support). We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.
Such a policy can seem strained, unrealistic, counter-intuitive and unappealing. They appear to betray the hopes of Afghans who trusted us and to allow the Taliban to abuse district towns. No politician wants to be perceived to have underestimated, or failed to address, a terrorist threat; or to write off the ‘blood and treasure’ that we have sunk into Afghanistan; or to admit defeat. Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble; Obama’s motto is not ‘no we can’t’; soldiers are not trained to admit defeat or to say a mission is impossible. And to suggest that what worked in Iraq won’t work in Afghanistan requires a detailed knowledge of each country’s past, a bold analysis of the causes of development and a rigorous exposition of the differences, for which few have patience.
The greatest risk of our inflated ambitions and fears, encapsulated in the current surge is that it will achieve the exact opposite of its intentions and in fact precipitate a total withdrawal. The heavier our footprint, and the more costly, the less we are likely to be able to sustain it. Public opinion is already turning against it. Nato allies are mostly staying in Afghanistan simply to please the United States and have little confidence in our objectives or our reasons.
Contemporary political culture tends to encourage black and white solutions: either we garrison or we abandon.While, I strongly oppose troop increases, I equally strongly oppose a total flight. We are currently in danger of lurching from troop increases to withdrawal and from engagement to isolation. We are threatening to provide instant electro-shock therapy followed by abandonment. This is the last thing Afghanistan needs. The international community should aim to provide a patient, tolerant long-term relationship with a country as poor and traumatized as Afghanistan. Judging by comparable countries in the developing world (and Afghanistan is very near the bottom of the UN Human Development index), making Afghanistan more stable, prosperous and humane is a project which will take decades. It is a worthwhile project in the long-term for us and for Afghans but we will only be able to sustain our presence if we massively reduce our investment and our ambitions and begin to approach Afghanistan more as we do other poor countries in the developing world. The best way of avoiding the mistakes of the 1980s and 1990s – the familiar cycle of investment and abandonment which most Afghan expect and fear and which have contributed so much to instability and danger - is to husband and conserve our resources, limit our objectives to counter-terrorism and humanitarian assistance and work out how to work with fewer troops and less money over a longer period. In Afghanistan in the long-term, less will be more.
About Rory Stewart:Rory Stewart, Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, studied at Oxford and served briefly in the British army before working in the diplomatic service in Indonesia and as British representative to Montenegro. From 2000 to 2002 he walked 6,000 miles on foot from Turkey to Bangladesh – a journey described in his New York Times bestseller, The Places in Between. In 2003, he was appointed as the Coalition Provisional Authority deputy governor of two provinces in Southern Iraq, a period described in his second book, The Prince of the Marshes. He has presented BBC documentaries, been a visiting columnist for the New York Times and written extensively on intervention. In 2005, he moved to Afghanistan where he founded the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, an NGO dedicated to Afghan traditional crafts and the regeneration of the historic commercial center of Kabul.
Copyright © 2008 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bob
-----------------------------
Testimony of Rory Stewart, Senate on Foreign Relations Committee HearingSeptember 16th 2009The Future in Afghanistan
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/testimonies/rory-stewart-on-afghanistan
The administration’s new policy on Afghanistan has a very narrow focus – counter-terrorism – and a very broad definition of how to achieve it: no less than the fixing of the Afghan state and defeating the Taliban insurgency. President Obama has presented this in a formal argument. The final goal in the region is ‘to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future’. A necessary condition of the defeat of al-Qaida is the defeat of the Taliban because ‘if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban, that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.’ He, therefore, proposes a counter-insurgency strategy, which includes the deployment of more troops ‘to take the fight to the Taliban in the south and the east’ and a more comprehensive approach, which aims to ‘promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government . . . advance security, opportunity and justice . . . develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.’
This policy is rooted in the pre-set categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, state-building and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that policy-makers appear to put them in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don’t have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, ‘If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists.’ These connections are global: in Obama’s words, ‘our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others.’ Indeed, at times it seems that all these activities – building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al-Qaida and eliminating poverty – are the same activity. The new US army and marine corps counter-insurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank policy document, replete with commitments to the rule of law, economic development, governance, state-building and human rights. In Obama’s words, ‘security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project.
The fundamental problem with the strategy is that it is trying to do the impossible. It is highly unlikely that the US will be able either to build an effective, legitimate state or to defeat a Taliban insurgency . It needs to find another way of protecting the US against terrorist attack.
We claim to be engaged in a neutral, technocratic, universal project of ‘statebuilding’ but we don’t know exactly what that means. Those who see Afghanistan as reverting to the Taliban or becoming a traditional autocratic state are referring to situations that existed there in 1972 and 1994. But the international community’s ambition appears to be to create something that has not existed before. Obama calls it ‘a more capable and accountable Afghangovernment’. The US, the UK and their allies agreed unanimously at the Nato 60th anniversary summit in April to create ‘a stronger democratic state’ in Afghanistan.’
Whatever this state is, it could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. As we have seen over the last seven years – and most starkly in the recent election – Afghan government is certainly unlikely in the next five years to reflect US ideas of legitimacy, legal process, civil service function, rights, economic behavior or even broader international assumption about development. Even an aim as modest as ‘stability’ is highly ambitious. Afghanistan is a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values. A centralizing constitution may well be combined with de facto local independence and Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. And Pakistan clearly still does not have whatever mixture of state-formation, legitimacy, accountability or effectiveness that is apparently necessary to prevent the Taliban and Al Qaeda from operating.
Nor is it clear that even if stronger central institutions were to emerge that they would they assist US national security objectives. Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely becausePakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.
Secondly, it is highly unlikely that the US will be able to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. The ingredients of successful counter-insurgency campaigns in places like Malaya – control of the borders, large numbers of troops in relation to the population, strong support from the majority ethnic groups, a long-term commitment and a credible local government – are lacking in Afghanistan.
Nor is Afghanistan, comparable to Iraq. There are no mass political parties in Afghanistan and the Kabul government lacks the base, strength or legitimacy of the Baghdad government. Afghan tribal groups lack the coherence of the Iraqi Sunni tribes and their relation to state structures: they are not being driven out of neighbourhood after neighbourhood and they do not have the same relation to the Taliban that the Sunni groups had to ‘al-Qaida in Iraq’. Afghans are weary of the war but the Afghan chiefs are not approaching us, seeking a deal. Since the political players and state structures in Afghanistan are much more fragile than those in Iraq, they are less likely to play a strong role in ending the insurgency.
A strategy of ‘clear, hold and build’ seems particularly implausible in Afghanistan. In Iraq – which is a much more urban society –it was possible for US and Iraqi security forces around Baghdad to ‘clear and hold’ ground because the geographical area was relatively limited. Afghanistan has an overwhelmingly rural population scattered through an inhospitable terrain, the size of Texas and encompassing perhaps thousand villages. Even a hundred thousand US troops would be far too few to hold or garrison even a fraction of such a vast area. In Iraq, a tradition of strong central government and a much more educated population with an indigenous resource base at least allowed for the possibility of ‘building’, following the ‘clear and hold.’ In Afghanistan the lack of the most basic education and capacity and will in governmental structures (and even in the private sector) means that very little of substance could be ‘built’ during the time that the US and its allies attempted to ‘hold’.
Meanwhile, the Taliban can exploit the ideology of religious resistance that the West deliberately fostered in the 1980s to defeat the Russians. They can portray the Kabul government as US slaves, Nato as an infidel occupying force and their own insurgency as a jihad. Their complaints about corruption, human rights abuses and aerial bombardments appeal to a large audience. They are attracting Afghans to their rural courts by giving quicker and more predictable rulings than government judges. They can now easily exploit the corrupt practices in the election to portray the Kabul government as fraudulent and illegitimate. But our inability to inflict a final defeat on the Taliban may not be as dangerous as policy-makers imagine.
If the administration cannot create an effective, stable, legitimate state and cannot defeat a Taliban insurgency it must find another method of protecting US national security and fulfilling our obligations to the Afghan people. And if it is impossible to build a state or defeat the Taliban, there is no point in deploying a hundred thousand troops or spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan.
The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state or winning a counter-insurgency campaign. A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. Even a light US presence could continue to allow for aggressive operations against Al Qaeda terrorists, in Afghanistan, who plan to attack the United States. The US has successfully prevent Al Qaeda from re-establishing itself since 2001 (though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.). The US military could also (with other forms of assistance) support the Afghan military to prevent the Taliban from seizing a city or taking over the country.
These twin objectives will require a very long-term presence, as indeed is almost inevitable in a country which is as poor, as fragile and traumatized as Afghanistan(and which lacks the internal capacity at the moment to become independent of Foreign aid or control its territory). But a long-term presence will in turn mean a much lighter and more limited presence (if it is to retain US domestic support). We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.
Such a policy can seem strained, unrealistic, counter-intuitive and unappealing. They appear to betray the hopes of Afghans who trusted us and to allow the Taliban to abuse district towns. No politician wants to be perceived to have underestimated, or failed to address, a terrorist threat; or to write off the ‘blood and treasure’ that we have sunk into Afghanistan; or to admit defeat. Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble; Obama’s motto is not ‘no we can’t’; soldiers are not trained to admit defeat or to say a mission is impossible. And to suggest that what worked in Iraq won’t work in Afghanistan requires a detailed knowledge of each country’s past, a bold analysis of the causes of development and a rigorous exposition of the differences, for which few have patience.
The greatest risk of our inflated ambitions and fears, encapsulated in the current surge is that it will achieve the exact opposite of its intentions and in fact precipitate a total withdrawal. The heavier our footprint, and the more costly, the less we are likely to be able to sustain it. Public opinion is already turning against it. Nato allies are mostly staying in Afghanistan simply to please the United States and have little confidence in our objectives or our reasons.
Contemporary political culture tends to encourage black and white solutions: either we garrison or we abandon.While, I strongly oppose troop increases, I equally strongly oppose a total flight. We are currently in danger of lurching from troop increases to withdrawal and from engagement to isolation. We are threatening to provide instant electro-shock therapy followed by abandonment. This is the last thing Afghanistan needs. The international community should aim to provide a patient, tolerant long-term relationship with a country as poor and traumatized as Afghanistan. Judging by comparable countries in the developing world (and Afghanistan is very near the bottom of the UN Human Development index), making Afghanistan more stable, prosperous and humane is a project which will take decades. It is a worthwhile project in the long-term for us and for Afghans but we will only be able to sustain our presence if we massively reduce our investment and our ambitions and begin to approach Afghanistan more as we do other poor countries in the developing world. The best way of avoiding the mistakes of the 1980s and 1990s – the familiar cycle of investment and abandonment which most Afghan expect and fear and which have contributed so much to instability and danger - is to husband and conserve our resources, limit our objectives to counter-terrorism and humanitarian assistance and work out how to work with fewer troops and less money over a longer period. In Afghanistan in the long-term, less will be more.
About Rory Stewart:Rory Stewart, Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, studied at Oxford and served briefly in the British army before working in the diplomatic service in Indonesia and as British representative to Montenegro. From 2000 to 2002 he walked 6,000 miles on foot from Turkey to Bangladesh – a journey described in his New York Times bestseller, The Places in Between. In 2003, he was appointed as the Coalition Provisional Authority deputy governor of two provinces in Southern Iraq, a period described in his second book, The Prince of the Marshes. He has presented BBC documentaries, been a visiting columnist for the New York Times and written extensively on intervention. In 2005, he moved to Afghanistan where he founded the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, an NGO dedicated to Afghan traditional crafts and the regeneration of the historic commercial center of Kabul.
Copyright © 2008 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
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