Foreign Policy In Focus

Two pieces in Wednesday’s New York Times allege progress on two key fronts in the United States’ engagement in Afghanistan. Reporter Carlotta Gall offers a comparatively jubilant piece valorizing a supposed “rout” of Taliban forces in the vital province of Kandahar. Comparing the success favorably to the ill fated and highly publicized Marja incursion of last year, Gall credits much of the advance to the skillful employment of the new High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, a precision rocket-delivery system that has enabled coalition forces to attack Taliban supply routes, command centers, and weapons facilities. Taken aback by the intensity of the strikes as well as the perceived unfriendliness of some local residents, many Taliban soldiers have buried their weapons and fled for the time being to Pakistan. 

While NATO commanders express a great deal of encouragement at the development, there remains ample space for skepticism. No amount of expensive innovation in armaments can provide for a sustainable counterinsurgency operation – witness Iraq, where insurgents hobbled the massive Pentagon apparatus with the development of the IED, which is said to cost no more than a pizza. Clearing a field of weeds is of little efficacy without the sowing of a strain of seeds suitable to local conditions. While the Afghan National Army remains a relatively popular national institution, its shortcomings are well documented. However thoroughly the area is cleared of Taliban soldiers, it is difficult to imagine anyone other than the Taliban returning, as they have promised to do, or else a local warlord filling the void, the latter of which would hardly be alien to the greater thrust of American strategy in the country. While some warlords have pressed down on the Taliban, it was the very proliferation of such disreputable figures that created a climate favorable to the Taliban in the first place. 

Thus even at its most successful, a military-led counterinsurgency campaign remains inherently unsustainable. This is particularly well illustrated by a PBS Frontline piece from last year called “Obama’s War,” which documented the incursion into Marja. The piece features footage of American soldiers speaking with local residents as Taliban soldiers fire shots off in the distance. The bullets are not meant to strike anybody but rather to disrupt the conversation and remind the villagers of an undeniable political fact: the Taliban will remain long after NATO has declared victory and gotten out, and they are keeping track of who speaks to whom. With such an unmistakable cue within one’s own earshot, where would you hedge your bets?

Nicholas Kristof, in yet another piece on mountain climber turned master school builder Greg Mortenson, offers a tale of progress of a different sort. Kirstof reminds us that Mortenson has been able to bypass the security blankets of bullets and bombs to build schools even in Taliban-held territory. Staffing his development crews entirely with locals and consulting with village elders, Mortenson has provided for an education program that locals are willing defend against the Taliban, even while the organization eschews the protection of NATO soldiers.

“Aid can be done anywhere, including where Taliban are,” Mr. Mortenson said. “But it’s imperative the elders are consulted, and that the development staff is all local, with no foreigners.”

In volatile Kunar Province, which borders Pakistan, the Taliban recently ordered a halt to a school being built by Mr. Mortenson’s organization, the Central Asia Institute. But the villagers rushed to the school’s defense. The Taliban, which have been mounting a campaign for hearts and minds, dropped the issue, according to Wakil Karimi, who leads Mr. Mortenson’s team in Afghanistan.

In another part of Kunar Province, the Central Asia Institute is running a girls’ primary school and middle school in the hear t of a Taliban-controlled area. Some of the girls are 17 or 18, which is particularly problematic for fundamentalists (who don’t always mind girls getting an education as long as they drop out by puberty). Yet this school is expanding, and now has 320 girls, Mr. Karimi said. 

While the construction of schools is not a silver bullet for the Afghanistan werewolf, surprisingly simple elements of Mortenson’s approach offer a refreshing contrast to military-led efforts. Aligning educational priorities with those of local leaders, he has created space for local Taliban leaders to do the same by demonstrating the value of such projects to locals and reconfiguring the Taliban’s incentive structure. The success of this approach is born out in the experience of other Track II organizations as well: 

Government schools regularly get burned down, but villagers tell me that that’s because they’re seen as alien institutions built by outside construction crews. In contrast, CARE runs 300 schools in Afghanistan and not one has been burned down, the aid organization says. The Afghan Institute of Learning, run by a redoubtable Afghan woman named Sakena Yacoobi, has supported more than 300 schools and none have been burned, the institute says. Another great aid organization, BRAC, runs schools, clinics and microfinance programs — and operates in every single province in Afghanistan.

Then there’s the Global Partnership for Afghanistan, which is based in New York and helps Afghan villagers improve agricultural yields in the most unstable parts of the country. Some Taliban commanders have even sent word inviting the group into their areas.

One hopes that it is not passé to invoke the celebrity at the center of Three Cups of Tea. But given that we seem to have defined our Afghan strategy along a willful conflation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and given further that the Taliban are unlikely to disappear in the near term (even if they must camp out in Pakistan for a time), it seems eminently pragmatic to align our stars with those who can improve the condition of Afghanistan and nourish its hearts and minds even while keeping neighborly company with the Taliban. To invoke the lexicon of civil society, acts of solidarity will carry themselves much further than acts of imposition.

However precise, no expensive rocket system will accomplish that.

Peace talks involving the Taliban and its allies are apparently underway, according to the Asia Times (AT), and from most accounts a deal appears doable. AT’s Pakistan bureau chief Syed Saleem Shahzad reported Sept. 11 and 15^th that, under the auspices of the Pakistan military and intelligence services, “serious negotiations” were taking place, with Saudi Arabia serving as the go-between to the U.S.

That the antagonists are looking for a way out of the nine-year war is not surprising, given the deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan and the rising tide of opposition in Europe and the U.S. to continuing the war. What is surprising is that at the same time as there looks to be a possible diplomatic breakthrough, the U.S. has launched a major military operation in Kandahar.  

Is the new offensive a cover for the secret talks or an effort by the U.S. military to derail any possibility of serious negotiations?

According to the AT, while Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar has not been directly involved in the talks, according to a “Pakistan security official” the elusive cleric “has shown a positive and flexible attitude.” The talks also include Sirajuddin Haqqani, who has been a major thorn in the side of the occupation troops, particularly the U.S.

There are several sticking points, but none of them seem insurmountable. The Taliban want to talk about the 60 Afghans currently imprisoned in Guantanamo, while the U.S. wants to make sure al-Qaeda can no longer operate from within Afghanistan.

On the first point Pakistan appears hopeful that the U.S. will release the detainees. It “would be a good will gesture from the American side,” a Pakistani official told the AF, “and also set the stage for negotiations between the Taliban and Washington.” 

Regarding al-Qaeda, the Taliban say they are willing to make sure that no “outside” forces use Afghanistan as a springboard to attack other nations. The Taliban have agreed to expel the terrorist organization, but they argue that al-Qaeda be given “honorable treatment.” What that means is not clear, but it is not likely to become a major sticking point. U.S. intelligence says al-Qaeda has virtually no presence in Afghanistan. According to Shahzad, the terrorist organization is more interested in the Central Asian “Stans” and southern Russia. On Sept 9, the group set off a bomb in the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz that killed 18 people. 

According to AT, al-Qaeda would rather get the U.S. out of Afghanistan than for it to have an in-country presence, and the organization would have no objection to the Taliban cutting a deal with Washington.

The Americans also want the right to keep troops in Northern Afghanistan, the home of its major in-country allies, the Northern Alliance, but, according to officials close to the talks, the Taliban want all foreign troops out. 

The Taliban originally demanded the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan that existed at the time of the 2001 invasion. But in Ramadan talks held in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, “Taliban representatives indicated a willingness to accept a more broad-based political setup in Afghanistan,” says Shahzad.

The Taliban are still hostile to some of their internal opponents, ranging from former mujahedeen leaders to men like General Abdul Rashid Dostrum of the Northern Alliance. However, according to Pakistan officials, the group is willing to work with other people associated with their opponents, provided “they have a clean reputation and have never been involved in bloodshed.” The “clean reputation” refers to graft. As for the “bloodshed,” all sides have at one point or the other fought one another, so it is unclear what the Taliban mean. 

“The process of bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table is gaining momentum,” says Shahzad, “with the United States and its allies escalating their efforts to get America out of the Afghan quagmire.”

So then why has the U.S. launched an offensive into western Zhari near the city of Kandahar? This is the same region that the Canadians went into in 2006 and got thoroughly thrashed. Not even the U.S. commander on the ground thinks much is going to come of it. Lt. Col. Peter Benchoff of the 101^st Airborne told the Los Angeles Times that, as far as western Zhari goes, “Security sucks. Development? Nothing substantial. Information campaign? Nobody believes us. Governance? We’ve had one hour long visit by a governmental official in the last two and a half months.” 

The 101^st’s base is regularly mortared, and three contractors were killed two weeks ago by Taliban shells. The town has no schools, no clinics and no government presence.

Indeed, the situation all over the country is going downhill for the U.S. and NATO. In spite of the surge—allied troops levels have risen from 30,000 in 2005 to 150,000 today—the country is less secure and more violent than it was in 2001.

The Afghan Study Group found that American combat deaths have sharply escalated, as have roadside bombs, suicide attacks, assassinations, and civilian casualties. According to the International Security Assistance Force, shellings, bombings and small arms attacks for August 2010 were up 49 percent over August of last year. And local Afghan media sources report that there are four to five assassinations every day in Kandahar City.

For the Sept. 19 election there were 350 fewer polling places—14 percent of the total—than there were last year, because the government could not provide security. 

More than that, Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service found that there has been a sharp drop in the number of roadside bombs being reported by local people. “The percentage of Taliban roadside bombs turned in had been averaging 3.5 percent from November 2009 through March 2010,” says Porter, but after the U.S. stepped up its nighttime raids with Special Forces, “the percentage of turn-ins fell precipitously to 1.5 percent.” In short, the “surge” has deeply angered the average Afghan.

Parts of the country that used to be safe, like the north and east, are increasingly insecure, and in places like the North, most the insurgents are non-Pashtuns. Pashtuns make up the bulk of the Taliban and are mainly concentrated in the south. According to the United Nations, travel is no longer safe in 30 percent of the country, and insurgent attacks have more than doubled from a year ago—from 630 in August 2009, to 1,353 in August 2010.

The Americans attribute the rise in violence to the surge, but most of the attacks are occurring in places where the surge has no presence. “We do not support the perspective that this constitutes ‘things getting worse before they get better’,” Nic Lee, director of Afghan NGO Safety Office, told the New York Times, “but see it consistent with the five-year trend of things getting worse.” 

Under pressure to show “progress” in the Afghan war, the U.S. military has fallen back on a device it used during the war in Southeast Asia: the body count. Gen. David Petraeus told National Public Radio that this summer, NATO forces has killed or captured 2,974 insurgents, 235 of them “commanders.” But Porter found that the captures included “suspected” insurgents, which generally means anyone in the immediate vicinity of a raid. The Guardian concluded that as many as two-thirds of those detained in such raids are innocent.

Porter also questions the “commander” designation, since the Taliban is not organized into formal fighting units. “The vast majority of those ‘leaders’, it appears, were low level Taliban personnel who are easily replaced,” he says. Given that the step up in raids over the past year has not resulted in a reduction of insurgent activity—indeed, quite the opposite—Porter’s doubts seem valid. 

Is the Kandahar operation, then, blind folly—Gen. David Petraeus is lobbying for keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan for years to come—pre-negotiating positioning, or theater, because the enormous U.S. military budget is coming under increasing pressure? No one is going to suggest cutting military spending while the troops are locked in battle, a point that U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates have been arguing to Congress.

The danger is that the U.S. will step back from an opportunity to end the bloodletting in Afghanistan because Washington is worried that it will look like a defeat—it is—or because keeping the war going will armor the Pentagon from spending cuts. There was a moment like this in 2007, but the U.S. ignored a tentative Taliban peace proposal and the war got worse. If the Obama Administration is not careful, it could happen again, and the U.S. will slip deeper into the Afghan quagmire.

For more by Conn Hallinan visit Dispatches from the Edge.

Though the New York Times is a valuable source of information, its tone and content sometimes betray its mainstream liberal bias to an embarrassing degree. This Monday’s front-page piece, titled “Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap” well illustrates the point.

Published in sync with Hillary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan, the report says that the absence of an equitable tax system is helping to “[create] conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.”

Tongue-clucking about Pakistan’s failure to do its part in America’s war, it describes “a sorry performance for a country that is among the largest recipients of American aid, payments of billions of dollars that prop up the country’s finances and are meant to help its leaders fight the insurgency.”

Nowhere in the article, however, does the Times offer any evidence, statements of fact, expert commentary, or testimony from ordinary Pakistanis to substantiate its claim that its tax policy has “created the conditions” for the insurgency.

It is doubtless true that inequality is rampant in Pakistan, and it is equally true that its ruling elite is corrupt, parasitic, and stunningly myopic. But that is not unusual in a poor country, and it does not explain the rapid rise of the blistering Pakistani Taliban insurgency.

A more methodical tax collection effort would certainly bolster state revenue, but most uncollected taxes would be drawn from major cities like Karachi, which lies far to the south, and from the playgrounds of the rich that pepper Islamabad, the country’s capital.

The insurgency, on the other hand, is burgeoning in the North Western Frontier Province that lies north and borders Afghanistan. The government exercises little administrative control there because of the fierce Pashtun tribalism that prevails on both sides of the border. That has been the case since the country’s founding more than sixty years ago.

So how could a long history of unfair wealth distribution explain an insurgency that has sprung up only recently? If mere poverty were a kindle for political violence, wouldn’t the populations of, say, Bangladesh or North Korea be engaged in mass revolt? And if taxation policies benefiting the rich were responsible for the violence, shouldn’t America have been in the throes of an insurgency after G.W. Bush enacted massive tax cuts for the country’s richest citizens?

To find the real catalyst for the insurgency, the Times ought to have looked a little closer to home. Before the United States launched its invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani extremists were either working with the state or lying low. Indeed, it is only very recently—when the U.S. woke up from its neoconservative-induced coma in Iraq and shifted focus back to Afghanistan—that Pakistani cities, mosques, shrines, government centers, and military installations have regularly become scenes of bloody militant attacks.

Though the Pakistani Taliban have certainly exploited the poverty of the rural masses, their rallying cry has not exactly echoed the slogan of “no taxation without representation”; it has instead homed in on the Pakistan’s support for the U.S. led war along the “Af-Pak” border. Its bloodiest assaults, including the cowardly massacres at an Ahmadi mosque and a Sufi shrine, came only after Pakistan launched a 2009 summer offensive in parts of the NWFP.

Of course, the American-led war in Afghanistan is not the only reason for the insurgency, even though the Pakistani press, reflecting the impotence of the people, has heaped all blame on America. The Pakistani elites have themselves been playing a cynical and myopic double-game with militants, hoping to leverage ties with extremists such as the local Haqqani network and even the Afghan Taliban to shape Afghanistan once the United States exits the stage. According to one recent report, the ties are even more extensive than previously believed.

The Pakistani military, blind to the pernicious effects of empowering illiterate and backward Pahstun tribal elements who imagine themselves to be pious Muslims, thinks it can harness the extremists’ violence against Indian interests in Afghanistan—even though these Pakistani “Islamists” have so far succeeded only in killing Muslim civilians and Pakistani soldiers at an unprecedented pace.

The Times’ fixation on Pakistan’s tax policies is curiously off the mark, blaming Pakistan for the insurgency without pointing to either of the actual reasons to blame. It is the presence of thousands of American troops in neighboring Afghanistan and the Pakistani state’s tacit support for extremism, not an absence of tax collectors, that is most responsible for kindling the flames of the insurgency.

Investigative reporter and historian Gareth Porter at IPS News writes in an article titled CIA Drone Operators Oppose Strikes as Helping al Qaeda:

Some CIA officers involved in the agency's drone strikes programme in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the programme within the agency, because it is helping al Qaeda and its allies recruit, according to a retired military officer in contact with them.

The interview he landed is an eye-opener.

"Some of the CIA operators are concerned that, because of its blowback effect, it is doing more harm than good," said Jeffrey Addicott, former legal adviser to U.S. Special Forces and director of the Centre for Terrorism Law at St Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, in an interview with IPS.

Not only that, but neither are "'The people at the top . . . believers,' said Addicott, referring to the CIA. 'They know that the objective is not going to be achieved.'"

Especially discouraging . . .

Addicott said the drone programme has been driven by President Barack Obama, rather than by the CIA. "Obama's trying to show people that we're winning," he added. …

Within the administration, it appears that the logic behind the programme is that it has to be seen to be doing something about al Qaeda. ... "Very frankly," Panetta declared May 18, 2009, "it's the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership."

CIA officers: Come to Florida, where you, too, can become a victim of PTSD while dealing out indiscriminate death from the comfort of your own console.

Be sure to read the rest of Gareth Porter's exclusive at IPS News: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51706

Yesterday was almost equally violent for both India, where suspected sabotage of train by Maoists left at least 74 dead in West Bengal, and Pakistan. In Lahore, an equivalent number were killed in the attacks on the two Ahmadi mosques. According to the New York Times: "Geo TV, a leading news channel in Pakistan, reported that members of the Punjab branch of the Pakistani Taliban were claiming responsibility for the attacks."

The Los Angeles Times reports:

An Ahmadi elder from the Model Town mosque said the mosque had been getting threatening phone calls for some time, and had reported the threats to Lahore police. "We asked the government and police several times to enhance our security, but we didn't get anything," … After the [first] attack, Ahmadi worshippers . . . were angered by what they said was a delayed response from police once the attack began. Though a police station is near the mosque, the Ahmadi elder said police arrived about 50 minutes after worshippers called for help.

Elsewhere, another survivor said: "We are peaceful, law-abiding citizens and we get no protection."

Persecution of the tiny Ahmadi sect has in fact been legislated. As ReligiousIntolerance.org reports:

In 1974, the National Assembly of Pakistan approved the Second Amendment to the Constitution literally excommunicating Ahmadi Muslims and banishing them from the fold of Islam. … In 1984, General Zia-ul Haq, promulgated [an ordinance] branding Ahmadis as criminals liable to fine and imprisonment if they practiced their belief in Islam.

In 1993 the Supreme Court of Pakistan heard a case by a number of Ahmadis who asserted that they were being deprived of their religious rights and freedoms. … The majority opinion of the court stated that many Islamic phrases were, in effect, copyrighted trademarks of the Islamic faith. Thus the use of these phrases by Ahmadis was a form of copyright infringement [violating] the Trademark Act of 1940.

Hmm, Islam as a brand. But what do Focal Points readers think inspired the Taliban to divert manpower and resources to attacking the Ahmadi, who arguably outdo the Taliban as cultural outlanders (since the latter enjoy some support in the Army and ISI),  now. Why not keep their sites set on attacking the Pakistani government, which has caused it such grief in the frontier provinces?