[Afghan News] November 18, 2011

[یاسمینه]

Why hunger looms in aid-rich Afghanistan
18 November 2011 BBC News
More than 2.5 million people face hunger in drought-stricken areas of Afghanistan despite billions of dollars of aid that have poured into the country in recent years, aid agencies say. Many villagers have only limited supplies of food left as winter looms, as the BBC's Mike Thomson reports from the central province of Bamiyan.
In the far north of mountainous Bamiyan Province, to the east of the capital, Kabul, a mother sits in despair with a small boy on her lap. Bibi Nakiba tells me that all she has left is some dried fruit and a few potatoes.
"Whatever we have in our house we give, but we've come to the time when there is little left. We have to say no to our children, there is nothing for you. Sometimes they cry because they are so hungry."
She fears that things will only get worse as snow, which already caps the many mountain peaks surrounding her village, cuts her isolated community off from help.
"We've sent so many messages to the government about our plight but they never listen. Our children could die here this winter," she says.
"Even if our neighbours have food they would not be able to help us because they will need all they have for themselves. In these times everyone has to think of themselves, not others."
Aid groups say 14 of the country's 34 provinces, most of them in the north, have been hit by the drought, believed to be one of the worst this decade.
The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says harvests in some areas have been almost completely wiped out, doubling the price of wheat and causing other food prices to soar.
Some 90% of households in affected areas are living in debt and many schools have closed because children have been sent to find work. The WFP says only half the funds needed were raised after an earlier appeal for assistance.
Bibi lost everything she owns in the spring when floods, which preceded the drought, washed her home away along with everything she owned.
She now lives with brother, Abdul Kadir, and his family. They too are struggling.
Abdul says his crops failed, many of his animals have died and local food prices have soared. His community, he says, has had no help at all, either from the government or international aid agencies.
Yet he has heard on the radio that large sums of aid have come to his country, though not, Abdul insists, to peaceful areas like his.
"There is no fighting here and nobody cultivates poppies. All the international aid seems to go to Kandahar and Helmand, none of it comes here," he says.
"Maybe people in those provinces are powerful, or maybe because they are fighting they send all the aid to them."
Abdul's theory may not be far from the truth. Aid agencies have been concerned for some time about the amount of aid directed towards conflict areas of Afghanistan.
Much of it is designed to win hearts and minds through "quick impact projects" in insurgency-plagued provinces in the south and east of the country. According to a US Congressional study, 80% of US aid has gone to troubled regions.
For example, last year Kandahar province received four times more US aid per head than Bamiyan, while the equally quiet neighbouring Daykundi province saw five times less.
It is a policy that is roundly defended by the US ambassador to Kabul, Ryan Crocker.
"We have put substantial assistance into the south. You know, we are trying to end an insurgency here and that means, in part, funding a better future and giving people alternatives," he says.
"You know, that's part of a counter-insurgency strategy."
Oxfam's policy and advocacy director in Afghanistan, Louise Hancock, insists that such a policy means that political and military objectives are often being allowed to outweigh humanitarian need when the allocation of aid is decided.
"Militarised aid is a major issue here. They are aiming on winning hearts and minds by implementing quick fix, quick impact projects," she says.
"These result in schools being built in areas where there are no roads going to them, where needs are not at their greatest or where there are not enough teachers to staff that school. This is what we say should not be happening."
Other aid agencies, including Save The Children, take a similar view. They further argue that more longer term development aid is needed and that blurring the lines between aid work and military objectives puts their staff, as well as the people they help, at more risk.
The UN World Food Programme's country director in Afghanistan, Louis Imbleau, refuses to get drawn in to what he regards as "politics" but is passionate about the urgent need to help those here suffering from drought.
The UN, he says, has already supplied more than 20,000 metric tonnes of food to the country's worst-affected areas, but more is urgently needed before the snows fall. If it does not arrive in time, Mr Imbleau insists, malnutrition could cause permanent damage to the health of many of Afghanistan's children.
"They will not achieve either the physical stature they could as well as the mental ability. It could reduce their IQ by upwards of 15 points, which is substantial," he says.
"It's very sad, it's irreversible and should just not be allowed to happen. It should not be allowed to happen."

Twitter is new battleground for NATO and Taliban in Afghanistan
By Nick Paton Walsh, CNN November 18, 2011
Kabul, Afghanitan (CNN) -- After a decade of lethal combat, NATO and the Taliban are now fighting over something else: the last word.
On Twitter, for months now, @ISAFmedia -- the press office for the coalition's International Security Assistance Force -- and @ABalkhi -- someone who tweets Taliban messages -- have been slugging it out. On Thursday the exchanges got personal, over claims NATO has Afghan mercenaries in its pay.
The Taliban affiliate, @ABalkhi, tweeted @ISAFmedia of the accusations: "@ISAFmedia - your officials admitted to it dumb dumb."
ISAF's twitterer replied: "@ABalkhi - Dumb dumb? How the dialogue elevates.
Look: Nobody takes you seriously. Everything you type is wrong. Just. Stop."
The Taliban affiliate replied: "@ISAFmedia - That's why they picked you for this job. If I wasnt here, you wouldnt have a job."
CNN approached @ABalkhi for comment and also asked NATO to discuss the nature of their tweets, but neither side wanted to talk about it on camera or show the face of their twitterer.
Some other contributors to the social media microblogging site have commented that these barbed exchanges are the closest NATO is right now to direct talks with the Taliban.
The Twitter exchanges are part of the growing information war in Afghanistan. NATO has long held that this is a war of perception and -- as U.S. domestic public opinion increasingly moves toward a swift drawdown -- the court of public opinion over who is winning or losing has never been more important.
While NATO has long had reporters and a TV channel to put out their own message, they seem keen to keep the upper hand with social media observers in Kabul -- a relatively small group of media, NGO researchers and diplomats who discuss issues over social media in a country where the internet reaches very few Afghans.
On Monday, after reports a Taliban spokesman was arrested, @ABalkhi and @ISAFmedia sniped over whether the detained man counted as a civilian.
The Taliban affiliate, citing a report of the arrest, said: "@ISAFmedia why are you capturing civilians?"
@ISAFmedia replied: "@ABalkhi So you're saying he was not a member of the Taliban? Is that what you want everyone to believe?"
After posting a series of U.N. definitions of civilians, the Taliban affiliate said: "@ISAFmedia - You know not everyone is paid to sit behind a desk all day to tweet. Everyone else has a life to tend to."
The tit-for-tat nature of the exchanges has raised eyebrows among some media analysts who wonder what NATO has to gain from engaging with the Taliban via Twitter.
Lotfullah Najafizada, head of current affairs at TOLOTV, one of Afghanistan's biggest TV networks, said: "I saw some of them [Thursday morning] and to be honest they were so funny and I was wondering why ISAF should reply."
"ISAF should not do such things as the Taliban may not consider all ethics of communications so it's good for ISAF to stay out of it and not to engage in such communications. It would be counter-productive for ISAF."
But it's not just about sniping. ISAF often uses Twitter to swiftly respond to what it sees as false claims by the Taliban about insurgent operational successes.
ISAF: "@ABalkhi Nope again. No ISAF helo shot down last night. Nice try".
ISAF: "@Pressistan Did. Not. Happen. @ABalkhi is truly the gift that keeps on giving."
After more than a decade of fighting, it's also a war of words online.

Afghan Loya Jirga enters 3rd day, dialogue with Taliban discussed
By Abdul Haleem, Zhang Jianhua
KABUL, Nov. 18 (Xinhua) -- The traditional Afghan Loya Jirga or grand assembly of tribal elders, elite, lawmakers and government functionaries, which was inaugurated on Wednesday, debated the government-initiated peace talks in its third day on Friday.
Although no statement was issued, local media reported that government-backed efforts of holding talks with the Taliban outfit came under discussion in Friday's meeting.
The Afghan government has suspended talks with the Taliban since the assassination of Burhanudin Rabbani, the chief of government-backed peace body the High Council for Peace in September.
The ex-president was killed at his home in Kabul on September 20 this year when a man pretended to be a Taliban peace emissary met him and blew himself up.
Participants in the historic Jirga, which was attended by more than 2,300 people, urged the international community to focus on the sanctuaries of the Taliban fighters and to press on their foreign supporters in Friday's meeting, according to the private Tolo television channel.
However, they did not point the finger at any specific foreign nation.
Afghan officials usually say that Taliban insurgents and associated militants have taken shelter in Pakistan's tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, a claim rejected by Islamabad as baseless.
Taliban militants, who staged a violent comeback some five years ago and since then have been fighting against the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Afghan forces, have rejected any talks with the Afghan government in the presence of foreign troops.
In their statements sent to media outlets, the hardliner outfit has conditioned any talks with the Afghan government on the pull out of some 130,000-strong NATO-led forces, with nearly 100,000 of them Americans from the post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai in his opening remarks at the Loya Jirga on Wednesday clarified that the proposed strategic partnership with the United States and peace talks with the Taliban are the two topics to be debated at the four-day assembly.
Any decision taken at the historic Jirga would be forwarded to the parliament for endorsement, and if get approval, it would be promulgated by the president.

Afghanistan faces 'regional war' if NATO troops go
By Arthur MacMillan | AFP
Afghanistan risks falling into civil and regional war if all US and international troops leave as planned by the end of 2014, the conflict-wracked state's former interior minister warned on Thursday.
Mohammad Haneef Atmar, speaking in Washington, also said Kabul's efforts to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, which the United States sees as crucial to a peace settlement, had failed to attract hard-core insurgents.
Atmar, who served as interior minister between 2008 and 2010, said it was wrong to assume that violence would taper off after a scheduled 2014 pullout of NATO forces, and that 20,000-30,000 foreign soldiers should remain.
"With 450,000, we have a problem at the moment," he told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, referring to the combined numbers of Afghan security forces and international troops.
"We are making progress in Helmand and Kandahar but we are not making progress in the east and southeast. Why do we believe that after more years Afghans alone will be able to manage that problem?" he said.
The United States has increasingly been looking for a negotiated end to the Afghan conflict given that the insurgency remains virulent more than 10 years after the September 11 attacks prompted American forces to invade the country.
A US troop surge was credited for improving security in the troubled south but Pentagon officials have said President Barack Obama's administration is contemplating scaling back Afghan combat operations much earlier than planned.
Atmar said Afghanistan would only succeed if security gains in hotspots such as Kandahar are built upon and forecast that the Kabul government could fall.
"Why would it fall? If there is a premature drawdown of troops, if there is a significant reduction of economic assistance... and if the vacuum created is to be filled by regional actors," he said, alluding to Afghanistan's neighbors Pakistan, Iran, Russia and India.
"If these things happen we will fall. There will be a perfect scenario for a regional wargame and it will be a proxy-led civil war in Afghanistan which would lead to the disintegration of Afghanistan," he said, noting that such conditions would provide more safe havens for anti-American insurgents.
Atmar, who was also education minister between 2006 and 2008, said the resulting security vacuum would lead the Afghan national army and police to become "factionalized" and loyalty would shift from the state to warlords.
"A significant part of Afghanistan would be controlled by the insurgents and that would provide safe haven to Al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba and to all the other groups that do not have problems with Afghans alone," he added.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is the Pakistan-based insurgent group fighting against Indian control in Kashmir and has been blamed by India for deadly violence, most notably the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month urged Pakistan to take action within "days and weeks" on dismantling Afghan militant havens and encouraging the Taliban into peace talks, which Atmar said had so far failed.
"Of around 30,000 insurgents, only eight percent have reconciled so far -- and 99 percent of them are not from the south," he said.
"Frankly speaking, it does not work."
Peace initiatives have stalled since ex-Afghanistan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who had been given the Herculean task of negotiating with insurgents, was killed by a suicide bomber on September 20.
Michael O'Hanlon, an expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Brookings think tank in Washington, described Atmar as "one of the three or four best (people) that Afghanistan has to offer."
"I take everything he says very seriously," O'Hanlon told AFP. "That said, I don't believe our force would have to be quite as large," as 20,000 to 30,000 troops. "But it would have to be more than 10,000 for a while," he said.
Afghanistan and the United States are currently negotiating a strategic partnership that will govern bilateral relations after NATO combat forces -- there are currently 140,000 in the war-torn state -- withdraw in 2014.

U.S. General Defends Afghanistan Night Raids
Head of Coalition Joint Command Argues for Continuing Operations After President Karzai Says They Must End
Wall Street Journal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV NOVEMBER 18, 2011
KABUL - Special Operations night raids are "very important" for the U.S.-led campaign against the Taliban, the coalition's day-to-day commander said in an interview a day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded an end to such practices.
"Special Operations Forces allow us to put constant pressure across the entire insurgent network that we're going after," U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who heads the coalition's Joint Command that is running the war-fighting effort, told The Wall Street Journal. The night raids, he added, are "safe for the populace as wellbecause they're done at night when there is very little civilian activity."
The issue of night raids and detentions of Afghans by coalition forces has emerged as the key obstacle to a U.S.-Afghan strategic agreement that would outline the framework for continued American presence after most international combat forces leave Afghanistan in 2014.
Mr. Karzai convened this week a traditional gathering of representatives from across the country, known as a Loya Jirga, to discuss the planned deal. In his opening speech to the Loya Jirga on Wednesday, he set the end to night raids, home searches and detentions by coalition troops as his condition for endorsing the pact.
While Gen. Scaparrotti isn't directly involved in the strategic partnership negotiations, and didn't criticize Mr. Karzai, the American commander offered a vigorous defense of these tactics.
U.S. and coalition Special Operations Forces carry out hundreds of night raids a month, targeting insurgent leaders, facilitators and bomb-makers, Gen. Scaparrotti said. More than 90% of these operations end with no shots fired, he said. Though in most of those raids foreign troops are accompanied by Afghan commandos or other elite units, the fledgling Afghan security forces don't yet have the capacity to execute such raids alone, he said.
"We need to continue to do our Special Operations Forces work. It's a very important part of our campaign," he explained.
"Over time, we will get to a place where those operations will be run by Afghans to reach their own objectives," he said. Gen. Scaparrotti declined to say how long this would take.
Gen. Scaparrotti also said more time is needed to hand over all detainees to Afghan facilities, which the United Nations has recently criticized for abuse of prisoners.
The U.S.-led coalition, he said, will turn over the detentions to the Afghan government "when we know they have the capacity to operate a detention facilityand the appropriate legal system that ensures the security of their people, and our soldiers as well."
Night raids in particular are a highly sensitive issue in the conservative Afghan society, where the mere act of strangers entering a home and seeing women living inside is considered a grave offense.
Coalition officials, however, say that the ramping up of such raids over the past two years has been crucial in weakening the insurgency and stopping the Taliban's momentum.
"We clearly have the initiative. The enemy is reacting to what we do," Gen. Scaparrotti said. He pointed to the coalition forces' successes in the Taliban's cradle of Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The only part of the country that experienced an uptick in insurgent activity over the past year, he said, is eastern Afghanistan, particularly the provinces of Wardak and Logar abutting Kabul and the Pakistani frontier belt south of Khost.
"As we've secured the other portions of Afghanistan, in particular so much of the south, there's a natural flowinto the region. There's probably been more of a movement into that corridor by the enemy," Gen. Scaparrotti said. "It's a natural line of operations by the enemy, and that's where we've met him."
Even though the U.S. is drawing down 10,000 troops this year and 23,000 more by September, Gen. Scaparrotti said the remaining forces would allow the coalition to reach its key objectives over the next fighting season: to maintain the gains in Kandahar and Helmand, to open up the highway that connects Kandahar to Kabul, and to push back the insurgency in eastern Afghanistan, expanding the security bubble around Kabul.
This week's Loya Jirga in Kabul has unfolded so far without major incidents, despite Taliban threats to disrupt the gathering.
On Thursday morning, two rockets hit a residential area far from Loya Jirga's venue; there were no fatalities.
"Will there be zero incidents in Kabul? I don't think so, given the enemy's intent," Gen. Scaparrotti said.
Thursday's rockets, he pointed out, fell well short of their targets, and the men who had fired them were captured by the Afghan forces hours later. "That's a very good outcome."

4 Afghan Children Killed in Blast
VOA News November 18, 2011
Officials in eastern Afghanistan say a roadside bomb blast has killed four children.
A Nangarhar province spokesman said the bomb exploded Friday, killing the four children and wounding six others.
Insurgents often plant roadside bombs to target Afghan security forces or international troops. The devices usually detonate when someone steps or drives over them.

Afghan, NATO forces capture several insurgents
KABUL, Nov. 18 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) captured several anti-government militants in Helmand province 555 km south of Afghan capital Kabul on Thursday, a press release of the alliance said Friday.
"A combined Afghan and coalition security force detained multiple suspected insurgents during an operation in Nawah-ye Barakzai district, Helmand province, yesterday," the press release said.
"The force conducted the operation after receiving a tip that insurgent leaders were meeting at a compound in the area. After calling for the men inside to come out peacefully, the insurgent leaders, with several subordinates, emerged and were detained without incident," the press release said but did not give details.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces have yet to make comment.

Weapon cache discovered in Afghan district
KABUL, Nov. 18 (Xinhua) -- Afghan forces backed by NATO-led troops found a weapon cache in Naw Zad district of Helmand province 555 km south of Afghan capital Kabul on Thursday, a press release of NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) issued here Friday said.
"In Now Zad district, Helmand province, a combined Afghan and coalition security force discovered a weapons cache during an operation yesterday," the press release added.
It also said that the weapon cache consisted of three rocket- propelled grenades, multiple improvised explosive device components, two anti-personnel mines, 20 flares, and 1,400 rounds of AK-47 ammunition.
All of the weapons were destroyed on the site and no casualties or damages have been reported as a result of the operation, the press release further said.

Afghanistan: What the Anthropologists Say
By ALEXANDER STAR The New York Times November 18, 2011
Ten years after the Taliban’s leaders fled their country in apparent defeat, the war in Afghanistan has become what one observer calls “a perpetually escalating stalemate.” As in Iraq, the United States military has responded to bad news with counterinsurgency: eliminate troublemakers in the dark of night, with the most lethal arts, and befriend tribal elders by day, with cultural sensitivity and expertise. The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in “Human Terrain Teams” that engage in “rapid ethnographic assessment” — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to “operationalize” the Pashtun tribal code.
The military, in short, demands local knowledge. But what kind of local knowledge is in supply, and what does it indicate? Though the chief purveyors of such insight, academic ethnographers, have balked at working with the military — the American Anthropological Association issued a report condemning the Human Terrain program as a violation of professional ethics — they have not ignored the country. Noah Coburn’s “Bazaar Politics” is the first extended study of an Afghan community to appear since the Taliban fell. It follows an ambitious history of Afghanistan by the Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield, and an impassioned essay by Rory Stewart, the Conservative M.P., author-adventurer and Kabul preservationist, that faults the international effort in Afghanistan for its neglect of ethnographic insight. Whatever anthropology has to say about America’s longest war, it’s saying it now.
Anthropologists who studied Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion of 1979 described a complex country at the crossroads of Persian, Indian and Central Asian civilizations where nomads, farmers and traders of disparate cultures jostled against one another. In the 1950s and ’60s, the tens of millions of Pashtuns straddling the Afghan-Pakistani border drew particular interest for illustrating a favorite anthropological concept: they were said to compose the world’s largest “segmentary lineage society,” in which all members claimed a single male ancestor and allied with relatives in groups of variable size depending on the conflict at hand; one might enlist a first cousin against a second cousin, or a first and second cousin against a third cousin, and so on. While anthropologists like Fredrik Barth and Charles Lindholm stressed the chronic instability and feuding among Pashtun mountain clans, they also noted the strong value placed on equality among all male members of a tribe; indeed, the Pakistani scholar Akbar Ahmed suggested that the Pashtuns opposed the British Empire on certain occasions because it attempted to introduce unwanted ranks and titles.
In wartime Afghanistan of the 1980s and ’90s, anthropologists were scarce. But with the Taliban’s fall, a few returned, along with other professionals of Afghan and Western extraction. Arriving in 2006 as a Boston University graduate student, Coburn conducted his anthropological fieldwork in Istalif, a predominantly Tajik village 20 miles north of Kabul that was hostile to the Taliban and relatively safe for foreigners. Though he could speak Dari, the local language, he “did not fit into any familiar category”: he was not a soldier or an employee of a nongovernmental organization, and he was not trying to buy up anyone’s carpet stock; he was a puzzle. Eventually, he struck up relationships with the villagers, especially the young men. Modestly prosperous, famed for its pottery and mountain scenery, Istalif was peaceful and stable despite having been razed to the ground by the Taliban in the late 1990s — a place optimists might point to with pride. But the continuing stability, in Coburn’s view, owed little to the Afghan state or to the presence of international forces; it resulted from a wary equilibrium among rivals who feared disturbing the status quo more than they welcomed change.
When Coburn analyzed how power was exercised in Istalif, he found that no one was truly in charge. Local power brokers might possess wealth, honor, a reputation for piety, abundant weaponry or powerful allies, but they lacked the means or the will to convert those gifts into decisive authority. The maliks, or elders, made a big show of representing their communities’ interests in meetings with outsiders and serving their followers generous meals; each year they presided over festive villagewide “snow picnics,” where the children of Istalif playfully competed to wreck one another’s snow-and-ice dams on the terraced hills above the town. But for all their public visibility, the maliks were only as strong as their communities allowed them to be; they were not secure hereditary chieftains but anxious agents of the professions or neighborhoods or clans they served. (Coburn speculates that when villagers obeyed a curious edict permitting music at weddings only if it issued from a single boombox, they did so largely because they feared that louder music would draw too many guests needing to be fed.) The mullahs, for their part, had little ability to intervene outside the mosque, and the village’s wealthy merchants had little sway since they lived primarily in Kabul and often came from the low-status weaver class. Aging commanders of the anti-Soviet jihad supplied money and guns to young men, who struck a menacing pose by wearing the “pakul” hat of the great Tajik fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud, rather than the “karakul” hat favored by Hamid Karzai. While the commanders successfully extorted rent from local merchants who ran shops on public lands, they were unpopular and preferred to remain in the shadows, strenuously avoiding one another as well as any direct conflict with the state.
As for the state’s representatives, their authority was what Coburn calls a “useful fiction.” The district governor wielded his connections to Kabul as best he could, but did not possess great influence, in part because — in keeping with the most sophisticated state-building methods — government aid was mainly distributed by locally elected committees. Istalif’s police were seen as hapless at best, predatory at worst; Coburn found that villagers were eager to protect him from a local officer. The French soldiers who periodically showed up in the bazaar had little impact, though their presence did become an excuse for keeping women out of the area. But Coburn observed that “no group was less effective at accumulating influence” than the NGO community. The best development experts accomplished little: their turnover was high, and they frequently bestowed their largess on deserving locals — women, refugees who’d returned from abroad with some education, victims of wartime injuries — who didn’t have the connections or ability to capitalize on their good fortune. NGO workers seemed less concerned with achieving a valuable outcome than with demonstrating to their backers that they had followed a mission plan to the letter.
As Coburn recounts, one organization spent $20,000 on an electric kiln that could have greatly increased the productivity of the local potters except that it was donated to a women’s center where men were not allowed to set foot; apparently, the donors did not know that the custom in Istalif was for men to do all the pot-making and firing, and for women to stick to the glazing and other decorations. The kiln supposedly wound up being used by friends of the district governor’s wife. If the NGOs achieved so little unintentionally, Coburn found that local leaders often achieved little by design. He watched in disbelief as they rejected a proposal to pave the main road connecting Istalif with the nearby highway leading to Kabul. The new road would have benefited the entire village by reducing the difficulty and cost of travel; but one malik objected that its construction would disproportionately assist another malik’s sector of the town, and the proposal was quietly tabled. In other words, to disturb the existing distribution of power was to risk reigniting too many local conflicts. And as in the American white-collar workplace, no one was eager to speak strongly on behalf of the idea for fear of losing face if it failed. In Istalif, it often seemed, politics meant convincing people you had power by forestalling any event that might reveal you didn’t.
Coburn does not romanticize the ways of Istalif — the quiet the town has enjoyed since the end of the Taliban regime is highly tenuous, and largely the result of tacit agreements among bitter rivals over what to forget and ignore. Whatever the fragility of such an arrangement, Coburn implies that it is preferable to the modernizing plans of even the most thoughtful state-builders. The attempt to create impersonal, merit-oriented bureaucracies and to spread liberal beliefs about gender, religion or criminal punishment is as likely to exacerbate conflict as to resolve it. Stability is created with the resources at hand, not from on high or far away (“The state does not live here,” Istalifis like to say).
In his skepticism of centralizers, modernizers and humanitarians, Coburn echoes other anthropologically minded writers. Thomas Barfield’s “Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History” insists that Western powers made a serious error by installing Karzai in a presidency with quasi-monarchical powers. They “attempted to restore a system designed for autocrats in a land where autocracy was no longer politically sustainable.” Similarly, Barfield suggests that asking rural Afghans to rethink their beliefs about religion or women’s rights is sure to fail. Afghanistan’s own Ataturk, Amanullah, who tried to ban the veil in 1928, fled to India in 1929. A better course of action, the record shows, was to pursue “policies of social change in urban areas where they were welcome, and then let them spread to the countryside only after prejudices against them had waned.” With some irony, Barfield shows that Afghan rulers of the last 150 years anticipated Karzai in their combination of anti-foreign rhetoric with a reliance on outside assistance; one king after another cast himself as the essential preserver of Afghan independence and tradition while depending on British subsidies. Meanwhile, life in the countryside was little affected: the most successful rulers “declared their governments all-powerful but rarely risked testing that claim by implementing controversial policies.” After the Taliban’s departure, “the enthusiasm for restoring a highly centralized government was confined to the international community and the Kabul elite that ran it.”
In “Can Intervention Work?” Rory Stewart castigates that very same international community for its irrelevant data sets, flow charts and attempts to define “best practices.” He worries that “a culture of country experts has been replaced by a culture of consultants” who travel everywhere with jargon: “Lofty abstractions such as ‘ungoverned space,’ ‘the rule of law’ and ‘the legitimate monopoly on the use of violence’ are so difficult to apply to an Afghan village that it was almost impossible to know when they were failing.” At Harvard, where he directed a human rights center, Stewart struggled to convince his congenitally optimistic American students of his stark conclusion: “The international community necessarily lacked the knowledge, the power and the legitimacy to engage with politics at a local provincial level.” If we are to intervene at all, we must do so with modest expectations and a sure sense that “less is often more” and that “we had no moral obligation to do what we could not do.” In a companion essay, Stewart’s former Harvard colleague Gerald Knaus defends the West’s intervention in Bosnia while arguing for an ethic of “principled incrementalism.” While “there is encouraging evidence that limited missions in support of peace agreements and with sufficient resources can produce a good result,” he concludes, the prospects for “nation-building under fire” are much worse.
Last month, Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of American troops in Afghanistan, lamented that Americans had a “frighteningly simplistic view of recent history” when they arrived in the country. “We didn’t know enough, and we still don’t know enough.” The counterinsurgency strategy championed by McChrystal and his successor, David Petraeus, tried mightily to overcome such deficiencies, but its results have been mixed. Understanding Afghanistan’s social and cultural diversity has proven little easier than mastering it. Consider the question of whether Afghan traditions are still intact after decades of war. Human Terrain specialists warn that the Pashtun tribal system has been shredded even as others urge the military to “engage” with tribes on the premise that they “form the fabric of Afghan society.”
The trouble, it seems, is that a little local knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Western soldiers meet with village councils, or shuras, and work to strike deals with local elders; and the methods of counterinsurgency may well give them a greater capacity to do so. But what if the shura is largely ceremonial, with real power exercised behind the scenes? And what if the elders are not all they seem? What if they exaggerate their own authority, or seek to establish that authority through prominent meetings with easily impressed outsiders? What if the elders, like everyone else, are anxiously hoarding their power, refusing to take risks, and preparing for an unpredictable future in which it’s equally plausible that mullahs, militias or Kabul bureaucrats might each gain more power? What then is to be done?
Like Stewart, Barfield expresses concern about the Obama administration’s military and civilian surge. He believes it could be “destabilizing,” particularly if the new troops are “seen as defenders of an unpopular Kabul regime.” Coburn further asserts that “a decrease in the amount of money being spent in the country, and a drawdown of international troops, seem likely to reduce violence because these measures will remove a significant source of political tension.” In the absence of a contemporary study of Pashtun villages as nuanced as Coburn’s account of a Tajik one, it’s hard to evaluate such a claim. All the same, American troop levels are starting to decline, and the counterinsurgency and other campaigns that were supposed to blanket Afghanistan’s troubled provinces with experts have begun to lose favor. Quite soon, and perhaps for reasons not their own, those anthropologists who favor a diminished Western presence are likely to get their wish.
Alexander Star is the senior editor of the Book Review.

More in Afghanistan criticize country's direction. What it means for US troops
A recent Afghanistan poll finds progress on several fronts but some worrisome signs, including a jump in the number who say the country is headed in the wrong direction. Security is still a major issue.
Christian Science Monitor By Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer November 17, 2011
Washington - More Afghans than not say their country is moving in the right direction, but the number who say that a decade into a Western-led war Afghanistan is headed in the wrong direction is increasing – now to more than one-third of the population.
Even as Afghan President Hamid Karzai lays out a plan that envisions US troops remaining in his country for years to come, a large majority of Afghans say that one of the things that frightens them most in their daily life is the prospect of crossing paths with foreign troops.
Those are among the finds of an annual survey of the Afghan people conducted by the Asia Foundation, a Washington-based organization focused on US-Asia relations.
RECOMMENDED: Fighting continues in Afghanistan
More Afghans expressed optimism over improvements in the availability of services such as health care, education, and water. In recent testimony before Congress addressing the billions of dollars the US has invested in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton focused on those improvements.
Today more than 2.4 million Afghan girls are enrolled in school, Secretary Clinton is fond of noting, compared with 5,000 just before the Taliban government’s fall.
But the Asia Foundation survey, in which 6,348 Afghans in all 34 provinces were interviewed between July 2 and Aug. 1, also contains worrisome signs. This year 35 percent of Afghans said conditions in their country are headed in the wrong direction – an 8 percent jump over last year and the highest level for “wrong direction” respondents since the group began taking the annual poll in 2004.
The main reason cited for the higher pessimism: lack of security.
One factor that may have contributed to this sense of deteriorating security was the rising level of violence in some regions as a greater number of US troops (as a result of the mini-surge of 2010) launched more anti-Taliban assaults.
But the survey also found dwindling sympathy for the country’s militants. Afghans expressing support for at least some aims of the armed antigovernment groups fell to below a third – 29 percent compared with 40 percent last year, the lowest level of any of the annual surveys.
At the same time, a majority of Afghans support initiatives to engage in a dialogue with militant groups and ultimately to make peace with them.
What is a loya jirga? Afghanistan's most pivotal jirgas since 2002.
The Asia Foundation survey was released this week, as President Karzai holds a loya jirga, or grand council, in Kabul to consider the terms of an eventual strategic partnership with the US. Karzai told the council Wednesday that he favors reaching an agreement with the US to allow for American military bases to remain in the country past NATO’s 2014 date for ending its military mission.
But Karzai said he has a set of conditions for reaching an agreement with the US. The Afghan leader said the US would have to agree to end a number of its practices – carrying out night raids, invading Afghan homes, detaining Afghan citizens – that he said he could not support as the head of a sovereign nation.
The military practices Karzai cited are also among the reasons average Afghans cite for feeling fearful around foreign troops. The survey found that 76 percent of Afghans are fearful of encountering US and other foreign troops in the country.
In contrast, 55 percent said they fear encountering the Afghan National Army.
In any case, concerns over deterioration in the country’s security don’t appear to be limited to average Afghans. Karzai himself seemed to second his people’s pessimism over security conditions when he opted to take a helicopter – rather than risking a car ride on the capital’s streets – to get to the loya jirga.

Deciding Between Heritage and Hard Cash in Afghanistan
By ARYN BAKER | Time.com – Thu, Nov 17, 2011
Many in Afghanistan hold that the country's future lies underground, in vast mineral deposits with the potential to boost the country's economy for decades. Nowhere is that more true than Mes Aynak. The ancient mine, 30 km south of Kabul in Logar province, is believed to be the world's second largest untapped copper source. According to Afghanistan's Mining Ministry, the site is worth tens of billions of dollars at today's prices. Extracting the metal could deliver thousands of jobs and $1.2 billion in revenue a year to a country in desperate need as international assistance dries up ahead of the planned U.S. and NATO withdrawal in 2014.
Copper, however, is not the only treasure at Mes Aynak. Archaeologists are also excavating an ancient Buddhist temple complex located on top of the deposits. It has so far yielded manuscripts, Buddha statues and stunning ancient architecture. The discovery rivals Machu Picchu in terms of historic import, says Philippe Marquis, a French archaeologist overseeing the project, and could also rewrite the history of Buddhism and the Silk Road.
In a reversal of the theory that religious centers grew up alongside but separate from commercial activity, Marquis and his team suspect that in Mes Aynak, religious leaders may have actually directed copper mining and refining and used the monastery network to trade the metal as far away as Japan and Korea. "People always talk about the Silk Road," says Marquis. "What if it was the Copper Road or the Buddhist Road that established trade across the region?"
The clock, however, is ticking. The Chinese-government-backed China Metallurgical Group Corp., which successfully bid on the mine in 2007, wanted to start mining in '09. The work will destroy the temple complex, so the group agreed to a three-year pause for a basic excavation. The short window is emblematic of the difficult compromises that must be made as Afghanistan struggles to balance financial and cultural concerns. "I don't think anyone can argue with the fact that the Buddha statues would last far longer than copper in terms of generational value," says Laura Tedesco, an archaeologist and manager of the U.S. embassy's cultural-heritage programs. "But the needs of the country right now are in the revenue from the mine."
Mes Aynak's more recent history is less glorious than its ancient past. The hidden valley, located at the end of a dusty road that zigzags past rocky hills streaked with chalky green stains of oxidizing copper, was once an al-Qaeda training ground. No one has found graffiti from Osama bin Laden yet, but most archaeologists familiar with the site agree that the terrorist group, among others, looted statues to sell on the international antiquities black market. According to a recent article in the Journal of Art Crime, Mohammad Atta, the lead hijacker in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, attempted to sell looted artifacts from Afghanistan to a German archaeologist in order to fund his Florida flight training.
The irony is that although the Chinese mine will eventually destroy the archaeological site, it has contributed to the protection of its artifacts. "We have enough examples of other Buddhist sites in Afghanistan destroyed because of looting, ignorance and lack of care," says Marquis. But because of the international attention brought to Mes Aynak in the wake of the Chinese bid, archaeologists now have some $50 million from the World Bank, USAID and other foreign donors to invest in excavation and the construction of a nearby interpretive museum. Security for the mine also helps protect the archaeologists, and the site, from nearby insurgents. Besides, Marquis adds, the ancient mud construction materials and unbaked-clay statues would not last long exposed to the Afghan elements. "The fact is that preservation in situ would be impossible."
If Marquis's theories are correct, copper once made Afghanistan the hub of central Asian trade. And if he and his team of archaeologists dig fast enough, Mes Aynak could yet restore some of Afghanistan's regional luster, not just in copper, but in culture as well.

Kabul's unlikely housing bubble seems ready to burst
McClatchy Newspapers By Shashank Bengali 17/11/2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The war in his homeland was a boom time for Sayed Aman Abed.
The Kabul real estate broker made a small fortune over the past several years as billions of dollars in foreign aid and reconstruction contracts flooded into Afghanistan, creating a robust market for homebuyers and renters in the capital. Abed, a slight, boyish 25-year-old, did well enough to pick up the entire tab for his wedding last year, which cost $27,000, a princely sum in Afghanistan.
But Kabul's unlikely housing bubble is deflating rapidly amid a rash of extravagant insurgent attacks and growing worries among Afghans about what will happen after U.S. combat forces stand down, as expected, by 2014.
For many Afghans, President Barack Obama's announcement in June that he was withdrawing one-third of U.S. forces by next September marked the beginning of the end of the foreign intervention in their country. While that raised security concerns, the prospect that U.S.-led NATO troops, who now number 100,000, would soon depart also sparked worries about the economy, especially among those who've gotten rich off the sudden influx of foreign investment.
Brokers say that the market value of homes — scooped up like trophies by a cadre of Afghans who hold high-paying jobs with foreign embassies or aid agencies, or scored lucrative transportation or security contracts with coalition forces — has fallen by one-third or more.
"Ever since the Americans announced the drawdown of their forces," Abed said, "I haven't sold a single house."
As a grand assembly of Afghan leaders, known as a loya jirga, meets here to discuss topics including a future strategic partnership with the United States, U.S. officials stress that they'll remain engaged in Afghanistan long after the military drawdown.
Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker said that while U.S. and Afghan officials were still negotiating the terms of such a pact, some American forces could remain past 2014 in a training or advisory role — and that in the meantime, Afghan forces continue to improve.
"Afghanistan is going to look a lot different in 2014 than it looks now," Crocker said. "In what ways, we can't quite predict. But, you know, don't panic."
But that hasn't calmed nerves in Kabul, a city of 4 million people and seemingly as many rumors. Although the crisis of confidence is mostly anecdotal, it underscores how much of the Afghan national budget — more than 90 percent, by most estimates — still comes from foreign assistance more than 10 years into the war.
"There are fears — and I think they are realistic — that the drawdown has economic effects long term," said Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent research organization in Kabul.
Besides a decline in foreign assistance, Ruttig said, "a lot of jobs will be lost when the drawdown happens and other international actors reduce" their presence, including embassies and relief organizations.
Last year, Abed said, he rented a large house on 11,000 square feet of land in Shash Derak, a well-guarded neighborhood near the presidential palace, to a U.S. aid agency for $22,000 a month for use as a guesthouse. When the lease expired and the agency moved out several months ago, there were no takers. He ended up renting the property for $10,000 a month on a shortened lease to a handful of British expatriates.
A construction firm that Abed works with sold six stories' worth of apartments in a brand-new building last year before it had even built the first floor. This year, he said, the firm is working on a similar, 12-story complex, but it has nine floors still unclaimed.
"A successful businessman, when I told him that I had this or that property in the best sections of Kabul, they used to grab it," Abed said. "Now they are keeping that money in cash in case something happens."
Compounding concerns is a deterioration of security in the capital, which until this year had been mostly quiet even as violence raged elsewhere in the country. Insurgents have carried out more than a dozen major attacks in Kabul since January, including a car bomb attack last month on an armored NATO bus on a busy road in western Kabul, not far from Abed's office.
Mohammad Akram, who deals in property and vehicles from a small showroom in western Kabul, said that the days before the annual autumn Eid holiday, a celebratory period akin to Christmas in the West, previously were among his busiest. But this year he didn't sell a single car before Eid.
Adding to his fears, Afghan security officials came to his office several days ago and warned him not to sell or rent any property in the area as part of security precautions for the loya jirga, which is taking place on a university campus nearby.
"Most of my clients have left the country," Akram said. "They are in Dubai and other places now because of the security situation, and why would they come back? Things are getting worse."
Akram, who looks older than his 38 years, wonders how long he'll be able to keep paying the tuition fees for his three youngest children. He complained that Afghan political leaders, whose business connections have also made them rich off the foreign intervention, have been much more interested in pocketing loot than in preparing for the transition to 2014.
"So much money came to Afghanistan," he said. "If we had an honest government and an honest president, I think our streets would be covered in dollars."

Germany gears up for Afghan meet with Pakistan talks
(AFP) – November 18, 2011
ISLAMABAD — Germany on Friday welcomed a promise from Pakistan to work "without hidden agendas" in Afghanistan, as it gears up to host a key international conference on the war-torn country.
More than 90 delegations from all over the world will gather in Bonn on December 5, with Afghanistan's neighbours playing a key role.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle arrived in Pakistan this week in preparation for the conference.
"I welcome the clear commitment by Pakistan that it has no hidden agenda in Afghanistan," Westerwelle told a news conference alongside Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar after talks in Islamabad.
"We have to work together because stability in Afghanistan is in our interest and in the interest of the world," he said.
"The commitment of the German government and the international community is crystal clear -- we will not forget Afghanistan and this region," he added.
NATO combat troops are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and the Afghan government is set to take full responsibility for national security.
The United States and Afghanistan have often accused Pakistan of playing a double game in continuing to support the Afghan Taliban as a means of offsetting the growing power of arch-rival India.
Westerwelle, who also held talks with Pakistan's powerful army chief of staff General Ashfaq Kayani, called for a political solution in Afghanistan, saying his country believes that military engagement alone will not work.
Earlier this year, Der Spiegel magazine said Germany was helping mediate secret, direct talks between the US and the Afghan Taliban although Western diplomats in Kabul now say these have collapsed.
Peace efforts in Afghanistan were driven further into a dead end by the September assassination of Kabul peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani by a suicide turban bomber.
"Pakistan has no hidden agenda for pursuit of peace in Afghanistan and in the region," Khar told the news conference.
"We want a stable and peaceful government in Afghanistan which allows us to function peacefully," she added.

Ex-soldier gets four years in jail for fatally shooting fellow troop in Kandahar
By The Canadian Press | The Canadian Press
HALIFAX - A military judge has sentenced former army reservist Matthew Wilcox to four years in jail for fatally shooting fellow soldier Cpl. Kevin Megeney in Afghanistan.
Lt.-Col. Louis-Vincent d'Auteuil said Wilcox was well-trained in handling weapons and "should have known better" than to pull a gun on his tentmate.
"The incident was out of character in terms of what you did and who you are," d'Auteuil said as he delivered his sentence Friday.
Wilcox was found guilty earlier this week of criminal negligence causing death and negligent performance of a military duty after shooting Megeney dead inside a tent at Kandahar Airfield on March 6, 2007.
Wilcox, 26, previously told the court martial that he fired his weapon in self-defence as he reacted to what he thought was a threat inside a tent at the military base.
D'Auteuil said Wilcox knew he was required to keep his weapon unloaded in his tent, but failed to do so and was aware he shouldn't have pointed his gun at Megeney.
The prosecution argued for a six-year sentence while the defence wanted a one year term in jail.
D'Auteuil said he considered Wilcox's relative youth and noted he has potential to contribute to society in the future. He also said he took into consideration the fact this was Wilcox's second court martial on the same charges.
Wilcox was sentenced to four years in prison and ejected from the military after he was found guilty of the two offences following the first trial in 2009.
That verdict was set aside last year and a new trial ordered after Wilcox's lawyers argued the makeup of the military jury was unfair.
D'Auteuil said he would subtract the 76 days Wilcox has already served from his sentence.

Loya jirga: Afghan elders reject 'pimp's number 39'
BBC News 17 November 2011
Officials at a meeting of elders in Kabul changed a committee's number after delegates rejected 39 because of an Afghan belief that the number is associated with pimps.
Delegates at the gathering, or loya jirga, convened by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, divided into 40 groups to consider Afghan-US relations.
Elders refused to take part in group 39 until its number was changed to 41.
The number is held as a mark of great shame across Afghanistan.
Correspondents say some believe the taboo started because a pimp had 39 on his vehicle number plate. But others say it dates from an old way of calculating numbers called "Abjad".
Many delegates at the loya jirga voiced their fervent opposition to being part of committee 39, one attendee told the BBC's Bilal Sarwary in Kabul.
''One delegate said: 'I don't want to return to my area and be called a pimp. I don't care if it is true or not, but people out there believe in it. Look no one wants to have a vehicle with number plate 39. And yet, you want me to be in 39?''' the member said.
But there were some who saw the outcry as an unnecessary diversion from more important matters.
"It is sad to see delegates raise such issues at such an important meeting. We have more important things to deal with," one delegate from northern Afghanistan said.
"But when I raised it, everyone else told me to shut up. Everyone said, they didn't want to be called [a pimp] or their children and family members harassed in streets, schools and neighbourhoods. So than a committee 41 was established,'' the delegate continued.
Officials at the loya jirga said they never expected this to be a sticking point at the gathering, which is considering reconciliation with the Taliban as well as future Afghan-US relations.
''We needed 40 committees and we created 40. But a special solution was found for a 'special problem','' the official said.
In June, vehicle licensing officials in Afghanistan said that new registration plates with the number 39 were stacking up because of the Afghan aversion to the number.

European Union Blocks Afghanistan Film That It Financed
By RAVI SOMAIYA The New York Times November 18, 2011, 1:30 pm
The documentary “In-Justice: The Story of Afghan Women in Jail” was financed by the European Union to show what Afghan justice can mean for its women.
One of the two women it follows is 19. She was raped by her cousin, bore his child, and was jailed for 12 years for having sex out of wedlock, to be released early only if she consented to marry him. The other, 26, ran away from an abusive husband with a another young man, whom she says she did not have sex with. She was jailed for six years for adultery.
But in a decision that has sparked a growing debate, the European Union has now declined to release the film and threatened the filmmakers with legal action for showing it. It says that the women’s lives may be in danger and that it does not want to jeopardize its relations with the Afghan judiciary. The women themselves have said they would like their voices heard, and the filmmakers are campaigning for its release.
A report (PDF) by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2007 estimated that half of the women imprisoned in Afghanistan are held for “moral crimes” such as running away from home, refusing to marry or committing what is broadly defined as adultery or attempted adultery. They “are not only victims of their social and economic circumstances,” it said, “but also of an unfair criminal justice system, where males and patriarchal principles dominate.” A BBC report in 2010 highlighted similar issues.
The documentary was commissioned in 2010 with $96,000 of European Union money to highlight such issues, the Associated Press reported, citing documents it obtained.
According to the British and American news media, the 19-year-old was filmed saying that she had agreed to participate, at great risk to herself, “because when everybody sees this it will be a lesson for them and these things won’t happen in Afghanistan.”
But in a statement released amid months of negotiations beginning earlier this year, the European Union said it “decided to withdraw the film only because there were very real concerns for the safety of the women it portrayed. Their welfare was and continues to be the paramount consideration in this matter.” But an earlier e-mail said that the organization “has to consider its relations with the justice institutions in connection with the other work that it is doing in the sector.” It has declined to comment further.
The filmmaker, Clementine Malpas, did not immediately respond to a message seeking an interview. But in a statement to The A.P. she said that risk to the women “must be balanced against their clear and express wish to tell their stories.” She continued: “Ultimately, it is their decision, and we admire their clear-eyed courage to speak out. It is not for us to veto their voices.”
The United Nations has released a supportive statement, and several organizations that campaign for women’s rights in Afghanistan have condemned the decision not to release the documentary. But the European Union is unmoved. According to a report in The London Evening Standard this week it has written to Ms. Malpas, who is based in London, warning that it “reserves the right to consider legal action” if it hears that the film has been screened.
Last week, as the issue grew, the 19-year-old woman’s rapist was interviewed by The Times of London in Afghanistan, where he too was jailed. He told the newspaper that the European Union “had done a good thing.” It also reported that, after 18 months in prison with her baby, a girl born in her cell, the woman had relented and would marry her rapist.
“I had no choice,” she told the newspaper. “I did it for my daughter.”

www.afghanistannewscenter.com