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NATO attack allegedly kills 24 Pakistani troops
By SEBASTIAN ABBOT
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan has blocked vital supply routes for U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan and demanded Washington vacate a base used by American drones after coalition aircraft allegedly killed 24 Pakistani troops at two posts along a mountainous frontier that serves as a safe haven for militants.
The incident Saturday was a major blow to American efforts to rebuild an already tattered alliance vital to winding down the 10-year-old Afghan war. Islamabad called the bloodshed in one of its tribal areas a "grave infringement" of the country's sovereignty, and it could make it even more difficult for the U.S. to enlist Pakistan's help in pushing Afghan insurgents to engage in peace talks.
A NATO spokesman said it was likely that coalition airstrikes caused Pakistani casualties, but an investigation was being conducted to determine the details. If confirmed, it would be the deadliest friendly fire incident by NATO against Pakistani troops since the Afghan war began a decade ago.
A prolonged closure of Pakistan's two Afghan border crossings to NATO supplies could cause serious problems for the coalition. The U.S., which is the largest member of the NATO force in Afghanistan, ships more than 30 percent of its non-lethal supplies through Pakistan. The coalition has alternative routes through Central Asia into northern Afghanistan, but they are costlier and less efficient.
Pakistan temporarily closed one of its Afghan crossings to NATO supplies last year after U.S. helicopters accidentally killed two Pakistani soldiers. Suspected militants took advantage of the impasse to launch attacks against stranded or rerouted trucks carrying NATO supplies. The government reopened the border after about 10 days when the U.S. apologized. NATO said at the time the relatively short closure did not significantly affect its ability to keep its troops supplied.
But the reported casualties are much greater this time, and the relationship between Pakistan and the U.S. has severely deteriorated over the last year, especially following the covert American raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town in May. Islamabad was outraged that it wasn't told about the operation beforehand.
The government announced it closed its border crossings to NATO in a statement issued after an emergency meeting of the Cabinet's defense committee chaired by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.
It also said that within 15 days the U.S. must vacate Shamsi Air Base, which is located in southwestern Baluchistan province. The U.S. uses the base to service drones that target al-Qaida and Taliban militants in Pakistan's tribal region when they cannot return to their bases inside Afghanistan because of weather conditions or mechanical difficulty, said U.S. and Pakistani officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive strategic matters.
The government also plans to review all diplomatic, military and intelligence cooperation with the U.S. and other NATO forces, according to the statement issued after the defense committee meeting.
The White House said that senior U.S. civilian and military officials had expressed their condolences to their Pakistani counterparts.
The White House statement said the officials expressed "our desire to work together to determine what took place, and our commitment to the U.S.-Pakistan partnership which advances our shared interests, including fighting terrorism in the region."
The White House statement did not address Pakistan's decision to block supply routes for the war in Afghanistan or its demand that the U.S. vacate the drone base.
The Pakistani army said Saturday that NATO helicopters and fighter jets carried out an "unprovoked" attack on two of its border posts in the Mohmand tribal area before dawn, killing 24 soldiers and wounding 13 others. The troops responded in self-defense "with all available weapons," an army statement said.
Pakistan army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani condemned the attack, calling it a "blatant and unacceptable act," according to the statement.
A spokesman for NATO forces, Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, said Afghan and coalition troops were operating in the border area of eastern Afghanistan when "a tactical situation" prompted them to call in close air support. It is "highly likely" that the airstrikes caused Pakistani casualties, he told BBC television.
"My most sincere and personal heartfelt condolences go out to the families and loved ones of any members of Pakistan security forces who may have been killed or injured," Gen. John Allen, the top overall commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
The border issue is a major source of tension between Islamabad and Washington, which is committed to withdrawing its combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Much of the violence in Afghanistan is carried out by insurgents who are based just across the border in Pakistan. Coalition forces are not allowed to cross the frontier to attack the militants. However, the militants sometimes fire artillery and rockets across the line, reportedly from locations close to Pakistani army posts.
American officials have repeatedly accused Pakistani forces of supporting — or turning a blind eye — to militants using its territory for cross-border attacks. But militants based in Afghanistan have also been attacking Pakistan recently, prompting complaints from Islamabad.
The two posts that were attacked Saturday were located about 1,000 feet (300 meters) apart on a mountain top and were set up recently to stop Pakistani Taliban militants holed up in Afghanistan from crossing the border and staging attacks, said local government and security officials.
There was no militant activity in the area when the alleged NATO attack occurred, local officials said. Some of the soldiers were standing guard, while others were asleep, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
Pakistan army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said map references of all of the force's border posts have been given to NATO several times.
Pakistan's prime minister summoned U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter to protest the alleged NATO strike, according to a Foreign Ministry statement. It said the attack was a "grave infringement of Pakistan's sovereignty" and could have serious repercussions on Pakistan's cooperation with NATO.
Munter said in a statement that he regretted any Pakistani deaths and promised to work closely with Islamabad to investigate the incident.
The U.S., Pakistan, and Afghan militaries have long wrestled with the technical difficulties of patrolling a border that in many places is disputed or poorly marked. Saturday's incident took place a day after a meeting between NATO's Gen. Allen and Pakistan army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in Islamabad to discuss border operations.
The meeting tackled "coordination, communication and procedures ... aimed at enhancing border control on both sides," according to a statement from the Pakistani side.
The U.S. helicopter attack that killed two Pakistani soldiers on Sept. 30 of last year took place south of Mohmand in the Kurram tribal area. A joint U.S.-Pakistan investigation found that Pakistani soldiers fired at the two U.S. helicopters prior to the attack, a move the investigation team said was likely meant to notify the aircraft of their presence after they passed into Pakistani airspace several times.
A U.S. airstrike in June 2008 reportedly killed 11 Pakistani paramilitary troops during a clash between militants and coalition forces in the tribal region.
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Associated Press writers Anwarullah Khan in Khar, Pakistan, Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, Matiullah Achakzai in Chaman and Deb Riechmann in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.
Will inking strategic pact with U.S. lead to viable stability in Afghanistan?
By Abdul Haleem
KABUL, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- In its latest efforts to achieve durable peace in the militancy-plagued country, the Afghan government convened the traditional Loya Jirga or grand assembly of chieftains, notables and functionaries last week to discuss the proposed Washington-Kabul strategic partnership, but received mixed reactions at home and abroad.
The four-day national gathering attended by more than 2,300 people from across the country and concluded on Nov. 19 had backed the proposal of having strategic relations with Washington and recommended the administration to ink the controversial pact which grants the U.S. to have military bases in Afghanistan.
In its bold decision inscribed in a lengthy 76-article resolution, the Jirga participants described having strategic relationship with the U.S. very necessary for maintaining security, economic development and peace talks with Taliban and for ensuring lasting peace in the conflict-ridden nation.
However, local analysts are doubtful about future U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and its ability in forcing Taliban towards peace talks or annihilation of insurgency in the country.
"Inking strategic pact and giving military bases to the U.S. would not change the situation in the country and the militancy would continue as it has been continuing over the past 10 years in the presence of over 140,000 U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan," Kabul-based security analyst and former Taliban official Wahid Mujda told Xinhua.
He also said "long-term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would provoke Afghanistan's neighboring countries including Iran, Pakistan and Russia."
Afghan opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah, who was President Hamid Karzai's main challenger in last presidential election, in a sharp reaction termed the Loya Jirga as unconstitutional.
Abdullah, who heads the "Change and Hope Coalition", said "no country's permanent bases are in the interest of Afghanistan," according to Afghan media.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan government, U.S. and NATO-led troops have lashed at the Jirga and its recommendations of having strategic relations with Washington.
"Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (name of ousted Taliban regime) calls on all its countrymen, parties and political figures that the sole reason for the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan is because of foreign invaders," the Taliban outfit said in a statement.
"We believe the Afghan crisis will only find an end when our nation thwarts the Strategic Partnership of the invaders and their mercenaries under the disguise of Loya Jirga and their other plans, brings the ongoing occupation to an end and fulfills the duty of bringing about an independent, proud and peaceful Afghanistan," the statement sent to media said.
Russian ambassador to Afghanistan Andrey Avetisyan has expressed concerns over the long-term U.S. military presence in the country, according to local media reports.
"Bearing in mind two major threats -- terrorism and narcotics, we have to watch closely what is happening here. By now we are not convinced that a long-term foreign military presence in Afghanistan will help to maintain security in the region," the English Daily Outlook Afghanistan quoted the ambassador as saying.
To enact the Jirga's core decision as law requires the approval of the parliament where oppositions and supporters would remain at loggerhead over the controversial issue and its impacts on the future of Afghanistan.
Keeping in mind the support and opposition at home and abroad to the proposed strategic partnership and NATO-led forces' inability to curb militancy over the past 10 years, "it seems that instability would continue in the country," said Mujda, who is also the author of "Afghanistan and the Five-Year Reign of Taliban. "
MPs approve new Afghan central bank chief
(AFP)
KABUL — Afghan MPs on Saturday approved an American-educated banker as new governor of the country's central bank after the previous chief fled to the United States saying he feared for his life.
Noorullah Dilawari, previously central bank governor from 2004 to 2007, secured 173 confidence votes from the 228 MPs present in the country's 249-member lower house of parliament.
Afghan MPs also granted a trust vote to Rahmatullah Nabeel, President Karzai's candidate to head Afghanistan's intelligence agency (NDS), who has been serving as acting director of the agency since July 2010.
Dilawari will replace Abdul Qadir Fitrat, who left Afghanistan in June saying he was in danger after speaking out about the near-collapse of Kabul Bank, the warring country's biggest private lender.
In his resignation statement, Fitrat accused politicians of undermining the central bank's independence and told the BBC that his life was at risk after he exposed some of those who he said were responsible for Kabul Bank's woes.
Karzai's government dismissed Fitrat's claims, saying his life was not in danger and suggesting he was fleeing a possible probe into his own activities.
Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a new $133.6 million loan for Afghanistan after months of delay due to concerns over the Kabul Bank scandal, which it described as a "Ponzi scheme".
The IMF said Kabul had now made progress cleaning up its financial system.
Taliban reportedly getting salary to stop fighting
UK newspaper says participants get 100 pounds per month during training period
msnbc.com
Taliban members who agree to stop fighting are being paid 100 pounds per month as part of an effort to reduce attacks against NATO troops in Afghanistan, a British newspaper reported.
The Sunday Telegraph said the program, supervised by a British major general, was open to any Taliban fighters, even if they had committed atrocities such as beheadings and hanging of women.
Participants aren't interrogated but are asked to complete a questionnaire about their reasons for joining the insurgency, the newspaper said. They then enter a three-month training program in which they are are taught citizenship and must vow not to participate in violence. They are paid the 100 pounds during that period. A total of 98 million pounds is available in the program, the newspaper said.
The Sunday Telegraph said more than 2,700 insurgents had participated, including 900 in northern Afghanistan, which had seen a 30 percent decrease in violence.
Is Afghanistan on the brink of civil war?
The withdrawal of foreign forces could leave Afghanistan on the brink of social, political and economic collapse. Is there still time to avoid disaster?
Global Post By Jean MacKenzie November 25, 2011
BOSTON - The bad news on Afghanistan just does not stop. With the prospect of significant troop cuts over the next year, analysts on all sides of the debate are warning of ominous developments ahead.
The most common fear is that Afghanistan is heading for a civil war between the Taliban-led insurgency and their foreign backers, on the one hand, and the Afghan government, backed by the Afghan National Security Forces, on the other. Few hope for a positive outcome with such an alignment of forces.
Former Interior Minister Hanif Atmar made the rounds in Washington last week, using his considerable urbane appeal to make the case for continued US involvement in Afghanistan. If the foreign forces leave too soon, warned the UK-educated Atmar, “The state will disintegrate It is the perfect scenario for a proxy-led civil war,” which he said would include Pakistan and Iran.
Atmar, who lost his job last year in the wake of a security incident at the president’s Peace Jirga, has just founded a new political party, Right and Justice, and observers say he might be trying to drum up support for his own oppositionist coalition.
More from GlobalPost: Karzai's peace meeting plagued by conflict
But the warning resounded in Washington, which is already nervous about the troop cuts announced for next year by US President Barack Obama.
The World Bank has just issued dire predictions about the Afghan economy, which, it says, could completely implode without the aid money that the foreign intervention has brought into the country.
None of this is startling news to those who follow Afghanistan, or to the millions of Afghans facing an uncertain future. They have been voting with their feet and their wallets for many months now, causing property prices in the capital, Kabul, to fall by more than 40 percent over the past year. Many Afghans are looking for an exit.
But how likely is it that Afghanistan will suffer a repeat of its dark history?
“If the current political process continues, where people lose trust in their government, by 2014 the current government will be unable to take responsibility for Afghanistan either militarily or politically,” said Haroon Mir, head of the Center for Research and Policy Studies in Kabul.
But according to Michael Semple, a leading expert on Afghan politics and the Taliban at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the worst might still be avoided.
He cautions against “woolly assumptions” that Afghanistan is inevitably headed for a repeat of the 1990s, when the power groups formed to battle the Soviets turned their anger, and their guns, on each other.
“We should not underestimate war fatigue among Afghans,” he said. “They are determined to avoid a civil war, even as it is staring them in the face. But it is a very serious prospect.”
More from GlobalPost: Kabul attack belies US optimism
One of the main problems, said Semple, is that the promise of 2001 has not been realized. When the Taliban regime collapsed, it was time for Afghans to renegotiate their social contract, to decide just who was going to play which role in the new Afghanistan.
Instead, they were given a system in which the largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, felt marginalized, in which some of the more nefarious actors from the civil war years were given a large share of power, and where ethnic and regional divisions were allowed to fester.
“I am not sure people have appreciated how dangerous the failure of the political process over the past 10 years has been,” Semple said. “In 2001, the task was to establish a functional pluralism in a country where the ‘ancient regime’ had disappeared in 1978.”
Afghanistan has been in conflict since Prime Minister Daud and his family were overthrown and murdered in a communist-led coup in April, 1978. According to Semple, reestablishing a system in which all segments of Afghan society can feel that they have a place is of paramount importance.
But since 2001, when the international forces sent the Taliban packing and installed Karzai as the head of the interim government, things have gone badly awry in Afghanistan.
More from GlobalPost: The Drone Wars
Some would argue that the country is not much better off now than it was before the US-led intervention. Semple argues that the reality is more nuanced.
“The comparison should not be between Afghanistan now and Afghanistan in 2001,” he said. “Afghanistan in 2001 was a miserable place. What we should be comparing are the hopes and expectations of Afghans in 2001 with what we have achieved by 2014.”
This will not necessarily lead to a more optimistic assessment, he cautions: “What we are seeing now is the death of hope,” he added.
Lucy Morgan Edwards, who has just written a book called “The Afghan solution: The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, The CIA, and How Western Hubris Lost Afghanistan,” is less convinced that civil war can still be staved off, and she is not shy about pinpointing blame.
According to Edwards, international ignorance and arrogance are largely responsible for the dire state in which Afghanistan finds itself today.
“The key word is legitimacy,” said Edwards, speaking from her home in Geneva. “There is none. What we have done over the past 10 years is build a house of cards that is about to collapse.”
The United States and its allies did not understand the underlying reality of what they were doing, Edwards said.
“It has always been a civil war,” she insisted. “We intervened on the side of the Northern Alliance,” the collection of commanders, mainly Tajik and Uzbek, who battled the Soviets in the 1980s, each other in the early 1990s, and the Taliban from the mid-1990s until 2001.
By installing Karzai, a man who before 2001 had minimal following in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies prepared the ground for the present morass. Bringing the Northern Alliance back into the government alienated the Pashtuns, especially those in the volatile south, preparing the ground for the present insurgency.
“Karzai was just a figurehead for the Northern Alliance,” Edwards said. Attempts to bolster the security forces as a way out have failed miserably, she added. The army, with its largely Tajik officer corps and minimal representation from southern Pashtuns, is much more part of the problem than a solution.
“We have spent $46 billion on the Afghan security forces over the past 10 years,” she said. “This was money very badly spent.”
According to both Semple and Edwards, Karzai’s recent spate of often bizarre policy speeches are an attempt to soothe the Pashtun base.
Karzai has just finished a major exercise in public relations at a gathering of elders known as a Loya Jirga, called to drum up support for a strategic partnership agreement with the United States.
Opening the gathering, he delivered a rambling speech aimed at stirring national pride.
“Even if old, sick and feeble, a lion is still a lion!” he said. “We are lions, the United States should treat us as lions, and we want nothing less than that. We therefore are prepared to enter into a strategic agreement between a lion and America A lion hates a stranger entering his home; a lion dislikes a stranger trespassing its space, a lion does not want his children taken away at night the lion is the king of his territory and he governs his own territory.”
Karzai is insisting that the United States and its allies cease night raids and kill/capture missions as a condition for signing any sort of agreement. But the foreign forces have shown little inclination to heed Karzai’s warnings; they say that night raids are an essential tool of their counterinsurgency mission.
For the embattled president, however, perception may be more important than reality.
“Karzai plays to a strong sense of Pashtun nationalism,” Semple said. “His anti-foreign stance is essential for this. The Pashtuns love it.”
The United States is a bit less enamored of Karzai’s increasingly virulent attacks on the foreign presence. But, as Semple points out, they are stuck.
“The United States has no obvious way to extricate itself,” he said. “It would pay a very high price if it were to turn away from Afghanistan. There are international military networks who still harbor plans to attack the West. They are committed to diminishing the United States’ standing in the world. If they can create the perception that that the United States is disgraced and defeated in Afghanistan, it will be an iconic victory for them.”
Abdul Qayum Suroush contributed to this report from Kabul.
German troops to stay in Afghanistan after NATO goes
AFP – Sat, Nov 26, 2011
Germany will keep troops in Afghanistan after NATO forces leave the country at the end of 2014, German Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere told the Bild am Sonntag paper in an interview to be published Sunday.
Troops remaining would concentrate on the training of Afghan forces, the minister said.
They "would be sufficiently armed so as to be able to defend themselves" but "it won't be about having troops for combat," said De Maiziere.
Berlin currently has 5,350 soldiers in Afghanistan, a number which will reduce to 4,900 as Germany starts withdrawing its forces ahead of NATO's 2014 deadline for the transferral of security control to Afghan forces.
After the US and Britain, German soldiers are the third largest NATO troop contingent in Afghanistan.
The decade-long war was the first major deployment of German troops abroad since the Second World War and has not been welcomed by a majority of public opinion.
Richard Holbrooke's Last Mission in Afghanistan
In an excerpt from a new book, The Unquiet American, journalist David Rohde salutes Richard Holbrooke’s vision and effectiveness in Afghanistan—and remembers how he was saved by him, twice.
Daily Beast By David Rohde Nov 26, 2011
For four days in March 2006, Richard Holbrooke crisscrossed Afghanistan as a private citizen. The country’s resilient people and rugged landscape fascinated him. He was enthralled during a two-hour conversation with an imprisoned young Taliban militant, appalled by the American police training and counternarcotics effort, and welcomed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. At a farewell dinner attended by American generals and Afghan ministers, he held forth in classic Holbrooke fashion. For thirty minutes, he laid out his vision of a sweeping new American effort in the region.
Two years later, the Obama administration named Holbrooke its special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In theory, Holbrooke should have been at the zenith of his diplomatic skills and career. Decades of work in Washington and war zones had prepared him for what he called his last mission. The then sixty-seven-year-old diplomat was determined and captivated, and carried personal ties to the region. In 1971, Holbrooke had briefly visited Afghanistan while working as a Peace Corps official.
“I saw this romantic, exotic, harmonious, multi-ethnic society,” he later told a journalist, “just a few years before it was destroyed.”
But it was not an easy task for the man famed for nearly singlehandedly bringing peace to the Balkans. His bluntness and bluster initially alienated Afghan and Pakistani officials. His perceived competitiveness with his peers compounded suspicions in Washington. And a multi-dimensional conflict, combined with nagging questions about the extent of American influence and patience, proved far less susceptible to Holbrooke’s or America’s will than the war in the former Yugoslavia.
As a journalist who covered the conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, I saw Holbrooke soar and stumble. And in a deeply personal way, I experienced his goodwill and his determination. The legendary American diplomat helped save my life—twice.
Instead of simply giving up in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke waited, narrowed his focus, and played what he called “the long game.” While much has been written of Holbrooke’s struggles, he achieved a great deal in the region. In his final year, he revitalized his relationship with Afghan and Pakistani leaders, enjoyed policy victories in Washington, and achieved diplomatic breakthroughs in the region. A man stereotyped as a publicity-seeking egotist kept many of those successes secret.
Sadly, just as his labors began to bear fruit, on December 11, 2010, he collapsed in a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her ornate office on the State Department’s seventh floor. Two days later, he passed away before his strategy could be put to the test.
Four lessons emerge from Holbrooke’s effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan. First, the period represents the culmination of Holbrooke’s approach to diplomacy. The techniques he used, open internal debate he encouraged, and team he assembled are a model for aspiring diplomats.
Second, Afghanistan reaffirmed Holbrooke’s lifelong belief that American foreign aid programs must empower local governments and officials. When impatient American aid workers or troops do the work of local officials, it creates a destructive dependency, he argued, that delegitimizes local governments and draws the United States into quagmires.
Third, Holbrooke’s fervent work in Pakistan showed the indispensable value of sophisticated, respectful, and passionate diplomacy in the field. By repeatedly journeying to Pakistan, candidly engaging officials and the Pakistani public, and responding pragmatically to a traumatic natural disaster, Holbrooke did more than any other American official since 2001 to ease long-running Pakistani mistrust of the United States.
And fourth, Holbrooke lived the ultimate life of service. After joining the State Department at twenty-one and serving every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy, he accepted a virtually impossible assignment in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke died, literally, while serving his nation and showed all Americans the value, dignity, and worth of public service.
Personal and professional passions drove Holbrooke’s decision to return to Afghanistan in 2006, according to family and friends. A successful New York investment banker, he did not need to survey a war overshadowed by the spiraling conflict in Iraq. On a personal level, though, Holbrooke wanted to see what had become of the Afghanistan he visited as a young man. And on a professional level, he made the trip in his capacity as chairman of the Asia Society, an organization he believed needed to focus more on South Asia.
When he arrived in Kabul, Holbrooke despaired over the physical destruction of the country, and expressed shock at the ongoing suffering of the Afghan people—particularly once-independent urban women now clad in burqas.
Throughout his life, Holbrooke’s diplomacy often centered on the sufferings of individuals. A refugee he met in Bosnia inspired his work there. HIV-positive women he met in Namibia fueled his AIDS activism. In one of his first press conferences in Kabul, he told Afghan journalists that he hoped to help re-create the peaceful Afghanistan he drove across over three decades earlier.
After his 2006 trip, he devoured books and reports on the country and found any excuse to consult with regional experts. He also employed one of his favorite habits: mining journalists for what they knew. Holbrooke invited me to lunch in December 2006 to discuss my experience covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for The New York Times since 2001. He listened as I described the need for a larger American effort in the region—and then interrupted me.
“We can’t force Pakistan to accept democracy,” I remember him saying.
“It will never work.”
Holbrooke was eager for the United States to avoid the slow escalations that entangled it in Vietnam. For him, one of the central lessons of Vietnam was the danger of not deeply studying a complex foreign policy problem before acting. In March 2008, Holbrooke returned to Afghanistan, again as a private citizen, and embedded with American troops in the eastern province of Khost. Impressed by the local governor, the commanding American military officer, and the American diplomat serving there, he hailed them in a monthly column he wrote for The Washington Post.
He also tried to lower expectations and talked about the importance—and dangers—of American intervention. One of his largest fears was that a sweeping American presence in Afghanistan would create dependence and inadvertently undermine the local government, as he had seen in Vietnam. American good intentions, he warned, could prolong the conflict in Afghanistan.
“With each tactical achievement, Afghanistan will become more dependent on international support,” Holbrooke wrote. “Will short-term success create a long-term trap for the United States and its allies, as the war becomes the longest in American history?”
Nine months later, Holbrooke did not hesitate when then president-elect Obama and Hillary Clinton offered him the position of special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Despite warnings from numerous friends that he was doomed to fail, Holbrooke embraced a seemingly hopeless undertaking. His decision to accept was driven both by his desire for the limelight and, critically, by the same call to public service that had caused him to join the foreign service after graduating from Brown.
Holbrooke, who had always argued that people were the difference between good and bad policy, immediately began assembling what he described as an all-star team of advisers and aides. As he had throughout his career, he hired people with little government experience and broke bureaucratic protocol.
On the night before his appointment was announced, he reached out to Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American academic known for his knowledge of Pakistan. Three months later, on a shuttle flight from Washington to New York, he made an impromptu job offer to Rina Amiri, an Afghan-American expert on Afghan politics and a former U.N. official.
He was equally creative inside the government. After Steve Berk, an obscure U.S. Department of Agriculture official who had briefly served in Afghanistan, sent Holbrooke an unsolicited email detailing his thoughts on agriculture in Afghanistan, Holbrooke made him a job offer. When Vikram Singh, a young aide to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, impressed Holbrooke during a trip, he hired him as well.
While the offers may have seemed spontaneous, Holbrooke was acting strategically. When it was complete, his thirty-member team had ties to every government organization vital to the office’s success. Treasury, Defense, Agriculture, Homeland Security, and Justice as well as USAID, the FBI, the Joint Staff, and the British and German governments were all represented.
Holbrooke exhibited little of his famed imperiousness and constantly encouraged, challenged, and supported his staff, according to former aides on his Afghanistan-Pakistan team. Over the years, his abrasiveness appeared to have mellowed. He worked grueling hours and pushed his staff hard, but his advisers said they relished the experience. Comparing his office to an Internet start-up, they praised the veteran diplomat for keeping the organization as flat as possible. All staff members had access to Holbrooke, they said, and he encouraged frank and honest policy discussions.
Amiri, the expert on Afghan politics, said Holbrooke insisted that she typically present the local perspective on what was occurring in Kabul, not the Washington view. “He looked at me to give the Afghan lens, not simply the objective lens,” Amiri said. “How Afghans would see things on the ground.”
In a September 2009 New Yorker profile, Holbrooke described his method as “a form of democratic centralism.”
“You want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward,” he said. “But once the policy’s decided, you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it.”
His exhaustive travel reflected another abiding belief that dated to Vietnam. For Holbrooke, intricate foreign policy problems could only be understood in the field. Impatient with what he considered Washington’s glacial pace and myopic bureaucratic views, he traveled to the region once every two months.
Vietnam had also taught him to be skeptical of the American government’s ability to produce cohesive efforts in foreign countries. Whatever challenges lay inside Afghanistan, he believed that getting the White House, military, intelligence community, State Department, and Congress to unite behind—and implement—a multifaceted plan was extraordinarily difficult.
“One thing he definitely understood was the daunting complexity of Washington,” said Nasr, the Pakistan expert on Holbrooke’s staff. “He knew what the strength of the United States was. And he knew its weaknesses.”
In his 1970 Foreign Policy essay “The Machine That Fails”, Holbrooke—then a young foreign service officer who had been in government for just eight years—warned of the cumbersome nature of Washington’s foreign policy apparatus. Despite repeated efforts to rein them in, multiple government agencies—as well as multiple bureaus within the State Department—pursued their own bureaucratic interests and projects.
“Over time, each agency has acquired certain ‘pet projects’ which its senior officials promote,” Holbrooke wrote. “These are often carried out by one agency despite concern and even mid-level opposition from others.”
Lastly, Holbrooke was wary of the tendency of American diplomats and aid workers to bypass slow-moving or corrupt foreign officials and do things themselves. Too large an American effort created passivity, he believed, and undermined the local government in the long term.
“That creates a dependency culture,” Holbrooke said in a 2009 Charlie Rose interview. “I saw that when I was a young diplomat in Vietnam. I’ve seen that in other parts of the world.”
And in a final nuance often misunderstood by many American liberals, Holbrooke believed in the use of military force in certain circumstances. His mind—and his thinking—was supple. Holbrooke, according to his aides, saw the use of force as an instrument that might lead to a negotiated settlement. He viewed diplomacy and military force as tools that complement one another, not as stark alternatives.
“It was never black and white,” said a former aide. “In Holbrooke’s mind, military pressure was the key to any political effort.”
When Holbrooke tried to apply these lessons to South Asia after taking office in 2009, he struggled. India was not part of his diplomatic brief, putting the central dynamic that destabilized the region—India-Pakistan tensions—out of his reach. Pakistani leaders despised the term “AfPak”—an expression Holbrooke had championed—because they felt it equated their nuclear-armed nation with its far poorer and smaller neighbor, Afghanistan.
Like all of us, Holbrooke made mistakes as well. His blunt manner and habit of talking to the press initially alienated Afghan and Pakistani leaders. Before an April 2009 trip to Islamabad, Holbrooke and Admiral Mike Mullen, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly alluded to ties between Pakistani intelligence and the Afghan Taliban.
For years, American and Pakistan analysts had accused Pakistani military intelligence of supporting the Afghan Taliban as a proxy force to prevent India from gaining influence in Afghanistan. This public airing of the issue, though, infuriated military officials in Pakistan.
Holbrooke’s initial relations with Karzai were even more contentious. Before taking office, Holbrooke publicly criticized the Afghan president in his March 2008 Washington Post column. He disparaged Karzai for failing to arrest an infamous Afghan warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, after he attacked, brutalized, and nearly killed a rival commander in Kabul.
“The effect on Karzai’s standing and reputation has been enormous,” Holbrooke wrote. “Excuses were made, but none justified his open disregard for justice.”
In his first meeting with Karzai as special representative in February 2009, Holbrooke reportedly lectured the Afghan leader. Six months later, their relationship unraveled after Karzai supporters committed widespread fraud in the 2009 Afghan presidential elections.
According to media accounts, Holbrooke and Karl Eikenberry, then the American ambassador in Kabul, met with Karzai to discuss the race the day after the balloting. The Afghan president and Holbrooke clashed when the American diplomat asked Karzai if he would accept a runoff election. Karzai insisted he had won the required 50 percent of votes and there was no need for a runoff. Holbrooke, though, refused to drop the issue.
“Holbrooke was extremely blunt with Karzai,” said a former aide. “You cannot behave this way in Afghanistan. This is not the Balkans.”
Within days, the BBC reported that Holbrooke’s meeting with Karzai had been “explosive” and a “dramatic bust up.” Holbrooke insisted the meeting had not been confrontational, but the story went viral. Across Afghanistan and the Web, Holbrooke was portrayed as Karzai’s American taskmaster.
In Washington, Holbrooke struggled as well. Fairly or unfairly, his prominence made his job more difficult. Holbrooke could be exhausting, even to his staunchest allies and defenders. His rivals in Washington looked for the slightest indication of his famed ego or misbehavior. His friend Hillary Clinton repeatedly had to defend him. Stories of his difficulties inevitably found their way into the press.
It was widely reported, for instance, that officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development deeply resented a push by Holbrooke to funnel more aid through Afghan ministries and reduce the role of American contractors. Holbrooke’s goal was to lessen Afghan dependency, but many reportedly believed the Karzai government was too weak and corrupt to handle additional aid. According to media reports, tensions between some agency officials and Holbrooke soared.
To Holbrooke’s surprise, the press—traditionally his ally—complicated his efforts. The rise of partisan cable news channels intensified Washington’s demand for instant winners and losers. Reports of waste, incompetence, and failure in Afghanistan and Pakistan overshadowed calls for patience, diplomacy, and nuance. Books and news coverage about the new administration described the clichéd Holbrooke of the 1990s—the abrasive, egocentric “bulldozer.” The public heard little of the deeply committed public servant who unleashed tremendous energy and creativity into Afghanistan and Pakistan policy discussions that for years lacked such high-level attention and care.
As 2009 came to a close, Holbrooke faced disappointment on multiple fronts. Friends advised him to resign, return to New York, and stop wasting his time on a mission impossible.
Instead, Holbrooke waited. In 2010, he learned from his mistakes, narrowed his focus, and quietly achieved successes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Washington. One of the most important was a historic July 2010 transit agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan that allowed Afghan trucks to cross Pakistani territory to deliver goods to India. The agreement lessened the stranglehold India-Pakistan tensions had put on trade in the region for decades.
In Afghanistan, he hampered the illicit flow of ammonium nitrate fertilizer—which insurgents used to make roadside bombs—from Pakistan to Afghanistan. He focused so intently on agriculture—the country’s traditional economic engine—that Clinton dubbed him “farmer Holbrooke.” And he reversed the Bush administration policy of demanding the eradication of opium crops in southern Afghanistan, a practice he and American military commanders believed increased support for the Taliban.
After months of intensive effort, Holbrooke salvaged his relationship with Karzai, according to Amiri, his adviser on Afghanistan. He met with the Afghan leader six times between January and April 2010, with the final meeting lasting over two hours. Holbrooke then used a Karzai visit to Washington in May to laud the Afghan leader with pomp, circumstance, and attention. Most importantly, he fought for Karzai’s request that the Afghan leader be allowed to carry out negotiations with the Taliban.
“He worked very hard at repairing that relationship,” Amiri said. “I think Karzai realized this was the man who could deliver reconciliation from the administration.”
In Pakistan, Holbrooke learned from his mistakes as well. He worked furiously at courting Pakistani leaders and public opinion.
“He did have a grand strategy,” said Nasr, Holbrooke’s senior adviser on Pakistan. “He believed that we needed to stabilize the government and we needed to close the gap in trust that had developed for decades.”
After mishandling his April 2009 trip to Islamabad with Mullen, Holbrooke played a central role in Hillary Clinton’s successful October 2009 trip to Pakistan. After years of American diplomats taking few questions in brief, tightly scripted press conferences, Clinton held a series of well-received public forums where she tried to address the concerns of average Pakistanis. He also encouraged American military officials to focus on developing a long-term relationship with the Pakistani military.
Holbrooke’s efforts bore the most fruit in the summer of 2010. That July, epic floods engulfed nearly 20 percent of Pakistan, unleashing the worst natural disaster in the country’s history and wiping out roads, bridges, power lines, schools, and health clinics built over decades.
Holbrooke flew to Islamabad to coordinate American relief efforts. In his element in the field, he brought decades of experience to bear. Holbrooke drove the American government bureaucracy, demanding that U.S. military helicopters be shifted from Afghanistan to Pakistan to deliver aid. He met with Pakistani officials and listened to their needs. And he carefully managed the media.
Pakistani television showed images of American helicopters delivering aid to desperate flood victims. American newspapers printed photos of Holbrooke consoling Pakistani refugees. On blazingly hot days, Holbrooke reached camps for the displaced before Pakistani officials did.
To his admirers, the floods were Holbrooke at his best. On a governmental level, he fiercely pursued pragmatic policies that delivered concrete results. On a diplomatic level, he developed respectful relationships with Pakistani officials. And on a public relations level, he presented dramatic proof of American caring. Most importantly, his core human empathy suffused—and drove—the effort.
In speeches, interviews, and private conversations, Holbrooke called for a more respectful long-term relationship between the United States and Pakistan. He expressed interest in the long-term welfare of the Pakistani people. After years in which the “global war on terror” had defined the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, Holbrooke deemphasized that aspect of a relationship that he insisted must be permanent and multidimensional.
“This cannot be a transactional relationship,” he told me several months before he died. “We have to create a long-term relationship.”
Holbrooke’s diplomacy played out in unexpected ways as well. After the Obama administration worked with Congress to triple annual American civilian aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion, Holbrooke helped convince Islamabad to issue more visas to American civilians. Some of the Americans implemented aid programs. Others were dispatched to Pakistan to track terrorists like Osama bin Laden. Holbrooke did not live to see it, but one could argue his diplomacy played a small but important role in the May 2011 death of Al Qaeda’s leader.
And after nearly a year of quiet, persistent effort, Holbrooke won approval for the first meeting between American government officials and Taliban representatives since 2001. As has been widely reported in the spring of 2010, German and Qatari officials offered to set up a meeting between the two sides. Holbrooke and his staff then tirelessly worked in Washington to gain support for it. In an example of Holbrooke’s deep belief in diplomacy’s central role in ending conflicts, American government and Taliban representatives met on November 28, 2010, near Munich. Two weeks later, Holbrooke died.
In the end, the American strategy in the region adopted many of the pragmatic policies that were Holbrooke’s hallmark. Two months after Holbrooke’s death, Hillary Clinton spoke at the inaugural Richard C. Holbrooke Memorial Lecture at the Asia Society in New York. She praised Holbrooke for helping the administration mount military, civilian, and diplomatic surges in the region. She also outlined the terms and approach for the Taliban reconciliation process that Holbrooke had helped initiate in the weeks before his death.
“He had a flair for the dramatic, to be sure, but it was for more than theatrics,” Clinton said. “He understood in every cell of his body that bold action and big ideas can and will change history. After all, he did it himself, again and again.”
If the post-2001 effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan falters, it will be primarily due to continuing tensions between India and Pakistan and the limits of the international community’s influence in the region. If anyone could have succeeded in South Asia, it would have been Holbrooke, but the challenge might have proven too great even for him.
I also have a deeply personal understanding of the ferocious energy and empathy that Holbrooke brought to his diplomacy. During the war in Bosnia, Serb forces arrested me in 1995 after I discovered a mass grave near the town of Srebrenica, site of the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. At the time, Holbrooke was at the peak of his diplomatic power. He had convened peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, to end the three-year conflict.
As my family and editors watched, Holbrooke and his wife, journalist Kati Marton, pressured Serb officials to free me. To their amazement, Holbrooke deftly rattled the Serbs. In one meeting, he picked up the Bosnian Serb vice president’s plaid wool fedora and intimidated him. “Maybe I can hold your hat hostage,” Holbrooke said. Finally, he told Serbian President Slobodan Miloević that the peace talks would be halted until my release. Days later, I was freed.
For years, Holbrooke ribbed me for complicating his already difficult Balkan peace talks. I promised him and my family it would not happen again. In November 2008, a Taliban commander proved me wrong. After inviting me to an interview outside Kabul, he kidnapped two Afghan colleagues and me and ferried us to the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Again, Holbrooke flew into action. He raised my case in meetings with senior officials in Islamabad. He forced senior Pakistani officials to meet with my wife and family in Washington. Yet Holbrooke’s pressure produced few results. At first, Pakistani generals falsely insisted that I was being held captive in Afghanistan, not Pakistan. Then they failed to act.
In an indirect way, though, Holbrooke might have saved my life. My captors scoured the web for information about me and discovered our history in Bosnia. They gleefully announced that Holbrooke was my “best friend” and that I was a “big fish.” Perhaps that made me worth more to them alive than dead.
In June 2009, we escaped from captivity, bringing a sudden resolution of a captivity that seemed destined to drag on for years. After being flown to the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, I was told that Holbrooke was demanding to speak with me by phone. It was a conversation I dreaded. For the second time, I had complicated a hugely complex diplomatic task Holbrooke faced. Expecting to be lambasted, I picked up the phone and said: “I apologize.” Holbrooke’s response surprised me.
“God,” he declared, his voice booming with genuine warmth and affection. “It is so good to hear your voice.”
That day, a conversation began that continued in the United States over the next several months that showed how Holbrooke had changed. Instead of chastising me, he tried to use my time with the Taliban as a means to better understand them.
“Who are they? Why are they fighting? What do they want?” Holbrooke asked, rapid-fire. A man known for his impatience then quietly listened to my long explanations. He even set up meetings with senior American officials who he thought should hear my story.
In the larger scale of events, of course, Holbrooke’s handling of my captivities is trivial. The Dayton agreement saved the lives of countless Bosnians. His work in Vietnam, China, Germany, Africa, and at the United Nations saved many others. The diplomatic groundwork he laid in Afghanistan and Pakistan may yet bring peace to tens of millions of civilians there who have endured thirty years of brutal conflict.
In the Balkans, Holbrooke had the threat of seemingly omnipotent American-led NATO air strikes to force the Serbs to make peace. In South Asia, he labored to get Pakistani generals to stop seeing the Taliban as friendly proxies they could use to thwart Indian influence in Afghanistan. It was a different conflict; in many ways, a different world. For me, Holbrooke will always be a source of inspiration. He devoted his life to public service, a notion that is now derided in many quarters. Some say his death marks the end of a Kennedy-inspired generation—and an America—that believed it could be a virtuous force in the world. I fervently disagree. All of us have the chance to follow his example.
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David Rohde, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, is a reporter for The New York Times and the author of A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides.
To stop Afghan bombs, a focus on Pakistani fertilizer
Washington Post By Greg Jaffe Saturday, November 26, 2011
To grasp the severity of Lt. Gen. Michael D. Barbero’s $40-fertilizer-bomb problem, it helps to consider some much bigger numbers.
Barbero heads a U.S. military command, with an annual budget of about $2.8 billion, that was created to stem U.S. casualties from insurgent bombs. In just the past few months, he has shelled out $24 million for a new hand-held ground-penetrating radar, $33 million for mini-surveillance robots and $19 million for bomb-resistant underwear.
The insurgent’s weapon of choice in Afghanistan is at the other end of the price spectrum: a plastic jug filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer. So far this year, these cheap, hard-to-detect bombs have wounded about 3,200 U.S. soldiers and Marines, up 22 percent from 2010, according to the Pentagon.
“We are sweeping more and more of this stuff off the battlefield,” Barbero said of the fertilizer bombs. “But it just keeps coming, and it keeps growing.”
Almost all of the ammonium nitrate used in the Taliban’s bombs comes from two big fertilizer plants across the border in Pakistan. Barbero concluded that the best way to slow the Taliban killing was to make it harder for the insurgents to obtain the fertilizer, which is banned in Afghanistan because it can be made into explosives.
In August, the general called Fawad Mukhtar, the chairman of the Fatima Group, which owns the fertilizer plants, and asked to meet with him in Pakistan.
Mukhtar replied that Barbero did not need to travel. He was planning to visit the United States to drop off his son at college and promised to stop by Barbero’s office in Arlington. The two met for about 30 minutes.
Barbero told the Pakistani businessman that the fertilizer from his plants was responsible for most of the U.S. deaths in Afghanistan. Mukhtar countered that less than 1 percent of his product fell into insurgents’ hands and was fashioned into bombs. The vast majority of the fertilizer was used for farming; people depended on his product to eat and live.
“He is not a radical,” Barbero said of Mukhtar. “I think he wants to be part of the solution.”
Mukhtar declined an interview request for this article. A spokesman for the Fatima Group praised Barbero’s efforts in an e-mail. “I am sure that a person of his experience and caliber can be very effective in dealing with the issue of IED related incidents,” he said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device.
The brief office visit was the beginning of Barbero’s months-long immersion in the global fertilizer industry. He and his staff have studied how the ammonium nitrate fertilizer is made, how it can be processed into a bomb and how it might be modified to make it less dangerous or more detectable by U.S. and Afghan troops at border crossings.
A week after his meeting with Mukhtar, Barbero flew to Denver to address a global conference of ammonium nitrate plant managers. His speech included a plea for help and warnings of onerous regulation if industry executives did not find ways to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer less useful as a weapon.
The plant managers reacted coolly. “They told me how hard it was to make it non-detonable,” Barbero said. “I said I got it. But you need to start working on it.”
Last week, Barbero’s command, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, organized its own fertilizer conference at a hotel in Arlington. About 120 industry executives, agronomists, chemists and military officers met for three days. Mukhtar’s Fatima Group sent a representative from its plant in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
Almost immediately, the industry executives raised doubts that there was anything they could do to help the military. The amounts of fertilizer the Taliban were using to make their bombs — about 480,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate a year — seemed minuscule when compared with the global industry’s annual output.
“I appreciate the gravity of the situation,” said Donald Thomas, an executive with Illinois-based CF Industries. “I have a son-in-law who is a lance corporal in the Marines. But when I look at the volumes [in insurgent bombs], it is nothing. It is two rail cars out of millions of tons.”
“I think you need to talk to your son-in-law,” said Bob Best, the top fertilizer expert on Barbero’s staff. “That 480,000 pounds is a big number to him.”
In the summer, the 59-year-old chemist visited the Fatima Group’s fertilizer plant in Multan to understand how the company made and distributed its product.
“It was amazing for me,” recalled Best, who said he received a warm reception from the plant’s technical staff.
A few days after his trip, a Pakistani newspaper alleged that Best was a CIA operative and said that U.S. officials were using a diplomatic facade to “secure niches for their spies and hit men in and around Multan.” Best said the allegations are untrue.
At the November conference, Best described how the Taliban convert fertilizer into explosives, a process he has studied for years by making and detonating crude bombs himself.
The first step is to remove calcium carbonate, which the industry began adding to ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the 1970s to make it less explosive. Taliban bombmakers remove the calcium by pouring the fertilizer granules into a large pot of hot water. The insoluble calcium carbonate sinks to the bottom of the container.
The insurgents then dry the ammonium nitrate solution. The final product, which looks like laundry detergent, is packed in yellow plastic jugs. Blasting caps are fashioned out of ball¬point pens or glass tubes full of acid. The bombs contain no metal, making them exceptionally hard to detect.
Best flashed a picture of one of the Taliban’s bomb-making factories on a large screen for the conference participants. “What you are seeing is a few guys living in a mud hut with no electricity,” he told the crowd.
A few minutes later the conference broke into working groups. The teams’ task was to find easy, quick and cheap ways to modify the fertilizer so it would be harder to make into a bomb.
Some groups talked about adding pink or yellow dyes to the fertilizer to make it easier to spot at border crossings. One team debated whether there was a way to add an effervescent substance to the bags of calcium ammonium nitrate so that when insurgents placed the granules in water they would get a fizzy mess. Another group suggested putting radio frequency identification tags in the bags so that they could be tracked as they left the factory.
The most promising solution, recommended by all four working groups, involved adding coated urea fertilizer granules to the bags of ammonium nitrate. The combination of urea and ammonium nitrate has a strong affinity for water and would be very difficult for insurgents to dry into an explosive powder.
The urea additives would not stop the insurgents from processing the fertilizer into bombs, but it would complicate their task and potentially make the blast less potent.
On the conference’s last day, groups reported their findings and the attention shifted to Fatima Group representative Farrukh Qureshi, the sole Pakistani at the conference.
A British military officer at the conference suggested that only the Fatima Group plants should have to change their method of production because they were the lone source of the problem in Afghanistan.
“It is a near-monopoly,” the British officer said. “And if those two plants would adjust their processes, it would make it very difficult for the insurgent to shop around.”
Qureshi bristled at the suggestion that Pakistan plants were the only problem. “There is a lot of trade taking place with India. There is Iran and Indonesia,” he said. “And I am not even discussing about the former Russian states. . . . The extremists will find ways to get calcium ammonium nitrate. These are very smart people.”
Another conference participant suggested banning ammonium nitrate in Pakistan and forcing farmers to shift to other kinds of fertilizer, such as urea, which is used heavily in the United States and is harder to make into a bomb.
Qureshi said that Pakistan’s impoverished subsistence farmers would need expensive machinery to spread urea. Ammonium nitrate fertilizer is spread by hand and is better suited to Pakistani soil. “Our customers are very change-sensitive and very cost-sensitive,” he said.
A few minutes later, the conference ended. Barbero’s command will pay for some quick studies in the next few months to determine whether adding coated urea granules, dyes or radio tags to the ammonium nitrate bags really will mean fewer bombs.
The goal is to have any potential solution in place at the Fatima Group plants before the 2012 summer fighting season in Afghanistan.
Correspondent Karin Brulliard in Islamabad contributed to this report.
Afghan Reporters Maneuver Media Minefields
NPR By Ahmad Shafi November 25, 2011
In Afghanistan, a media boom followed the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, but it hasn't been without problems. Watchdog groups report hundreds of cases of violence and intimidation against journalists, including murder. Afghan reporters have learned which topics are off limits, and they take great care to avoid offending the country's most powerful personalities.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
In Afghanistan, a media boom followed the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, but there have been problems. Watchdog groups report hundreds of cases of violence and intimidation against journalists, including murder. Afghan reporters have learned which topics are off-limits, and they take great care to avoid offending the country's powerful. NPR's Ahmad Shafi reports from Kabul.
AHMAD SHAFI, BYLINE: Last year, Abdullah Khinjani, a 23-year-old law school graduate, landed a job as a presenter for an investigative program at one of the popular private TV stations in Kabul. His exposes of government corruption earned him a devoted following, and also alarmed many Afghan government officials. But after an episode of the show that exposed links between the private security companies and senior members of President Hamid Karzai's administration, Khinjani began receiving threatening phone calls. Then things got worse.
ABDULLAH KHINJANI: One night, I was driving home. It was about 11 o'clock. Suddenly, a big SUV car with dark windows pulled over in front of me. Four men walk out of it and came straight to me. They pointed their guns at me and told me that I should stop reporting on private security companies, and if I want to stay alive, I must quit my job.
SHAFI: A couple of days later, Khinjani says more armed men showed up at his home and told him there would be no more warnings.
KHINJANI: They were armed. They had big guns, they were wearing parliamentary uniforms and they come with big cars that had no license plate. Only very high government officials' cars are with no license plates. I was very scared.
SHAFI: Khinjani says he quit his job, fearing for his life. He's not the only journalist who has faced threats and violence in Afghanistan. According to the Nye(ph) Center for Open Media, since 2001, more than 250 journalists have been threatened, kidnapped, beaten, arrested and/or killed. Siddiqullah Tawhidi, the director of Afghan Media Watch says Afghan government officials were blamed for 55 percent of the incidents, 16 percent were blamed on Taliban militants, and 26 percent were attributed to unknown armed groups.
Tawhidi says 2009 was the worst year for attacks on journalists, but he doesn't think the situation is improving.
SIDDIQULLAH TAWHIDI: (Through translator) It is because more Afghan journalists are resorting to self-censorship when it comes to issues and figures in the government and the armed opposition, and controversial issues such as corruption.
SHAFI: Tawhidi says Karzai's administration has begun to view the Afghan media as a nuisance. He says there was more media freedom in the early years of Karzai's administration, but when journalists started criticizing him and his aides for failing to tackle corruption, the government became more hostile towards freedom of his speech. He says the government has done little about attacks on journalists. Lotfullah Najafizada, a senior current affairs producer was Tolo TV in Kabul says reporters have become aware of the red lines around dangerous topics.
They include religious issues, ethnic issues, corruption, war crimes, or anything to do with warlords or high-ranking governmental officials.
LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: If you really, you know, cross a red line probably, you know, you're going to be knocked out, you know, without any prior notice. There is no, basically, insurance, no guarantee.
SHAFI: Despite the violence and intimidation Najafizada says Afghan journalists still consider the media scene a success story.
NAJAFIZADA: During the Taliban, nothing was here. There was nothing, you know, any kind of newspapers or radio stations, you know, criticizing government. The Taliban had banned, you know, the state channel as well, but now you've got, you know, a growing number of channels, more than 35 now operating, most of them based in Kabul, and most of them private.
SHAFI: Although Karzai's administration maintains it supports free press in Afghanistan, many Afghan journalists fear that gains for the media industry are in jeopardy with worsening security and threats from warlords and conservatives who wield an increasingly heavy hand within the government. They also fear that without the support of the international community and the establishment of viable democratic institutions, media freedom, a key post-Taliban achievement, will be lost when NATO troops leave by the end of 2014. Ahmad Shafi, NPR News, Kabul.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By SEBASTIAN ABBOT
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan has blocked vital supply routes for U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan and demanded Washington vacate a base used by American drones after coalition aircraft allegedly killed 24 Pakistani troops at two posts along a mountainous frontier that serves as a safe haven for militants.
The incident Saturday was a major blow to American efforts to rebuild an already tattered alliance vital to winding down the 10-year-old Afghan war. Islamabad called the bloodshed in one of its tribal areas a "grave infringement" of the country's sovereignty, and it could make it even more difficult for the U.S. to enlist Pakistan's help in pushing Afghan insurgents to engage in peace talks.
A NATO spokesman said it was likely that coalition airstrikes caused Pakistani casualties, but an investigation was being conducted to determine the details. If confirmed, it would be the deadliest friendly fire incident by NATO against Pakistani troops since the Afghan war began a decade ago.
A prolonged closure of Pakistan's two Afghan border crossings to NATO supplies could cause serious problems for the coalition. The U.S., which is the largest member of the NATO force in Afghanistan, ships more than 30 percent of its non-lethal supplies through Pakistan. The coalition has alternative routes through Central Asia into northern Afghanistan, but they are costlier and less efficient.
Pakistan temporarily closed one of its Afghan crossings to NATO supplies last year after U.S. helicopters accidentally killed two Pakistani soldiers. Suspected militants took advantage of the impasse to launch attacks against stranded or rerouted trucks carrying NATO supplies. The government reopened the border after about 10 days when the U.S. apologized. NATO said at the time the relatively short closure did not significantly affect its ability to keep its troops supplied.
But the reported casualties are much greater this time, and the relationship between Pakistan and the U.S. has severely deteriorated over the last year, especially following the covert American raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town in May. Islamabad was outraged that it wasn't told about the operation beforehand.
The government announced it closed its border crossings to NATO in a statement issued after an emergency meeting of the Cabinet's defense committee chaired by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.
It also said that within 15 days the U.S. must vacate Shamsi Air Base, which is located in southwestern Baluchistan province. The U.S. uses the base to service drones that target al-Qaida and Taliban militants in Pakistan's tribal region when they cannot return to their bases inside Afghanistan because of weather conditions or mechanical difficulty, said U.S. and Pakistani officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive strategic matters.
The government also plans to review all diplomatic, military and intelligence cooperation with the U.S. and other NATO forces, according to the statement issued after the defense committee meeting.
The White House said that senior U.S. civilian and military officials had expressed their condolences to their Pakistani counterparts.
The White House statement said the officials expressed "our desire to work together to determine what took place, and our commitment to the U.S.-Pakistan partnership which advances our shared interests, including fighting terrorism in the region."
The White House statement did not address Pakistan's decision to block supply routes for the war in Afghanistan or its demand that the U.S. vacate the drone base.
The Pakistani army said Saturday that NATO helicopters and fighter jets carried out an "unprovoked" attack on two of its border posts in the Mohmand tribal area before dawn, killing 24 soldiers and wounding 13 others. The troops responded in self-defense "with all available weapons," an army statement said.
Pakistan army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani condemned the attack, calling it a "blatant and unacceptable act," according to the statement.
A spokesman for NATO forces, Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, said Afghan and coalition troops were operating in the border area of eastern Afghanistan when "a tactical situation" prompted them to call in close air support. It is "highly likely" that the airstrikes caused Pakistani casualties, he told BBC television.
"My most sincere and personal heartfelt condolences go out to the families and loved ones of any members of Pakistan security forces who may have been killed or injured," Gen. John Allen, the top overall commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
The border issue is a major source of tension between Islamabad and Washington, which is committed to withdrawing its combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Much of the violence in Afghanistan is carried out by insurgents who are based just across the border in Pakistan. Coalition forces are not allowed to cross the frontier to attack the militants. However, the militants sometimes fire artillery and rockets across the line, reportedly from locations close to Pakistani army posts.
American officials have repeatedly accused Pakistani forces of supporting — or turning a blind eye — to militants using its territory for cross-border attacks. But militants based in Afghanistan have also been attacking Pakistan recently, prompting complaints from Islamabad.
The two posts that were attacked Saturday were located about 1,000 feet (300 meters) apart on a mountain top and were set up recently to stop Pakistani Taliban militants holed up in Afghanistan from crossing the border and staging attacks, said local government and security officials.
There was no militant activity in the area when the alleged NATO attack occurred, local officials said. Some of the soldiers were standing guard, while others were asleep, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
Pakistan army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said map references of all of the force's border posts have been given to NATO several times.
Pakistan's prime minister summoned U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter to protest the alleged NATO strike, according to a Foreign Ministry statement. It said the attack was a "grave infringement of Pakistan's sovereignty" and could have serious repercussions on Pakistan's cooperation with NATO.
Munter said in a statement that he regretted any Pakistani deaths and promised to work closely with Islamabad to investigate the incident.
The U.S., Pakistan, and Afghan militaries have long wrestled with the technical difficulties of patrolling a border that in many places is disputed or poorly marked. Saturday's incident took place a day after a meeting between NATO's Gen. Allen and Pakistan army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in Islamabad to discuss border operations.
The meeting tackled "coordination, communication and procedures ... aimed at enhancing border control on both sides," according to a statement from the Pakistani side.
The U.S. helicopter attack that killed two Pakistani soldiers on Sept. 30 of last year took place south of Mohmand in the Kurram tribal area. A joint U.S.-Pakistan investigation found that Pakistani soldiers fired at the two U.S. helicopters prior to the attack, a move the investigation team said was likely meant to notify the aircraft of their presence after they passed into Pakistani airspace several times.
A U.S. airstrike in June 2008 reportedly killed 11 Pakistani paramilitary troops during a clash between militants and coalition forces in the tribal region.
____
Associated Press writers Anwarullah Khan in Khar, Pakistan, Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, Matiullah Achakzai in Chaman and Deb Riechmann in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.
Will inking strategic pact with U.S. lead to viable stability in Afghanistan?
By Abdul Haleem
KABUL, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- In its latest efforts to achieve durable peace in the militancy-plagued country, the Afghan government convened the traditional Loya Jirga or grand assembly of chieftains, notables and functionaries last week to discuss the proposed Washington-Kabul strategic partnership, but received mixed reactions at home and abroad.
The four-day national gathering attended by more than 2,300 people from across the country and concluded on Nov. 19 had backed the proposal of having strategic relations with Washington and recommended the administration to ink the controversial pact which grants the U.S. to have military bases in Afghanistan.
In its bold decision inscribed in a lengthy 76-article resolution, the Jirga participants described having strategic relationship with the U.S. very necessary for maintaining security, economic development and peace talks with Taliban and for ensuring lasting peace in the conflict-ridden nation.
However, local analysts are doubtful about future U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and its ability in forcing Taliban towards peace talks or annihilation of insurgency in the country.
"Inking strategic pact and giving military bases to the U.S. would not change the situation in the country and the militancy would continue as it has been continuing over the past 10 years in the presence of over 140,000 U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan," Kabul-based security analyst and former Taliban official Wahid Mujda told Xinhua.
He also said "long-term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would provoke Afghanistan's neighboring countries including Iran, Pakistan and Russia."
Afghan opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah, who was President Hamid Karzai's main challenger in last presidential election, in a sharp reaction termed the Loya Jirga as unconstitutional.
Abdullah, who heads the "Change and Hope Coalition", said "no country's permanent bases are in the interest of Afghanistan," according to Afghan media.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan government, U.S. and NATO-led troops have lashed at the Jirga and its recommendations of having strategic relations with Washington.
"Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (name of ousted Taliban regime) calls on all its countrymen, parties and political figures that the sole reason for the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan is because of foreign invaders," the Taliban outfit said in a statement.
"We believe the Afghan crisis will only find an end when our nation thwarts the Strategic Partnership of the invaders and their mercenaries under the disguise of Loya Jirga and their other plans, brings the ongoing occupation to an end and fulfills the duty of bringing about an independent, proud and peaceful Afghanistan," the statement sent to media said.
Russian ambassador to Afghanistan Andrey Avetisyan has expressed concerns over the long-term U.S. military presence in the country, according to local media reports.
"Bearing in mind two major threats -- terrorism and narcotics, we have to watch closely what is happening here. By now we are not convinced that a long-term foreign military presence in Afghanistan will help to maintain security in the region," the English Daily Outlook Afghanistan quoted the ambassador as saying.
To enact the Jirga's core decision as law requires the approval of the parliament where oppositions and supporters would remain at loggerhead over the controversial issue and its impacts on the future of Afghanistan.
Keeping in mind the support and opposition at home and abroad to the proposed strategic partnership and NATO-led forces' inability to curb militancy over the past 10 years, "it seems that instability would continue in the country," said Mujda, who is also the author of "Afghanistan and the Five-Year Reign of Taliban. "
MPs approve new Afghan central bank chief
(AFP)
KABUL — Afghan MPs on Saturday approved an American-educated banker as new governor of the country's central bank after the previous chief fled to the United States saying he feared for his life.
Noorullah Dilawari, previously central bank governor from 2004 to 2007, secured 173 confidence votes from the 228 MPs present in the country's 249-member lower house of parliament.
Afghan MPs also granted a trust vote to Rahmatullah Nabeel, President Karzai's candidate to head Afghanistan's intelligence agency (NDS), who has been serving as acting director of the agency since July 2010.
Dilawari will replace Abdul Qadir Fitrat, who left Afghanistan in June saying he was in danger after speaking out about the near-collapse of Kabul Bank, the warring country's biggest private lender.
In his resignation statement, Fitrat accused politicians of undermining the central bank's independence and told the BBC that his life was at risk after he exposed some of those who he said were responsible for Kabul Bank's woes.
Karzai's government dismissed Fitrat's claims, saying his life was not in danger and suggesting he was fleeing a possible probe into his own activities.
Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a new $133.6 million loan for Afghanistan after months of delay due to concerns over the Kabul Bank scandal, which it described as a "Ponzi scheme".
The IMF said Kabul had now made progress cleaning up its financial system.
Taliban reportedly getting salary to stop fighting
UK newspaper says participants get 100 pounds per month during training period
msnbc.com
Taliban members who agree to stop fighting are being paid 100 pounds per month as part of an effort to reduce attacks against NATO troops in Afghanistan, a British newspaper reported.
The Sunday Telegraph said the program, supervised by a British major general, was open to any Taliban fighters, even if they had committed atrocities such as beheadings and hanging of women.
Participants aren't interrogated but are asked to complete a questionnaire about their reasons for joining the insurgency, the newspaper said. They then enter a three-month training program in which they are are taught citizenship and must vow not to participate in violence. They are paid the 100 pounds during that period. A total of 98 million pounds is available in the program, the newspaper said.
The Sunday Telegraph said more than 2,700 insurgents had participated, including 900 in northern Afghanistan, which had seen a 30 percent decrease in violence.
Is Afghanistan on the brink of civil war?
The withdrawal of foreign forces could leave Afghanistan on the brink of social, political and economic collapse. Is there still time to avoid disaster?
Global Post By Jean MacKenzie November 25, 2011
BOSTON - The bad news on Afghanistan just does not stop. With the prospect of significant troop cuts over the next year, analysts on all sides of the debate are warning of ominous developments ahead.
The most common fear is that Afghanistan is heading for a civil war between the Taliban-led insurgency and their foreign backers, on the one hand, and the Afghan government, backed by the Afghan National Security Forces, on the other. Few hope for a positive outcome with such an alignment of forces.
Former Interior Minister Hanif Atmar made the rounds in Washington last week, using his considerable urbane appeal to make the case for continued US involvement in Afghanistan. If the foreign forces leave too soon, warned the UK-educated Atmar, “The state will disintegrate It is the perfect scenario for a proxy-led civil war,” which he said would include Pakistan and Iran.
Atmar, who lost his job last year in the wake of a security incident at the president’s Peace Jirga, has just founded a new political party, Right and Justice, and observers say he might be trying to drum up support for his own oppositionist coalition.
More from GlobalPost: Karzai's peace meeting plagued by conflict
But the warning resounded in Washington, which is already nervous about the troop cuts announced for next year by US President Barack Obama.
The World Bank has just issued dire predictions about the Afghan economy, which, it says, could completely implode without the aid money that the foreign intervention has brought into the country.
None of this is startling news to those who follow Afghanistan, or to the millions of Afghans facing an uncertain future. They have been voting with their feet and their wallets for many months now, causing property prices in the capital, Kabul, to fall by more than 40 percent over the past year. Many Afghans are looking for an exit.
But how likely is it that Afghanistan will suffer a repeat of its dark history?
“If the current political process continues, where people lose trust in their government, by 2014 the current government will be unable to take responsibility for Afghanistan either militarily or politically,” said Haroon Mir, head of the Center for Research and Policy Studies in Kabul.
But according to Michael Semple, a leading expert on Afghan politics and the Taliban at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the worst might still be avoided.
He cautions against “woolly assumptions” that Afghanistan is inevitably headed for a repeat of the 1990s, when the power groups formed to battle the Soviets turned their anger, and their guns, on each other.
“We should not underestimate war fatigue among Afghans,” he said. “They are determined to avoid a civil war, even as it is staring them in the face. But it is a very serious prospect.”
More from GlobalPost: Kabul attack belies US optimism
One of the main problems, said Semple, is that the promise of 2001 has not been realized. When the Taliban regime collapsed, it was time for Afghans to renegotiate their social contract, to decide just who was going to play which role in the new Afghanistan.
Instead, they were given a system in which the largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, felt marginalized, in which some of the more nefarious actors from the civil war years were given a large share of power, and where ethnic and regional divisions were allowed to fester.
“I am not sure people have appreciated how dangerous the failure of the political process over the past 10 years has been,” Semple said. “In 2001, the task was to establish a functional pluralism in a country where the ‘ancient regime’ had disappeared in 1978.”
Afghanistan has been in conflict since Prime Minister Daud and his family were overthrown and murdered in a communist-led coup in April, 1978. According to Semple, reestablishing a system in which all segments of Afghan society can feel that they have a place is of paramount importance.
But since 2001, when the international forces sent the Taliban packing and installed Karzai as the head of the interim government, things have gone badly awry in Afghanistan.
More from GlobalPost: The Drone Wars
Some would argue that the country is not much better off now than it was before the US-led intervention. Semple argues that the reality is more nuanced.
“The comparison should not be between Afghanistan now and Afghanistan in 2001,” he said. “Afghanistan in 2001 was a miserable place. What we should be comparing are the hopes and expectations of Afghans in 2001 with what we have achieved by 2014.”
This will not necessarily lead to a more optimistic assessment, he cautions: “What we are seeing now is the death of hope,” he added.
Lucy Morgan Edwards, who has just written a book called “The Afghan solution: The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, The CIA, and How Western Hubris Lost Afghanistan,” is less convinced that civil war can still be staved off, and she is not shy about pinpointing blame.
According to Edwards, international ignorance and arrogance are largely responsible for the dire state in which Afghanistan finds itself today.
“The key word is legitimacy,” said Edwards, speaking from her home in Geneva. “There is none. What we have done over the past 10 years is build a house of cards that is about to collapse.”
The United States and its allies did not understand the underlying reality of what they were doing, Edwards said.
“It has always been a civil war,” she insisted. “We intervened on the side of the Northern Alliance,” the collection of commanders, mainly Tajik and Uzbek, who battled the Soviets in the 1980s, each other in the early 1990s, and the Taliban from the mid-1990s until 2001.
By installing Karzai, a man who before 2001 had minimal following in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies prepared the ground for the present morass. Bringing the Northern Alliance back into the government alienated the Pashtuns, especially those in the volatile south, preparing the ground for the present insurgency.
“Karzai was just a figurehead for the Northern Alliance,” Edwards said. Attempts to bolster the security forces as a way out have failed miserably, she added. The army, with its largely Tajik officer corps and minimal representation from southern Pashtuns, is much more part of the problem than a solution.
“We have spent $46 billion on the Afghan security forces over the past 10 years,” she said. “This was money very badly spent.”
According to both Semple and Edwards, Karzai’s recent spate of often bizarre policy speeches are an attempt to soothe the Pashtun base.
Karzai has just finished a major exercise in public relations at a gathering of elders known as a Loya Jirga, called to drum up support for a strategic partnership agreement with the United States.
Opening the gathering, he delivered a rambling speech aimed at stirring national pride.
“Even if old, sick and feeble, a lion is still a lion!” he said. “We are lions, the United States should treat us as lions, and we want nothing less than that. We therefore are prepared to enter into a strategic agreement between a lion and America A lion hates a stranger entering his home; a lion dislikes a stranger trespassing its space, a lion does not want his children taken away at night the lion is the king of his territory and he governs his own territory.”
Karzai is insisting that the United States and its allies cease night raids and kill/capture missions as a condition for signing any sort of agreement. But the foreign forces have shown little inclination to heed Karzai’s warnings; they say that night raids are an essential tool of their counterinsurgency mission.
For the embattled president, however, perception may be more important than reality.
“Karzai plays to a strong sense of Pashtun nationalism,” Semple said. “His anti-foreign stance is essential for this. The Pashtuns love it.”
The United States is a bit less enamored of Karzai’s increasingly virulent attacks on the foreign presence. But, as Semple points out, they are stuck.
“The United States has no obvious way to extricate itself,” he said. “It would pay a very high price if it were to turn away from Afghanistan. There are international military networks who still harbor plans to attack the West. They are committed to diminishing the United States’ standing in the world. If they can create the perception that that the United States is disgraced and defeated in Afghanistan, it will be an iconic victory for them.”
Abdul Qayum Suroush contributed to this report from Kabul.
German troops to stay in Afghanistan after NATO goes
AFP – Sat, Nov 26, 2011
Germany will keep troops in Afghanistan after NATO forces leave the country at the end of 2014, German Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere told the Bild am Sonntag paper in an interview to be published Sunday.
Troops remaining would concentrate on the training of Afghan forces, the minister said.
They "would be sufficiently armed so as to be able to defend themselves" but "it won't be about having troops for combat," said De Maiziere.
Berlin currently has 5,350 soldiers in Afghanistan, a number which will reduce to 4,900 as Germany starts withdrawing its forces ahead of NATO's 2014 deadline for the transferral of security control to Afghan forces.
After the US and Britain, German soldiers are the third largest NATO troop contingent in Afghanistan.
The decade-long war was the first major deployment of German troops abroad since the Second World War and has not been welcomed by a majority of public opinion.
Richard Holbrooke's Last Mission in Afghanistan
In an excerpt from a new book, The Unquiet American, journalist David Rohde salutes Richard Holbrooke’s vision and effectiveness in Afghanistan—and remembers how he was saved by him, twice.
Daily Beast By David Rohde Nov 26, 2011
For four days in March 2006, Richard Holbrooke crisscrossed Afghanistan as a private citizen. The country’s resilient people and rugged landscape fascinated him. He was enthralled during a two-hour conversation with an imprisoned young Taliban militant, appalled by the American police training and counternarcotics effort, and welcomed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. At a farewell dinner attended by American generals and Afghan ministers, he held forth in classic Holbrooke fashion. For thirty minutes, he laid out his vision of a sweeping new American effort in the region.
Two years later, the Obama administration named Holbrooke its special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In theory, Holbrooke should have been at the zenith of his diplomatic skills and career. Decades of work in Washington and war zones had prepared him for what he called his last mission. The then sixty-seven-year-old diplomat was determined and captivated, and carried personal ties to the region. In 1971, Holbrooke had briefly visited Afghanistan while working as a Peace Corps official.
“I saw this romantic, exotic, harmonious, multi-ethnic society,” he later told a journalist, “just a few years before it was destroyed.”
But it was not an easy task for the man famed for nearly singlehandedly bringing peace to the Balkans. His bluntness and bluster initially alienated Afghan and Pakistani officials. His perceived competitiveness with his peers compounded suspicions in Washington. And a multi-dimensional conflict, combined with nagging questions about the extent of American influence and patience, proved far less susceptible to Holbrooke’s or America’s will than the war in the former Yugoslavia.
As a journalist who covered the conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, I saw Holbrooke soar and stumble. And in a deeply personal way, I experienced his goodwill and his determination. The legendary American diplomat helped save my life—twice.
Instead of simply giving up in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke waited, narrowed his focus, and played what he called “the long game.” While much has been written of Holbrooke’s struggles, he achieved a great deal in the region. In his final year, he revitalized his relationship with Afghan and Pakistani leaders, enjoyed policy victories in Washington, and achieved diplomatic breakthroughs in the region. A man stereotyped as a publicity-seeking egotist kept many of those successes secret.
Sadly, just as his labors began to bear fruit, on December 11, 2010, he collapsed in a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her ornate office on the State Department’s seventh floor. Two days later, he passed away before his strategy could be put to the test.
Four lessons emerge from Holbrooke’s effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan. First, the period represents the culmination of Holbrooke’s approach to diplomacy. The techniques he used, open internal debate he encouraged, and team he assembled are a model for aspiring diplomats.
Second, Afghanistan reaffirmed Holbrooke’s lifelong belief that American foreign aid programs must empower local governments and officials. When impatient American aid workers or troops do the work of local officials, it creates a destructive dependency, he argued, that delegitimizes local governments and draws the United States into quagmires.
Third, Holbrooke’s fervent work in Pakistan showed the indispensable value of sophisticated, respectful, and passionate diplomacy in the field. By repeatedly journeying to Pakistan, candidly engaging officials and the Pakistani public, and responding pragmatically to a traumatic natural disaster, Holbrooke did more than any other American official since 2001 to ease long-running Pakistani mistrust of the United States.
And fourth, Holbrooke lived the ultimate life of service. After joining the State Department at twenty-one and serving every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy, he accepted a virtually impossible assignment in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke died, literally, while serving his nation and showed all Americans the value, dignity, and worth of public service.
Personal and professional passions drove Holbrooke’s decision to return to Afghanistan in 2006, according to family and friends. A successful New York investment banker, he did not need to survey a war overshadowed by the spiraling conflict in Iraq. On a personal level, though, Holbrooke wanted to see what had become of the Afghanistan he visited as a young man. And on a professional level, he made the trip in his capacity as chairman of the Asia Society, an organization he believed needed to focus more on South Asia.
When he arrived in Kabul, Holbrooke despaired over the physical destruction of the country, and expressed shock at the ongoing suffering of the Afghan people—particularly once-independent urban women now clad in burqas.
Throughout his life, Holbrooke’s diplomacy often centered on the sufferings of individuals. A refugee he met in Bosnia inspired his work there. HIV-positive women he met in Namibia fueled his AIDS activism. In one of his first press conferences in Kabul, he told Afghan journalists that he hoped to help re-create the peaceful Afghanistan he drove across over three decades earlier.
After his 2006 trip, he devoured books and reports on the country and found any excuse to consult with regional experts. He also employed one of his favorite habits: mining journalists for what they knew. Holbrooke invited me to lunch in December 2006 to discuss my experience covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for The New York Times since 2001. He listened as I described the need for a larger American effort in the region—and then interrupted me.
“We can’t force Pakistan to accept democracy,” I remember him saying.
“It will never work.”
Holbrooke was eager for the United States to avoid the slow escalations that entangled it in Vietnam. For him, one of the central lessons of Vietnam was the danger of not deeply studying a complex foreign policy problem before acting. In March 2008, Holbrooke returned to Afghanistan, again as a private citizen, and embedded with American troops in the eastern province of Khost. Impressed by the local governor, the commanding American military officer, and the American diplomat serving there, he hailed them in a monthly column he wrote for The Washington Post.
He also tried to lower expectations and talked about the importance—and dangers—of American intervention. One of his largest fears was that a sweeping American presence in Afghanistan would create dependence and inadvertently undermine the local government, as he had seen in Vietnam. American good intentions, he warned, could prolong the conflict in Afghanistan.
“With each tactical achievement, Afghanistan will become more dependent on international support,” Holbrooke wrote. “Will short-term success create a long-term trap for the United States and its allies, as the war becomes the longest in American history?”
Nine months later, Holbrooke did not hesitate when then president-elect Obama and Hillary Clinton offered him the position of special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Despite warnings from numerous friends that he was doomed to fail, Holbrooke embraced a seemingly hopeless undertaking. His decision to accept was driven both by his desire for the limelight and, critically, by the same call to public service that had caused him to join the foreign service after graduating from Brown.
Holbrooke, who had always argued that people were the difference between good and bad policy, immediately began assembling what he described as an all-star team of advisers and aides. As he had throughout his career, he hired people with little government experience and broke bureaucratic protocol.
On the night before his appointment was announced, he reached out to Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American academic known for his knowledge of Pakistan. Three months later, on a shuttle flight from Washington to New York, he made an impromptu job offer to Rina Amiri, an Afghan-American expert on Afghan politics and a former U.N. official.
He was equally creative inside the government. After Steve Berk, an obscure U.S. Department of Agriculture official who had briefly served in Afghanistan, sent Holbrooke an unsolicited email detailing his thoughts on agriculture in Afghanistan, Holbrooke made him a job offer. When Vikram Singh, a young aide to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, impressed Holbrooke during a trip, he hired him as well.
While the offers may have seemed spontaneous, Holbrooke was acting strategically. When it was complete, his thirty-member team had ties to every government organization vital to the office’s success. Treasury, Defense, Agriculture, Homeland Security, and Justice as well as USAID, the FBI, the Joint Staff, and the British and German governments were all represented.
Holbrooke exhibited little of his famed imperiousness and constantly encouraged, challenged, and supported his staff, according to former aides on his Afghanistan-Pakistan team. Over the years, his abrasiveness appeared to have mellowed. He worked grueling hours and pushed his staff hard, but his advisers said they relished the experience. Comparing his office to an Internet start-up, they praised the veteran diplomat for keeping the organization as flat as possible. All staff members had access to Holbrooke, they said, and he encouraged frank and honest policy discussions.
Amiri, the expert on Afghan politics, said Holbrooke insisted that she typically present the local perspective on what was occurring in Kabul, not the Washington view. “He looked at me to give the Afghan lens, not simply the objective lens,” Amiri said. “How Afghans would see things on the ground.”
In a September 2009 New Yorker profile, Holbrooke described his method as “a form of democratic centralism.”
“You want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward,” he said. “But once the policy’s decided, you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it.”
His exhaustive travel reflected another abiding belief that dated to Vietnam. For Holbrooke, intricate foreign policy problems could only be understood in the field. Impatient with what he considered Washington’s glacial pace and myopic bureaucratic views, he traveled to the region once every two months.
Vietnam had also taught him to be skeptical of the American government’s ability to produce cohesive efforts in foreign countries. Whatever challenges lay inside Afghanistan, he believed that getting the White House, military, intelligence community, State Department, and Congress to unite behind—and implement—a multifaceted plan was extraordinarily difficult.
“One thing he definitely understood was the daunting complexity of Washington,” said Nasr, the Pakistan expert on Holbrooke’s staff. “He knew what the strength of the United States was. And he knew its weaknesses.”
In his 1970 Foreign Policy essay “The Machine That Fails”, Holbrooke—then a young foreign service officer who had been in government for just eight years—warned of the cumbersome nature of Washington’s foreign policy apparatus. Despite repeated efforts to rein them in, multiple government agencies—as well as multiple bureaus within the State Department—pursued their own bureaucratic interests and projects.
“Over time, each agency has acquired certain ‘pet projects’ which its senior officials promote,” Holbrooke wrote. “These are often carried out by one agency despite concern and even mid-level opposition from others.”
Lastly, Holbrooke was wary of the tendency of American diplomats and aid workers to bypass slow-moving or corrupt foreign officials and do things themselves. Too large an American effort created passivity, he believed, and undermined the local government in the long term.
“That creates a dependency culture,” Holbrooke said in a 2009 Charlie Rose interview. “I saw that when I was a young diplomat in Vietnam. I’ve seen that in other parts of the world.”
And in a final nuance often misunderstood by many American liberals, Holbrooke believed in the use of military force in certain circumstances. His mind—and his thinking—was supple. Holbrooke, according to his aides, saw the use of force as an instrument that might lead to a negotiated settlement. He viewed diplomacy and military force as tools that complement one another, not as stark alternatives.
“It was never black and white,” said a former aide. “In Holbrooke’s mind, military pressure was the key to any political effort.”
When Holbrooke tried to apply these lessons to South Asia after taking office in 2009, he struggled. India was not part of his diplomatic brief, putting the central dynamic that destabilized the region—India-Pakistan tensions—out of his reach. Pakistani leaders despised the term “AfPak”—an expression Holbrooke had championed—because they felt it equated their nuclear-armed nation with its far poorer and smaller neighbor, Afghanistan.
Like all of us, Holbrooke made mistakes as well. His blunt manner and habit of talking to the press initially alienated Afghan and Pakistani leaders. Before an April 2009 trip to Islamabad, Holbrooke and Admiral Mike Mullen, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly alluded to ties between Pakistani intelligence and the Afghan Taliban.
For years, American and Pakistan analysts had accused Pakistani military intelligence of supporting the Afghan Taliban as a proxy force to prevent India from gaining influence in Afghanistan. This public airing of the issue, though, infuriated military officials in Pakistan.
Holbrooke’s initial relations with Karzai were even more contentious. Before taking office, Holbrooke publicly criticized the Afghan president in his March 2008 Washington Post column. He disparaged Karzai for failing to arrest an infamous Afghan warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, after he attacked, brutalized, and nearly killed a rival commander in Kabul.
“The effect on Karzai’s standing and reputation has been enormous,” Holbrooke wrote. “Excuses were made, but none justified his open disregard for justice.”
In his first meeting with Karzai as special representative in February 2009, Holbrooke reportedly lectured the Afghan leader. Six months later, their relationship unraveled after Karzai supporters committed widespread fraud in the 2009 Afghan presidential elections.
According to media accounts, Holbrooke and Karl Eikenberry, then the American ambassador in Kabul, met with Karzai to discuss the race the day after the balloting. The Afghan president and Holbrooke clashed when the American diplomat asked Karzai if he would accept a runoff election. Karzai insisted he had won the required 50 percent of votes and there was no need for a runoff. Holbrooke, though, refused to drop the issue.
“Holbrooke was extremely blunt with Karzai,” said a former aide. “You cannot behave this way in Afghanistan. This is not the Balkans.”
Within days, the BBC reported that Holbrooke’s meeting with Karzai had been “explosive” and a “dramatic bust up.” Holbrooke insisted the meeting had not been confrontational, but the story went viral. Across Afghanistan and the Web, Holbrooke was portrayed as Karzai’s American taskmaster.
In Washington, Holbrooke struggled as well. Fairly or unfairly, his prominence made his job more difficult. Holbrooke could be exhausting, even to his staunchest allies and defenders. His rivals in Washington looked for the slightest indication of his famed ego or misbehavior. His friend Hillary Clinton repeatedly had to defend him. Stories of his difficulties inevitably found their way into the press.
It was widely reported, for instance, that officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development deeply resented a push by Holbrooke to funnel more aid through Afghan ministries and reduce the role of American contractors. Holbrooke’s goal was to lessen Afghan dependency, but many reportedly believed the Karzai government was too weak and corrupt to handle additional aid. According to media reports, tensions between some agency officials and Holbrooke soared.
To Holbrooke’s surprise, the press—traditionally his ally—complicated his efforts. The rise of partisan cable news channels intensified Washington’s demand for instant winners and losers. Reports of waste, incompetence, and failure in Afghanistan and Pakistan overshadowed calls for patience, diplomacy, and nuance. Books and news coverage about the new administration described the clichéd Holbrooke of the 1990s—the abrasive, egocentric “bulldozer.” The public heard little of the deeply committed public servant who unleashed tremendous energy and creativity into Afghanistan and Pakistan policy discussions that for years lacked such high-level attention and care.
As 2009 came to a close, Holbrooke faced disappointment on multiple fronts. Friends advised him to resign, return to New York, and stop wasting his time on a mission impossible.
Instead, Holbrooke waited. In 2010, he learned from his mistakes, narrowed his focus, and quietly achieved successes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Washington. One of the most important was a historic July 2010 transit agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan that allowed Afghan trucks to cross Pakistani territory to deliver goods to India. The agreement lessened the stranglehold India-Pakistan tensions had put on trade in the region for decades.
In Afghanistan, he hampered the illicit flow of ammonium nitrate fertilizer—which insurgents used to make roadside bombs—from Pakistan to Afghanistan. He focused so intently on agriculture—the country’s traditional economic engine—that Clinton dubbed him “farmer Holbrooke.” And he reversed the Bush administration policy of demanding the eradication of opium crops in southern Afghanistan, a practice he and American military commanders believed increased support for the Taliban.
After months of intensive effort, Holbrooke salvaged his relationship with Karzai, according to Amiri, his adviser on Afghanistan. He met with the Afghan leader six times between January and April 2010, with the final meeting lasting over two hours. Holbrooke then used a Karzai visit to Washington in May to laud the Afghan leader with pomp, circumstance, and attention. Most importantly, he fought for Karzai’s request that the Afghan leader be allowed to carry out negotiations with the Taliban.
“He worked very hard at repairing that relationship,” Amiri said. “I think Karzai realized this was the man who could deliver reconciliation from the administration.”
In Pakistan, Holbrooke learned from his mistakes as well. He worked furiously at courting Pakistani leaders and public opinion.
“He did have a grand strategy,” said Nasr, Holbrooke’s senior adviser on Pakistan. “He believed that we needed to stabilize the government and we needed to close the gap in trust that had developed for decades.”
After mishandling his April 2009 trip to Islamabad with Mullen, Holbrooke played a central role in Hillary Clinton’s successful October 2009 trip to Pakistan. After years of American diplomats taking few questions in brief, tightly scripted press conferences, Clinton held a series of well-received public forums where she tried to address the concerns of average Pakistanis. He also encouraged American military officials to focus on developing a long-term relationship with the Pakistani military.
Holbrooke’s efforts bore the most fruit in the summer of 2010. That July, epic floods engulfed nearly 20 percent of Pakistan, unleashing the worst natural disaster in the country’s history and wiping out roads, bridges, power lines, schools, and health clinics built over decades.
Holbrooke flew to Islamabad to coordinate American relief efforts. In his element in the field, he brought decades of experience to bear. Holbrooke drove the American government bureaucracy, demanding that U.S. military helicopters be shifted from Afghanistan to Pakistan to deliver aid. He met with Pakistani officials and listened to their needs. And he carefully managed the media.
Pakistani television showed images of American helicopters delivering aid to desperate flood victims. American newspapers printed photos of Holbrooke consoling Pakistani refugees. On blazingly hot days, Holbrooke reached camps for the displaced before Pakistani officials did.
To his admirers, the floods were Holbrooke at his best. On a governmental level, he fiercely pursued pragmatic policies that delivered concrete results. On a diplomatic level, he developed respectful relationships with Pakistani officials. And on a public relations level, he presented dramatic proof of American caring. Most importantly, his core human empathy suffused—and drove—the effort.
In speeches, interviews, and private conversations, Holbrooke called for a more respectful long-term relationship between the United States and Pakistan. He expressed interest in the long-term welfare of the Pakistani people. After years in which the “global war on terror” had defined the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, Holbrooke deemphasized that aspect of a relationship that he insisted must be permanent and multidimensional.
“This cannot be a transactional relationship,” he told me several months before he died. “We have to create a long-term relationship.”
Holbrooke’s diplomacy played out in unexpected ways as well. After the Obama administration worked with Congress to triple annual American civilian aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion, Holbrooke helped convince Islamabad to issue more visas to American civilians. Some of the Americans implemented aid programs. Others were dispatched to Pakistan to track terrorists like Osama bin Laden. Holbrooke did not live to see it, but one could argue his diplomacy played a small but important role in the May 2011 death of Al Qaeda’s leader.
And after nearly a year of quiet, persistent effort, Holbrooke won approval for the first meeting between American government officials and Taliban representatives since 2001. As has been widely reported in the spring of 2010, German and Qatari officials offered to set up a meeting between the two sides. Holbrooke and his staff then tirelessly worked in Washington to gain support for it. In an example of Holbrooke’s deep belief in diplomacy’s central role in ending conflicts, American government and Taliban representatives met on November 28, 2010, near Munich. Two weeks later, Holbrooke died.
In the end, the American strategy in the region adopted many of the pragmatic policies that were Holbrooke’s hallmark. Two months after Holbrooke’s death, Hillary Clinton spoke at the inaugural Richard C. Holbrooke Memorial Lecture at the Asia Society in New York. She praised Holbrooke for helping the administration mount military, civilian, and diplomatic surges in the region. She also outlined the terms and approach for the Taliban reconciliation process that Holbrooke had helped initiate in the weeks before his death.
“He had a flair for the dramatic, to be sure, but it was for more than theatrics,” Clinton said. “He understood in every cell of his body that bold action and big ideas can and will change history. After all, he did it himself, again and again.”
If the post-2001 effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan falters, it will be primarily due to continuing tensions between India and Pakistan and the limits of the international community’s influence in the region. If anyone could have succeeded in South Asia, it would have been Holbrooke, but the challenge might have proven too great even for him.
I also have a deeply personal understanding of the ferocious energy and empathy that Holbrooke brought to his diplomacy. During the war in Bosnia, Serb forces arrested me in 1995 after I discovered a mass grave near the town of Srebrenica, site of the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. At the time, Holbrooke was at the peak of his diplomatic power. He had convened peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, to end the three-year conflict.
As my family and editors watched, Holbrooke and his wife, journalist Kati Marton, pressured Serb officials to free me. To their amazement, Holbrooke deftly rattled the Serbs. In one meeting, he picked up the Bosnian Serb vice president’s plaid wool fedora and intimidated him. “Maybe I can hold your hat hostage,” Holbrooke said. Finally, he told Serbian President Slobodan Miloević that the peace talks would be halted until my release. Days later, I was freed.
For years, Holbrooke ribbed me for complicating his already difficult Balkan peace talks. I promised him and my family it would not happen again. In November 2008, a Taliban commander proved me wrong. After inviting me to an interview outside Kabul, he kidnapped two Afghan colleagues and me and ferried us to the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Again, Holbrooke flew into action. He raised my case in meetings with senior officials in Islamabad. He forced senior Pakistani officials to meet with my wife and family in Washington. Yet Holbrooke’s pressure produced few results. At first, Pakistani generals falsely insisted that I was being held captive in Afghanistan, not Pakistan. Then they failed to act.
In an indirect way, though, Holbrooke might have saved my life. My captors scoured the web for information about me and discovered our history in Bosnia. They gleefully announced that Holbrooke was my “best friend” and that I was a “big fish.” Perhaps that made me worth more to them alive than dead.
In June 2009, we escaped from captivity, bringing a sudden resolution of a captivity that seemed destined to drag on for years. After being flown to the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, I was told that Holbrooke was demanding to speak with me by phone. It was a conversation I dreaded. For the second time, I had complicated a hugely complex diplomatic task Holbrooke faced. Expecting to be lambasted, I picked up the phone and said: “I apologize.” Holbrooke’s response surprised me.
“God,” he declared, his voice booming with genuine warmth and affection. “It is so good to hear your voice.”
That day, a conversation began that continued in the United States over the next several months that showed how Holbrooke had changed. Instead of chastising me, he tried to use my time with the Taliban as a means to better understand them.
“Who are they? Why are they fighting? What do they want?” Holbrooke asked, rapid-fire. A man known for his impatience then quietly listened to my long explanations. He even set up meetings with senior American officials who he thought should hear my story.
In the larger scale of events, of course, Holbrooke’s handling of my captivities is trivial. The Dayton agreement saved the lives of countless Bosnians. His work in Vietnam, China, Germany, Africa, and at the United Nations saved many others. The diplomatic groundwork he laid in Afghanistan and Pakistan may yet bring peace to tens of millions of civilians there who have endured thirty years of brutal conflict.
In the Balkans, Holbrooke had the threat of seemingly omnipotent American-led NATO air strikes to force the Serbs to make peace. In South Asia, he labored to get Pakistani generals to stop seeing the Taliban as friendly proxies they could use to thwart Indian influence in Afghanistan. It was a different conflict; in many ways, a different world. For me, Holbrooke will always be a source of inspiration. He devoted his life to public service, a notion that is now derided in many quarters. Some say his death marks the end of a Kennedy-inspired generation—and an America—that believed it could be a virtuous force in the world. I fervently disagree. All of us have the chance to follow his example.
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David Rohde, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, is a reporter for The New York Times and the author of A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides.
To stop Afghan bombs, a focus on Pakistani fertilizer
Washington Post By Greg Jaffe Saturday, November 26, 2011
To grasp the severity of Lt. Gen. Michael D. Barbero’s $40-fertilizer-bomb problem, it helps to consider some much bigger numbers.
Barbero heads a U.S. military command, with an annual budget of about $2.8 billion, that was created to stem U.S. casualties from insurgent bombs. In just the past few months, he has shelled out $24 million for a new hand-held ground-penetrating radar, $33 million for mini-surveillance robots and $19 million for bomb-resistant underwear.
The insurgent’s weapon of choice in Afghanistan is at the other end of the price spectrum: a plastic jug filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer. So far this year, these cheap, hard-to-detect bombs have wounded about 3,200 U.S. soldiers and Marines, up 22 percent from 2010, according to the Pentagon.
“We are sweeping more and more of this stuff off the battlefield,” Barbero said of the fertilizer bombs. “But it just keeps coming, and it keeps growing.”
Almost all of the ammonium nitrate used in the Taliban’s bombs comes from two big fertilizer plants across the border in Pakistan. Barbero concluded that the best way to slow the Taliban killing was to make it harder for the insurgents to obtain the fertilizer, which is banned in Afghanistan because it can be made into explosives.
In August, the general called Fawad Mukhtar, the chairman of the Fatima Group, which owns the fertilizer plants, and asked to meet with him in Pakistan.
Mukhtar replied that Barbero did not need to travel. He was planning to visit the United States to drop off his son at college and promised to stop by Barbero’s office in Arlington. The two met for about 30 minutes.
Barbero told the Pakistani businessman that the fertilizer from his plants was responsible for most of the U.S. deaths in Afghanistan. Mukhtar countered that less than 1 percent of his product fell into insurgents’ hands and was fashioned into bombs. The vast majority of the fertilizer was used for farming; people depended on his product to eat and live.
“He is not a radical,” Barbero said of Mukhtar. “I think he wants to be part of the solution.”
Mukhtar declined an interview request for this article. A spokesman for the Fatima Group praised Barbero’s efforts in an e-mail. “I am sure that a person of his experience and caliber can be very effective in dealing with the issue of IED related incidents,” he said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device.
The brief office visit was the beginning of Barbero’s months-long immersion in the global fertilizer industry. He and his staff have studied how the ammonium nitrate fertilizer is made, how it can be processed into a bomb and how it might be modified to make it less dangerous or more detectable by U.S. and Afghan troops at border crossings.
A week after his meeting with Mukhtar, Barbero flew to Denver to address a global conference of ammonium nitrate plant managers. His speech included a plea for help and warnings of onerous regulation if industry executives did not find ways to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer less useful as a weapon.
The plant managers reacted coolly. “They told me how hard it was to make it non-detonable,” Barbero said. “I said I got it. But you need to start working on it.”
Last week, Barbero’s command, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, organized its own fertilizer conference at a hotel in Arlington. About 120 industry executives, agronomists, chemists and military officers met for three days. Mukhtar’s Fatima Group sent a representative from its plant in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
Almost immediately, the industry executives raised doubts that there was anything they could do to help the military. The amounts of fertilizer the Taliban were using to make their bombs — about 480,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate a year — seemed minuscule when compared with the global industry’s annual output.
“I appreciate the gravity of the situation,” said Donald Thomas, an executive with Illinois-based CF Industries. “I have a son-in-law who is a lance corporal in the Marines. But when I look at the volumes [in insurgent bombs], it is nothing. It is two rail cars out of millions of tons.”
“I think you need to talk to your son-in-law,” said Bob Best, the top fertilizer expert on Barbero’s staff. “That 480,000 pounds is a big number to him.”
In the summer, the 59-year-old chemist visited the Fatima Group’s fertilizer plant in Multan to understand how the company made and distributed its product.
“It was amazing for me,” recalled Best, who said he received a warm reception from the plant’s technical staff.
A few days after his trip, a Pakistani newspaper alleged that Best was a CIA operative and said that U.S. officials were using a diplomatic facade to “secure niches for their spies and hit men in and around Multan.” Best said the allegations are untrue.
At the November conference, Best described how the Taliban convert fertilizer into explosives, a process he has studied for years by making and detonating crude bombs himself.
The first step is to remove calcium carbonate, which the industry began adding to ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the 1970s to make it less explosive. Taliban bombmakers remove the calcium by pouring the fertilizer granules into a large pot of hot water. The insoluble calcium carbonate sinks to the bottom of the container.
The insurgents then dry the ammonium nitrate solution. The final product, which looks like laundry detergent, is packed in yellow plastic jugs. Blasting caps are fashioned out of ball¬point pens or glass tubes full of acid. The bombs contain no metal, making them exceptionally hard to detect.
Best flashed a picture of one of the Taliban’s bomb-making factories on a large screen for the conference participants. “What you are seeing is a few guys living in a mud hut with no electricity,” he told the crowd.
A few minutes later the conference broke into working groups. The teams’ task was to find easy, quick and cheap ways to modify the fertilizer so it would be harder to make into a bomb.
Some groups talked about adding pink or yellow dyes to the fertilizer to make it easier to spot at border crossings. One team debated whether there was a way to add an effervescent substance to the bags of calcium ammonium nitrate so that when insurgents placed the granules in water they would get a fizzy mess. Another group suggested putting radio frequency identification tags in the bags so that they could be tracked as they left the factory.
The most promising solution, recommended by all four working groups, involved adding coated urea fertilizer granules to the bags of ammonium nitrate. The combination of urea and ammonium nitrate has a strong affinity for water and would be very difficult for insurgents to dry into an explosive powder.
The urea additives would not stop the insurgents from processing the fertilizer into bombs, but it would complicate their task and potentially make the blast less potent.
On the conference’s last day, groups reported their findings and the attention shifted to Fatima Group representative Farrukh Qureshi, the sole Pakistani at the conference.
A British military officer at the conference suggested that only the Fatima Group plants should have to change their method of production because they were the lone source of the problem in Afghanistan.
“It is a near-monopoly,” the British officer said. “And if those two plants would adjust their processes, it would make it very difficult for the insurgent to shop around.”
Qureshi bristled at the suggestion that Pakistan plants were the only problem. “There is a lot of trade taking place with India. There is Iran and Indonesia,” he said. “And I am not even discussing about the former Russian states. . . . The extremists will find ways to get calcium ammonium nitrate. These are very smart people.”
Another conference participant suggested banning ammonium nitrate in Pakistan and forcing farmers to shift to other kinds of fertilizer, such as urea, which is used heavily in the United States and is harder to make into a bomb.
Qureshi said that Pakistan’s impoverished subsistence farmers would need expensive machinery to spread urea. Ammonium nitrate fertilizer is spread by hand and is better suited to Pakistani soil. “Our customers are very change-sensitive and very cost-sensitive,” he said.
A few minutes later, the conference ended. Barbero’s command will pay for some quick studies in the next few months to determine whether adding coated urea granules, dyes or radio tags to the ammonium nitrate bags really will mean fewer bombs.
The goal is to have any potential solution in place at the Fatima Group plants before the 2012 summer fighting season in Afghanistan.
Correspondent Karin Brulliard in Islamabad contributed to this report.
Afghan Reporters Maneuver Media Minefields
NPR By Ahmad Shafi November 25, 2011
In Afghanistan, a media boom followed the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, but it hasn't been without problems. Watchdog groups report hundreds of cases of violence and intimidation against journalists, including murder. Afghan reporters have learned which topics are off limits, and they take great care to avoid offending the country's most powerful personalities.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
In Afghanistan, a media boom followed the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, but there have been problems. Watchdog groups report hundreds of cases of violence and intimidation against journalists, including murder. Afghan reporters have learned which topics are off-limits, and they take great care to avoid offending the country's powerful. NPR's Ahmad Shafi reports from Kabul.
AHMAD SHAFI, BYLINE: Last year, Abdullah Khinjani, a 23-year-old law school graduate, landed a job as a presenter for an investigative program at one of the popular private TV stations in Kabul. His exposes of government corruption earned him a devoted following, and also alarmed many Afghan government officials. But after an episode of the show that exposed links between the private security companies and senior members of President Hamid Karzai's administration, Khinjani began receiving threatening phone calls. Then things got worse.
ABDULLAH KHINJANI: One night, I was driving home. It was about 11 o'clock. Suddenly, a big SUV car with dark windows pulled over in front of me. Four men walk out of it and came straight to me. They pointed their guns at me and told me that I should stop reporting on private security companies, and if I want to stay alive, I must quit my job.
SHAFI: A couple of days later, Khinjani says more armed men showed up at his home and told him there would be no more warnings.
KHINJANI: They were armed. They had big guns, they were wearing parliamentary uniforms and they come with big cars that had no license plate. Only very high government officials' cars are with no license plates. I was very scared.
SHAFI: Khinjani says he quit his job, fearing for his life. He's not the only journalist who has faced threats and violence in Afghanistan. According to the Nye(ph) Center for Open Media, since 2001, more than 250 journalists have been threatened, kidnapped, beaten, arrested and/or killed. Siddiqullah Tawhidi, the director of Afghan Media Watch says Afghan government officials were blamed for 55 percent of the incidents, 16 percent were blamed on Taliban militants, and 26 percent were attributed to unknown armed groups.
Tawhidi says 2009 was the worst year for attacks on journalists, but he doesn't think the situation is improving.
SIDDIQULLAH TAWHIDI: (Through translator) It is because more Afghan journalists are resorting to self-censorship when it comes to issues and figures in the government and the armed opposition, and controversial issues such as corruption.
SHAFI: Tawhidi says Karzai's administration has begun to view the Afghan media as a nuisance. He says there was more media freedom in the early years of Karzai's administration, but when journalists started criticizing him and his aides for failing to tackle corruption, the government became more hostile towards freedom of his speech. He says the government has done little about attacks on journalists. Lotfullah Najafizada, a senior current affairs producer was Tolo TV in Kabul says reporters have become aware of the red lines around dangerous topics.
They include religious issues, ethnic issues, corruption, war crimes, or anything to do with warlords or high-ranking governmental officials.
LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: If you really, you know, cross a red line probably, you know, you're going to be knocked out, you know, without any prior notice. There is no, basically, insurance, no guarantee.
SHAFI: Despite the violence and intimidation Najafizada says Afghan journalists still consider the media scene a success story.
NAJAFIZADA: During the Taliban, nothing was here. There was nothing, you know, any kind of newspapers or radio stations, you know, criticizing government. The Taliban had banned, you know, the state channel as well, but now you've got, you know, a growing number of channels, more than 35 now operating, most of them based in Kabul, and most of them private.
SHAFI: Although Karzai's administration maintains it supports free press in Afghanistan, many Afghan journalists fear that gains for the media industry are in jeopardy with worsening security and threats from warlords and conservatives who wield an increasingly heavy hand within the government. They also fear that without the support of the international community and the establishment of viable democratic institutions, media freedom, a key post-Taliban achievement, will be lost when NATO troops leave by the end of 2014. Ahmad Shafi, NPR News, Kabul.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com