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Obama: 'Tough Fight' Still In Afghanistan
September 1, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
U.S. President Barack Obama has told U.S. soldiers heading to Afghanistan they still faced a "very tough fight" but vowed to end the war there as "responsibly" as in Iraq.
Obama was speaking August 31 at Fort Bliss in the southern state of Texas.
"You know this. You carry it in your hearts, the memory of comrades who made that ultimate sacrifice, including six heroes from Bliss who gave their lives on that awful day last month."
The six troops killed in an attack in July became the latest of more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan, including more than 200 this year, according to a count published on the icasualties.org website.
Obama was at Fort Bliss to mark the two year anniversary of the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq.
"You left Iraq with honor and a mission completed, your heads held high. After nine years our war in Iraq was over and today Iraq has the chance to forge its own destiny. There are no American troops fighting and dying in Iraq. On this anniversary we honor the memory of all who gave their lives there, nearly 4500 American patriots, including 198 fallen heroes from Fort Bliss," Obama told a gathering of soldiers.
Obama praised the strength and commitment of U.S. allies around the world while ensuring Al-Qaeda's defeat.
"With our allies and partners we've taken out more top Al-Qaeda terrorists than at any time since 9-11. And thanks to the courage of our forces, Al-Qaeda is on the road to defeat and Bin Laden will never again will threaten the United States of America," Obama stated.
Obama defended his four years in offices from allegations of a lack of leadership by the Republican ticket running for the White House, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
"So make no mistake, ending the wars responsibly makes us safer and makes our military even stronger. And ending these wars is letting us do something else, restore American leadership. If you or anyone are trying to say that America is in decline or that our influence is waned, don't you believe it," Obama said.
"Because here is the truth, our alliances have never been stronger, we are leading on behalf of freedom including with the people of Libya who are finally free from Muammar Qaddafi. Around the world there is a new attitude toward America, new confidence in our leadership. When people are asked, which country do you admire most? One nation always comes up on top, the United States of America," the American leader explained.
Aides to Obama, meanwhile, faulted Romney for failing to mention the Afghan war or the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers serving there during his speech on August 30 at the Republican Party's National Convention in Tampa, Florida to formally accept the party's nomination to run in November's presidential election.
Based on AFP and AP reporting
U.S. Seems Set to Brand Militant Group as ‘Terrorist’
New York Times By ERIC SCHMITT August 31, 2012
WASHINGTON - Risking a new breach in relations with Pakistan, the Obama administration is leaning toward designating the Haqqani network, the insurgent group responsible for some of the most spectacular assaults on American bases in Afghanistan in recent years, as a terrorist organization.
With a Congressional reporting deadline looming, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and top military officials are said to favor placing sanctions on the network, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to half a dozen current and former administration officials.
A designation as a terrorist organization would help dry up the group’s fund-raising activities in countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, press Pakistan to carry out long-promised military action against the insurgents, and sharpen the administration’s focus on devising policies and operations to weaken the group, advocates say.
But no final decision has been made. A spirited internal debate has American officials, including several at the White House, worried about the consequences of such a designation not only for relations with Pakistan, but also for peace talks with the Taliban and the fate of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier known to be held by the militants.
Perhaps the most important consideration, administration and Congressional officials say, is whether the designation would make any difference in the group’s ability to raise money or stage more assaults as the American-led NATO force draws down in Afghanistan. Several Haqqani leaders have already been designated individually as “global terrorists,” so the issue now is what would be gained by designating the entire organization.
An administration official involved in the debate, who declined to speak on the record because of the continuing decision-making process, said, “The optics of designating look great, and the chest-thumping is an understandable expression of sentiment, but everyone has to calm down and say, ‘What does it actually do?’ ”
Mrs. Clinton, in the Cook Islands at the start of a trip to Asia, declined to discuss the internal debate but said she would meet the Congressional deadline in September. “I’d like to underscore that we are putting steady pressure on the Haqqanis,” she said. “That is part of what our military does every day.”
A National Security Council spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, would not comment on the administration’s internal deliberations, but hinted in an e-mail on Friday at the White House’s preferences for using other means to pressure the group. “We’ve taken steps to degrade the Haqqani Taliban network’s ability to carry out attacks, including drying up their resources, targeting them with our military and intelligence resources, and pressing Pakistan to take action,” the e-mail said.
Critics also contend that a designation by the Treasury Department or the United Nations, or under an existing executive order, could achieve the same result as adding the network to the much more prominent State Department list, with far fewer consequences.
The internal debate has been so divisive that the United States intelligence community has been assigned to prepare classified analyses on the possible repercussions of a designation on Pakistan. “The whole thing is absurd,” said one senior American official who has long favored designating the group, expressing frustration with the delay.
The administration has debated the designation for nearly two years, with senior military officers like Gen. John R. Allen, commander of American and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and many top counterterrorism officials arguing for it.
This year, bipartisan pressure in Congress to add the group to the terrorist list has grown. “It is well past time to designate this network as a terrorist group,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said in July.
With virtually unanimous backing, Congress approved legislation that President Obama signed into law on Aug. 10 giving Mrs. Clinton 30 days to determine whether the Haqqani network is a terrorist group. If she says it is not, she must explain her reasoning in a report to lawmakers by Sept. 9.
On one level, the decision seems clear-cut. Since 2008, Haqqani suicide attackers in Afghanistan have struck the Indian Embassy, hotels and restaurants and the headquarters of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and the American Embassy.
A recent report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point described how the Haqqani network had evolved into a “sophisticated, diverse and transnational crime network.”
In a paper for the Heritage Foundation, Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow at the foundation and a former C.I.A. analyst on South Asia, said, “The U.S. should stand by its counterterrorism principles and identify this deadly terrorist organization for what it is.”
American officials confirmed this week that a senior member of the Haqqani family leadership, Badruddin Haqqani, the network’s operational commander, was killed last week in a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Opponents cite several reasons that designating the Haqqani network a terrorist organization could further complicate relations between the United States and Pakistan, just as relations are getting back on track after months of grueling negotiations that finally reopened NATO supply routes through Pakistan.
One reason, officials said, is that such a move would seem to bring Pakistan a step closer to being designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. American officials say the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate is covertly aiding the insurgents. Pakistani officials have said that the agency maintains regular contact with the Haqqanis, but deny that it provides operational support. They contend that the Obama administration is trying to deflect attention from its own failings in Afghanistan.
In his meetings at the Central Intelligence Agency in early August, Pakistan’s new spy chief, Lt. Gen. Zahir ul-Islam, told the C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, that his country would not protest the designation, if it was given. Two other Pakistani officials said this week that the decision was “an internal American issue.” American analysts believe Pakistan would be reluctant to publicly protest the designation because to do so would substantiate American beliefs that Pakistan supports the Haqqanis.
Critics also voice concern that designating the Haqqani network could undermine peace talks with the Taliban and complicate efforts to win the release of Sergeant Bergdahl.
The main American effort to open negotiations with the Taliban remains centered on the talks in Qatar, where Taliban representatives are supposed to be opening an office. But those talks were suspended by the insurgents in March, largely over a delayed prisoner swap for Sergeant Bergdahl, held by the Haqqani network since 2009. The United States would have released five insurgents from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to win his release.
“A designation makes negotiating with the Taliban harder, and would add another layer of things to do to build confidence in order to restart negotiations,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a South Asia analyst at the Eurasia Group who was the director for Pakistan and Afghanistan at the National Security Council.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting.
Twin Suicide Bombers Kill At Least 12 Afghans; 2 U.S. Soldiers Killed
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan September 1, 2012
Afghan officials say four police officers and eight civilians died and 50 people were injured when two suicide attackers blew themselves up near a NATO base in the country's east.
In that attack, one suicide bomber on foot blew himself up outside the district governor's office, while another detonated a car bomb on a road separating the office from the NATO base.
Meanwhile, NATO said that two U.S. soldiers died "following an insurgent attack in Ghazni province on Saturday (September 1)."
Separately, President Hamid Karzai condemned what he called a "unilateral operation" launched by Australian troops in southern Oruzgan Province, saying it breached an agreement with NATO.
Australian forces launched the operation on August 31 in the provincial capital, Tarinkot, in which a tribal elder and his son were killed.
With additional reporting by AP and dpa
Taliban key commander arrested in N. Afghanistan
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- Police have arrested a Taliban key commander in Kunduz province 250 km north of Afghan capital Kabul, provincial police chief Samiullah Qatra said Saturday.
"Security forces during a special operation arrested Taliban key commander Qari Ahsanullah alias Mullah Niaz Mohammad and today he is in our custody," Qatra told journalists at a press conference here.
Mullah Niaz Mohammad, according to the police officer, was commanding Taliban activities in Kunduz, Baghlan, Takhar and Badakhshan provinces over the past couple of years.
Taliban militants have yet to make comment.
Cultural sensitivity key to U.S. role in Afghanistan
CNN By Javid Ahmad, Special CNN August 31st, 2012
Editor’s note: Javid Ahmad, a native of Kabul, is a program coordinator with the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, D.C. The views expressed are his own.
As noted by Ahmad Majidyar yesterday, the killing of three Australian troops this week marked the latest in a string of insider, or so-called green-on-blue, attacks by members of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) against Western troops. These attacks have severely eroded NATO’s trust in its local partners and they present a major challenge to the U.S. exit strategy.
There is no shortage of explanations for the attacks. The Afghan government has pointed its finger at Pakistan’s spy agencies for orchestrating the infiltrations. But these accusations directly contradict the Pentagon’s assertion that the vast majority of attacks on American soldiers are triggered by personal grudges, grievances, and cultural clashes from disgruntled individuals, and are not the product of Taliban infiltration. Indeed, U.S. commander General John Allen has blamed shortened tempers on the month-long Ramadan fasting season in the sweltering August heat, although this clearly isn’t the first Ramadan to have been marked in Afghanistan, nor the first hot summer there.
Washington has taken measures to counter future incidents, including a greater U.S. intelligence presence on the ground, an order for NATO soldiers to carry loaded guns at all times, and embedding “guardian angels” into Afghan security units to spy on fellow soldiers. Kabul, too, has tightened its vetting process for new recruits, which now includes biometrics and background checks, all run through databases at the Kabul Military Training Center. Applications that used to be one page are now a few pages. Recruits are also required to submit character references from influential village and tribal elders.
It remains to be seen how these measures will help contain the problem, but another important element has yet to be explored: if the assertions concerning personal animosity and cultural friction between Afghan and Western troops are true, then it is time to address them head on.
The Afghan government often complains that foreign troops ignore key aspects of local culture and norms, particularly during contentious night raids. Too often, insurgents exploit these shortcomings to win over locals who feel they have been humiliated by the actions of foreign troops: intrusions of homes and mosques, the seemingly indiscriminate killing of innocent people, and perceived disrespect for family and cultural values.
A disgruntled Afghan soldier can react with his gun, but local villagers will either accept the humiliations or turn towards the Taliban. Senior U.S. military and civilian officials have acknowledged that the United States could and should be doing a better job at cultural awareness education. But cultural awareness is not always properly practiced even in training facilities and joint bases, with reports of Afghan soldiers undermined, verbally abused, and mocked in front of their fellow soldiers by Western troops – all actions that add to their resentment towards foreign troops.
The system of cultural advisors embedded with foreign military and civilian teams – whose job is to facilitate communication in one of the two local languages, Pashto or Dari, and provide cultural advice – is also inadequate. Most are employed by Pentagon and defense contractors, and are often U.S.-educated professionals who are detached from daily Afghan life. Lavishly compensated and recruited from the Afghan diaspora, most such advisors appear to be motivated largely by the money.
The United States and NATO military personnel need to work more closely with their cultural advisors and linguists in order to adopt a more culturally acceptable approach to communication style and become better attuned to religious values. Without question, there is a link between cultural awareness, personal relationships, and ultimately, success on the ground. Greater sensitivity in the treatment of Afghan soldiers by foreign troops and greater respect for local culture will significantly lessen the likelihood of Afghan soldiers turning their guns on American and NATO troops or becoming willing “insiders” for the Taliban to accomplish their dirty work.
Ultimately, increased cultural awareness translates into better personal relationships between foreign and Afghan troops – and greater success on the ground.
Young Girl and Boy Found Beheaded in Afghanistan
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY and TAIMOOR SHAH August 31, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The decapitated bodies of a 7-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy found Friday in the country’s south and east continued a spate of grisly beheadings in Afghanistan this week.
The body of the boy was discovered in the rural Panjwai district of Kandahar Province in the south, where the Taliban retain command of some areas despite regular clearing operations by American and Afghan forces.
Residents and officials said the Taliban had killed the boy because his brother and uncle were members of the local police. The Taliban denied killing him.
There was no immediate explanation for the killing of the girl, whose body was found in a garden in the Tagab district of eastern Kapisa Province, said the governor of Kapisa, Mehrabudin Safi. Mr. Safi said she had been killed Thursday. “So far it is not clear to the security forces who was behind this beheading,” he said. “The Taliban have not claimed responsibility for it.”
On Sunday, 15 men and 2 women were beheaded in a Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province, in the south.
The boy who was killed had been sent by his father from their home in the Zhari district to Spirwan in the Panjwai district to borrow money from a landowner on Wednesday. The journey would take at least a couple of hours through a dusty desert region of mud-brick villages and vineyards in western Kandahar. But four Taliban fighters on motorcycles picked up the boy, local officials said.
“He was killed because I am supporting the government,” said the boy’s uncle, Mullah Zianullah, who was a former Taliban commander in Panjwai but last year joined the peace and reintegration process in Kandahar and is now leading the local police in Spirwan. “There is nothing else except killing.”
Mullah Zianullah has a reputation for tough dealing with the Taliban, ordering his officers to shoot insurgents on the spot, residents said. The Taliban, in turn, had warned him that no one in his family was safe.
A village elder who did not give his name offered another reason that the boy, who was not named, set out through Taliban territory: he had worked on a poppy field last year but had not been paid and was going to claim his wages.
Whatever the reason for the boy’s journey, as soon as the Taliban discovered his family’s involvement with the Afghan Local Police, a local militia trained by American forces, they were swift with their punishment, local officials said.
“The boy was beheaded immediately and his headless body dumped on the main road in Spirwan,” said Javed Faisal, the spokesman for the Kandahar governor.
A spokesman for the Taliban, reached by phone, denied the accounts. “Our supreme leader strictly prohibited beheading,” said the spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, referring to the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. “We are not only rejecting it, but condemning whoever carried it out.”
But this was no consolation for the boy’s uncle, who said in a telephone interview that he could not go to Spirwan to claim his nephew’s body for fear of further Taliban retribution.
“We have been told by people living there that the body was buried there, but we cannot go to bring the body back and the other people are afraid to help us,” he said.
Graham Bowley reported from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting.
Time for Pakistan to push Afghan talks with the Taliban
Financial Times ‘A’ List. By Ahmed Rashid. 31 August 2012
President Hamid Karzai’s expected cabinet reshuffle signals a growing confrontation with Pakistan after the appointment of a hardline confidante as head of Afghan intelligence. Through a variety of Taliban proxies, Pakistan and Afghanistan have been involved in intense skirmishing on their common border, even as the insurgents are getting routed in some provinces though local peoples’ uprisings.
Earlier this month the Kabul parliament demanded that Mr Karzai sack the ministers of defence and the interior for not standing up to intrusions and shelling along the eastern border by Pakistani forces and Islamabad-backed Afghan Taliban. Mr Karzai has used the opportunity to do some house cleaning, mindful of the decision he has to take soon in choosing a successor to stand for presidential elections in 2014 when his term ends. The ministers names were declared to the media by presidential aides but a formal announcement is due on Saturday.
The startling change in the expected reshuffle is the appointment of Asadullah Khalid as head of the powerful intelligence organisation, the National Directorate of Security, which is funded and partly managed by the US Central Intelligence Agency. As a fiercely anti-Taliban former governor of Kandahar, Mr Khalid faced several assassination attempts from the radical Islamist movement. He always blamed the attempts on Pakistan’s military Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Mr Khalid and the ISI hate each other with a vengeance.
Previous fire-breathing Afghan intelligence chiefs have been Tajik, whom Pakistan found easy to condemn by describing them as pro-Indian. But Mr Khalid is a Ghilzai Pashtun from eastern Afghanistan – the very ethnic group which the ISI seeks to foster and considers loyal to Pakistan. Moreover he is a long-time confidante of Mr Karzai and has worked closely with the Americans in the past. Both facets will allow him to pursue an aggressive line towards Pakistan.
As a former minister of tribes and border affairs, Mr Khalid has recently taken credit for village uprisings in five provinces where local people have driven out the Taliban, but are also refusing to co-operate with the government. This new advent of people power across southern and eastern Afghanistan (in the provinces of Ghazni, Laghman, Nangahar, Kandahar and Baghdis) could be a positive game-changer for the US military as its troops are withdrawn by 2014.
Both Kabul and Washington are pleased with this new anti-Taliban mood, but also fearful of losing political control in key provinces bordering Pakistan to a new kind of people power that refuses to accept a government mandate. Under Mr Khalid the NDS will surely be entrusted with making sure that these movements are turned around to kick out the Taliban but embrace the government.
The ISI also loathe Mr Khalid for his role as tribal affairs minister in giving sanctuary in Kunar province to a Pakistani Taliban group that Islamabad has been trying to wipe out for several years. This group has launched a series of vicious attacks on Pakistani army outposts on the border, killing dozens of soldiers before retreating back to Afghanistan.
Afghans see this as payback for the decade-long safe havens that Islamabad has provided to the Afghan Taliban, who use Pakistan’s tribal belt to organise attacks against US and Kabul’s forces. The Americans are particularly obsessed with the Jalaluddin Haqqani network that has carried out the largest suicide attacks and is based in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Last week it received a major blow when Badruddin Haqqani, the third son of the founder, was killed by a US drone-fired missile in Waziristan.
Mr Khalid’s appointment also comes at a time when public and political anger against Pakistan is on the rise in Kabul. Mr Karzai has called off all talks with Pakistan, as officials in Afghanistan blame the Pakistani military for frustrating political reconciliation with the Taliban and the promises made by Islamabad to allow Afghan leaders to talk to the Taliban based in Pakistan. Islamabad allowed one such meeting but there was no follow-up. Pakistan itself – government or military – has no coherent Afghan policy apart from knowing what it dislikes.
There is now an ever greater risk of a border skirmish between Afghan and Pakistani forces. This could lead to either side carrying out “hot pursuit” in the other’s territory. It could also leave the Americans having to broker a peace between two neighbours whom they expected to co-operate as Washington tries to withdraw its forces out of the Afghan quagmire. Ironically, however, the Afghan and Pakistani fears about the other may be the only equation that can bring both sides to the peace table. The international pressure for Pakistan to come up with a more rational policy facilitating reconciliation between Kabul and the Taliban is building fast.
The writer is best-selling author of several books about Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.
Afghanistan will remain fragile, unstable and corrupt long after troops leave, says outgoing Ambassador
The former British ambassador to Afghanistan has said that the country will remain a fragile, unstable, corrupt state long after British troops have departed.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Bryant 31 Aug 2012
Sir William Patey told BBC Radio 4’s World At One that Afghanistan would for some time remain “A fragile, unstable state with weak institutions and higher levels of corruptions than is healthy for any country.”
He added that he was, however, “cautiously optimistic” about the future of Afghanistan - provide that the international community continues to support the embattled country financially.
Britain plans to withdraw the majority of its 9,500 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Sir William, who was ambassador to Kabul from 2010-2012, described the end of 2014 as a time when “the training wheels will be well and truly off.”
He said : “Afghanistan, having suffered decades of conflict, is not about to become, after one decade of international help, a modern liberal democracy.”
He said that nevertheless “there will still be high levels of support for training and logistics and more importantly financial support.”
Sir William stressed the need for the international community to commit to sustained financial support in Afghanistan, in return for a commitment from the country to tackle corruption.
He said: “The Afghans will have to show that they continue to be worthy of such support by addressing issues of corruption and by ensuring that the money we provide goes where it is intended: on providing security and supporting the country’s development needs.”
He also suggested that Britain should be prepared to negotiate with the Taliban for an end to insurgency and an “inclusive political process.”
He said: “I was encouraged by a statement attributed to a senior Taliban figure by Michael Semple that the Taliban no longer believed it could take power by force. I have been saying this for some time.
“If this becomes a widely held view among the Taliban leadership then there is scope for a negotiated end to the insurgency and a more inclusive political process that will hand us the prospects for a more secure future for Afghanistan.”
COIN's Failure in Afghanistan
The National Interest Online By Oleg Svet August 31, 2012
Late August marked a significant milestone in U.S. foreign policy and military strategy, even if its implications are yet to be properly recognized. The death toll of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan has now reached two thousand.
Half of that number came in the first nine years of the campaign. The second half came in just the past twenty-seven months, after the implementation of the counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) in Afghanistan. Five years after COIN’s ascendancy, it is time to critically analyze the empirical evidence from the strategy. The empirical data suggests that the predominant U.S. military strategy of the past half decade has not worked.
The death-toll figure of two thousand lives lost in Iraq represents a tragedy on several levels. It is of course a great loss for the families of those soldiers and their communities. But it is also a blow to U.S.-Afghan relations. In the past two weeks alone, at least nine Americans have been killed in insider attacks: Afghans dressed in the uniforms of Afghan Security Forces attacking U.S. soldiers.
The death toll also suggests that the lone superpower has not been able to master the art of small wars. That last point may be especially bothersome for the proponents of modern-day COIN. The implementation of COIN in Afghanistan was a mistake, even if this has only become apparent in retrospect. It is time to abandon the illusion that an effective counterinsurgency campaign will produce a decisive and apparent strategic victory in Afghanistan.
COIN’s Modern-Day Context
The implementation of modern-day COIN did not begin in Afghanistan. As a military strategy, counterinsurgency gained prominence in Iraq during 2006, when General David Petraeus and a group of advisors wrote Field Manual (FM) 3-24, the manual on counterinsurgency.
Their theory displayed an unusual level of brilliance and nuance. Most importantly, it was a strategy that stood in such sharp contrast to the “shock-and-awe” campaign that was successful in bringing down Saddam Hussein’s regime but failed in the reconstruction phase. With a focus on winning hearts and minds, an emphasis on ethics and the recognition that war is won by political (not military) victories, COIN seemed attractive to political leaders, military officials and foreign-policy experts who recognized that “hard power” and pure military might have reached the limits of their political utility in Iraq.
Political Appeal
The resurgence of the COIN strategy should thus be viewed in the context of the times in which FM 3-24 was written: in 2006, U.S. forces were facing increasing violence in Iraq, the type of violence that sparked debates over whether Iraq was descending into a civil war or not. Old notions of military power had to be discarded because they were not only ineffective but also seemed to contribute to more violence.
COIN offered a way out. Military power did have utility in Iraq, the authors of COIN seemed to say, but only if it was infused with a lot of nonkinetic elements of warfare: ethics, culture awareness, sense of proportion.
COIN’s appeal stood out because it seemed like a sensible middle ground between military power and diplomacy, an attempt to resolve military dilemmas by indirect means. Rather than using kinetic means, COIN emphasized information operations and human intelligence. Whereas the target in “regular” warfare was the enemy (and thus the goal was to kill more of the enemy), in COIN it was the hearts and minds of the local population.
One of the strongest appeals of counterinsurgency was that it aimed to build the support of the local population for the government of the host nation. The idea that this was achievable offered a long-term exit strategy, whereby the United States could leave Iraq while a friendly government in Baghdad would continue running the country, respected by its people.
Military Utility
Aside from its political appeal, as a military strategy COIN seemed to have a solid foundation. Strategists from Sun Tzu to Liddell Hart to David Galula to Lawrence of Arabia offered theories that in one or more ways tied to COIN. These strategists also wrote on topics like insurgencies, indirect means of warfare, small wars and the importance of cultural factors in warfare. COIN theorists built their strategy on that rich historic literature. In combining all the excellent thoughts of previous strategies into modern-day COIN, strategists were able to fit all dimensions of power (political, military, economic, informational) into political-military strategies that were highly complex and nuanced.
With its political appeal and its apparent soundness, COIN was accepted by political leaders and military officers as the strategy in Afghanistan. Although COIN proponents argued that the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would not simply be a replicate of the one in Iraq, in essence it was also a large scale military campaign to win the support of the local population for the host nation government.
Democrats and Republicans, hawks and doves, foreign-policy professionals and laymen could all empathize with a strategy that, at the heart of it, was simply trying to win popular support. It was filled with the potential promise of showing the military’s soft side and demonstrating that soldiers could be culturally sensitive. Most importantly, the strategy was supposed to show Afghans that the United States and the host-nation government in Kabul could offer Afghans a better future than the Taliban ever could. The COIN strategy, in short, was all about good intentions.
Empirical Data
Has the COIN strategy in Afghanistan worked? One way to measure the strategy’s effectiveness is by looking at the death toll of the military personnel who are implementing it. If more U.S. military personnel (the counterinsurgents who are executing the strategy) are killed after its implementation, then the battle for hearts and minds may be said to have failed.
The empirical data shows that in the first nine years of the war in Afghanistan, one thousand U.S. military personnel were killed. That same figure of one thousand killed was reached in just the past twenty-seven months after the U.S. officially adopted COIN as the strategy in Afghanistan. In other words, since the time that United States sent thirty-three thousand additional troops as part of the Afghan “surge” and issued guidance to its military forces in Afghanistan to follow the COIN strategy, the number of U.S. troops killed doubled.
The political decision to implement the COIN strategy failed to recognize that more people with more guns on foreign territory cannot win the battle for hearts and minds. COIN, for all its positives, seemed to offer too romantic a notion of what was actually achievable, especially in a large-scale military campaign such as the one that Afghanistan ultimately became. Regardless of whether new U.S. military personnel smiled more or were culturally attune or were more ethically upright or whether they now teamed up with diplomats, aid workers or anthropologists (who normally donned bullet-proof gear and carried weapons), building trust in such an environment was simply impossible.
The Dissenters
Not all policy makers were persuaded by the utility of the COIN-based “surge” in Afghanistan. Vice President Biden expressed his doubts about the viability of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. The doubling in the number U.S. deaths since the implementation of COIN confirms Biden’s doubts.
Counterinsurgency proponents may argue that in the initial phase of a COIN-based surge strategy, there may be a natural spike in deaths (i.e. things may get worse before they get better.) But in a war that has gone on for eleven years, that argument can no longer be taken seriously, at least on political grounds.
COIN’s greatest tragedy was that it gave policy makers—who were facing difficult choices in Iraq and Afghanistan—the illusion that “victory” (or some sort of political resolution) was possible; that military power applied in a specific manner against an insurgency can lead to specific political outcomes.
In Iraq, it may have prevented a complete disaster (i.e. an all-out civil war), but it did not bring any clear strategic triumph. The ongoing COIN effort in Afghanistan may be too new to judge, but the recent data—especially the accelerating rate of U.S. casualties—seems to suggest that it has not worked either.
Henry Kissinger once wrote that “each generation is permitted only one effort of abstraction; it can attempt only one interpretation and a single experiment, for it is its own subject. This is the challenge of history and its tragedy.” Five years ago, COIN seemed like the right strategy. The empirical results on this experiment are now in, and they are not looking good.
Oleg Svet is a doctorate student in the war-studies department in King’s College London.
With trust eroded, the Afghanistan mission is doomed
Sydney Morning Herald By Nicholas Stuart Opinion September 1, 2012
Although the fort had been hastily erected from dirt-filled sandbags and metal containers, its design was as ancient. Two thousand years ago, in a nearby valley, the armoured phalanx of Alexander the Great had built forts exactly like this one - open in the centre and with walls and towers girdled round. Then, as now, the castles served two purposes: they dominated the surrounding ground and, critically, provided a vital refuge for the soldiers inside. It was a space where they could relax, talk, and rest, rebuilding after the turmoil of the day.
Today it's Diggers who are wearing the heavy armour and helmets. Until last year they'd return from patrol, put down their weapons, and remove their breastplates. Not any more. It's impossible to ''partner'' your Afghan allies when you don't trust them. Instead of representing safety, the interior of those rocky compounds has become the new killing ground in this, our longest war.
Lance Corporal Andrew Jones was the first to die. Last May the cook woke, climbed out of his camp stretcher, and wandered over to the latrines at patrol base Mashal. Normally two Afghan soldiers manned the machine gun in the sandbagged tower, but at that particular moment only Shafidullah Guhlamon was on duty. No one knows why he opened fire on Jones; he jumped and ran as soon as the body of the Australian had hit the dry, dusty soil of the compound. Shafidullah was later killed in a US Special Forces raid - Jones died on the operating table after being airlifted back to the medical facility at the base at Tarin Kowt. There was no apparent reason he was targeted.
Three months later I stood where Jones had been shot. The same Afghan National Army soldiers still patrolled the perimeter, but the Diggers had pulled out. Further tension had inevitably crept into the relationship between the Aussies (blue) and the ANA (green). A couple of days after I left Mashal, three more Australians were killed in the south of the province by another Afghan soldier; although this time it was a premeditated attack that appeared to have been inspired by religious reasons. Now, another three have died, with more wounded.
Since May last year seven Aussies died in a hail of allied bullets; three in helicopter crashes; three in action and two from improvised explosives. Our soldiers have been told to wear body-armour and keep a loaded rifle with them whenever they're moving around their bases. Trust has evaporated: it's a simple fact.
You can forget the babble from Russell about the ''marvellous relationship'' between the Diggers and the Afghans and what ''great cultural ambassadors'' our soldiers are. No magic cloak of wishfulness will ever provide security against a full-metal jacket of an M-16 rifle tearing through skin and bone. That's why our soldiers have been ordered to keep loaded weapons nearby at all times and wear their body-armour when moving around the bases.
When Julia Gillard says she's ordered ''protection measures'' to be put in place to give our soldiers extra security, it sounds like a positive. The reality is, however, that it's a signal the Taliban are winning. Each extra barrier that's erected between the Diggers and the Afghan soldiers they're meant to be mentoring eats away at the trust that's vital to accomplish the mission.
Defence will not admit it yet, but the requirement has subtly changed. Protecting our soldiers is now the first priority. There's nothing more that can be done to ''train'' the Afghans. They're well aware our soldiers will be pulling out in a year's time: no new battalion's been designated to replace the current rotation. This one will be the last.
The ANA's recruited from different ethnic groups from all over Afghanistan. Most of the soldiers have no desire to die, certainly not for Hamid Karzai or any of the provincial governors. Most just want to survive long enough to return to their families in other parts of the country. But just two per cent of people manage to stay alive until they're 65 and violent and sudden death is the norm. In an environment like this the immediate becomes omnipresent. Rational calculations about the importance of survival become warped by concepts about honour and religion. Survival relies on cultural bonds and norms that make nonsense of the Western enlightenment.
Two utterly different ways of life are clashing in Afghanistan: our world and another that's existed since long before the Ancient Greeks first charged across the rocky ground and barren soil on their way to the Khyber Pass. The locals know the latest superpower will pass by just as quickly as the last one did. American know-how and ingenuity has proved somewhat more resilient than Moscow's efforts two decades before - but not by much. The local way has triumphed.
The PM's ''vowed'' to keep the soldiers in Afghanistan until they complete their mission. Tony Abbott talks similar rubbish. But let's get real. The Afghan government is corrupt. Utterly. Discreet peace feelers have already been extended to the Taliban as part of a desperate attempt to allow the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces to depart with some dignity. At least we're maintaining the pretence of somehow propping up the kleptocratic regime in Kabul. But this nonsense is only for domestic consumption back home. Our efforts are ending with the same realisation of futile emptiness that led the Dutch to pull out years ago.
Gillard and Defence Minister Stephen Smith have cut short important overseas trips as a result of the killings. It's a triumph of form over substance. They will achieve nothing back here apart from mollifying the Australian electorate with a reassurance that the politicians treat the sacrifice of so many young lives seriously.
But platitudes won't rebuild trust. This is the one, vital commodity that's necessary if Afghanistan is ever to be rebuilt, yet the deaths of another three Australian soldiers will do nothing to restore it.
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.
In Afghanistan, Roya Mahboob Connects Girls With Computers
A 25-year-old female entrepreneur working to help the next generation is also a model for it. Angela Shah reports.
The Daily Beast By Angela Shah Sep 1, 2012
The 25-year-old is at once exhilarated and shy. A woman is not supposed to attract so much attention. Just minutes earlier, a male colleague offered her a word to the wise as he gently pulled down her head scarf to cover her throat and shoulders, exposed from the scoop-necked top she wore, saying: “There are conservative men inside.”
On this day in late May, the girls at Baghnazargah High School were getting computers and Internet access for the first time. Mahboob’s IT company, Afghan Citadel Services, or ACS, installed the technology lab as part of a project to help wire schools in Herat, and Mahboob offered welcome remarks as a panel of bearded men dressed in traditional salwar kameez, elders in this community, along with school officials, sipped tea behind her.
Baghnazargah is located in a poor section of Herat and many of the female students come from conservative families. While boys can move freely, and so attend computer tutorials outside of school, girls are only allowed to leave home to attend school. And those girls are, in a sense, the lucky ones: most girls don’t even attend high school. Like most 16-year-olds, Augiza longs to surf the Web, but she doesn’t have an email address. “This is the only way for me to learn the computer,” she says. “It gives me [a] connection to everywhere in the world.”
For students like Augiza, Mahboob is a revelation. Here is a woman less than a decade older than they are who runs her own company and flies in from Kabul on her own for ribbon-cutting ceremonies like the one on this day. She, they can see, has a position of power. Once the men have left and the formal festivities are concluded, the girls congregate around Mahboob in packs of threes and fours asking to take pictures with her.
“You have to show everybody that men and women are equal,” Mahboob says. “Women can do something if you allow them. Give them opportunity and they can prove themselves.”
In a country where the Taliban had outlawed telephones, Afghanistan has quickly wired itself in the last decade. The number of Internet users in the country has grown from 300,000 in 2006 to 1 million two years ago, according to the International Monetary Fund.
“Only 20 percent of Afghanistan is electrified; it’s only 20 percent illiterate,” says Paul Brinkley, the former deputy undersecretary of defense. “But 60 percent have a cellphone. What does this tell you about the Afghan people? They’re starving for information. You need that more to stabilize this country than all the security things you could do.”
Brinkley, a Silicon Valley veteran before joining the government, founded the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations in Afghanistan in 2010, to link the department’s military operations with economic development. That program led to the Herat Information Technology Program, which started in May 2011 with an inaugural class of seven Afghan entrepreneurs, including Mahboob. The program’s goal is to show the potential of Afghanistan once international forces withdraw troops and treasure by the end of 2014: that, with a little bit of help from the international community, talented and determined Afghans are succeeding despite an enduring insurgency, a frequently inefficient and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy, and a weak domestic economy.
“Roya represents what the majority of Afghanistan wants,” he says. “To stand on their own two feet, to build their own lives.”
Mahboob founded ACS two years ago along with two Herat University classmates with an investment of $20,000, partly through savings from their jobs lecturing at the university and with funds from Mahboob’s family. She owns 45 percent of ACS, with the remaining shares divided among the two former Herat University classmates and her brother and sister.
I have to keep working for my company, for my country. We have to stay focused on helping girls.
In an industrial-park compound behind high walls topped with concertina wire, the entrepreneurs set up offices in free office spaces with Internet provided by the program and attended seminars on “Business 101": how to create a business plan to attract investors, how to respond to RFPs, and how to price their services.
A year after the incubator’s launch, some entrepreneurs are still struggling to establish a commercial foothold. But others, like Mahboob, have thrived. Crucially, ACS is making the transition away from sourcing business solely through contracts offered by ISAF and international groups and toward Afghan governments, hospitals, and schools. Currently, the company has projects underway or completed worth $500,000. In the last year, Mahboob has hired three additional software programmers and aggressively sought contracts for projects worth millions.
“What matters is that those Afghan businesses are doing better than before,” says Scott Gilmore, a former Canadian diplomat who founded the nongovernmental organization Building Markets, which recently changed its name from the Peace Dividend Trust. “That is your sustainability.”
A NATO promotional video last year featuring Mahboob attracted the attention of Francesco Rulli, a New York businessman. The Italian-born Rulli is sort of a Renaissance man entrepreneur—one of his businesses is a men’s clothing line in partnership with actor John Malkovich—and he says he was attracted by Mahboob’s spunk.
So far, he and his brother have invested nearly $120,000 to build eight computer labs in Herat schools like the one at Baghnazargah High School. “I sent the first $15,000 and within a week, ACS had built up the first classroom,” he says.
“I have an opportunity to do the right thing,” he explains. “I appreciate the fact that this is a woman with the opportunity to do something meaningful.”
Rulli runs Film Annex, a Web-based video-content farm that allows individuals to create Web TV channels; Rulli profits by capturing and selling user data. He says the site has 30 million page views a day. He and Mahboob recently expanded their partnership to install computer labs in other Central Asian countries, and to develop e-learning and testing platforms for use in those schools. Mahboob’s university classmate and co-investor Fereshteh Forough plans to move to New York by the end of the year to open an office there.
“Let’s give the kids the Internet and let them choose what they want their future to be,” Rulli says. “I have three kids. I know ‘Angry Birds’ is a stronger weapon against the Taliban than anything else.”
Late one spring evening as Mahboob and I enjoyed the breeze at Takht-e-Safar, the mountain-side park that overlooks Herat, she told me: “You know, in Afghanistan, we women are not supposed to go out, run the business, but I don’t agree with this.” The park is a popular retreat for Heratis, but past sundown, it is mainly the refuge of men clumped together on car hoods or blankets. Hidden by the darkness and foliage, Mahboob and I could allow our head scarves to loosen.
“If we can’t prove to 100 people that women have ability and skills, we can prove it to at least 10 people,” she says. “That’s enough.”
Mahboob tells me that she first discovered the Web in high school in 2003, when she saw her cousin in Iran use Yahoo messenger. Her lack of knowledge shamed her. She immediately saw how isolated she had been among Iran’s Afghan refugees and how the Web could connect her not only to Afghanistan but to the rest of the world. So, when her family moved to Herat just across the Iranian border later that year, she enrolled in Information and communications technology courses offered for women by the United Nations Development Programme.
Recognizing technology’s power to connect her to the rest of the world, she pursued a computer sciences degree at Herat University. After graduation she stayed on as a junior faculty member in the university’s computer lab. There she first got a taste of her biggest obstacle in business: she’s a woman.
Slender, 5-feet tall and partial to fashionable tunics, skinny jeans, and heels, curly bangs escape from her headscarf onto her forehead. “When I started working at university, all people were thinking that I am a typist,” she says. “I created websites, databases for them, but they never even mention our names. They mentioned my deputy when he was a man.”
Even today, when responding to contract bids at ministries in Kabul, Mahboob says bureaucrats often openly disbelieve that she is the CEO of her own company. She has recently pitched the Ministry of Public Health for services on an IT contract. “She is a woman,” Mahboob says of the minister. “I hope she will listen.”
Such paternal condescension is fairly common, and Mahboob has learned to navigate around the soft discrimination. But the opposition is also, frequently, more sinister.
One afternoon in late May, Mahboob picks up her ringing cellphone. Without saying anything—she makes a slight face—she pushes the button to hang up the line.
Physical threats from anonymous male callers come almost daily. While her own father and brother support her efforts at ACS, many in the conservative community of Herat do not. “They call and call and call, saying ‘I will pay you, too,’ as if I am doing bad things to get business,” she says.
For many conservative men, Mahboob’s having business meetings with unrelated men on her own—a basic of doing business–is akin to prostituting herself: the business men can only be paying her for one thing, and that is sex.
Ahkhtar Mohammed Mahboob says he, too, receives phone calls asking why he doesn’t force his daughter to abandon her business. “It has been difficult for us, for our family,” he says after breakfast at the Herat home he shares with his wife; his daughters, Roya and Elha; and his son, Ali.
“Maybe they will hurt Roya but I can’t change myself or my daughter,” he says, quietly. “This is her time. We cannot stop progress."
Mahboob used to switch among an assortment of SIM cards to deflect her harassers, but is now resigned to the taunting and threats. For the last eight months, she’s kept the same cellphone number.
“What can I do?” Mahboob asks. “I have to keep working for my company, for my country. We have to stay focused on helping girls.”
Angela Shah is a journalist based in Dubai whose work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME and The Dallas Morning News.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
September 1, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
U.S. President Barack Obama has told U.S. soldiers heading to Afghanistan they still faced a "very tough fight" but vowed to end the war there as "responsibly" as in Iraq.
Obama was speaking August 31 at Fort Bliss in the southern state of Texas.
"You know this. You carry it in your hearts, the memory of comrades who made that ultimate sacrifice, including six heroes from Bliss who gave their lives on that awful day last month."
The six troops killed in an attack in July became the latest of more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan, including more than 200 this year, according to a count published on the icasualties.org website.
Obama was at Fort Bliss to mark the two year anniversary of the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq.
"You left Iraq with honor and a mission completed, your heads held high. After nine years our war in Iraq was over and today Iraq has the chance to forge its own destiny. There are no American troops fighting and dying in Iraq. On this anniversary we honor the memory of all who gave their lives there, nearly 4500 American patriots, including 198 fallen heroes from Fort Bliss," Obama told a gathering of soldiers.
Obama praised the strength and commitment of U.S. allies around the world while ensuring Al-Qaeda's defeat.
"With our allies and partners we've taken out more top Al-Qaeda terrorists than at any time since 9-11. And thanks to the courage of our forces, Al-Qaeda is on the road to defeat and Bin Laden will never again will threaten the United States of America," Obama stated.
Obama defended his four years in offices from allegations of a lack of leadership by the Republican ticket running for the White House, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
"So make no mistake, ending the wars responsibly makes us safer and makes our military even stronger. And ending these wars is letting us do something else, restore American leadership. If you or anyone are trying to say that America is in decline or that our influence is waned, don't you believe it," Obama said.
"Because here is the truth, our alliances have never been stronger, we are leading on behalf of freedom including with the people of Libya who are finally free from Muammar Qaddafi. Around the world there is a new attitude toward America, new confidence in our leadership. When people are asked, which country do you admire most? One nation always comes up on top, the United States of America," the American leader explained.
Aides to Obama, meanwhile, faulted Romney for failing to mention the Afghan war or the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers serving there during his speech on August 30 at the Republican Party's National Convention in Tampa, Florida to formally accept the party's nomination to run in November's presidential election.
Based on AFP and AP reporting
U.S. Seems Set to Brand Militant Group as ‘Terrorist’
New York Times By ERIC SCHMITT August 31, 2012
WASHINGTON - Risking a new breach in relations with Pakistan, the Obama administration is leaning toward designating the Haqqani network, the insurgent group responsible for some of the most spectacular assaults on American bases in Afghanistan in recent years, as a terrorist organization.
With a Congressional reporting deadline looming, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and top military officials are said to favor placing sanctions on the network, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to half a dozen current and former administration officials.
A designation as a terrorist organization would help dry up the group’s fund-raising activities in countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, press Pakistan to carry out long-promised military action against the insurgents, and sharpen the administration’s focus on devising policies and operations to weaken the group, advocates say.
But no final decision has been made. A spirited internal debate has American officials, including several at the White House, worried about the consequences of such a designation not only for relations with Pakistan, but also for peace talks with the Taliban and the fate of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier known to be held by the militants.
Perhaps the most important consideration, administration and Congressional officials say, is whether the designation would make any difference in the group’s ability to raise money or stage more assaults as the American-led NATO force draws down in Afghanistan. Several Haqqani leaders have already been designated individually as “global terrorists,” so the issue now is what would be gained by designating the entire organization.
An administration official involved in the debate, who declined to speak on the record because of the continuing decision-making process, said, “The optics of designating look great, and the chest-thumping is an understandable expression of sentiment, but everyone has to calm down and say, ‘What does it actually do?’ ”
Mrs. Clinton, in the Cook Islands at the start of a trip to Asia, declined to discuss the internal debate but said she would meet the Congressional deadline in September. “I’d like to underscore that we are putting steady pressure on the Haqqanis,” she said. “That is part of what our military does every day.”
A National Security Council spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, would not comment on the administration’s internal deliberations, but hinted in an e-mail on Friday at the White House’s preferences for using other means to pressure the group. “We’ve taken steps to degrade the Haqqani Taliban network’s ability to carry out attacks, including drying up their resources, targeting them with our military and intelligence resources, and pressing Pakistan to take action,” the e-mail said.
Critics also contend that a designation by the Treasury Department or the United Nations, or under an existing executive order, could achieve the same result as adding the network to the much more prominent State Department list, with far fewer consequences.
The internal debate has been so divisive that the United States intelligence community has been assigned to prepare classified analyses on the possible repercussions of a designation on Pakistan. “The whole thing is absurd,” said one senior American official who has long favored designating the group, expressing frustration with the delay.
The administration has debated the designation for nearly two years, with senior military officers like Gen. John R. Allen, commander of American and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and many top counterterrorism officials arguing for it.
This year, bipartisan pressure in Congress to add the group to the terrorist list has grown. “It is well past time to designate this network as a terrorist group,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said in July.
With virtually unanimous backing, Congress approved legislation that President Obama signed into law on Aug. 10 giving Mrs. Clinton 30 days to determine whether the Haqqani network is a terrorist group. If she says it is not, she must explain her reasoning in a report to lawmakers by Sept. 9.
On one level, the decision seems clear-cut. Since 2008, Haqqani suicide attackers in Afghanistan have struck the Indian Embassy, hotels and restaurants and the headquarters of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and the American Embassy.
A recent report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point described how the Haqqani network had evolved into a “sophisticated, diverse and transnational crime network.”
In a paper for the Heritage Foundation, Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow at the foundation and a former C.I.A. analyst on South Asia, said, “The U.S. should stand by its counterterrorism principles and identify this deadly terrorist organization for what it is.”
American officials confirmed this week that a senior member of the Haqqani family leadership, Badruddin Haqqani, the network’s operational commander, was killed last week in a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Opponents cite several reasons that designating the Haqqani network a terrorist organization could further complicate relations between the United States and Pakistan, just as relations are getting back on track after months of grueling negotiations that finally reopened NATO supply routes through Pakistan.
One reason, officials said, is that such a move would seem to bring Pakistan a step closer to being designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. American officials say the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate is covertly aiding the insurgents. Pakistani officials have said that the agency maintains regular contact with the Haqqanis, but deny that it provides operational support. They contend that the Obama administration is trying to deflect attention from its own failings in Afghanistan.
In his meetings at the Central Intelligence Agency in early August, Pakistan’s new spy chief, Lt. Gen. Zahir ul-Islam, told the C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, that his country would not protest the designation, if it was given. Two other Pakistani officials said this week that the decision was “an internal American issue.” American analysts believe Pakistan would be reluctant to publicly protest the designation because to do so would substantiate American beliefs that Pakistan supports the Haqqanis.
Critics also voice concern that designating the Haqqani network could undermine peace talks with the Taliban and complicate efforts to win the release of Sergeant Bergdahl.
The main American effort to open negotiations with the Taliban remains centered on the talks in Qatar, where Taliban representatives are supposed to be opening an office. But those talks were suspended by the insurgents in March, largely over a delayed prisoner swap for Sergeant Bergdahl, held by the Haqqani network since 2009. The United States would have released five insurgents from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to win his release.
“A designation makes negotiating with the Taliban harder, and would add another layer of things to do to build confidence in order to restart negotiations,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a South Asia analyst at the Eurasia Group who was the director for Pakistan and Afghanistan at the National Security Council.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting.
Twin Suicide Bombers Kill At Least 12 Afghans; 2 U.S. Soldiers Killed
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan September 1, 2012
Afghan officials say four police officers and eight civilians died and 50 people were injured when two suicide attackers blew themselves up near a NATO base in the country's east.
In that attack, one suicide bomber on foot blew himself up outside the district governor's office, while another detonated a car bomb on a road separating the office from the NATO base.
Meanwhile, NATO said that two U.S. soldiers died "following an insurgent attack in Ghazni province on Saturday (September 1)."
Separately, President Hamid Karzai condemned what he called a "unilateral operation" launched by Australian troops in southern Oruzgan Province, saying it breached an agreement with NATO.
Australian forces launched the operation on August 31 in the provincial capital, Tarinkot, in which a tribal elder and his son were killed.
With additional reporting by AP and dpa
Taliban key commander arrested in N. Afghanistan
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- Police have arrested a Taliban key commander in Kunduz province 250 km north of Afghan capital Kabul, provincial police chief Samiullah Qatra said Saturday.
"Security forces during a special operation arrested Taliban key commander Qari Ahsanullah alias Mullah Niaz Mohammad and today he is in our custody," Qatra told journalists at a press conference here.
Mullah Niaz Mohammad, according to the police officer, was commanding Taliban activities in Kunduz, Baghlan, Takhar and Badakhshan provinces over the past couple of years.
Taliban militants have yet to make comment.
Cultural sensitivity key to U.S. role in Afghanistan
CNN By Javid Ahmad, Special CNN August 31st, 2012
Editor’s note: Javid Ahmad, a native of Kabul, is a program coordinator with the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, D.C. The views expressed are his own.
As noted by Ahmad Majidyar yesterday, the killing of three Australian troops this week marked the latest in a string of insider, or so-called green-on-blue, attacks by members of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) against Western troops. These attacks have severely eroded NATO’s trust in its local partners and they present a major challenge to the U.S. exit strategy.
There is no shortage of explanations for the attacks. The Afghan government has pointed its finger at Pakistan’s spy agencies for orchestrating the infiltrations. But these accusations directly contradict the Pentagon’s assertion that the vast majority of attacks on American soldiers are triggered by personal grudges, grievances, and cultural clashes from disgruntled individuals, and are not the product of Taliban infiltration. Indeed, U.S. commander General John Allen has blamed shortened tempers on the month-long Ramadan fasting season in the sweltering August heat, although this clearly isn’t the first Ramadan to have been marked in Afghanistan, nor the first hot summer there.
Washington has taken measures to counter future incidents, including a greater U.S. intelligence presence on the ground, an order for NATO soldiers to carry loaded guns at all times, and embedding “guardian angels” into Afghan security units to spy on fellow soldiers. Kabul, too, has tightened its vetting process for new recruits, which now includes biometrics and background checks, all run through databases at the Kabul Military Training Center. Applications that used to be one page are now a few pages. Recruits are also required to submit character references from influential village and tribal elders.
It remains to be seen how these measures will help contain the problem, but another important element has yet to be explored: if the assertions concerning personal animosity and cultural friction between Afghan and Western troops are true, then it is time to address them head on.
The Afghan government often complains that foreign troops ignore key aspects of local culture and norms, particularly during contentious night raids. Too often, insurgents exploit these shortcomings to win over locals who feel they have been humiliated by the actions of foreign troops: intrusions of homes and mosques, the seemingly indiscriminate killing of innocent people, and perceived disrespect for family and cultural values.
A disgruntled Afghan soldier can react with his gun, but local villagers will either accept the humiliations or turn towards the Taliban. Senior U.S. military and civilian officials have acknowledged that the United States could and should be doing a better job at cultural awareness education. But cultural awareness is not always properly practiced even in training facilities and joint bases, with reports of Afghan soldiers undermined, verbally abused, and mocked in front of their fellow soldiers by Western troops – all actions that add to their resentment towards foreign troops.
The system of cultural advisors embedded with foreign military and civilian teams – whose job is to facilitate communication in one of the two local languages, Pashto or Dari, and provide cultural advice – is also inadequate. Most are employed by Pentagon and defense contractors, and are often U.S.-educated professionals who are detached from daily Afghan life. Lavishly compensated and recruited from the Afghan diaspora, most such advisors appear to be motivated largely by the money.
The United States and NATO military personnel need to work more closely with their cultural advisors and linguists in order to adopt a more culturally acceptable approach to communication style and become better attuned to religious values. Without question, there is a link between cultural awareness, personal relationships, and ultimately, success on the ground. Greater sensitivity in the treatment of Afghan soldiers by foreign troops and greater respect for local culture will significantly lessen the likelihood of Afghan soldiers turning their guns on American and NATO troops or becoming willing “insiders” for the Taliban to accomplish their dirty work.
Ultimately, increased cultural awareness translates into better personal relationships between foreign and Afghan troops – and greater success on the ground.
Young Girl and Boy Found Beheaded in Afghanistan
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY and TAIMOOR SHAH August 31, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The decapitated bodies of a 7-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy found Friday in the country’s south and east continued a spate of grisly beheadings in Afghanistan this week.
The body of the boy was discovered in the rural Panjwai district of Kandahar Province in the south, where the Taliban retain command of some areas despite regular clearing operations by American and Afghan forces.
Residents and officials said the Taliban had killed the boy because his brother and uncle were members of the local police. The Taliban denied killing him.
There was no immediate explanation for the killing of the girl, whose body was found in a garden in the Tagab district of eastern Kapisa Province, said the governor of Kapisa, Mehrabudin Safi. Mr. Safi said she had been killed Thursday. “So far it is not clear to the security forces who was behind this beheading,” he said. “The Taliban have not claimed responsibility for it.”
On Sunday, 15 men and 2 women were beheaded in a Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province, in the south.
The boy who was killed had been sent by his father from their home in the Zhari district to Spirwan in the Panjwai district to borrow money from a landowner on Wednesday. The journey would take at least a couple of hours through a dusty desert region of mud-brick villages and vineyards in western Kandahar. But four Taliban fighters on motorcycles picked up the boy, local officials said.
“He was killed because I am supporting the government,” said the boy’s uncle, Mullah Zianullah, who was a former Taliban commander in Panjwai but last year joined the peace and reintegration process in Kandahar and is now leading the local police in Spirwan. “There is nothing else except killing.”
Mullah Zianullah has a reputation for tough dealing with the Taliban, ordering his officers to shoot insurgents on the spot, residents said. The Taliban, in turn, had warned him that no one in his family was safe.
A village elder who did not give his name offered another reason that the boy, who was not named, set out through Taliban territory: he had worked on a poppy field last year but had not been paid and was going to claim his wages.
Whatever the reason for the boy’s journey, as soon as the Taliban discovered his family’s involvement with the Afghan Local Police, a local militia trained by American forces, they were swift with their punishment, local officials said.
“The boy was beheaded immediately and his headless body dumped on the main road in Spirwan,” said Javed Faisal, the spokesman for the Kandahar governor.
A spokesman for the Taliban, reached by phone, denied the accounts. “Our supreme leader strictly prohibited beheading,” said the spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, referring to the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. “We are not only rejecting it, but condemning whoever carried it out.”
But this was no consolation for the boy’s uncle, who said in a telephone interview that he could not go to Spirwan to claim his nephew’s body for fear of further Taliban retribution.
“We have been told by people living there that the body was buried there, but we cannot go to bring the body back and the other people are afraid to help us,” he said.
Graham Bowley reported from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting.
Time for Pakistan to push Afghan talks with the Taliban
Financial Times ‘A’ List. By Ahmed Rashid. 31 August 2012
President Hamid Karzai’s expected cabinet reshuffle signals a growing confrontation with Pakistan after the appointment of a hardline confidante as head of Afghan intelligence. Through a variety of Taliban proxies, Pakistan and Afghanistan have been involved in intense skirmishing on their common border, even as the insurgents are getting routed in some provinces though local peoples’ uprisings.
Earlier this month the Kabul parliament demanded that Mr Karzai sack the ministers of defence and the interior for not standing up to intrusions and shelling along the eastern border by Pakistani forces and Islamabad-backed Afghan Taliban. Mr Karzai has used the opportunity to do some house cleaning, mindful of the decision he has to take soon in choosing a successor to stand for presidential elections in 2014 when his term ends. The ministers names were declared to the media by presidential aides but a formal announcement is due on Saturday.
The startling change in the expected reshuffle is the appointment of Asadullah Khalid as head of the powerful intelligence organisation, the National Directorate of Security, which is funded and partly managed by the US Central Intelligence Agency. As a fiercely anti-Taliban former governor of Kandahar, Mr Khalid faced several assassination attempts from the radical Islamist movement. He always blamed the attempts on Pakistan’s military Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Mr Khalid and the ISI hate each other with a vengeance.
Previous fire-breathing Afghan intelligence chiefs have been Tajik, whom Pakistan found easy to condemn by describing them as pro-Indian. But Mr Khalid is a Ghilzai Pashtun from eastern Afghanistan – the very ethnic group which the ISI seeks to foster and considers loyal to Pakistan. Moreover he is a long-time confidante of Mr Karzai and has worked closely with the Americans in the past. Both facets will allow him to pursue an aggressive line towards Pakistan.
As a former minister of tribes and border affairs, Mr Khalid has recently taken credit for village uprisings in five provinces where local people have driven out the Taliban, but are also refusing to co-operate with the government. This new advent of people power across southern and eastern Afghanistan (in the provinces of Ghazni, Laghman, Nangahar, Kandahar and Baghdis) could be a positive game-changer for the US military as its troops are withdrawn by 2014.
Both Kabul and Washington are pleased with this new anti-Taliban mood, but also fearful of losing political control in key provinces bordering Pakistan to a new kind of people power that refuses to accept a government mandate. Under Mr Khalid the NDS will surely be entrusted with making sure that these movements are turned around to kick out the Taliban but embrace the government.
The ISI also loathe Mr Khalid for his role as tribal affairs minister in giving sanctuary in Kunar province to a Pakistani Taliban group that Islamabad has been trying to wipe out for several years. This group has launched a series of vicious attacks on Pakistani army outposts on the border, killing dozens of soldiers before retreating back to Afghanistan.
Afghans see this as payback for the decade-long safe havens that Islamabad has provided to the Afghan Taliban, who use Pakistan’s tribal belt to organise attacks against US and Kabul’s forces. The Americans are particularly obsessed with the Jalaluddin Haqqani network that has carried out the largest suicide attacks and is based in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Last week it received a major blow when Badruddin Haqqani, the third son of the founder, was killed by a US drone-fired missile in Waziristan.
Mr Khalid’s appointment also comes at a time when public and political anger against Pakistan is on the rise in Kabul. Mr Karzai has called off all talks with Pakistan, as officials in Afghanistan blame the Pakistani military for frustrating political reconciliation with the Taliban and the promises made by Islamabad to allow Afghan leaders to talk to the Taliban based in Pakistan. Islamabad allowed one such meeting but there was no follow-up. Pakistan itself – government or military – has no coherent Afghan policy apart from knowing what it dislikes.
There is now an ever greater risk of a border skirmish between Afghan and Pakistani forces. This could lead to either side carrying out “hot pursuit” in the other’s territory. It could also leave the Americans having to broker a peace between two neighbours whom they expected to co-operate as Washington tries to withdraw its forces out of the Afghan quagmire. Ironically, however, the Afghan and Pakistani fears about the other may be the only equation that can bring both sides to the peace table. The international pressure for Pakistan to come up with a more rational policy facilitating reconciliation between Kabul and the Taliban is building fast.
The writer is best-selling author of several books about Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.
Afghanistan will remain fragile, unstable and corrupt long after troops leave, says outgoing Ambassador
The former British ambassador to Afghanistan has said that the country will remain a fragile, unstable, corrupt state long after British troops have departed.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Bryant 31 Aug 2012
Sir William Patey told BBC Radio 4’s World At One that Afghanistan would for some time remain “A fragile, unstable state with weak institutions and higher levels of corruptions than is healthy for any country.”
He added that he was, however, “cautiously optimistic” about the future of Afghanistan - provide that the international community continues to support the embattled country financially.
Britain plans to withdraw the majority of its 9,500 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Sir William, who was ambassador to Kabul from 2010-2012, described the end of 2014 as a time when “the training wheels will be well and truly off.”
He said : “Afghanistan, having suffered decades of conflict, is not about to become, after one decade of international help, a modern liberal democracy.”
He said that nevertheless “there will still be high levels of support for training and logistics and more importantly financial support.”
Sir William stressed the need for the international community to commit to sustained financial support in Afghanistan, in return for a commitment from the country to tackle corruption.
He said: “The Afghans will have to show that they continue to be worthy of such support by addressing issues of corruption and by ensuring that the money we provide goes where it is intended: on providing security and supporting the country’s development needs.”
He also suggested that Britain should be prepared to negotiate with the Taliban for an end to insurgency and an “inclusive political process.”
He said: “I was encouraged by a statement attributed to a senior Taliban figure by Michael Semple that the Taliban no longer believed it could take power by force. I have been saying this for some time.
“If this becomes a widely held view among the Taliban leadership then there is scope for a negotiated end to the insurgency and a more inclusive political process that will hand us the prospects for a more secure future for Afghanistan.”
COIN's Failure in Afghanistan
The National Interest Online By Oleg Svet August 31, 2012
Late August marked a significant milestone in U.S. foreign policy and military strategy, even if its implications are yet to be properly recognized. The death toll of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan has now reached two thousand.
Half of that number came in the first nine years of the campaign. The second half came in just the past twenty-seven months, after the implementation of the counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) in Afghanistan. Five years after COIN’s ascendancy, it is time to critically analyze the empirical evidence from the strategy. The empirical data suggests that the predominant U.S. military strategy of the past half decade has not worked.
The death-toll figure of two thousand lives lost in Iraq represents a tragedy on several levels. It is of course a great loss for the families of those soldiers and their communities. But it is also a blow to U.S.-Afghan relations. In the past two weeks alone, at least nine Americans have been killed in insider attacks: Afghans dressed in the uniforms of Afghan Security Forces attacking U.S. soldiers.
The death toll also suggests that the lone superpower has not been able to master the art of small wars. That last point may be especially bothersome for the proponents of modern-day COIN. The implementation of COIN in Afghanistan was a mistake, even if this has only become apparent in retrospect. It is time to abandon the illusion that an effective counterinsurgency campaign will produce a decisive and apparent strategic victory in Afghanistan.
COIN’s Modern-Day Context
The implementation of modern-day COIN did not begin in Afghanistan. As a military strategy, counterinsurgency gained prominence in Iraq during 2006, when General David Petraeus and a group of advisors wrote Field Manual (FM) 3-24, the manual on counterinsurgency.
Their theory displayed an unusual level of brilliance and nuance. Most importantly, it was a strategy that stood in such sharp contrast to the “shock-and-awe” campaign that was successful in bringing down Saddam Hussein’s regime but failed in the reconstruction phase. With a focus on winning hearts and minds, an emphasis on ethics and the recognition that war is won by political (not military) victories, COIN seemed attractive to political leaders, military officials and foreign-policy experts who recognized that “hard power” and pure military might have reached the limits of their political utility in Iraq.
Political Appeal
The resurgence of the COIN strategy should thus be viewed in the context of the times in which FM 3-24 was written: in 2006, U.S. forces were facing increasing violence in Iraq, the type of violence that sparked debates over whether Iraq was descending into a civil war or not. Old notions of military power had to be discarded because they were not only ineffective but also seemed to contribute to more violence.
COIN offered a way out. Military power did have utility in Iraq, the authors of COIN seemed to say, but only if it was infused with a lot of nonkinetic elements of warfare: ethics, culture awareness, sense of proportion.
COIN’s appeal stood out because it seemed like a sensible middle ground between military power and diplomacy, an attempt to resolve military dilemmas by indirect means. Rather than using kinetic means, COIN emphasized information operations and human intelligence. Whereas the target in “regular” warfare was the enemy (and thus the goal was to kill more of the enemy), in COIN it was the hearts and minds of the local population.
One of the strongest appeals of counterinsurgency was that it aimed to build the support of the local population for the government of the host nation. The idea that this was achievable offered a long-term exit strategy, whereby the United States could leave Iraq while a friendly government in Baghdad would continue running the country, respected by its people.
Military Utility
Aside from its political appeal, as a military strategy COIN seemed to have a solid foundation. Strategists from Sun Tzu to Liddell Hart to David Galula to Lawrence of Arabia offered theories that in one or more ways tied to COIN. These strategists also wrote on topics like insurgencies, indirect means of warfare, small wars and the importance of cultural factors in warfare. COIN theorists built their strategy on that rich historic literature. In combining all the excellent thoughts of previous strategies into modern-day COIN, strategists were able to fit all dimensions of power (political, military, economic, informational) into political-military strategies that were highly complex and nuanced.
With its political appeal and its apparent soundness, COIN was accepted by political leaders and military officers as the strategy in Afghanistan. Although COIN proponents argued that the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would not simply be a replicate of the one in Iraq, in essence it was also a large scale military campaign to win the support of the local population for the host nation government.
Democrats and Republicans, hawks and doves, foreign-policy professionals and laymen could all empathize with a strategy that, at the heart of it, was simply trying to win popular support. It was filled with the potential promise of showing the military’s soft side and demonstrating that soldiers could be culturally sensitive. Most importantly, the strategy was supposed to show Afghans that the United States and the host-nation government in Kabul could offer Afghans a better future than the Taliban ever could. The COIN strategy, in short, was all about good intentions.
Empirical Data
Has the COIN strategy in Afghanistan worked? One way to measure the strategy’s effectiveness is by looking at the death toll of the military personnel who are implementing it. If more U.S. military personnel (the counterinsurgents who are executing the strategy) are killed after its implementation, then the battle for hearts and minds may be said to have failed.
The empirical data shows that in the first nine years of the war in Afghanistan, one thousand U.S. military personnel were killed. That same figure of one thousand killed was reached in just the past twenty-seven months after the U.S. officially adopted COIN as the strategy in Afghanistan. In other words, since the time that United States sent thirty-three thousand additional troops as part of the Afghan “surge” and issued guidance to its military forces in Afghanistan to follow the COIN strategy, the number of U.S. troops killed doubled.
The political decision to implement the COIN strategy failed to recognize that more people with more guns on foreign territory cannot win the battle for hearts and minds. COIN, for all its positives, seemed to offer too romantic a notion of what was actually achievable, especially in a large-scale military campaign such as the one that Afghanistan ultimately became. Regardless of whether new U.S. military personnel smiled more or were culturally attune or were more ethically upright or whether they now teamed up with diplomats, aid workers or anthropologists (who normally donned bullet-proof gear and carried weapons), building trust in such an environment was simply impossible.
The Dissenters
Not all policy makers were persuaded by the utility of the COIN-based “surge” in Afghanistan. Vice President Biden expressed his doubts about the viability of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. The doubling in the number U.S. deaths since the implementation of COIN confirms Biden’s doubts.
Counterinsurgency proponents may argue that in the initial phase of a COIN-based surge strategy, there may be a natural spike in deaths (i.e. things may get worse before they get better.) But in a war that has gone on for eleven years, that argument can no longer be taken seriously, at least on political grounds.
COIN’s greatest tragedy was that it gave policy makers—who were facing difficult choices in Iraq and Afghanistan—the illusion that “victory” (or some sort of political resolution) was possible; that military power applied in a specific manner against an insurgency can lead to specific political outcomes.
In Iraq, it may have prevented a complete disaster (i.e. an all-out civil war), but it did not bring any clear strategic triumph. The ongoing COIN effort in Afghanistan may be too new to judge, but the recent data—especially the accelerating rate of U.S. casualties—seems to suggest that it has not worked either.
Henry Kissinger once wrote that “each generation is permitted only one effort of abstraction; it can attempt only one interpretation and a single experiment, for it is its own subject. This is the challenge of history and its tragedy.” Five years ago, COIN seemed like the right strategy. The empirical results on this experiment are now in, and they are not looking good.
Oleg Svet is a doctorate student in the war-studies department in King’s College London.
With trust eroded, the Afghanistan mission is doomed
Sydney Morning Herald By Nicholas Stuart Opinion September 1, 2012
Although the fort had been hastily erected from dirt-filled sandbags and metal containers, its design was as ancient. Two thousand years ago, in a nearby valley, the armoured phalanx of Alexander the Great had built forts exactly like this one - open in the centre and with walls and towers girdled round. Then, as now, the castles served two purposes: they dominated the surrounding ground and, critically, provided a vital refuge for the soldiers inside. It was a space where they could relax, talk, and rest, rebuilding after the turmoil of the day.
Today it's Diggers who are wearing the heavy armour and helmets. Until last year they'd return from patrol, put down their weapons, and remove their breastplates. Not any more. It's impossible to ''partner'' your Afghan allies when you don't trust them. Instead of representing safety, the interior of those rocky compounds has become the new killing ground in this, our longest war.
Lance Corporal Andrew Jones was the first to die. Last May the cook woke, climbed out of his camp stretcher, and wandered over to the latrines at patrol base Mashal. Normally two Afghan soldiers manned the machine gun in the sandbagged tower, but at that particular moment only Shafidullah Guhlamon was on duty. No one knows why he opened fire on Jones; he jumped and ran as soon as the body of the Australian had hit the dry, dusty soil of the compound. Shafidullah was later killed in a US Special Forces raid - Jones died on the operating table after being airlifted back to the medical facility at the base at Tarin Kowt. There was no apparent reason he was targeted.
Three months later I stood where Jones had been shot. The same Afghan National Army soldiers still patrolled the perimeter, but the Diggers had pulled out. Further tension had inevitably crept into the relationship between the Aussies (blue) and the ANA (green). A couple of days after I left Mashal, three more Australians were killed in the south of the province by another Afghan soldier; although this time it was a premeditated attack that appeared to have been inspired by religious reasons. Now, another three have died, with more wounded.
Since May last year seven Aussies died in a hail of allied bullets; three in helicopter crashes; three in action and two from improvised explosives. Our soldiers have been told to wear body-armour and keep a loaded rifle with them whenever they're moving around their bases. Trust has evaporated: it's a simple fact.
You can forget the babble from Russell about the ''marvellous relationship'' between the Diggers and the Afghans and what ''great cultural ambassadors'' our soldiers are. No magic cloak of wishfulness will ever provide security against a full-metal jacket of an M-16 rifle tearing through skin and bone. That's why our soldiers have been ordered to keep loaded weapons nearby at all times and wear their body-armour when moving around the bases.
When Julia Gillard says she's ordered ''protection measures'' to be put in place to give our soldiers extra security, it sounds like a positive. The reality is, however, that it's a signal the Taliban are winning. Each extra barrier that's erected between the Diggers and the Afghan soldiers they're meant to be mentoring eats away at the trust that's vital to accomplish the mission.
Defence will not admit it yet, but the requirement has subtly changed. Protecting our soldiers is now the first priority. There's nothing more that can be done to ''train'' the Afghans. They're well aware our soldiers will be pulling out in a year's time: no new battalion's been designated to replace the current rotation. This one will be the last.
The ANA's recruited from different ethnic groups from all over Afghanistan. Most of the soldiers have no desire to die, certainly not for Hamid Karzai or any of the provincial governors. Most just want to survive long enough to return to their families in other parts of the country. But just two per cent of people manage to stay alive until they're 65 and violent and sudden death is the norm. In an environment like this the immediate becomes omnipresent. Rational calculations about the importance of survival become warped by concepts about honour and religion. Survival relies on cultural bonds and norms that make nonsense of the Western enlightenment.
Two utterly different ways of life are clashing in Afghanistan: our world and another that's existed since long before the Ancient Greeks first charged across the rocky ground and barren soil on their way to the Khyber Pass. The locals know the latest superpower will pass by just as quickly as the last one did. American know-how and ingenuity has proved somewhat more resilient than Moscow's efforts two decades before - but not by much. The local way has triumphed.
The PM's ''vowed'' to keep the soldiers in Afghanistan until they complete their mission. Tony Abbott talks similar rubbish. But let's get real. The Afghan government is corrupt. Utterly. Discreet peace feelers have already been extended to the Taliban as part of a desperate attempt to allow the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces to depart with some dignity. At least we're maintaining the pretence of somehow propping up the kleptocratic regime in Kabul. But this nonsense is only for domestic consumption back home. Our efforts are ending with the same realisation of futile emptiness that led the Dutch to pull out years ago.
Gillard and Defence Minister Stephen Smith have cut short important overseas trips as a result of the killings. It's a triumph of form over substance. They will achieve nothing back here apart from mollifying the Australian electorate with a reassurance that the politicians treat the sacrifice of so many young lives seriously.
But platitudes won't rebuild trust. This is the one, vital commodity that's necessary if Afghanistan is ever to be rebuilt, yet the deaths of another three Australian soldiers will do nothing to restore it.
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.
In Afghanistan, Roya Mahboob Connects Girls With Computers
A 25-year-old female entrepreneur working to help the next generation is also a model for it. Angela Shah reports.
The Daily Beast By Angela Shah Sep 1, 2012
The 25-year-old is at once exhilarated and shy. A woman is not supposed to attract so much attention. Just minutes earlier, a male colleague offered her a word to the wise as he gently pulled down her head scarf to cover her throat and shoulders, exposed from the scoop-necked top she wore, saying: “There are conservative men inside.”
On this day in late May, the girls at Baghnazargah High School were getting computers and Internet access for the first time. Mahboob’s IT company, Afghan Citadel Services, or ACS, installed the technology lab as part of a project to help wire schools in Herat, and Mahboob offered welcome remarks as a panel of bearded men dressed in traditional salwar kameez, elders in this community, along with school officials, sipped tea behind her.
Baghnazargah is located in a poor section of Herat and many of the female students come from conservative families. While boys can move freely, and so attend computer tutorials outside of school, girls are only allowed to leave home to attend school. And those girls are, in a sense, the lucky ones: most girls don’t even attend high school. Like most 16-year-olds, Augiza longs to surf the Web, but she doesn’t have an email address. “This is the only way for me to learn the computer,” she says. “It gives me [a] connection to everywhere in the world.”
For students like Augiza, Mahboob is a revelation. Here is a woman less than a decade older than they are who runs her own company and flies in from Kabul on her own for ribbon-cutting ceremonies like the one on this day. She, they can see, has a position of power. Once the men have left and the formal festivities are concluded, the girls congregate around Mahboob in packs of threes and fours asking to take pictures with her.
“You have to show everybody that men and women are equal,” Mahboob says. “Women can do something if you allow them. Give them opportunity and they can prove themselves.”
In a country where the Taliban had outlawed telephones, Afghanistan has quickly wired itself in the last decade. The number of Internet users in the country has grown from 300,000 in 2006 to 1 million two years ago, according to the International Monetary Fund.
“Only 20 percent of Afghanistan is electrified; it’s only 20 percent illiterate,” says Paul Brinkley, the former deputy undersecretary of defense. “But 60 percent have a cellphone. What does this tell you about the Afghan people? They’re starving for information. You need that more to stabilize this country than all the security things you could do.”
Brinkley, a Silicon Valley veteran before joining the government, founded the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations in Afghanistan in 2010, to link the department’s military operations with economic development. That program led to the Herat Information Technology Program, which started in May 2011 with an inaugural class of seven Afghan entrepreneurs, including Mahboob. The program’s goal is to show the potential of Afghanistan once international forces withdraw troops and treasure by the end of 2014: that, with a little bit of help from the international community, talented and determined Afghans are succeeding despite an enduring insurgency, a frequently inefficient and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy, and a weak domestic economy.
“Roya represents what the majority of Afghanistan wants,” he says. “To stand on their own two feet, to build their own lives.”
Mahboob founded ACS two years ago along with two Herat University classmates with an investment of $20,000, partly through savings from their jobs lecturing at the university and with funds from Mahboob’s family. She owns 45 percent of ACS, with the remaining shares divided among the two former Herat University classmates and her brother and sister.
I have to keep working for my company, for my country. We have to stay focused on helping girls.
In an industrial-park compound behind high walls topped with concertina wire, the entrepreneurs set up offices in free office spaces with Internet provided by the program and attended seminars on “Business 101": how to create a business plan to attract investors, how to respond to RFPs, and how to price their services.
A year after the incubator’s launch, some entrepreneurs are still struggling to establish a commercial foothold. But others, like Mahboob, have thrived. Crucially, ACS is making the transition away from sourcing business solely through contracts offered by ISAF and international groups and toward Afghan governments, hospitals, and schools. Currently, the company has projects underway or completed worth $500,000. In the last year, Mahboob has hired three additional software programmers and aggressively sought contracts for projects worth millions.
“What matters is that those Afghan businesses are doing better than before,” says Scott Gilmore, a former Canadian diplomat who founded the nongovernmental organization Building Markets, which recently changed its name from the Peace Dividend Trust. “That is your sustainability.”
A NATO promotional video last year featuring Mahboob attracted the attention of Francesco Rulli, a New York businessman. The Italian-born Rulli is sort of a Renaissance man entrepreneur—one of his businesses is a men’s clothing line in partnership with actor John Malkovich—and he says he was attracted by Mahboob’s spunk.
So far, he and his brother have invested nearly $120,000 to build eight computer labs in Herat schools like the one at Baghnazargah High School. “I sent the first $15,000 and within a week, ACS had built up the first classroom,” he says.
“I have an opportunity to do the right thing,” he explains. “I appreciate the fact that this is a woman with the opportunity to do something meaningful.”
Rulli runs Film Annex, a Web-based video-content farm that allows individuals to create Web TV channels; Rulli profits by capturing and selling user data. He says the site has 30 million page views a day. He and Mahboob recently expanded their partnership to install computer labs in other Central Asian countries, and to develop e-learning and testing platforms for use in those schools. Mahboob’s university classmate and co-investor Fereshteh Forough plans to move to New York by the end of the year to open an office there.
“Let’s give the kids the Internet and let them choose what they want their future to be,” Rulli says. “I have three kids. I know ‘Angry Birds’ is a stronger weapon against the Taliban than anything else.”
Late one spring evening as Mahboob and I enjoyed the breeze at Takht-e-Safar, the mountain-side park that overlooks Herat, she told me: “You know, in Afghanistan, we women are not supposed to go out, run the business, but I don’t agree with this.” The park is a popular retreat for Heratis, but past sundown, it is mainly the refuge of men clumped together on car hoods or blankets. Hidden by the darkness and foliage, Mahboob and I could allow our head scarves to loosen.
“If we can’t prove to 100 people that women have ability and skills, we can prove it to at least 10 people,” she says. “That’s enough.”
Mahboob tells me that she first discovered the Web in high school in 2003, when she saw her cousin in Iran use Yahoo messenger. Her lack of knowledge shamed her. She immediately saw how isolated she had been among Iran’s Afghan refugees and how the Web could connect her not only to Afghanistan but to the rest of the world. So, when her family moved to Herat just across the Iranian border later that year, she enrolled in Information and communications technology courses offered for women by the United Nations Development Programme.
Recognizing technology’s power to connect her to the rest of the world, she pursued a computer sciences degree at Herat University. After graduation she stayed on as a junior faculty member in the university’s computer lab. There she first got a taste of her biggest obstacle in business: she’s a woman.
Slender, 5-feet tall and partial to fashionable tunics, skinny jeans, and heels, curly bangs escape from her headscarf onto her forehead. “When I started working at university, all people were thinking that I am a typist,” she says. “I created websites, databases for them, but they never even mention our names. They mentioned my deputy when he was a man.”
Even today, when responding to contract bids at ministries in Kabul, Mahboob says bureaucrats often openly disbelieve that she is the CEO of her own company. She has recently pitched the Ministry of Public Health for services on an IT contract. “She is a woman,” Mahboob says of the minister. “I hope she will listen.”
Such paternal condescension is fairly common, and Mahboob has learned to navigate around the soft discrimination. But the opposition is also, frequently, more sinister.
One afternoon in late May, Mahboob picks up her ringing cellphone. Without saying anything—she makes a slight face—she pushes the button to hang up the line.
Physical threats from anonymous male callers come almost daily. While her own father and brother support her efforts at ACS, many in the conservative community of Herat do not. “They call and call and call, saying ‘I will pay you, too,’ as if I am doing bad things to get business,” she says.
For many conservative men, Mahboob’s having business meetings with unrelated men on her own—a basic of doing business–is akin to prostituting herself: the business men can only be paying her for one thing, and that is sex.
Ahkhtar Mohammed Mahboob says he, too, receives phone calls asking why he doesn’t force his daughter to abandon her business. “It has been difficult for us, for our family,” he says after breakfast at the Herat home he shares with his wife; his daughters, Roya and Elha; and his son, Ali.
“Maybe they will hurt Roya but I can’t change myself or my daughter,” he says, quietly. “This is her time. We cannot stop progress."
Mahboob used to switch among an assortment of SIM cards to deflect her harassers, but is now resigned to the taunting and threats. For the last eight months, she’s kept the same cellphone number.
“What can I do?” Mahboob asks. “I have to keep working for my company, for my country. We have to stay focused on helping girls.”
Angela Shah is a journalist based in Dubai whose work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME and The Dallas Morning News.
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