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AP Newsbreak: Drop in Taliban attacks incorrect
By ROBERT BURNS | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S.-led military command in Afghanistan incorrectly reported a decline last year in Taliban attacks and is preparing to publish corrected numbers that could undercut its narrative of a Taliban in steep decline.
After finding what they called clerical errors, military officials in Kabul said Tuesday that a 7 percent drop in "enemy initiated attacks" for the period from January through December 2012 reported last month will be corrected to show no change in the number of attacks during that span.
The 7 percent figure had been included in a report posted on the coalition's website until it was removed recently without explanation. After The Associated Press inquired about the missing report, coalition officials said they were correcting the data and would re-publish the report.
"During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan," said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition known officially as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF.
Graybeal said a subsequent audit determined that portions of the data from unilateral Afghan military operations were "not properly reflected" in the trends ISAF had reported in its monthly updates on security and violence.
"After including this unilateral ANSF (Afghan National Security Force) data into our database, we have determined that there was no change in the total number of EIAs (enemy initiated attacks) from 2011 to 2012," Graybeal said.
"This was a record-keeping error that we recognized and have now corrected," he added.
The coalition defines enemy initiated attacks as attacks by small arms, mortars, rockets and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. But it does not include IEDs that are found and cleared before they explode.
Trends in Taliban attacks are one yardstick used by ISAF to measure war progress. Others include the state of security in populated areas, the number of coalition and Afghan casualties, the degree to which civilians can move about freely, and the performance of Afghan security forces.
Graybeal said that even though the number of 2012 Taliban attacks was unchanged from 2011, "our assessment of the fundamentals of campaign progress has not changed. The enemy is increasingly separated from the population and the ANSF are currently in the lead for the vast majority of partnered operations."
Karzai bans US troops from key province based on fault information
By Sayed Jawad - 26 Feb 2013, 4:21 pm Khaama Press
Afghan political and military observers blame misrepresentation of information behind president Hamid Karzai’s decision to order US special forces for an immediate withdrawal from Maidan Wardak province of Afghanistan.
The analysts also believe that incorrect information have been provided to Afghan president Hamid Karzai regarding the issue and criticize lack of coordination among the Afghan security institutions and coalition security forces.
Military analyst, Jawid Kohistani quoted by Tolo News said, “Lack of coordination among the Afghan security institutions and coalition security forces could be one of the main reason behind the issue and on other hand reliable information has not been provided to president Hamid Karzai.”
The decision was reportedly taken after residents in the province have complained to human rights groups and provincial leaders of being terrorized in recent months by an Afghan militia that works with U.S. commandos and calls itself “special forces” or “campaign forces.”
In the meantime Afghan defense ministry is preparing to fill the vacuum following US special forces withdrawal from central Maidan Wardak province within the next two weeks.
According to Afghan officials they demanded the pullout of U.S. Special Operations forces from an insurgency-wracked province because the U.S.-backed NATO command here for months has ignored residents’ allegations of severe abuses committed by the elite American troops and armed Afghan irregulars working with them.
However NATO said its past inquiries found no evidence to support allegations of misconduct by U.S. Special Operations forces in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.
Meanwhile a commission jointly formed by Afghan and NATO officials is expected to investigate the issue in coming days, including allegations of the arrest, torture and extrajudicial killing of civilians.
Talk of Inquiry, but Not Much Is Sure After Afghan Ban on U.S. Troops
New York Times By MATTHEW ROSENBERG February 25, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - A day after President Hamid Karzai ordered elite American forces out of a strategic province near the capital, very little was clear other than his increasing assertiveness in dictating the Western military role in Afghanistan.
Interviews with numerous Afghan and American officials on Monday were striking mostly for their similarity: everyone seemed confused, scrambling to confirm details of the events that led the Afghan government to issue the ban and demand Western cooperation in investigating accusations.
Officials and residents from the province, Maidan Wardak, had filed repeated complaints with Mr. Karzai’s government that Afghans working with American forces had been involved in the abuse, disappearance and deaths of villagers.
But officials from neither country could be sure which American forces would be covered by the ban, which is set to take place in two weeks in one of the most critical battleground provinces against the Taliban. None could offer any clarity about who was suspected of the alleged killings and abuses. Nor could any Afghan or American official say what military units the attackers might have worked with — or if they were tied to a military force.
In the absence of answers, American and NATO officials agreed to form a joint commission with the Afghan government to investigate. Still, a senior NATO spokesman, Brig. Gen. Günter Katz of Germany, said at a news conference on Monday that a previous inquiry could not confirm abuses by Western forces or Afghans working with them in Maidan Wardak. “So far, we could not find evidence that would support these allegations,” General Katz said. The ban did, however, drastically reinforce that Mr. Karzai has become the dominant voice in establishing how the final stages of the Western military involvement in his country will be conducted. And in the past year, he has appeared increasingly willing to curtail unilaterally the coalition’s role on issues of most concern to him: special operations missions, detentions and airstrikes.
As they have in past points of tension with Mr. Karzai, American officials maintained a conciliatory tone in their public comments on Monday.
Speaking to reporters in London, Secretary of State John Kerry said that Mr. Karzai “had many legitimate evaluations of how sometimes some things have gone or might be changed and be done better.”
Mr. Kerry cited talks on a security agreement that would keep American forces in Afghanistan after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014, and efforts to jointly manage the transition process away from coalition leadership now under way. “We’ve listened very carefully to his observations about wanting to speed up the transition with respect to the management of security,” he said, “and that’s happening.”
If anything, Mr. Karzai has set the pace of transition over the past year. He has repeatedly demanded and won greater Afghan control of the war effort, occasionally taking his confrontations with American officials public.
The result has been a substantive reshaping of the American role here. The United States ceded control of its main prison on a shortened schedule, gave the Afghan authorities oversight of night commando raids on Afghan homes and sharply curtailed the use of airstrikes.
People close to Mr. Karzai described the ban on elite forces in Maidan Wardak as a consistent expression of unease with how the war effort has developed under the coalition, and of his desire to fix what he sees as a faltering campaign that has helped fuel the war here, not end it.
The ban also reflected the Karzai administration’s limited patience for the use of Special Operations forces, whose aggressive tactics previously resulted in abuses, and attempted cover-ups. But Afghan officials cited as even more troubling American Special Operations units’ use of Afghan proxy forces that are not under the government’s control. Afghan civilians and local officials have complained that some irregular forces have looked little different from Taliban fighters or bandits and behaved little differently.
According to Afghan officials, villagers say the abuses in Maidan Wardak, including the beheading of a veterinary student, were committed by Afghan irregulars who worked with elite American forces.
Some Afghan officials say that they have photos and video of the suspects, and that they are not from any known irregular forces, like the Afghan Local Police, a defense militia created and trained by coalition Special Forces.
Rather, some Afghan officials believe the suspects are part of a force whose existence has been kept secret by the Americans.
Therein lies a major point of confusion: officials at the coalition and a separate American command, United States Forces-Afghanistan, which operates many of the Special Operations units in the country, say they do not run any secret militias. “My total honest answer: We have no idea what they’re talking about,” a senior American officer said.
One possibility that would match the descriptions of attackers offered by local Afghan officials and, at the same time, exclude American military forces would be that the suspects were working with the Central Intelligence Agency, whose operatives run militias in a number of provinces. A spokesman for the C.I.A. refused to comment on the issue.
One senior Afghan official said it was possible: Afghans, he said, make no distinction between military-type outfits. Americans with weapons, high-end gear and facial hair were “all special forces. It’s a phrase that catches all.”
American commanders are scrambling to plan for the next few months without knowing whether they will again be able to use Special Operations forces in a province that is seen as crucial to the defense of Kabul.
With conventional American and allied units shifting into an advisory role, the elite forces are fast becoming the coalition’s sole source of offensive ground troops.
The Obama administration’s plans for a presence here after the NATO mission ends in 2014 also calls for Special Operations to play a large role hunting down remnants of Al Qaeda.
But that decision may not be up to Washington, the senior American officer said Monday. It may well be that “our only decision is whether we want to go along with the Afghan decisions,” the officer said, “or if we want to leave.”
Karzai Order Raises Concerns About Kabul's Future Security
RFE/RL By Ron Synovitz February 25, 2013
Afghan President Hamid Karzai's order for all U.S. Special Forces to leave Wardak Province within two weeks has taken NATO military planners by surprise.
The move comes as Karzai is negotiating a new Status of Forces Agreement with the United States -- a treaty that will determine how many foreign troops remain in Afghanistan to support Afghan government forces after the planned withdrawal of foreign combat troops by the end of 2014.
It raises questions about how many, if any, elite U.S. commandos would stay in Afghanistan as trainers beyond 2014.
The edict also could present fresh security concerns for residents of Kabul.
The mountainous Wardak Province is the strategic western gateway to Kabul. It borders the provinces of Ghazni to the south and Loghar to the east -- both of which are adjacent to the volatile border provinces of Paktika and Paktia.
That means Taliban control over Wardak Province would make it easier for Pakistan-based militants to infiltrate Kabul from the west after crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistan's tribal areas. Afghan Army Chief of Staff General Sher Mohammad Karimi said on February 24 that Karzai's order could be aimed at tempering anger within some of Wardak's ethnic and tribal factions to prevent a backlash against the Afghan government. According to Karimi, Karzai expelled the elite U.S. commandos after hearing numerous allegations from Wardak residents about human rights abuses by the Afghan troops who work together with the U.S. commando teams in Wardak.
"The main complaint was about [Afghan] Special Forces' operations in the area -- intimidating people, torturing people, even killing people,” Karimi said. “The claim was that nine people have disappeared. Nobody knows where they are and they claim that they were taken by [Afghan] Special Forces."
Fears Of Factional Warfare
Karzai's order could also affect a U.S.-backed plan that began in late 2008 to form local Afghan forces to fight Taliban insurgents in Wardak and Loghar provinces.
Under that program, the United States was meant to give training, clothing, and other supplies to anti-Taliban villagers.
Those anti-Taliban fighters deny receiving any support from the Afghan government or from foreign military forces.
Washington has stressed that it is not providing the local village forces with weapons and was not recreating any kind of militia.
But there have been widespread fears in Wardak about the Afghan fighters, with many residents saying their activities could rekindle the kind of factional warfare seen there during the 1990s.
In London on February 25, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters that Karzai’s complaints about Wardak Province will be "appropriately evaluated" by the NATO-led International Security Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) -- and that he personally has taken "appropriate note of it."
"I think he's had many legitimate evaluations of how, sometimes, some things have gone wrong or might be changed and done better," Kerry said. “We're working on that. We're working on a bilateral security arrangement. We're working on this transition process."
ISAF: ‘No Evidence’ Of Misconduct
On the same day, in Kabul, ISAF spokesman Guenter Katz maintained that NATO has not found any evidence so far to support allegations of misconduct by U.S. Special Forces in Wardak Province.
"We take all allegations of misconduct seriously and go to great lengths to determine the facts surrounding them,” he said. “Over the past few weeks there have been various allegations of special forces conducting themselves in an unprofessional manner in Maidan Wardak. So far we could not find evidence that would support these allegations."
However, RFE/RL has documented how U.S. Special Forces and Afghan troops raided an Afghan government health clinic in Wardak in October 2012.
That raid began as an operation typical of U.S. commando missions in Afghanistan. About 20 U.S. Special Forces in helicopters landed near the medical compound in the village of Sebak, in Wardak's Chak district, during the night. They then linked up with about their Afghan support – about 100 Afghan National Army soldiers -- on the ground.
But after storming the health clinic, the Afghan troops held medical staff and civilians there for three days while the compound was used as a strategic combat position and a military-logistics hub.
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan -- which helps support the clinic in the village of Sebak in Wardak's Chak district -- protested in December to ISAF about the raid. It says ISAF officials acknowledged to them privately that the operation violated international law.
Andreas Stefansson, country director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, told RFE/RL that the Afghan troops used a building in the compound as a makeshift prison -- interrogating as many as several hundred civilians there.
Since then, Wardak's residents have raised numerous other complaints about abusive behavior by the Afghan soldiers who work alongside U.S. troops during commando raids.
US, Afghans Investigate Atrocities Claims
Luis Ramirez VOA News February 25, 2013
THE PENTAGON — U.S. military officials said they have set up a joint U.S.-Afghan commission to look into Afghanistan’s complaints that Afghan forces supported by U.S. troops have been torturing and murdering innocent civilians.
The joint commission will look into the complaints, which on Sunday prompted Afghan President Hamid Karzai to order all U.S. special operations forces out of Wardak, a strategically important province near Kabul.
Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters Monday U.S. officials will try to find out what prompted the government of President Karzai to make the decision, which military officials said they were not expecting.
“We’re working with the government of Afghanistan to define precisely what their concerns were. Obviously, we take all of their concerns very seriously,” he said.
Mr. Karzai’s decision comes shortly after his government banned NATO air strikes in populated areas - a move analysts say demonstrates the Afghan government’s growing anxiety about civilian casualties as most U.S. and foreign troops prepare to exit the country at the end of next year.
Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution research organization in Washington, said there is a problem of confidence.
“It’s pretty clear that President Karzai does not fully believe in the war strategy," he said. "I think it’s been true for a while, frankly, partly because the war’s been so frustrating for him and for us. But his confidence level that the downsides of war are worth it has declined.”
Building the confidence of Afghans is key at this stage in efforts to hand over security responsibility to Afghan national security forces, a process expected to be complete by the time most international troops withdraw at the end of 2014.
Senior NATO officials say they do not believe the growing Afghan restrictions on the operations will ultimately hinder their overall mission. As one NATO official put it, some tactical successes are not worth the strategic risk of losing the confidence of the Afghan people.
O’Hanlon saw a positive sign in the Afghan government’s growing assertiveness. He said, "Afghans or at least President Karzai are behaving like they control their own country and they’re taking on sovereign responsibility. That’s a transition that needs to be happening, is happening, and needs to be complete pretty soon. That mentality is actually appropriate. We don’t want a dependent state.”
President Obama has announced that more than half of the 66,000 U.S. troops now in Afghanistan will be out by this time next year. The U.S. says that exit will be gradual so as to keep enough troops in place to advise, train and assist Afghan forces during this year’s fighting season and next year’s elections.
10 Taliban militants give up fighting in S. Afghan province
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- Ten Taliban militants gave up fighting and joined the government-backed peace process in Ghazni province 125 km south of Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday.
"Today 10 dissident brothers gave up fighting, laid down arms and joined the peace process. We welcome them," provincial governor Musa Khan Akbarzada said in a ceremony here to welcome the former militants.
Akbarzada also called on all anti-government militants to give up fighting and join the peace process.
Meantime, the commander of the group Mullah Habib in talks with media called on the government to find job opportunities for the former militants and ensure their security.
Taliban militants fighting the government have yet to make comment.
More than 3,500 Taliban fighters, according to government officials, have joined the government-backed peace process over the past year, a claim rejected by the armed outfit as groundless.
8 militants killed, 12 detained in Afghanistan
KABUL, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- Eight militants have been killed and 12 others detained in Afghanistan over the past 24 hours, the Interior Ministry said on Tuesday.
"Afghan National Police (ANP) carried out several cleanup operations in collaboration with army and the NATO-led coalition forces in Logar, Parwan, Ghazni, Khost, Samangan, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces, killing eight armed Taliban insurgents and detaining 12 others over the past 24 hours," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates.
The ANP found and seized weapons, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
Over the same period of time, the ANP also found and defused four landmines in southern Helmand and eastern Nangarhar province, it added.
The Taliban, which has been waging an insurgency for more than one decade, has yet to make comments.
The Afghan army and police, backed by NATO-led coalition troops, have intensified operations against Taliban and other militant groups recently. But the insurgent groups responded by bombings.
On Monday, Taliban carried out a roadside bombing killing two ANP officers in southern Uruzgan province.
35 militants killed in Afghan army operation in W. provinces
HERAT, Afghanistan, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- Up to 35 militants have been killed and 41 others wounded in an operation conducted by Afghan army in the country's western province of Herat and neighboring Badghis province, authorities said on Tuesday.
"The Afghan army launched an one-week operation ending on Tuesday in Muquar district of Badghis and Kishk-e-Kohna district of Herat, killing 35 armed insurgents and wounding 41 others," deputy provincial governor Asilluddin Jami told Xinhua.
He said several militants' hideouts were destroyed and up to 28 other militants were detained by the army personnel.
The army also found and seized weapons, the official said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
The Taliban insurgent group, which has been waging an insurgency of more than one decade, has yet to make comments.
The Afghan security forces in partnership with the NATO-led coalition troops have intensified operations against Taliban and other militant groups recently. But the insurgent groups responded with bombings.
On Monday, two policemen were killed when their patrol was hit by a Taliban Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in southern Uruzgan province, hours after four civilians were killed in by IED attack in neighboring Helmand province.
Afghanistan could be ‘second Kashmir’ after US pullout
By Sajad - 26 Feb 2013, 11:43 am Khaama Press
British historian and writer William Dalrymple warned that Afghanistan could be ‘second Kashmir’ once the US forces pull out of the landlocked country.
While speaking to audience during a presentation at the launch of his latest book ‘Return of a King — The Battle for Afghanistan’, William Dalrymple said, there might be another proxy war between India and Pakistan as India would arm Hamid Karzai and Pakistan would arm the Taliban.
Dalrymple’s latest book “Return of a King” uses sources never before translated into English to draw startling parallels between the First Anglo-Afghan War and today’s conflict.
Mr Dalrymple gave a chilling account of British forces’ humiliating defeat in the early 1840s during the presentation while drawing paralells between the British invasion of Afghanistan in the first half of the 19th century and the US occupation of Afghanistan in the beginning of the 21st century.
He said, that the British invasion of Afghanistan (1839-1842) was the ‘biggest catastrophe’ that the Raj ever suffered as out of the 18,000 British and East India Company troops only one survived.
“There was a sensation in 2006 that history was in a general sense repeating itself but what usually happens is the closer you get to the detail, the parallels dissolve in the face of detailed evidence. What was so weird this time is the details lead to greater parallels,” he says.
This is the third time Dalrymple has turned his eye to the complex relationship between Britain and South Asia in the 1800s. In The Last Mughal and White Mughals he mined the Muslim history of India and the Raj.
The British historian and writer gathered epic poems, letters, memoirs and even Shah Shuja’s autobiography guided to a bookseller in Kabul while on a research trip but Dalrymple says English historians have long denied the existence of indigenous sources from the period.
Shuja had been the Shah or king of Afghanistan between 1803 and 1809 until he was overthrown by his brother Mahmud. His father and grandfather had been the first rulers of the Durrani empire. However, Mohammed Dost ruled Kabul between 1826 and 1839 until he was pushed out by the British.
Why Afghanistan may never eradicate opium
BBC Afghan By Dawood Azami 26 February 2013
Despite the best efforts of Afghanistan's drug eradication programme, the BBC has learned that farmers in several Afghan provinces, which had been deemed poppy-free, have gone back to cultivating opium poppies.
For years Afghanistan has been the world's largest producer of opium, the raw material for heroin, most of which is exported to Iran, Russia and Europe.
Programmes by the Nato-led Isaf force, the Afghan government and the UN to entice farmers away from cultivating the flower met with some success.
But farmers say that the high sale price of opium is difficult for them to resist.
They have another gripe: although the Afghan government and the international community initiated opium eradication programmes, many farmers say promises to provide high-quality seeds and fertiliser, carry out developmental projects and promote alternative careers have not been kept.
And despite an aggressive campaign to destroy the crop, the total area under poppy cultivation increased by 18% in 2012, reaching 154,000 hectares (380,000 acres), compared with 131,000 hectares in 2011, according to a 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report and Afghan officials.
One piece of apparently good news from that report was that the overall production of opium decreased by 36% - from nearly 6,000 tonnes in 2011 to around 3,700 tonnes in 2012.
But experts say this was due to a lower yield caused by plant disease and adverse weather conditions in several parts of the country.
Better income
A common complaint from Afghan farmers is that traditional crops, grown legally, do not bring them enough money.
"If we cultivate wheat, it might give us just bread. But what about clothes, medical costs and other things?" says Gul Ahmad, a farmer in Helmand province's Nad Ali district.
"Cultivating wheat will not even cover the cost of the fuel needed to pump out underground water."
A number of farmers who have switched to traditional crops such as cotton complain the prices of these crops have fallen and that there is no market for them at home or abroad.
"I cultivated cotton last year, but the prices are half of what they were last year," says Nuruddin, a farmer in the Chamtal district of northern Balkh province.
The Afghan government estimates that in 2011, the livelihoods of some 191,500 rural households depended on the growing of illicit drug crops, primarily opium poppy.
Among the surveyed villages, however, only 30% had received some form of agricultural assistance (eg seeds, fertilisers and irrigation) in the preceding year, says the UNODC 2012 report.
As part of its counter-narcotics strategy, the Afghan government has started a "Food Zone Programme" led by provincial governors, which also includes schemes to help farmers with seeds and fertilisers.
But provincial governors usually complain that they don't get enough funds from the international community to help farmers properly and fulfil the promises they made to them.
"I have a small piece of land which is my only source of income. If I cultivated other crops, it wouldn't bring me enough money to feed my family for a year," says Rahman Gul, a farmer in the eastern province of Nangarhar, which was poppy-free in 2008, but later lost this status.
Over the past few years, opium poppy cultivation has moved between and within provinces. In some cases this has meant the destruction of drug crops in one area simply leading to cultivation moving elsewhere.
According to the latest official figures, 17 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces had fewer than 100 hectares dedicated to opium cultivation and so were considered to be poppy-free.
But even this status is a movable feast: western Ghor province lost its poppy-free status in 2012, while northern Faryab province regained its poppy-free status.
Sometimes, farmers leave poppy cultivation when they are under pressure from the government, or when they are convinced by the promises of aid and developmental projects; some later return when the alternatives are not as lucrative or if government control weakens.
Cannabis and saffron
In the officially poppy-free province of Balkh a number of farmers switched back to poppy cultivation in at least two districts: Chamtal and Chaharbolak.
"I haven't cultivated poppies over the past two years, but no-one has given me any seeds or any other help," says Mawladad in Chamtal district.
"We all cultivated cotton last year, but there is no market and it is all stored in our houses."
The Afghan government does not readily accept this interpretation of events. It ran an aggressive campaign in 2012 taking poppy eradication to unprecedented levels, destroying nearly 10,000 hectares of poppy fields.
"We don't have a report that poppy has been cultivated on a large scale," says Rahim Rahman Oghly, the provincial head of the counter-narcotics department in Balkh.
"Last year, some farmers cultivated poppies in remote and insecure areas, but we destroyed their fields."
However, the cultivation of cannabis has replaced poppies in some parts of the country including Balkh province. Revenues from cannabis cultivation and production of cannabis resin are similar to or even surpassing those earned from the cultivation of opium poppy.
In recent years, many farmers in a number of provinces did start cultivating saffron.
"We have been cultivating saffron for the past two years which brings us the same amount of money as poppy," says Rahmatullah, a farmer in Kandahar province's Daman district.
"The government should find markets for our legal produce."
Risky affair
The UN and Afghan government figures show that the vast majority (95%) of poppy cultivation took place in the nine most insecure provinces in the country's west and south in 2012.
Southern Helmand province, where thousands of British and US troops are based, remained the largest opium-cultivating province in the country with nearly half of the country's total cultivation.
The Taliban banned opium poppies in the summer of 2000. But after it was toppled by a US-led invasion in 2001, the militant group reportedly encouraged some farmers to cultivate drugs and offered them protection.
Afghan officials say the Taliban insurgents get more than $100m (£65m) annually from taxing farmers and drug producers in areas of the country they control.
This means that even eradication is becoming risky. Official figures show that 102 Afghan soldiers, police officers and civilians died from attacks by farmers, drug traffickers and Taliban insurgents during the 2012 poppy eradication campaign, while another 127 people were injured.
Some farmers resort to violence to protect their poppy fields from destruction, saying they cannot allow the government to take away from them the only means of income they have.
"We are poor and desperate. If the government cannot help us by providing aid and jobs, then it shouldn't harm us either by destroying our fields," says Haji Munib, a farmer from Nangarhar province's Sherzad district.
The international community's engagement in Afghanistan is winding down, but analysts believe the issue of drug production is likely to remain an acute problem for decades to come.
Afghan actress takes on rape to bring attention on ultimate taboo
By Sadaf Shinwari - 26 Feb 2013, 3:09 pm Khaama Press
Afghan-American actress Fereshta Kazemi took the role of a rape victim in a recent film, “The Icy Sun”, in a bid to bring attention to the issue women facing in Afghanistan after being raped.
The law and society imprison the rape victim in Afghanistan rather than going after her attacker.
Kazemi 35, in an interview with the NBC news said, “The concept of honor for the men rests on a woman’s shoulders. Her brothers and her family feel that they have been raped of their honor.”
She said, the perception of honor means that society often blames the women who are attacked.
“There is this atmosphere where women are vulnerable to having people talk about them or say negative things or say that she wanted to be raped or say, ‘Look at the way they were behaving,’” Kazemi said.
According to a survey by Thomson Reuters Foundation, these deeply ingrained attitudes exist against a hostile backdrop for Afghan women and girls: The country remains one of the most dangerous countries in which to be a woman.
Human Rights Watch following a report also said close to 90 percent of women face at least one form of physical, sexual or psychological violence in their lifetimes.
HRW also estimates that around half of the approximately 700 women and girls in prison in the country are charged with so-called moral crimes, which include running away from an abusive home or feeling a forced marriage.
Rights Watchdog Concerned Over Likely Election Fraud
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Monday, 25 February 2013
Human Rights Watch raised concerns Monday over possible fraud and the election of individuals involved in rights violations to office in the upcoming presidential elections.
"We are watching very closely to see what will happen. There are so many questions about the elections: Will the voter registration be valid that everyone can vote and fraud is minimized? will there be some kind of investigation to make sure that people with serious human rights abuses are not able to run for president?" Barr told TOLOnews Monday.
She also said that the country's stability could be threatened if the legitimacy of the elections is compromised and adequate security isn't provided during the election.
"When the election is over and people feel like there was a legitimate election, the cause a real instability in the country."
But the Independent Election Commission (IEC) officials said that they cannot stop a candidate from running for president unless they are found guilty by the courts.
"Unfortunately, human rights violators are limited to run for the elections according to law," IEC Spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor told TOLOnews on Monday.
But he insisted that a commission will be formed after the registration process is complete to investigate if the candidates are linked to illegally armed groups.
The presidential election is scheduled for April 5, 2014.
Gov to Fund 90% of Development Budget by 2024
TOLOnews.com By Shahla Murtazaie Monday, 25 February 2013
Around 90 percent of the government's development budget will be funded by Afghanistan's own internal revenues by 2024, the Ministry of Finance announced Monday.
The country depends almost entirely on international aid for its development budget. About 56 percent of the regular budget is currently funded by the government's own revenues, a figure that the ministry announced would be increased to 100 percent over the next few years.
The government expects to raise the additional money by increasing customs revenues and taxes.
"We can fund 40 percent of [the targeted increase] from customs revenues. Taxes, too, are a main component of government income," said ministry spokesman Wahidullah Tawhidi.
But the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (ACCI) urged the government to improve its tax collection to meet the ambitious revenue targets.
"The country's improvement is linked to tax payments; otherwise, there will be no development," said Khan Jan Alokozai, deputy ACCI director.
Tax evasion, including income and property taxes, remains widespread in the country.
Will We Learn Anything from Afghanistan? William R. Polk, Part 1
The Atlantic By James Fallows Feb 23 2013
William R. Polk's first appearance as an Atlantic author came 55 years ago. While Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, while Americans were absorbing the impact of the launch of Sputnik, while the showdown over integrating Little Rock Central High School continued, he wrote an article for us in 1958 called [yes] "The Lessons of Iraq." You can read it here and note how much of the analysis still applies.
In the years since then Polk has been a scholar and diplomat concentrating mainly on Middle Eastern affairs. Three years ago he made a return visit here to report on his latest trip to Afghanistan.
Now he has written a two-part essay on what Americans should take from their past ten-plus years of combat in Afghanistan. Through all these decades, a central theme in Polk's writing has been the crucial importance of recognizing and learning from strategic mistakes -- but also the seeming impossibility of doing so. This first of his dispatches concentrates on the lessons of the Soviet Union's struggles in Afghanistan. This one is about 3500 words long, or the scale of a medium-sized Atlantic story. I turn the stage over to William R. Polk.
Introduction: President Obama intends to "wind down" the Afghan war over the next years and to leave only a training mission there. He inherited from President Bush and has continued, even enlarged, the American expenditures -- thousands of casualties, hundreds of thousands of wounded and a trillion dollars. The experience has been, or should have been, as Kipling wrote of another war, "no end of a lesson." Yet, I wonder, has it really been a lesson, and have we heeded it? Might we do the same things again?
As I have ruminated for years over these questions, which may be nearly vital for our country and our beliefs, I have reached the conclusion that we do not see or understand the similarities of events; rather we think of each venture as unique. What happened in Vietnam has no relevance to what happened in Iraq. After all, the two countries are far apart, speak different languages and...well you know the rest....
Fortunately, most of the current wars appear to be over even though they have left us with huge burdens. But, as we survey what may be the prospect of new burdens, do our leaders connect the past to the present and the future? I find little evidence to suggest that they do.
Perhaps, I have thought, this is partly because of our rotation of leadership. The new leaders are sure that they can do better what the former leaders did badly. It is also, I think, because our memories are weak and our attention spans are short. Perhaps we really don't care. Or all the above.
Here, I am trying to do two things, hence two papers I lay before you: the one is that by looking not only at our involvement in the current war, Afghanistan, but also looking at what the Soviet Union did and tried to do there, I can single out a few things that should command attention even of our leaders. The other, addressed in my second paper is, given what we know and what we have experienced, what now makes sense for us to do.
What the Russians did in Afghanistan And What We Can Learn From It. By William R. Polk
I have long been a student of Afghan affairs. I first went there in 1962 when I was a Member of the Policy Planning Council. During that visit, I made a 2,000 mile trip around the country during which I managed to talk with dozens of village elders, government officials and the diplomats and advisers from all the main states. The result was a policy paper I presented to the Secretary of State's policy committee.
The main argument in my paper was that the wisest policy for America was a modest and discrete involvement designed to help the Afghans manage their own affairs. To accomplish this goal, I proposed various ventures in education, health and infrastructure.
Above all, I proposed, America should avoid actions that were likely to restart the "Great Game," the competition for control of Afghanistan between Imperial Russia and the then British-dominated South Asia. Neither we, nor the by-then Soviet Russians, nor the by-then independent South Asians - and certainly not the Afghans - would gain. What the British called a "Forward Policy" had long since proven wasteful, sterile and self-defeating. Its modern version, proclaimed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was likely to repeat in Afghanistan what he and his brother Allan were already doing in Iran: ultimately nullifying attempts, slow and weak as they were, toward increased national capacity and improvement of life.
Secretary of State Rusk was complimentary of my effort but cautioned me not to waste my time: Afghanistan was not then and would never be of any significance.. Believing this, we phased down from the Dulles policy because we were distracted by urgent considerations in Vietnam. The Russians, similarly, eased their activities because they too were distracted by other events, notably in Eastern Europe. And, onto this relatively open field, the Afghans began a program of national enhancement. The university took the lead. Ideas, programs and even new styles of social interaction and dress appeared. It was as though the Afghans had heard Chairman Mao say "let a hundred flowers bloom." They -- not he -- meant it.
But the modernization movement was shallow and weak. It needed all the help it could get. What I had urged we do might have made a crucial difference, but our policy machine had only two settings, full speed ahead or stop. No moderation. We didn't quite stop, but we came close. And we drifted with events so when the King's cousin, Daud Khan overthrew the various and competing reformers and radicals, and installed a rightist dictatorship, we hardly noticed. Neither, at first, did the Russians. In fact, they were quite content with the Daud dictatorship. As the former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, in his excellent study of Soviet policy , has observed,
"Because the Soviet government valued its relationship with the Daud government, the Ambassador and the Chief Soviet Military Adviser were instructed to have no dealings with the PDPA [Communist Party] leaders."
As we did in Iran and elsewhere, they conducted their more sensitive relationships through their intelligence channel. There message they sent along that channel was dispiriting to the Afghan Communists: stop fighting among yourselves support President Daud.
The Afghan Communists did not listen. Few though they were - Braithwaite suggests only about 1,500 -- they were determined to seize power. Although we do not know much about their thinking, it is likely that they were driven rather than inhibited by recognition of their weakness. As they watched Daud purge one after another of his initial allies, they must have realized that if they did not seize power, Daud would imprison or kill them too. And, because they were split between an urban, university-oriented faction (known as Parcham) and a rural-based faction (known as Khalq), Daud found them an easy target. He took the initiative and began on April 25, 1978 to arrest the leaders, some of whom he had killed, but he purged too casually: from prison, the would-be rebels managed to get their junior military officer allies to strike on their behalf.
The coup itself, as coups often are, was the easy part. But the inexperienced young Party chiefs and their army colleagues soon overplayed their hands. Even when their objectives were laudable, as some were, they were unpopular among the generally conservative society. So eleven months after the coup, the army mutinied. Russian officers were killed and the regime teetered. What the Russians then faced sounds very familiar to us today with just the change of a few names and dates. What, the Russians leaders wondered, was their real interest: if they moved to protect their Afghan allies, they might disrupt the Russian-American détente which, despite Soviet repression of revolts in Eastern Europe, Leonid Brezhnev thought of as his "page in the history books." Was Secretary Rusk right? Was Afghanistan not important, or at least not important enough to risk other policy goals? And what response might a new "Forward Policy" draw?
The Soviet government had reason to worry about a possible American reaction even though Afghanistan was not a major American concern. Neighboring Iran was. And there the American position, the very keystone of the then American Middle Eastern policy, the Shah's regime, had been rudely overturned by the January 1979 Revolution. As the Russians were reacting to the revolts in Eastern Europe, it must have seemed to them not inconceivable that the Americans, motivated by their belief in the "Domino Theory" (that when one ally falls, the others are likely also to fall), would react to their Iranian fiasco by invading Afghanistan. Even if they did not send in troops, the Russians must have considered, the Americans might seek to establish intelligence-gathering bases to replace those they had operated in Iran. Worse, in the context of the Cold War, they might get themselves into position to engage in espionage among the restive Muslim population of Central Asia. Suddenly Afghanistan seemed significant.
But not, of course, as significant as Eastern Europe. So wise statesmen exercise what they believe to be prudent. But in strategy what passes as prudence is sometimes the first step in a process that soon becomes imprudent.. What they did was similar to the cautious first steps President Kennedy took on Vietnam almost twenty years before - send in some "advisers," food and other non-lethal aid. If more was needed, send weapons and set about training the native army on how to use them. Not much would be needed in their wars, both the Americans and the Russians believed. Intervention could be limited in both scale and time. All was under control.
What was not under control was the local ally. As in Vietnam so in Afghanistan, the native government failed to rise to the challenge. Worse, it presented to its own people, and gradually to the world, the face of a vicious, totalitarian, corrupt regime.
The Russians were under no illusions about the Afghans. Braithwaite found evidence in their archives of their recognition of "the deviousness, brutality, and incompetence of their Communist allies in Kabul." When the Afghan Communists tried to justify their policy by comparing it to Stalin's purges, the "evolved" Soviet leadership was infuriated. What Stalin did was long ago and no longer permissible.
Undeterred, the Afghan Communists arrested and killed tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. Massacres were followed by new uprisings which in turn were bloodily repressed. They found it convenient when some of the repressions were blamed on the Russians. Increasingly, even whole formations of army troops deserted to the rebels.
As the weeks and months passed and clashes increased in scale, the "men on the ground," the embassy, the KGB station and the military advisers urged deeper involvement. Heeding their demands while seeking to assuage religious and ethnic sentiments, the Soviet government began to send in small detachments of Central Asian Turkish-speaking Muslim troops. This was an advantage the later American forces did not have: the Americans must have appeared to Afghans, as we see in photos, like beings from outer space in their odd helmets, eye shades and camouflage uniforms.
The initial contingents did not suffice. There was always a need for more. The next step was to bring in the Soviet equivalent of the Green Berets or Special Forces, the SpetNaz. Initially, their task was to defend the other Russians, but gradually, of course, they were drawn into the conflict. As Braithwaite wrote,
"Thus by the late summer of 1979 several of the military units that were to play a significant role in the first days of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan were already in place....Step by step, with great reluctance, strongly suspecting that it would be a mistake, the Russians slithered toward a military intervention because they could not think of a better alternative."
During this period, when not distracted by events in Eastern Europe, the Politburo was thrown into turmoil. As we now know, even some of those we in the West thought of as the hardest of the hardliners were opposed to intervention. Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, was recorded as saying (as Braithwaite summarized the record), "If Soviet forces went in, they would find themselves fighting against the people, suppressing the people, firing upon the people. The Soviet Union would look like aggressors. That was unacceptable....Tanks could not solve what was essentially a political problem. If the revolution in Afghanistan could only be sustained with Soviet bayonets, that was a route down which the Soviet Union should not go."
And while many in Washington continued to argue about the reality of a Sino-Soviet split, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko sourly commented that "It would be a splendid present for the Chinese [because] All the non-aligned countries would come out against the Soviet Union."
Leonid Brezhnev observed that the Afghan army was falling apart and the new and unpopular Afghan government just wanted the Russians "to fight their war for them." The Russians were equally blunt in talks with the Afghans. Alexei Kosygin lectured the Afghan president, a fellow Communist, that 'If we sent in our troops, the situation in your country would not improve. On the contrary, it would get worse. Our troops would have to struggle not only with an external aggressor, but with a part of your own people. And people do not forgive that kind of thing.'"
Another argument must have been in the minds of those aging men. Although it is hardly known outside of the Kremlin, there was a precedent to make the Soviet leaders hesitant. This Russian intervention would not be the first. In 1929, Stalin had sent a task force of a thousand men, dressed in Afghan army uniforms, to help the then ruler keep his throne. They failed. Amanullah Khan fled and the military mission was withdrawn. Subsequently, the officer who had led the mission was shot. In high stakes Soviet leadership, it was prudent to remember the past.
But probably the deciding cause was that even in the Politburo few people had any idea of what might be involved. As Braithwaite writes - similar words might have written about America's wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan -- "Needless to say, the experts who actually knew about Afghanistan - and there were many of them in the Soviet Union in those days - were neither consulted nor informed." Instant experts came to the fore while seasoned observes were shunted aside: "no one in authority bothered to debrief [the very able Soviet ambassador who had spent 7 years in Afghanistan] or ask his opinion.... When the crisis peaked, the senior Soviet officials in the Afghan capital were men with little or no experience of the country."
What differed from Vietnam was that, unlike the American generals in Vietnam, the Soviet Army leaders were strongly opposed to intervention. The chief of staff argued all the way to the Politburo:
"the Afghan problem had to be settled by political means; the Afghans had never tolerated the presence of foreigners on their soil; the Soviet troops would probably be drawn into military operations whether they liked it or not. His arguments fell on deaf ears..." When the decision to intervene was made by the civilian Party leadership on Christmas day 1979, a powerful military force that ultimately numbered over a hundred thousand men and women, supplemented by various paramilitary formations, raced toward Kabul.
Powerful though the Soviet army was, it proved insufficient. The chief of the Soviet General Staff told them it was. I have never met a general who believed he had enough men or equipment. Counterinsurgency theory, based on the Vietnam war, held that the ratio of soldiers to natives needed to be about 20 or 25 per thousand. The Soviet forces always would fall far short of that. The 100 thousand they could muster gave a ratio of about 3 soldiers per thousand. (The American ratio has varied around 2 per thousand.)
To supplement what their own personnel could do, the Russians soon moved to create or reform existing organizations in the military and police. Their efforts with the Afghan army were, at best, of limited success. On paper, it was a formidable force, and the Russian-trained officer corps was actually reasonably competent, but the soldiers were mainly "Shanghaied" villagers. They not only could not be relied upon to act independently (as is true in Afghanistan today despite years of training and billions of dollars committed to this goal) and ran away when under fire (as our troops today complain they often do), but also about two in each three deserted with their weapons. Many joined the resistance or turned over their weapons to it.
The more entrepreneurial of the peasants-turned soldier learned to turn desertion to a profit. They took advantage of the offer of a bounty to enlist. "Renting" tribesmen was a Soviet policy copied twenty years later in northern Iraq by General Petraeus. As he said, "money is my most important ammunition in this war." While it made Petraeus's reputation, it did not work for him any more than it did for the Soviets. Many Iraqis and Afghans pocketed the money and when convenient walked home. The Afghans may have been shrewder military-businessmen: as the Russians learned, some "soldiers" changed sides time after time.
The Soviet program with the gendarmerie was more successful. The political police, the KhAD, Khadamat-e Etela'at-e Dawlati, which were partially patterned on the Soviet Spetsnaz and the KGB's special forces, and Kashad were more effective or at least more long lasting. Although their brutality created masses of new enemies for the Russians, they continued to employ them. After renaming them, President Karzai today continues to use them.
Unlike the Americans, the Russians did not use foreign mercenaries or Russian "contractors." In 2009, the 60,000 American regular troops were overmatched by some 68,197, often third-world, mercenaries. Blackwater, aka Xe, has become a major contractor with an income of c. $1 billion. It is not alone. Most American installations are now guarded by private armies.
Almost from the beginning the Soviet forces engaged in counterinsurgency tactics. The Russians learned that they could get better intelligence, and so win battles and avoid ambushes, if they performed "civic action." Instead of money, they offered services. Inspired by the Médecins Sans Frontières, they trained intelligence officers in rudimentary medical skills - as American forces later did -- before sending them out into the villages. They undertook large-scale programs also in education, government reform, social affairs including women's rights, irrigation and road building. Remarkably, they trained over 70,000 workers in relatively modern techniques. But, as Braithweaite has written,
"They discovered...that most Afghans preferred their own ways, and were not going to change them at the behest of a bunch of godless foreigners and home-grown infidels. The Russians did not, and could not, address this fundamental strategic issue."
At the urging of the neoconservatives, the American government would later fall into the same trap: the history they did not heed proves that while the reforming of a government is sometimes possible, the restructuring or recasting of a whole society is almost certainly beyond the capacity of foreigners. It must evolve internally or it will not evolve at all.
More pointedly, if reform of any sort or the provision of aid is tied to the tactics of foreign control, it will be regarded by the natives not as beneficial but as the very front line in the war. Neither the Russians nor the Americans have learned this simple truth.
After five years of warfare, a new Soviet government under Mikhail Gorbachev began to try to negotiate and scale back. In November 1986, it arranged to install a new, still Communist-dominated but more broadly based, government in Kabul. As in Hamid Karazai's Afghanistan today, Muhammad Najibullah's government then set out a two-pronged policy: build up the army and gendarmerie but proclaim a policy of national reconciliation. To enhance Najibullah's prestige, the Russians increased their aerial bombing of areas they did not control.
Meanwhile, the guerrilla war continued. As Braithwaite points out, the toll on the Soviet force, particularly on helicopters, was only a small fraction of the cost to America during the Vietnam war. And he dispels the myth that the American provision of the "Stinger" SAM was what turned the tide: "Gorbachev had decided to withdraw a full year before the first Stinger was fired." Another myth attributes a particularly sinister tactic to the Russians: the seeding of rebel areas with bombs disguised as toys or cattle food. As Braithwaithe points out, these devilish devices were copies of bomblets first used by Americans in Vietnam.
Gorbachev decided in 1986 to get out of Afghanistan and began, as President Barak Obama was later to do, by withdrawing a part of the Russian contingent. He quickly discovered that getting out was slower and harder than going in. Chief of the Soviet General Staff Sergei Akhromeev summed up the failure:
"In the past seven years [600,000] Soviet soldiers had had their boots on the ground in every square kilometer of the country. But as soon as they left, the enemy returned and restored everything the way it was before. We have lost this war. "
The Russians finally turned to diplomacy, but they were too late. Not having opted to negotiate, they found that the insurgents, having victory in sight, were in no mood to give up any advantage. Thus, they refused to sign the agreement formalized on April 14, 1988 in Geneva between the Afghan government and Pakistan (which was involved both because it was sheltering millions of Afghan refugees and because it was the conduit of aid to the insurgents) and guaranteed by the United States and the USSR.
That was nearly but not quite the end of the Communist regime. Even with its 300,000-man army, it rapidly gave up most of the country. As did the Saigon regime, it lasted a further three years without external support. Finally, in 1992 it literally ran out of gas: the weapons the Russians had left behind could not be used against the rebels who steadily consolidated their gains. The real price of the war was then to be paid, first by the Afghans and then by the Russians.
The insurgents had proved unbeatable partially because they were not unified; now the lack of unity made it impossible for them to govern. With the Russians gone, they turned on one another, tore the cities - particularly Kabul -- into rubble and caused about a quarter of a million more Afghans to flee or die.
The price the Russians paid, like that being paid by America, was to be measured in shattered lives, wasted treasure and warping of institutions. Post-traumatic stress disorder was not then so well understood in Russia and the Russian government was less sympathetic or helpful to its veterans. But, recognized or not, about one in two soldiers suffered from it. Malaise reached every corner of Russia and played no small part in the collapse of the Soviet system. America is today far stronger, but the final tab of America's Afghan adventure - in money, institutions and beliefs -- has yet to be paid.
End of part 1.
Getting Out of Afghanistan: William R. Polk, Part 2
The Atlantic By James Fallows Feb 25 2013
William R. Polk is a long-time scholar and analyst of U.S. foreign policy who published an Atlantic article called "The Lessons of Iraq" back in 1958. Two days ago, I posted the first part of his long assessment of the options now available for the United States in Afghanistan. That part dealt with the Soviet failure in Afghanistan and what lessons it might hold.
In parts two and three, Polk turns to American policy options. This installment, number two, sets out some of the basic but often-forgotten realities of Afghanistan. In the final part, which will be ready later today, Polk examines the trade-offs for America and Afghanistan and recommends a course of action.Toward a Feasible Afghan Policy By William R. Polk
Too much of what we read in reports and analyses on Afghanistan is based on wishful thinking. It is late, but not too late, to move toward an affordable and sustainable policy. To arrive at such a policy, we must begin by considering historical, geographical, ethnic and economic realities on the ground rather than merely focusing on what the Afghans, the Americans and other nations desire.
I The Basic Facts
Afghanistan has a surface area of 6.5 thousand square kilometers (about the size of Texas or the combination of France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Denmark) of which 85% to 90% is mountainous and/or desert. The central massif, broken by deep valleys, rises to a maximum height of nearly 8 thousand meters and much of the south and west is sand, rock or salty marsh. Thus, the economically "usable" Afghanistan is comparable to just Florida or the combination of Belgium and The Netherlands. The country has few known natural resources. Energy has been particularly lacking. Water power is hampered by erosion, causing generators to disintegrate and storage lakes to fill with sediment. Both oil and coal have been found but have only begun to be developed. Timber is in very short supply, with forests covering less than 5% of the surface; much of the earlier forest areas have been denuded (destroyed by war or cut for fuel). Ground water almost everywhere, except in the far north, is unavailable while rain falls heavily
and creates often devastating floods in March-April. Other floods come when snow melts in mid summer. These times are inappropriate for most agriculture; so Afghanistan cannot feed itself. The reality is that Afghanistan is and will remain a poor country.
The population has risen over the last half century, from perhaps 10 million in 1962, when I first went there, to 31-33 million in 2012. Today, over half of the Afghanis are below the age of 18, so a major upsurge of population can be anticipated in the years ahead. Before the Soviet invasion and occupation, the population was at least 80% rural: most Afghans were settled peasant farmers, living in some 22,000 villages, but perhaps 1 in each 8 or 9 was a nomad. Religiously, about 5-6 people in each 10 are Sunni Muslims and somewhat more than 3-4 in 10 are Shia Muslims. Ethnically, the population is divided into at least two dozen communities of which the Pushtuns (aka Pathans) (4 in each 10), the Tajiks (3 in each 10) and the Hazaras (1-2 in each 10) are the largest. These groups speak off-shoots of the Indo-European family of languages, mainly Dari, a dialect of Farsi (Persian). Smaller Turkish and Mongol groups speak languages in the Ural-Altaic (or East Asian) family while other, even smaller, communities
speak languages in the Semitic family of languages. Thus, Afghanistan is culturally, socially and politically diverse.
While, the diversity of the country is evident, it is important not to exaggerate its effects. The inhabitants of the cities, towns and villages share shaping influences of means of earning their livings, religious belief and practice and historical experience. The best known traditional code of life is the Pushtunwali of the Pushtuns, but similar "social contracts" are echoed in the other communities; Islam in Afghanistan, like Christianity in Europe and America, is divided, but overall there is an intense loyalty to it; and the experience of nearly all Afghans, shaped by generations of warfare, set them apart, they fervently believe, from all foreigners. At minimum, the Afghans have a unity in their difference from others.
Throughout history, central governments have functioned only intermittently and in sharply limited spheres except in the few cities. Effective government is traditionally primarily a function of village communities: each village runs its own affairs under its own leaders; its inhabitants were economically virtually autarkic, making most of their clothing and tools and eating their own produce.
This lack of national cohesion thwarted the Russians during their occupation: they won almost every battle and occupied at one time or another virtually every inch of the country, and through their civic action programs they actually pacified many of the villages, but they could never find or create an organization with which to make peace. Baldly put, no one could surrender the rest. Thus, over the decade of their involvement, the Russians lost about 15,000 soldiers - and the war. When they gave up and left, the Afghans resumed their traditional way of life, what might be called "the Afghan way."
"The Afghan way" is today manifested in three aspects of government:
first, the central government is weak. Its writ is hardly noticed, much less obeyed, outside of downtown Kabul and a few other cities. Religious law, outside the control of government, is supreme. Secular law exists only on paper. Those who can read it are usually powerful enough not to have to pay any attention to it. Many of the powerful, rich and well-connected have their own private "armies." Indeed, the most striking characteristic of Afghanistan is that it is a country of private armies. Thus, as Thucydides wrote of the ancient Greeks, "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Poorer Afghans live in fear of theft, kidnap or murder. Their only recourse is the payment of protection money. It follows that such government as exists, at least outside village communities, is corrupt at every level, from the traffic policeman to the president. A UN study in 2010 found that officials and thugs "shake down" their fellow citizens each year to an amount equal to about a quarter of the country's gross domestic product. The sometime US commander, General David Petraeus, described the ruling institution as a "crime syndicate."
A June 2010 report to the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs entitled "Warlord, Inc." detailed one aspect of extortion and corruption to show how millions of foreign assistance dollars are funneled into the crime syndicate. As the report makes clear, there are four major results of this activity: the crime syndicate becomes overwhelmingly powerful; the action of the Karzai family and associates demeans the very concept of government; the participants in the scam will do anything to continue the flow of money into their hands; but, they are hedging their bets by moving their new fortunes and their families abroad with all deliberate speed in full public view. As President Karzai himself already admitted in a well-publicized speech in November 2008, "The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen." Consequently, virtually no Afghan acknowledges the legitimacy of the Karzai government or its edicts. Most competent observers believe that once American
troops are withdrawn, the existing government will collapse. Those now in power obviously agree with this assessment as shown by their rush to get their fortunes and their families abroad to safe havens.
The traditional Afghan means of achieving political legitimacy is not by the system the central government, partly at American insistence, has employed: election. Even if it were, election is discredited today as fraudulent. The traditional Afghan way to achieve legitimacy is by consensus. Every social group, beginning in each village, comes together in a council. In the Pushtun areas, these councils are known as jirgas; in the Tajik area, shuras; and in the Hazara area, ulus. These councils are not, in the Western sense of the word, institutions; rather they are "occasions." They are called into being when some locally pressing issue cannot be resolved by the local headman or a respected religious figure. The members are not elected but are accorded their status by popular acclamation. Often the members are religious leaders. The code they enforce is what the local people see as their "way." That is, what they believe to be fair, right and proper. Throughout Afghanistan the definition of these attributes is
Quranic.
While such councils seem exotic to Americans, they are, in fact, remarkably widespread - the wartime Yugoslav partisans created odbors for similar purposes; as did the Greek EAM andartes. In Greece then, as in Afghanistan today, they were led by men regarded by their neighbors as ipefihinos or "responsible men." Similar needs gave rise to juntas in revolutionary Spain; "councils of public safety" in revolutionary America; comités de salut public in revolutionary France; and soviets in revolutionary Russia. None of these groups came about in elections; indeed, it is the electoral process itself that is exotic in most of the world. It still has not taken root in many places including Afghanistan.
As broader areas perceive common issues, local assemblies then give rise to "elevated" councils. In Afghanistan, local councils joined in regional councils to deal with shared concerns and ultimately coalesced into a single national council, known as the Loya Jirga. The Loya Jirga shares characteristics with constitutional assemblies. Its role in Afghan life was never fully understood by either the Soviets or the Americans. That role is described in the current constitution as "the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan." Its will was thwarted by US interference behind the scenes to impose Hamid Karzai as interim president of the country in 2002. Consequently, the working of the Loya Jirga was regarded by many Afghans as corrupted by foreign forces.
Third, virtually all Afghans share a deep commitment to Islam. In fact, Afghanistan is perhaps the most religious of all the Muslim lands. Religion permeates all aspects of life, literally from the cradle to the grave. And the most common Afghan version of Islam, a variation of the Hanafi School of law, is the most rigid now being practiced. We think of the extremists as members of the Taliban (literally "religious students"), but they would have little power if what they enforced was not what Afghans believed to be proper.
This perception is demonstrated by Afghan history. Twice in the last half century, Afghan governments tried to lead their citizens into a modern (read: "Western") program of reform. In the 1960s and 1970s, the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Maiwandwal seemed to be on the way to turning Afghanistan into a progressive modern state with heavy emphasis on the liberation of women, the spread of education and openness to foreign influences. His administration was easily overthrown; a decade later, the culturally more progressive of the two Communist parties, the urban-based Parcham, took power and set in motion an even more radical modernization program. In reaction, large units of the army went into rebellion, butchering "modernists" and their Soviet advisors. Huge uprisings broke out all over the country, even in larger towns and cities where reformist ideas were more acceptable than in rural areas.
When it conquered most of Afghanistan in 1996, the Taliban government enforced the strictest form of Islam practiced in modern times; many of its draconian actions were derived from the Old Testament and are proclaimed but not practiced in Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and in some obscurantist Christian sects. For implementing them, the Taliban regime has been widely criticized not only by non-Muslim foreigners but also by most non-Afghan Muslims. To our eyes, the Taliban was seen as imposing an ugly, retrograde, "Medieval" rein of terror, but it was not so regarded by many, possibly even most, Afghans. Thus, two of the things to be determined in Afghanistan's future are how rapidly and how much such attitudes can be expected to change. Many intelligent Afghans, including former senior members of the Taliban organization, have told me that such change will come but is unlikely so long as the country remains under foreign occupation.
Afghan society is also notable for its poverty. That has always been true, but during the brutal Soviet invasion and occupation and in the devastating civil war that followed, nearly 1 in each 10 Afghans was killed or died and about 5 million people fled to Pakistan or Iran while other millions - no one knows how many - lost their homes but stayed in Afghanistan. Most living inhabitants have known no time of peace or even minimal security. Large numbers are sick or suffering from wounds and lacking in skills needed to improve their condition.
Public health and education are both near the bottom of the world scale: more than 1 Afghan in each 3 lives on less than the equivalent of US $0.45 (45¢) a day and more than 1 in each 2 preschool children are stunted because of malnutrition. They are the lucky ones: 1 child in 5 dies before the age of 5. Life expectancy is about 45 years. On education, nearly 90% of Afghan women and nearly 60% of Afghan men are illiterate. Only 1 in each 5 Afghan children attends primary school and from ages 7 to 14 at least 1 in each 4 drops out of school to work.
Both the Soviet and American occupation forces have mounted "civic action" programs with the proclaimed purpose of raising the standard of life of the Afghan people. Obviously, the Afghans need help, so Americans - and the Russians before them - have thought that they should welcome efforts to aid them. But independent observers have found that they do not. Based on some 400 interviews throughout the country, a team of Tufts University researchers found that "Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative." We must ask why this is.
The reason appears to be that the Afghans, and particularly the insurgents, understand from published pronouncements that "civic action" is a form of warfare. In their decade of occupation, that is the way the Russians used it; it is the way the American government uses it today. The official position was neatly summed up by General David Petraeus as he fought in Iraq: "Money," he said, "is my most important ammunition in this war." The Afghans take him at his word.
Related to this perception of the actions of foreigners, Afghans generally suffer from what might be called an "invasion complex." Throughout history -- with rare exceptions -- Afghanistan has been more acted upon than acting upon others. In the long period of pre-history, it was the route by which Central Asian invaders (probably the founders of the ancient Indus River civilization and certainly the later Indo-European tribesmen who founded India's later kingdoms) reached the sub-continent. Afghanistan was the route across which Alexander the Great's Macedonians, various other East Asians fleeing from China and invading Turks plunged into South Asia. More recently, it was the scene upon which the conflict between Tsarist Russia and British India, the so-called Great Game, was played. Finally, Russia invaded in 1979 and occupied the country for a decade. A vicious civil war followed until the Taliban took control of about 90% of the country in the late 1990s. Their government was overthrown by the US in 2001.
Supported by some NATO military contingents, America has occupied the country ever since. This long experience has left a residue of fear and even hatred of foreigners that permeates Afghan society.
The country is landlocked, about 500 kilometers from the nearest sea, and is surrounded by Iran, Pakistan, China and the former Soviet Union with frontiers aggregating some 5.4 thousand kilometers. The capital, Kabul, is only about half as far from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, as New York City is from Washington D.C. The area in between, which the British called "the Northwest Frontier," is the homeland of the Pushtuns, a Pashto-speaking, Sunni-Muslim people. Roughly one-third of them --14 million -- live in Afghanistan (where they make up about 40% of the total Afghan population) and the other two-thirds -- 25 million -- live in Pakistan (where they aggregate about 16% of the total population).
Afghanistan's neighbors have undeniable interests in the country: when it is weak, foreigners intrude and when it is strong it reaches into their domains. Particularly in religion, it interacts strongly with both South and Central Asia and Russia where 1 in each 7 is a Muslim and are rapidly increasing. Pakistan's interests are the closest, but it is not alone: India seeks to use Afghanistan to backstop its policy toward Pakistan and Kashmir; China has a new interest in Afghan energy production; the Russian Federation wants to prevent encouragement of Muslim disaffection in its Central Asian provinces and its allies; Iran shares Shia Islam with a major ethnic community, the 1 to 2% who are Hazaras, has deeply influenced Afghan culture including the language of the majority of Afghans and seeks to choke off the pernicious drug trade originating in Afghanistan.
The roles of foreigners have undergone major changes in recent years and these changes will increasingly affect what is possible for outsiders to accomplish. First the Soviet Union and later America and the European Union have each fought for a decade against Afghan opponents. Neither has "won." And, in the course of warfare and occupation, new interests new interests have been created. Among these is the almost desperate need of their leaders to avoid admitting failure.
Foreigners find failure easy in Afghanistan. It is known as the graveyard of empires. The British lost a whole army there in 1842 and two subsequent campaigns ended in failure; a Russian invasion in 1929 was a near catastrophe, and in the 1979-1989 occupation as mentioned above, the Russians lost about 15,000 soldiers. The American invasion and occupation, has so far cost over 2,100 casualties and perhaps five times that many gravely or even permanently wounded. Few believe it can succeed.
These are the key facts forming the pattern in which policies must be accommodated; so what is possible to do that is acceptable to the Afghans and foreigners?
Involving the Taliban in Afghanistan Solution: William R. Polk, Part 3
The Atlantic By James Fallows Feb 25 2013
William R. Polk's first installment in this series, about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, is here; the second, about Afghan realities constraining U.S. options, is here. This is the third and last for now, an analysis of the least-bad way for the U.S. to manage its extrication from Afghanistan. For completeness, his 1958 article on "Lessons of Iraq" is here. The points below follow "Point I. Basic Facts" from earlier today:
By William R. Polk
II. The Essential Objectives of the Afghan People and The World Community:
The fundamental objective shared by the Afghans and foreigners is a peaceful and secure country, able and willing to manage its own affairs and to act as an independent member of the world community;
This objective is brought into sharp focus by the insistence of the member nations of the NATO alliance that Afghanistan, under any government, prohibit the use of its territory or other facilities for acts of terrorism or subversion in member countries and their allies. This, after all, was the justification for the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2003. This is the second objective;
The third objective is particularly important for, but not necessarily understood by, Americans. It is not only to eliminate or cut down on the vast expenditures of money (much of it borrowed) and human resources (much of it wasted in battle or used in unproductive ways) but also to avoid a "blowback" by the warping or degradation of their institutions, comity and laws caused by fear, apparent necessity for drastic action and excessive concern with "security;"
The fourth objective of the member nations of the NATO alliance and particularly of the United States is to end or at least diminish the costs to them of the war. Member nations of the NATO alliance are already acting to accomplish for themselves this objective. Afghans generally do not share it: the Taliban movement, fractured though it may be, is determined regardless of cost to induce the foreigners to leave and to reestablish something like the regime that was destroyed by the American invasion. The Karzai government wavers between the NATO/ American and the Taliban objectives. In principle, it seeks total independence but its power brokers (aided and abetted by influential outside participants) are making vast amounts of money off the occupation and are in no hurry to end it. That is to say, there is a small but significant area of agreement on the objectives but not on timing, on the means to achieve them and on whom will control the action.
III. Objectives Desired By The Afghan People and The World Community:
Although, in current conditions they have not uniformly or vigorously articulated it, we may assume that a desired objective of all the Afghan people is a more adequate standard of living with both an improved diet and an enhanced level of health as well as a level of education that will enable to achieve and sustain a strong economy;
Both the majority of the Afghan people and concerned foreign powers desire a level of stability sufficient to prevent civil strife and invite further foreign intervention;
Member countries of the NATO alliance as well as China and Russia would like for Afghanistan to take a place suitable to its capacities in legal world trade. Specifically, they would like to profit from Afghanistan's mineral resources, to make use of its routes of trade and to get its help in interdicting the drug trade;
Since some aspects of Afghan society, notably the position and role of women, appear to outsiders as ugly and "medieval," they would like to foster the "evolution" of the society along contemporary Western lines. This objective is not widely shared in the country today although, briefly in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the policy of the then Afghan government and was approved by a wide swath of urban society. Under conditions of peace and independence, especially if these are brought about through negotiations, it is likely gradually to re-emerge.
IV. Accomplishment of These Objectives:
Accomplishment of these objectives will be, at best, a complex task and can be accomplished only gradually. Rarely throughout its long history and only briefly in the last century have the Afghans had the opportunity to set their own agenda or to mobilize themselves to accomplish their own aims. Moreover, even discounting for the handicaps under which they have lived, they have not made satisfactory use of the opportunities they have had. (That is, except in the paramilitary field where they have taken on and essentially defeated both the Soviet Union and the United States.) Unless or until the Afghans gain the necessary scope of action to manage their own affairs and even to commit their own mistakes, they are unlikely to make significant progress in non-military endeavors. This scope can come only after an end to foreign control of their affairs. Therefore, the necessary but not sufficient step is true independence.
Costly and disappointing experience should have taught Western governments, and particularly the United States government, that the successful "engineering" of another country's government by foreigners is rare and that the beneficial recasting of an exotic society is even more rare. Foreign powers can contribute only marginally to local initiatives. To succeed, action must be modest.
V. Means of action:
The United States government must acknowledge, as does the Karzai government, that the Taliban claim to a major degree of participation in whatever government evolves cannot be successfully denied. This will be politically difficult for Western governments, but the sooner they, and particularly the United States government, recognizes this fact, the stronger will be its means of action. We must assume that the Taliban knows, as did the Vietminh in their war against the American occupation in Vietnam, that time in on their side. While painful, the Taliban struggle is sustainable at acceptable cost and is fought in their neighborhood while the NATO and American campaign is enormously expensive, not popular with their own peoples and is remote from their concerns. Thus, a wise American policy would seeks negotiations at the earliest feasible time.
Negotiation is the most efficient, fastest and least costly way ahead. The elements that will arise in negotiations are not many but are fundamental.
First is the revamping of the central government to include the Taliban. Absent this, there will be no productive negotiation. President Karzai himself has called for their inclusion. Before negotiations are undertaken, precisely what would be involved cannot be made clear. Hints have suggested participation in a sort of government of national unity with each side staking a claim to spheres of influence or control. The Taliban want more; Karzai wants to give less. This, of course, is the essence of negotiation. Neither Karzai nor the Taliban trust the other to abide by the deal they make. So a careful step-by-step process will be required and probably some form of guarantee will have to be devised to overcome the lack of trust.
Second is the structure of the state. Probably some sort of federal configuration will be necessary, but, at all costs, the country should not be "balkanized." This is because Afghanistan's several ethnic/religious/linguistic communities are so mingled that splitting the country into pieces, as some have suggested, would set off a panic flight that would create millions of new refugees; moreover, the resulting mini-states would be too weak to sustain themselves and so would invite perennial intervention.
Probably the negotiators will agree to continue the traditional, ethnicity-based arrangement of provinces. Exact boundaries may prove difficult to determine but something like the Pushtun south, the Tajik northeast, the Turkic north and the Hazara central massif will constitute the major elements. Afghans will probably agree to keep the current freedom of movement among the provinces; indeed, it probably could not be effectively curtailed.
In this somewhat loosely unified state, the negotiators will probably easily agree that area around Kabul should be a federal district, as it historically has been, administered by the central government. The foreign negotiators and donors of aid should endeavor to get agreement on making the federal district the leader in modernization. For example, strengthening of the university with such associated professional schools as the medical training college, augmented by European and American universities and foundations, acting like the Rockefeller Foundation did in China, will attract potential leaders from the provinces and help to integrate the country. Such a policy will be difficult to sell to the Taliban.
Third, and more difficult to be agreed will be the allocation of military power. Today, it is of two very different kinds: the Karzai regime has, at least on paper, a standing army while the Taliban has, effectively, a guerrilla army. If negotiations are delayed beyond the withdrawal of the foreign, mainly American, forces, it is likely that the standing army will simply implode. Soldiers will just go home. That is what happened in many revolutionary situations, most recently in neighboring Iran. This is another reason, obviously, to undertake negotiations sooner rather than later.
What negotiators should aim to achieve is the creation of a relatively small standing army. It should be small because such limited human and monetary resources as the country has are desperately needed elsewhere and a large army, absent other vigorous public institutions, which do not yet exist, would likely lead to a military take-over and derailment of the development program.
Fourth is the role of the government of national unity in other aspects of rule. Control of foreign affairs would give the central government the means to negotiate with and encourage donors and investors. Since external aid would pass through its hands, the central government could allocate aid projects among the provinces and so exercise a subtle but considerable influence over their policies. Continuation and strengthening of a uniform currency, under control of a central bank, will also help to unify the country, but given the level of corruption and flight of money, this may be stoutly resisted by Karzai's supporters; the Taliban will be less concerned with this issue.
Fifth is the crucial issue of the smaller-scale structure of the state: village assemblies are the backbone of Afghanistan. Their role is absolutely crucial. It should be easy to convince a government of national unity to support them. One way to do this is to give them authority over local aid projects. First on the list could be small, inexpensive, locally-built, farm-to-market roads (to connect with the ring road (see map) so that farmers can get their produce to market before it spoils. Such a program was highly successful even half a century ago, when I first observed it, but it was aborted by invasion, civil war and the break-down of rural order. Such a program in the aftermath of a negotiated end of war would meet locally-perceived needs, give a much-needed example of success and engender a new sense of "ownership." Thus, the village assemblies will be empowered, encouraged to support peace and make a serious attack on the current massive unemployment.
VI Dangers and Costs of Negotiation and Non-negotiation
Since, obviously, negotiations that include the Taliban will be politically costly, the United States government and particularly the current administration is likely to delay or even to avoid action. Given this contingency, a second category of action must be considered. What would it entail?
The first step would be the setting of a clear, firm and reasonably proximate date for the evacuation of foreign forces. Moves have been made in this direction, but they have been weakened by hedging on timing and numbers. So they have not had the effect on the Karzai regime, the Taliban or on the general public that is needed. It is important to understand exactly why clarity and determination are crucial. In summary, it is because they are necessary to change the "political psychology" of the Afghans. And only if such a change is brought about can progress can be made on either the essential or the desired objectives stated above.
Consider the reaction of the Afghans. The Taliban is committed to continue fighting until foreign forces evacuate the country. It is unlikely that they will accept a partial or long-delayed evacuation. If not, the war will continue. The Karzai regime shows two responses to lack of a clear policy: on the one hand, its "power brokers" continues at a truly astonishing scale and speed to profit from the occupation and, on the other hand, they are withdrawing their assets and families to safe havens abroad. Meanwhile, the general population can make no significant contribution to peace but, in part, helps to continue the insurgency by passively allowing or actively helping the Taliban.
The evidence of this is made clear in the way the way the Afghan community has viewed the war. At the present time, the Taliban can not only move virtually at will and draw support from the people but can destroy even such foreign donations as clinics, schools, bridges, etc.. The reason, as stated above, is that the Afghans regard these results of foreign activities as part of the military tactic to dominate them. Americans and Europeans with a sense of history will recall that in the 1950s, the Vietnamese also acquiesced in guerrilla tactics, allowing free passage and providing support, but also destroyed the works of the French (and later the Americans). The Vietcong murdered even doctors, nurses and teachers. Other insurgent groups have followed the same policy.
So, if we believe it is to our shared interest to move Afghanistan toward a degree of security which would allow an American administration to withdraw without a politically unacceptable defeat, we must change the context in which our actions are judged: that is, we must disconnect military tactics - our self-defeating counterinsurgency action-- from developmental programs.
If a firm date in the reasonably near term is believed, the Afghans can feel that their principal, shared objective has been achieved: the foreigners have agreed to leave. At that point, the village assemblies - jirgas, shuras and ulas -- will begin to view the construction in their neighborhoods of a clinic, the opening of a school or the laying of a farm-to-market road as intrinsically valuable; they will want these things for themselves and their fellow villagers.
Will the Taliban and/or local militias under the command of warlords continue to do as it is now doing to thwart this process? Probably. But if they do, they will gradually but inexorably lose the support of the villagers on whom they rely. (Thus, in Mao's often quoted phrase, the "water" will dry up around the "fish.") In this new context, they will be seen as operating against the public good in ways that can no longer be justified as opposition to foreign domination. In short, their cause will have become redundant and their opposition to foreign-financed and conceived beneficial activities will come to be seen as unpatriotic and anti-social.
VII. Anticipated Results:
Over time: Afghanistan can evolve into a relatively peaceful society in which citizens will have a chance for a considerably improved standard of living and, in the context of Afghan cultural norms, will come to share an acceptable form of participatory democracy. More Afghan émigrés, now constituting a drain on neighboring countries and needed at home to replace the over 1 million Afghans killed or died in the wars, will return as about 6 million already have. While results within Afghanistan itself will be modest, the benefits to outside powers will be immense: the enormous drain on the financial resources of the US and other powers will end, the wounding and killing of their soldiers will cease; and the dislocations of their societies in reaction to their perception of threats of terrorism and subversion will lessen as Afghanistan can no longer be used as a launching pad for actions against them. In short, the program laid out here is to the interest of all parties and should be undertaken with all deliberate speed.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By ROBERT BURNS | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S.-led military command in Afghanistan incorrectly reported a decline last year in Taliban attacks and is preparing to publish corrected numbers that could undercut its narrative of a Taliban in steep decline.
After finding what they called clerical errors, military officials in Kabul said Tuesday that a 7 percent drop in "enemy initiated attacks" for the period from January through December 2012 reported last month will be corrected to show no change in the number of attacks during that span.
The 7 percent figure had been included in a report posted on the coalition's website until it was removed recently without explanation. After The Associated Press inquired about the missing report, coalition officials said they were correcting the data and would re-publish the report.
"During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan," said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition known officially as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF.
Graybeal said a subsequent audit determined that portions of the data from unilateral Afghan military operations were "not properly reflected" in the trends ISAF had reported in its monthly updates on security and violence.
"After including this unilateral ANSF (Afghan National Security Force) data into our database, we have determined that there was no change in the total number of EIAs (enemy initiated attacks) from 2011 to 2012," Graybeal said.
"This was a record-keeping error that we recognized and have now corrected," he added.
The coalition defines enemy initiated attacks as attacks by small arms, mortars, rockets and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. But it does not include IEDs that are found and cleared before they explode.
Trends in Taliban attacks are one yardstick used by ISAF to measure war progress. Others include the state of security in populated areas, the number of coalition and Afghan casualties, the degree to which civilians can move about freely, and the performance of Afghan security forces.
Graybeal said that even though the number of 2012 Taliban attacks was unchanged from 2011, "our assessment of the fundamentals of campaign progress has not changed. The enemy is increasingly separated from the population and the ANSF are currently in the lead for the vast majority of partnered operations."
Karzai bans US troops from key province based on fault information
By Sayed Jawad - 26 Feb 2013, 4:21 pm Khaama Press
Afghan political and military observers blame misrepresentation of information behind president Hamid Karzai’s decision to order US special forces for an immediate withdrawal from Maidan Wardak province of Afghanistan.
The analysts also believe that incorrect information have been provided to Afghan president Hamid Karzai regarding the issue and criticize lack of coordination among the Afghan security institutions and coalition security forces.
Military analyst, Jawid Kohistani quoted by Tolo News said, “Lack of coordination among the Afghan security institutions and coalition security forces could be one of the main reason behind the issue and on other hand reliable information has not been provided to president Hamid Karzai.”
The decision was reportedly taken after residents in the province have complained to human rights groups and provincial leaders of being terrorized in recent months by an Afghan militia that works with U.S. commandos and calls itself “special forces” or “campaign forces.”
In the meantime Afghan defense ministry is preparing to fill the vacuum following US special forces withdrawal from central Maidan Wardak province within the next two weeks.
According to Afghan officials they demanded the pullout of U.S. Special Operations forces from an insurgency-wracked province because the U.S.-backed NATO command here for months has ignored residents’ allegations of severe abuses committed by the elite American troops and armed Afghan irregulars working with them.
However NATO said its past inquiries found no evidence to support allegations of misconduct by U.S. Special Operations forces in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.
Meanwhile a commission jointly formed by Afghan and NATO officials is expected to investigate the issue in coming days, including allegations of the arrest, torture and extrajudicial killing of civilians.
Talk of Inquiry, but Not Much Is Sure After Afghan Ban on U.S. Troops
New York Times By MATTHEW ROSENBERG February 25, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - A day after President Hamid Karzai ordered elite American forces out of a strategic province near the capital, very little was clear other than his increasing assertiveness in dictating the Western military role in Afghanistan.
Interviews with numerous Afghan and American officials on Monday were striking mostly for their similarity: everyone seemed confused, scrambling to confirm details of the events that led the Afghan government to issue the ban and demand Western cooperation in investigating accusations.
Officials and residents from the province, Maidan Wardak, had filed repeated complaints with Mr. Karzai’s government that Afghans working with American forces had been involved in the abuse, disappearance and deaths of villagers.
But officials from neither country could be sure which American forces would be covered by the ban, which is set to take place in two weeks in one of the most critical battleground provinces against the Taliban. None could offer any clarity about who was suspected of the alleged killings and abuses. Nor could any Afghan or American official say what military units the attackers might have worked with — or if they were tied to a military force.
In the absence of answers, American and NATO officials agreed to form a joint commission with the Afghan government to investigate. Still, a senior NATO spokesman, Brig. Gen. Günter Katz of Germany, said at a news conference on Monday that a previous inquiry could not confirm abuses by Western forces or Afghans working with them in Maidan Wardak. “So far, we could not find evidence that would support these allegations,” General Katz said. The ban did, however, drastically reinforce that Mr. Karzai has become the dominant voice in establishing how the final stages of the Western military involvement in his country will be conducted. And in the past year, he has appeared increasingly willing to curtail unilaterally the coalition’s role on issues of most concern to him: special operations missions, detentions and airstrikes.
As they have in past points of tension with Mr. Karzai, American officials maintained a conciliatory tone in their public comments on Monday.
Speaking to reporters in London, Secretary of State John Kerry said that Mr. Karzai “had many legitimate evaluations of how sometimes some things have gone or might be changed and be done better.”
Mr. Kerry cited talks on a security agreement that would keep American forces in Afghanistan after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014, and efforts to jointly manage the transition process away from coalition leadership now under way. “We’ve listened very carefully to his observations about wanting to speed up the transition with respect to the management of security,” he said, “and that’s happening.”
If anything, Mr. Karzai has set the pace of transition over the past year. He has repeatedly demanded and won greater Afghan control of the war effort, occasionally taking his confrontations with American officials public.
The result has been a substantive reshaping of the American role here. The United States ceded control of its main prison on a shortened schedule, gave the Afghan authorities oversight of night commando raids on Afghan homes and sharply curtailed the use of airstrikes.
People close to Mr. Karzai described the ban on elite forces in Maidan Wardak as a consistent expression of unease with how the war effort has developed under the coalition, and of his desire to fix what he sees as a faltering campaign that has helped fuel the war here, not end it.
The ban also reflected the Karzai administration’s limited patience for the use of Special Operations forces, whose aggressive tactics previously resulted in abuses, and attempted cover-ups. But Afghan officials cited as even more troubling American Special Operations units’ use of Afghan proxy forces that are not under the government’s control. Afghan civilians and local officials have complained that some irregular forces have looked little different from Taliban fighters or bandits and behaved little differently.
According to Afghan officials, villagers say the abuses in Maidan Wardak, including the beheading of a veterinary student, were committed by Afghan irregulars who worked with elite American forces.
Some Afghan officials say that they have photos and video of the suspects, and that they are not from any known irregular forces, like the Afghan Local Police, a defense militia created and trained by coalition Special Forces.
Rather, some Afghan officials believe the suspects are part of a force whose existence has been kept secret by the Americans.
Therein lies a major point of confusion: officials at the coalition and a separate American command, United States Forces-Afghanistan, which operates many of the Special Operations units in the country, say they do not run any secret militias. “My total honest answer: We have no idea what they’re talking about,” a senior American officer said.
One possibility that would match the descriptions of attackers offered by local Afghan officials and, at the same time, exclude American military forces would be that the suspects were working with the Central Intelligence Agency, whose operatives run militias in a number of provinces. A spokesman for the C.I.A. refused to comment on the issue.
One senior Afghan official said it was possible: Afghans, he said, make no distinction between military-type outfits. Americans with weapons, high-end gear and facial hair were “all special forces. It’s a phrase that catches all.”
American commanders are scrambling to plan for the next few months without knowing whether they will again be able to use Special Operations forces in a province that is seen as crucial to the defense of Kabul.
With conventional American and allied units shifting into an advisory role, the elite forces are fast becoming the coalition’s sole source of offensive ground troops.
The Obama administration’s plans for a presence here after the NATO mission ends in 2014 also calls for Special Operations to play a large role hunting down remnants of Al Qaeda.
But that decision may not be up to Washington, the senior American officer said Monday. It may well be that “our only decision is whether we want to go along with the Afghan decisions,” the officer said, “or if we want to leave.”
Karzai Order Raises Concerns About Kabul's Future Security
RFE/RL By Ron Synovitz February 25, 2013
Afghan President Hamid Karzai's order for all U.S. Special Forces to leave Wardak Province within two weeks has taken NATO military planners by surprise.
The move comes as Karzai is negotiating a new Status of Forces Agreement with the United States -- a treaty that will determine how many foreign troops remain in Afghanistan to support Afghan government forces after the planned withdrawal of foreign combat troops by the end of 2014.
It raises questions about how many, if any, elite U.S. commandos would stay in Afghanistan as trainers beyond 2014.
The edict also could present fresh security concerns for residents of Kabul.
The mountainous Wardak Province is the strategic western gateway to Kabul. It borders the provinces of Ghazni to the south and Loghar to the east -- both of which are adjacent to the volatile border provinces of Paktika and Paktia.
That means Taliban control over Wardak Province would make it easier for Pakistan-based militants to infiltrate Kabul from the west after crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistan's tribal areas. Afghan Army Chief of Staff General Sher Mohammad Karimi said on February 24 that Karzai's order could be aimed at tempering anger within some of Wardak's ethnic and tribal factions to prevent a backlash against the Afghan government. According to Karimi, Karzai expelled the elite U.S. commandos after hearing numerous allegations from Wardak residents about human rights abuses by the Afghan troops who work together with the U.S. commando teams in Wardak.
"The main complaint was about [Afghan] Special Forces' operations in the area -- intimidating people, torturing people, even killing people,” Karimi said. “The claim was that nine people have disappeared. Nobody knows where they are and they claim that they were taken by [Afghan] Special Forces."
Fears Of Factional Warfare
Karzai's order could also affect a U.S.-backed plan that began in late 2008 to form local Afghan forces to fight Taliban insurgents in Wardak and Loghar provinces.
Under that program, the United States was meant to give training, clothing, and other supplies to anti-Taliban villagers.
Those anti-Taliban fighters deny receiving any support from the Afghan government or from foreign military forces.
Washington has stressed that it is not providing the local village forces with weapons and was not recreating any kind of militia.
But there have been widespread fears in Wardak about the Afghan fighters, with many residents saying their activities could rekindle the kind of factional warfare seen there during the 1990s.
In London on February 25, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters that Karzai’s complaints about Wardak Province will be "appropriately evaluated" by the NATO-led International Security Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) -- and that he personally has taken "appropriate note of it."
"I think he's had many legitimate evaluations of how, sometimes, some things have gone wrong or might be changed and done better," Kerry said. “We're working on that. We're working on a bilateral security arrangement. We're working on this transition process."
ISAF: ‘No Evidence’ Of Misconduct
On the same day, in Kabul, ISAF spokesman Guenter Katz maintained that NATO has not found any evidence so far to support allegations of misconduct by U.S. Special Forces in Wardak Province.
"We take all allegations of misconduct seriously and go to great lengths to determine the facts surrounding them,” he said. “Over the past few weeks there have been various allegations of special forces conducting themselves in an unprofessional manner in Maidan Wardak. So far we could not find evidence that would support these allegations."
However, RFE/RL has documented how U.S. Special Forces and Afghan troops raided an Afghan government health clinic in Wardak in October 2012.
That raid began as an operation typical of U.S. commando missions in Afghanistan. About 20 U.S. Special Forces in helicopters landed near the medical compound in the village of Sebak, in Wardak's Chak district, during the night. They then linked up with about their Afghan support – about 100 Afghan National Army soldiers -- on the ground.
But after storming the health clinic, the Afghan troops held medical staff and civilians there for three days while the compound was used as a strategic combat position and a military-logistics hub.
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan -- which helps support the clinic in the village of Sebak in Wardak's Chak district -- protested in December to ISAF about the raid. It says ISAF officials acknowledged to them privately that the operation violated international law.
Andreas Stefansson, country director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, told RFE/RL that the Afghan troops used a building in the compound as a makeshift prison -- interrogating as many as several hundred civilians there.
Since then, Wardak's residents have raised numerous other complaints about abusive behavior by the Afghan soldiers who work alongside U.S. troops during commando raids.
US, Afghans Investigate Atrocities Claims
Luis Ramirez VOA News February 25, 2013
THE PENTAGON — U.S. military officials said they have set up a joint U.S.-Afghan commission to look into Afghanistan’s complaints that Afghan forces supported by U.S. troops have been torturing and murdering innocent civilians.
The joint commission will look into the complaints, which on Sunday prompted Afghan President Hamid Karzai to order all U.S. special operations forces out of Wardak, a strategically important province near Kabul.
Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters Monday U.S. officials will try to find out what prompted the government of President Karzai to make the decision, which military officials said they were not expecting.
“We’re working with the government of Afghanistan to define precisely what their concerns were. Obviously, we take all of their concerns very seriously,” he said.
Mr. Karzai’s decision comes shortly after his government banned NATO air strikes in populated areas - a move analysts say demonstrates the Afghan government’s growing anxiety about civilian casualties as most U.S. and foreign troops prepare to exit the country at the end of next year.
Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution research organization in Washington, said there is a problem of confidence.
“It’s pretty clear that President Karzai does not fully believe in the war strategy," he said. "I think it’s been true for a while, frankly, partly because the war’s been so frustrating for him and for us. But his confidence level that the downsides of war are worth it has declined.”
Building the confidence of Afghans is key at this stage in efforts to hand over security responsibility to Afghan national security forces, a process expected to be complete by the time most international troops withdraw at the end of 2014.
Senior NATO officials say they do not believe the growing Afghan restrictions on the operations will ultimately hinder their overall mission. As one NATO official put it, some tactical successes are not worth the strategic risk of losing the confidence of the Afghan people.
O’Hanlon saw a positive sign in the Afghan government’s growing assertiveness. He said, "Afghans or at least President Karzai are behaving like they control their own country and they’re taking on sovereign responsibility. That’s a transition that needs to be happening, is happening, and needs to be complete pretty soon. That mentality is actually appropriate. We don’t want a dependent state.”
President Obama has announced that more than half of the 66,000 U.S. troops now in Afghanistan will be out by this time next year. The U.S. says that exit will be gradual so as to keep enough troops in place to advise, train and assist Afghan forces during this year’s fighting season and next year’s elections.
10 Taliban militants give up fighting in S. Afghan province
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- Ten Taliban militants gave up fighting and joined the government-backed peace process in Ghazni province 125 km south of Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday.
"Today 10 dissident brothers gave up fighting, laid down arms and joined the peace process. We welcome them," provincial governor Musa Khan Akbarzada said in a ceremony here to welcome the former militants.
Akbarzada also called on all anti-government militants to give up fighting and join the peace process.
Meantime, the commander of the group Mullah Habib in talks with media called on the government to find job opportunities for the former militants and ensure their security.
Taliban militants fighting the government have yet to make comment.
More than 3,500 Taliban fighters, according to government officials, have joined the government-backed peace process over the past year, a claim rejected by the armed outfit as groundless.
8 militants killed, 12 detained in Afghanistan
KABUL, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- Eight militants have been killed and 12 others detained in Afghanistan over the past 24 hours, the Interior Ministry said on Tuesday.
"Afghan National Police (ANP) carried out several cleanup operations in collaboration with army and the NATO-led coalition forces in Logar, Parwan, Ghazni, Khost, Samangan, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces, killing eight armed Taliban insurgents and detaining 12 others over the past 24 hours," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates.
The ANP found and seized weapons, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
Over the same period of time, the ANP also found and defused four landmines in southern Helmand and eastern Nangarhar province, it added.
The Taliban, which has been waging an insurgency for more than one decade, has yet to make comments.
The Afghan army and police, backed by NATO-led coalition troops, have intensified operations against Taliban and other militant groups recently. But the insurgent groups responded by bombings.
On Monday, Taliban carried out a roadside bombing killing two ANP officers in southern Uruzgan province.
35 militants killed in Afghan army operation in W. provinces
HERAT, Afghanistan, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- Up to 35 militants have been killed and 41 others wounded in an operation conducted by Afghan army in the country's western province of Herat and neighboring Badghis province, authorities said on Tuesday.
"The Afghan army launched an one-week operation ending on Tuesday in Muquar district of Badghis and Kishk-e-Kohna district of Herat, killing 35 armed insurgents and wounding 41 others," deputy provincial governor Asilluddin Jami told Xinhua.
He said several militants' hideouts were destroyed and up to 28 other militants were detained by the army personnel.
The army also found and seized weapons, the official said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
The Taliban insurgent group, which has been waging an insurgency of more than one decade, has yet to make comments.
The Afghan security forces in partnership with the NATO-led coalition troops have intensified operations against Taliban and other militant groups recently. But the insurgent groups responded with bombings.
On Monday, two policemen were killed when their patrol was hit by a Taliban Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in southern Uruzgan province, hours after four civilians were killed in by IED attack in neighboring Helmand province.
Afghanistan could be ‘second Kashmir’ after US pullout
By Sajad - 26 Feb 2013, 11:43 am Khaama Press
British historian and writer William Dalrymple warned that Afghanistan could be ‘second Kashmir’ once the US forces pull out of the landlocked country.
While speaking to audience during a presentation at the launch of his latest book ‘Return of a King — The Battle for Afghanistan’, William Dalrymple said, there might be another proxy war between India and Pakistan as India would arm Hamid Karzai and Pakistan would arm the Taliban.
Dalrymple’s latest book “Return of a King” uses sources never before translated into English to draw startling parallels between the First Anglo-Afghan War and today’s conflict.
Mr Dalrymple gave a chilling account of British forces’ humiliating defeat in the early 1840s during the presentation while drawing paralells between the British invasion of Afghanistan in the first half of the 19th century and the US occupation of Afghanistan in the beginning of the 21st century.
He said, that the British invasion of Afghanistan (1839-1842) was the ‘biggest catastrophe’ that the Raj ever suffered as out of the 18,000 British and East India Company troops only one survived.
“There was a sensation in 2006 that history was in a general sense repeating itself but what usually happens is the closer you get to the detail, the parallels dissolve in the face of detailed evidence. What was so weird this time is the details lead to greater parallels,” he says.
This is the third time Dalrymple has turned his eye to the complex relationship between Britain and South Asia in the 1800s. In The Last Mughal and White Mughals he mined the Muslim history of India and the Raj.
The British historian and writer gathered epic poems, letters, memoirs and even Shah Shuja’s autobiography guided to a bookseller in Kabul while on a research trip but Dalrymple says English historians have long denied the existence of indigenous sources from the period.
Shuja had been the Shah or king of Afghanistan between 1803 and 1809 until he was overthrown by his brother Mahmud. His father and grandfather had been the first rulers of the Durrani empire. However, Mohammed Dost ruled Kabul between 1826 and 1839 until he was pushed out by the British.
Why Afghanistan may never eradicate opium
BBC Afghan By Dawood Azami 26 February 2013
Despite the best efforts of Afghanistan's drug eradication programme, the BBC has learned that farmers in several Afghan provinces, which had been deemed poppy-free, have gone back to cultivating opium poppies.
For years Afghanistan has been the world's largest producer of opium, the raw material for heroin, most of which is exported to Iran, Russia and Europe.
Programmes by the Nato-led Isaf force, the Afghan government and the UN to entice farmers away from cultivating the flower met with some success.
But farmers say that the high sale price of opium is difficult for them to resist.
They have another gripe: although the Afghan government and the international community initiated opium eradication programmes, many farmers say promises to provide high-quality seeds and fertiliser, carry out developmental projects and promote alternative careers have not been kept.
And despite an aggressive campaign to destroy the crop, the total area under poppy cultivation increased by 18% in 2012, reaching 154,000 hectares (380,000 acres), compared with 131,000 hectares in 2011, according to a 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report and Afghan officials.
One piece of apparently good news from that report was that the overall production of opium decreased by 36% - from nearly 6,000 tonnes in 2011 to around 3,700 tonnes in 2012.
But experts say this was due to a lower yield caused by plant disease and adverse weather conditions in several parts of the country.
Better income
A common complaint from Afghan farmers is that traditional crops, grown legally, do not bring them enough money.
"If we cultivate wheat, it might give us just bread. But what about clothes, medical costs and other things?" says Gul Ahmad, a farmer in Helmand province's Nad Ali district.
"Cultivating wheat will not even cover the cost of the fuel needed to pump out underground water."
A number of farmers who have switched to traditional crops such as cotton complain the prices of these crops have fallen and that there is no market for them at home or abroad.
"I cultivated cotton last year, but the prices are half of what they were last year," says Nuruddin, a farmer in the Chamtal district of northern Balkh province.
The Afghan government estimates that in 2011, the livelihoods of some 191,500 rural households depended on the growing of illicit drug crops, primarily opium poppy.
Among the surveyed villages, however, only 30% had received some form of agricultural assistance (eg seeds, fertilisers and irrigation) in the preceding year, says the UNODC 2012 report.
As part of its counter-narcotics strategy, the Afghan government has started a "Food Zone Programme" led by provincial governors, which also includes schemes to help farmers with seeds and fertilisers.
But provincial governors usually complain that they don't get enough funds from the international community to help farmers properly and fulfil the promises they made to them.
"I have a small piece of land which is my only source of income. If I cultivated other crops, it wouldn't bring me enough money to feed my family for a year," says Rahman Gul, a farmer in the eastern province of Nangarhar, which was poppy-free in 2008, but later lost this status.
Over the past few years, opium poppy cultivation has moved between and within provinces. In some cases this has meant the destruction of drug crops in one area simply leading to cultivation moving elsewhere.
According to the latest official figures, 17 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces had fewer than 100 hectares dedicated to opium cultivation and so were considered to be poppy-free.
But even this status is a movable feast: western Ghor province lost its poppy-free status in 2012, while northern Faryab province regained its poppy-free status.
Sometimes, farmers leave poppy cultivation when they are under pressure from the government, or when they are convinced by the promises of aid and developmental projects; some later return when the alternatives are not as lucrative or if government control weakens.
Cannabis and saffron
In the officially poppy-free province of Balkh a number of farmers switched back to poppy cultivation in at least two districts: Chamtal and Chaharbolak.
"I haven't cultivated poppies over the past two years, but no-one has given me any seeds or any other help," says Mawladad in Chamtal district.
"We all cultivated cotton last year, but there is no market and it is all stored in our houses."
The Afghan government does not readily accept this interpretation of events. It ran an aggressive campaign in 2012 taking poppy eradication to unprecedented levels, destroying nearly 10,000 hectares of poppy fields.
"We don't have a report that poppy has been cultivated on a large scale," says Rahim Rahman Oghly, the provincial head of the counter-narcotics department in Balkh.
"Last year, some farmers cultivated poppies in remote and insecure areas, but we destroyed their fields."
However, the cultivation of cannabis has replaced poppies in some parts of the country including Balkh province. Revenues from cannabis cultivation and production of cannabis resin are similar to or even surpassing those earned from the cultivation of opium poppy.
In recent years, many farmers in a number of provinces did start cultivating saffron.
"We have been cultivating saffron for the past two years which brings us the same amount of money as poppy," says Rahmatullah, a farmer in Kandahar province's Daman district.
"The government should find markets for our legal produce."
Risky affair
The UN and Afghan government figures show that the vast majority (95%) of poppy cultivation took place in the nine most insecure provinces in the country's west and south in 2012.
Southern Helmand province, where thousands of British and US troops are based, remained the largest opium-cultivating province in the country with nearly half of the country's total cultivation.
The Taliban banned opium poppies in the summer of 2000. But after it was toppled by a US-led invasion in 2001, the militant group reportedly encouraged some farmers to cultivate drugs and offered them protection.
Afghan officials say the Taliban insurgents get more than $100m (£65m) annually from taxing farmers and drug producers in areas of the country they control.
This means that even eradication is becoming risky. Official figures show that 102 Afghan soldiers, police officers and civilians died from attacks by farmers, drug traffickers and Taliban insurgents during the 2012 poppy eradication campaign, while another 127 people were injured.
Some farmers resort to violence to protect their poppy fields from destruction, saying they cannot allow the government to take away from them the only means of income they have.
"We are poor and desperate. If the government cannot help us by providing aid and jobs, then it shouldn't harm us either by destroying our fields," says Haji Munib, a farmer from Nangarhar province's Sherzad district.
The international community's engagement in Afghanistan is winding down, but analysts believe the issue of drug production is likely to remain an acute problem for decades to come.
Afghan actress takes on rape to bring attention on ultimate taboo
By Sadaf Shinwari - 26 Feb 2013, 3:09 pm Khaama Press
Afghan-American actress Fereshta Kazemi took the role of a rape victim in a recent film, “The Icy Sun”, in a bid to bring attention to the issue women facing in Afghanistan after being raped.
The law and society imprison the rape victim in Afghanistan rather than going after her attacker.
Kazemi 35, in an interview with the NBC news said, “The concept of honor for the men rests on a woman’s shoulders. Her brothers and her family feel that they have been raped of their honor.”
She said, the perception of honor means that society often blames the women who are attacked.
“There is this atmosphere where women are vulnerable to having people talk about them or say negative things or say that she wanted to be raped or say, ‘Look at the way they were behaving,’” Kazemi said.
According to a survey by Thomson Reuters Foundation, these deeply ingrained attitudes exist against a hostile backdrop for Afghan women and girls: The country remains one of the most dangerous countries in which to be a woman.
Human Rights Watch following a report also said close to 90 percent of women face at least one form of physical, sexual or psychological violence in their lifetimes.
HRW also estimates that around half of the approximately 700 women and girls in prison in the country are charged with so-called moral crimes, which include running away from an abusive home or feeling a forced marriage.
Rights Watchdog Concerned Over Likely Election Fraud
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Monday, 25 February 2013
Human Rights Watch raised concerns Monday over possible fraud and the election of individuals involved in rights violations to office in the upcoming presidential elections.
"We are watching very closely to see what will happen. There are so many questions about the elections: Will the voter registration be valid that everyone can vote and fraud is minimized? will there be some kind of investigation to make sure that people with serious human rights abuses are not able to run for president?" Barr told TOLOnews Monday.
She also said that the country's stability could be threatened if the legitimacy of the elections is compromised and adequate security isn't provided during the election.
"When the election is over and people feel like there was a legitimate election, the cause a real instability in the country."
But the Independent Election Commission (IEC) officials said that they cannot stop a candidate from running for president unless they are found guilty by the courts.
"Unfortunately, human rights violators are limited to run for the elections according to law," IEC Spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor told TOLOnews on Monday.
But he insisted that a commission will be formed after the registration process is complete to investigate if the candidates are linked to illegally armed groups.
The presidential election is scheduled for April 5, 2014.
Gov to Fund 90% of Development Budget by 2024
TOLOnews.com By Shahla Murtazaie Monday, 25 February 2013
Around 90 percent of the government's development budget will be funded by Afghanistan's own internal revenues by 2024, the Ministry of Finance announced Monday.
The country depends almost entirely on international aid for its development budget. About 56 percent of the regular budget is currently funded by the government's own revenues, a figure that the ministry announced would be increased to 100 percent over the next few years.
The government expects to raise the additional money by increasing customs revenues and taxes.
"We can fund 40 percent of [the targeted increase] from customs revenues. Taxes, too, are a main component of government income," said ministry spokesman Wahidullah Tawhidi.
But the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (ACCI) urged the government to improve its tax collection to meet the ambitious revenue targets.
"The country's improvement is linked to tax payments; otherwise, there will be no development," said Khan Jan Alokozai, deputy ACCI director.
Tax evasion, including income and property taxes, remains widespread in the country.
Will We Learn Anything from Afghanistan? William R. Polk, Part 1
The Atlantic By James Fallows Feb 23 2013
William R. Polk's first appearance as an Atlantic author came 55 years ago. While Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, while Americans were absorbing the impact of the launch of Sputnik, while the showdown over integrating Little Rock Central High School continued, he wrote an article for us in 1958 called [yes] "The Lessons of Iraq." You can read it here and note how much of the analysis still applies.
In the years since then Polk has been a scholar and diplomat concentrating mainly on Middle Eastern affairs. Three years ago he made a return visit here to report on his latest trip to Afghanistan.
Now he has written a two-part essay on what Americans should take from their past ten-plus years of combat in Afghanistan. Through all these decades, a central theme in Polk's writing has been the crucial importance of recognizing and learning from strategic mistakes -- but also the seeming impossibility of doing so. This first of his dispatches concentrates on the lessons of the Soviet Union's struggles in Afghanistan. This one is about 3500 words long, or the scale of a medium-sized Atlantic story. I turn the stage over to William R. Polk.
Introduction: President Obama intends to "wind down" the Afghan war over the next years and to leave only a training mission there. He inherited from President Bush and has continued, even enlarged, the American expenditures -- thousands of casualties, hundreds of thousands of wounded and a trillion dollars. The experience has been, or should have been, as Kipling wrote of another war, "no end of a lesson." Yet, I wonder, has it really been a lesson, and have we heeded it? Might we do the same things again?
As I have ruminated for years over these questions, which may be nearly vital for our country and our beliefs, I have reached the conclusion that we do not see or understand the similarities of events; rather we think of each venture as unique. What happened in Vietnam has no relevance to what happened in Iraq. After all, the two countries are far apart, speak different languages and...well you know the rest....
Fortunately, most of the current wars appear to be over even though they have left us with huge burdens. But, as we survey what may be the prospect of new burdens, do our leaders connect the past to the present and the future? I find little evidence to suggest that they do.
Perhaps, I have thought, this is partly because of our rotation of leadership. The new leaders are sure that they can do better what the former leaders did badly. It is also, I think, because our memories are weak and our attention spans are short. Perhaps we really don't care. Or all the above.
Here, I am trying to do two things, hence two papers I lay before you: the one is that by looking not only at our involvement in the current war, Afghanistan, but also looking at what the Soviet Union did and tried to do there, I can single out a few things that should command attention even of our leaders. The other, addressed in my second paper is, given what we know and what we have experienced, what now makes sense for us to do.
What the Russians did in Afghanistan And What We Can Learn From It. By William R. Polk
I have long been a student of Afghan affairs. I first went there in 1962 when I was a Member of the Policy Planning Council. During that visit, I made a 2,000 mile trip around the country during which I managed to talk with dozens of village elders, government officials and the diplomats and advisers from all the main states. The result was a policy paper I presented to the Secretary of State's policy committee.
The main argument in my paper was that the wisest policy for America was a modest and discrete involvement designed to help the Afghans manage their own affairs. To accomplish this goal, I proposed various ventures in education, health and infrastructure.
Above all, I proposed, America should avoid actions that were likely to restart the "Great Game," the competition for control of Afghanistan between Imperial Russia and the then British-dominated South Asia. Neither we, nor the by-then Soviet Russians, nor the by-then independent South Asians - and certainly not the Afghans - would gain. What the British called a "Forward Policy" had long since proven wasteful, sterile and self-defeating. Its modern version, proclaimed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was likely to repeat in Afghanistan what he and his brother Allan were already doing in Iran: ultimately nullifying attempts, slow and weak as they were, toward increased national capacity and improvement of life.
Secretary of State Rusk was complimentary of my effort but cautioned me not to waste my time: Afghanistan was not then and would never be of any significance.. Believing this, we phased down from the Dulles policy because we were distracted by urgent considerations in Vietnam. The Russians, similarly, eased their activities because they too were distracted by other events, notably in Eastern Europe. And, onto this relatively open field, the Afghans began a program of national enhancement. The university took the lead. Ideas, programs and even new styles of social interaction and dress appeared. It was as though the Afghans had heard Chairman Mao say "let a hundred flowers bloom." They -- not he -- meant it.
But the modernization movement was shallow and weak. It needed all the help it could get. What I had urged we do might have made a crucial difference, but our policy machine had only two settings, full speed ahead or stop. No moderation. We didn't quite stop, but we came close. And we drifted with events so when the King's cousin, Daud Khan overthrew the various and competing reformers and radicals, and installed a rightist dictatorship, we hardly noticed. Neither, at first, did the Russians. In fact, they were quite content with the Daud dictatorship. As the former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, in his excellent study of Soviet policy , has observed,
"Because the Soviet government valued its relationship with the Daud government, the Ambassador and the Chief Soviet Military Adviser were instructed to have no dealings with the PDPA [Communist Party] leaders."
As we did in Iran and elsewhere, they conducted their more sensitive relationships through their intelligence channel. There message they sent along that channel was dispiriting to the Afghan Communists: stop fighting among yourselves support President Daud.
The Afghan Communists did not listen. Few though they were - Braithwaite suggests only about 1,500 -- they were determined to seize power. Although we do not know much about their thinking, it is likely that they were driven rather than inhibited by recognition of their weakness. As they watched Daud purge one after another of his initial allies, they must have realized that if they did not seize power, Daud would imprison or kill them too. And, because they were split between an urban, university-oriented faction (known as Parcham) and a rural-based faction (known as Khalq), Daud found them an easy target. He took the initiative and began on April 25, 1978 to arrest the leaders, some of whom he had killed, but he purged too casually: from prison, the would-be rebels managed to get their junior military officer allies to strike on their behalf.
The coup itself, as coups often are, was the easy part. But the inexperienced young Party chiefs and their army colleagues soon overplayed their hands. Even when their objectives were laudable, as some were, they were unpopular among the generally conservative society. So eleven months after the coup, the army mutinied. Russian officers were killed and the regime teetered. What the Russians then faced sounds very familiar to us today with just the change of a few names and dates. What, the Russians leaders wondered, was their real interest: if they moved to protect their Afghan allies, they might disrupt the Russian-American détente which, despite Soviet repression of revolts in Eastern Europe, Leonid Brezhnev thought of as his "page in the history books." Was Secretary Rusk right? Was Afghanistan not important, or at least not important enough to risk other policy goals? And what response might a new "Forward Policy" draw?
The Soviet government had reason to worry about a possible American reaction even though Afghanistan was not a major American concern. Neighboring Iran was. And there the American position, the very keystone of the then American Middle Eastern policy, the Shah's regime, had been rudely overturned by the January 1979 Revolution. As the Russians were reacting to the revolts in Eastern Europe, it must have seemed to them not inconceivable that the Americans, motivated by their belief in the "Domino Theory" (that when one ally falls, the others are likely also to fall), would react to their Iranian fiasco by invading Afghanistan. Even if they did not send in troops, the Russians must have considered, the Americans might seek to establish intelligence-gathering bases to replace those they had operated in Iran. Worse, in the context of the Cold War, they might get themselves into position to engage in espionage among the restive Muslim population of Central Asia. Suddenly Afghanistan seemed significant.
But not, of course, as significant as Eastern Europe. So wise statesmen exercise what they believe to be prudent. But in strategy what passes as prudence is sometimes the first step in a process that soon becomes imprudent.. What they did was similar to the cautious first steps President Kennedy took on Vietnam almost twenty years before - send in some "advisers," food and other non-lethal aid. If more was needed, send weapons and set about training the native army on how to use them. Not much would be needed in their wars, both the Americans and the Russians believed. Intervention could be limited in both scale and time. All was under control.
What was not under control was the local ally. As in Vietnam so in Afghanistan, the native government failed to rise to the challenge. Worse, it presented to its own people, and gradually to the world, the face of a vicious, totalitarian, corrupt regime.
The Russians were under no illusions about the Afghans. Braithwaite found evidence in their archives of their recognition of "the deviousness, brutality, and incompetence of their Communist allies in Kabul." When the Afghan Communists tried to justify their policy by comparing it to Stalin's purges, the "evolved" Soviet leadership was infuriated. What Stalin did was long ago and no longer permissible.
Undeterred, the Afghan Communists arrested and killed tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. Massacres were followed by new uprisings which in turn were bloodily repressed. They found it convenient when some of the repressions were blamed on the Russians. Increasingly, even whole formations of army troops deserted to the rebels.
As the weeks and months passed and clashes increased in scale, the "men on the ground," the embassy, the KGB station and the military advisers urged deeper involvement. Heeding their demands while seeking to assuage religious and ethnic sentiments, the Soviet government began to send in small detachments of Central Asian Turkish-speaking Muslim troops. This was an advantage the later American forces did not have: the Americans must have appeared to Afghans, as we see in photos, like beings from outer space in their odd helmets, eye shades and camouflage uniforms.
The initial contingents did not suffice. There was always a need for more. The next step was to bring in the Soviet equivalent of the Green Berets or Special Forces, the SpetNaz. Initially, their task was to defend the other Russians, but gradually, of course, they were drawn into the conflict. As Braithwaite wrote,
"Thus by the late summer of 1979 several of the military units that were to play a significant role in the first days of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan were already in place....Step by step, with great reluctance, strongly suspecting that it would be a mistake, the Russians slithered toward a military intervention because they could not think of a better alternative."
During this period, when not distracted by events in Eastern Europe, the Politburo was thrown into turmoil. As we now know, even some of those we in the West thought of as the hardest of the hardliners were opposed to intervention. Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, was recorded as saying (as Braithwaite summarized the record), "If Soviet forces went in, they would find themselves fighting against the people, suppressing the people, firing upon the people. The Soviet Union would look like aggressors. That was unacceptable....Tanks could not solve what was essentially a political problem. If the revolution in Afghanistan could only be sustained with Soviet bayonets, that was a route down which the Soviet Union should not go."
And while many in Washington continued to argue about the reality of a Sino-Soviet split, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko sourly commented that "It would be a splendid present for the Chinese [because] All the non-aligned countries would come out against the Soviet Union."
Leonid Brezhnev observed that the Afghan army was falling apart and the new and unpopular Afghan government just wanted the Russians "to fight their war for them." The Russians were equally blunt in talks with the Afghans. Alexei Kosygin lectured the Afghan president, a fellow Communist, that 'If we sent in our troops, the situation in your country would not improve. On the contrary, it would get worse. Our troops would have to struggle not only with an external aggressor, but with a part of your own people. And people do not forgive that kind of thing.'"
Another argument must have been in the minds of those aging men. Although it is hardly known outside of the Kremlin, there was a precedent to make the Soviet leaders hesitant. This Russian intervention would not be the first. In 1929, Stalin had sent a task force of a thousand men, dressed in Afghan army uniforms, to help the then ruler keep his throne. They failed. Amanullah Khan fled and the military mission was withdrawn. Subsequently, the officer who had led the mission was shot. In high stakes Soviet leadership, it was prudent to remember the past.
But probably the deciding cause was that even in the Politburo few people had any idea of what might be involved. As Braithwaite writes - similar words might have written about America's wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan -- "Needless to say, the experts who actually knew about Afghanistan - and there were many of them in the Soviet Union in those days - were neither consulted nor informed." Instant experts came to the fore while seasoned observes were shunted aside: "no one in authority bothered to debrief [the very able Soviet ambassador who had spent 7 years in Afghanistan] or ask his opinion.... When the crisis peaked, the senior Soviet officials in the Afghan capital were men with little or no experience of the country."
What differed from Vietnam was that, unlike the American generals in Vietnam, the Soviet Army leaders were strongly opposed to intervention. The chief of staff argued all the way to the Politburo:
"the Afghan problem had to be settled by political means; the Afghans had never tolerated the presence of foreigners on their soil; the Soviet troops would probably be drawn into military operations whether they liked it or not. His arguments fell on deaf ears..." When the decision to intervene was made by the civilian Party leadership on Christmas day 1979, a powerful military force that ultimately numbered over a hundred thousand men and women, supplemented by various paramilitary formations, raced toward Kabul.
Powerful though the Soviet army was, it proved insufficient. The chief of the Soviet General Staff told them it was. I have never met a general who believed he had enough men or equipment. Counterinsurgency theory, based on the Vietnam war, held that the ratio of soldiers to natives needed to be about 20 or 25 per thousand. The Soviet forces always would fall far short of that. The 100 thousand they could muster gave a ratio of about 3 soldiers per thousand. (The American ratio has varied around 2 per thousand.)
To supplement what their own personnel could do, the Russians soon moved to create or reform existing organizations in the military and police. Their efforts with the Afghan army were, at best, of limited success. On paper, it was a formidable force, and the Russian-trained officer corps was actually reasonably competent, but the soldiers were mainly "Shanghaied" villagers. They not only could not be relied upon to act independently (as is true in Afghanistan today despite years of training and billions of dollars committed to this goal) and ran away when under fire (as our troops today complain they often do), but also about two in each three deserted with their weapons. Many joined the resistance or turned over their weapons to it.
The more entrepreneurial of the peasants-turned soldier learned to turn desertion to a profit. They took advantage of the offer of a bounty to enlist. "Renting" tribesmen was a Soviet policy copied twenty years later in northern Iraq by General Petraeus. As he said, "money is my most important ammunition in this war." While it made Petraeus's reputation, it did not work for him any more than it did for the Soviets. Many Iraqis and Afghans pocketed the money and when convenient walked home. The Afghans may have been shrewder military-businessmen: as the Russians learned, some "soldiers" changed sides time after time.
The Soviet program with the gendarmerie was more successful. The political police, the KhAD, Khadamat-e Etela'at-e Dawlati, which were partially patterned on the Soviet Spetsnaz and the KGB's special forces, and Kashad were more effective or at least more long lasting. Although their brutality created masses of new enemies for the Russians, they continued to employ them. After renaming them, President Karzai today continues to use them.
Unlike the Americans, the Russians did not use foreign mercenaries or Russian "contractors." In 2009, the 60,000 American regular troops were overmatched by some 68,197, often third-world, mercenaries. Blackwater, aka Xe, has become a major contractor with an income of c. $1 billion. It is not alone. Most American installations are now guarded by private armies.
Almost from the beginning the Soviet forces engaged in counterinsurgency tactics. The Russians learned that they could get better intelligence, and so win battles and avoid ambushes, if they performed "civic action." Instead of money, they offered services. Inspired by the Médecins Sans Frontières, they trained intelligence officers in rudimentary medical skills - as American forces later did -- before sending them out into the villages. They undertook large-scale programs also in education, government reform, social affairs including women's rights, irrigation and road building. Remarkably, they trained over 70,000 workers in relatively modern techniques. But, as Braithweaite has written,
"They discovered...that most Afghans preferred their own ways, and were not going to change them at the behest of a bunch of godless foreigners and home-grown infidels. The Russians did not, and could not, address this fundamental strategic issue."
At the urging of the neoconservatives, the American government would later fall into the same trap: the history they did not heed proves that while the reforming of a government is sometimes possible, the restructuring or recasting of a whole society is almost certainly beyond the capacity of foreigners. It must evolve internally or it will not evolve at all.
More pointedly, if reform of any sort or the provision of aid is tied to the tactics of foreign control, it will be regarded by the natives not as beneficial but as the very front line in the war. Neither the Russians nor the Americans have learned this simple truth.
After five years of warfare, a new Soviet government under Mikhail Gorbachev began to try to negotiate and scale back. In November 1986, it arranged to install a new, still Communist-dominated but more broadly based, government in Kabul. As in Hamid Karazai's Afghanistan today, Muhammad Najibullah's government then set out a two-pronged policy: build up the army and gendarmerie but proclaim a policy of national reconciliation. To enhance Najibullah's prestige, the Russians increased their aerial bombing of areas they did not control.
Meanwhile, the guerrilla war continued. As Braithwaite points out, the toll on the Soviet force, particularly on helicopters, was only a small fraction of the cost to America during the Vietnam war. And he dispels the myth that the American provision of the "Stinger" SAM was what turned the tide: "Gorbachev had decided to withdraw a full year before the first Stinger was fired." Another myth attributes a particularly sinister tactic to the Russians: the seeding of rebel areas with bombs disguised as toys or cattle food. As Braithwaithe points out, these devilish devices were copies of bomblets first used by Americans in Vietnam.
Gorbachev decided in 1986 to get out of Afghanistan and began, as President Barak Obama was later to do, by withdrawing a part of the Russian contingent. He quickly discovered that getting out was slower and harder than going in. Chief of the Soviet General Staff Sergei Akhromeev summed up the failure:
"In the past seven years [600,000] Soviet soldiers had had their boots on the ground in every square kilometer of the country. But as soon as they left, the enemy returned and restored everything the way it was before. We have lost this war. "
The Russians finally turned to diplomacy, but they were too late. Not having opted to negotiate, they found that the insurgents, having victory in sight, were in no mood to give up any advantage. Thus, they refused to sign the agreement formalized on April 14, 1988 in Geneva between the Afghan government and Pakistan (which was involved both because it was sheltering millions of Afghan refugees and because it was the conduit of aid to the insurgents) and guaranteed by the United States and the USSR.
That was nearly but not quite the end of the Communist regime. Even with its 300,000-man army, it rapidly gave up most of the country. As did the Saigon regime, it lasted a further three years without external support. Finally, in 1992 it literally ran out of gas: the weapons the Russians had left behind could not be used against the rebels who steadily consolidated their gains. The real price of the war was then to be paid, first by the Afghans and then by the Russians.
The insurgents had proved unbeatable partially because they were not unified; now the lack of unity made it impossible for them to govern. With the Russians gone, they turned on one another, tore the cities - particularly Kabul -- into rubble and caused about a quarter of a million more Afghans to flee or die.
The price the Russians paid, like that being paid by America, was to be measured in shattered lives, wasted treasure and warping of institutions. Post-traumatic stress disorder was not then so well understood in Russia and the Russian government was less sympathetic or helpful to its veterans. But, recognized or not, about one in two soldiers suffered from it. Malaise reached every corner of Russia and played no small part in the collapse of the Soviet system. America is today far stronger, but the final tab of America's Afghan adventure - in money, institutions and beliefs -- has yet to be paid.
End of part 1.
Getting Out of Afghanistan: William R. Polk, Part 2
The Atlantic By James Fallows Feb 25 2013
William R. Polk is a long-time scholar and analyst of U.S. foreign policy who published an Atlantic article called "The Lessons of Iraq" back in 1958. Two days ago, I posted the first part of his long assessment of the options now available for the United States in Afghanistan. That part dealt with the Soviet failure in Afghanistan and what lessons it might hold.
In parts two and three, Polk turns to American policy options. This installment, number two, sets out some of the basic but often-forgotten realities of Afghanistan. In the final part, which will be ready later today, Polk examines the trade-offs for America and Afghanistan and recommends a course of action.Toward a Feasible Afghan Policy By William R. Polk
Too much of what we read in reports and analyses on Afghanistan is based on wishful thinking. It is late, but not too late, to move toward an affordable and sustainable policy. To arrive at such a policy, we must begin by considering historical, geographical, ethnic and economic realities on the ground rather than merely focusing on what the Afghans, the Americans and other nations desire.
I The Basic Facts
Afghanistan has a surface area of 6.5 thousand square kilometers (about the size of Texas or the combination of France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Denmark) of which 85% to 90% is mountainous and/or desert. The central massif, broken by deep valleys, rises to a maximum height of nearly 8 thousand meters and much of the south and west is sand, rock or salty marsh. Thus, the economically "usable" Afghanistan is comparable to just Florida or the combination of Belgium and The Netherlands. The country has few known natural resources. Energy has been particularly lacking. Water power is hampered by erosion, causing generators to disintegrate and storage lakes to fill with sediment. Both oil and coal have been found but have only begun to be developed. Timber is in very short supply, with forests covering less than 5% of the surface; much of the earlier forest areas have been denuded (destroyed by war or cut for fuel). Ground water almost everywhere, except in the far north, is unavailable while rain falls heavily
and creates often devastating floods in March-April. Other floods come when snow melts in mid summer. These times are inappropriate for most agriculture; so Afghanistan cannot feed itself. The reality is that Afghanistan is and will remain a poor country.
The population has risen over the last half century, from perhaps 10 million in 1962, when I first went there, to 31-33 million in 2012. Today, over half of the Afghanis are below the age of 18, so a major upsurge of population can be anticipated in the years ahead. Before the Soviet invasion and occupation, the population was at least 80% rural: most Afghans were settled peasant farmers, living in some 22,000 villages, but perhaps 1 in each 8 or 9 was a nomad. Religiously, about 5-6 people in each 10 are Sunni Muslims and somewhat more than 3-4 in 10 are Shia Muslims. Ethnically, the population is divided into at least two dozen communities of which the Pushtuns (aka Pathans) (4 in each 10), the Tajiks (3 in each 10) and the Hazaras (1-2 in each 10) are the largest. These groups speak off-shoots of the Indo-European family of languages, mainly Dari, a dialect of Farsi (Persian). Smaller Turkish and Mongol groups speak languages in the Ural-Altaic (or East Asian) family while other, even smaller, communities
speak languages in the Semitic family of languages. Thus, Afghanistan is culturally, socially and politically diverse.
While, the diversity of the country is evident, it is important not to exaggerate its effects. The inhabitants of the cities, towns and villages share shaping influences of means of earning their livings, religious belief and practice and historical experience. The best known traditional code of life is the Pushtunwali of the Pushtuns, but similar "social contracts" are echoed in the other communities; Islam in Afghanistan, like Christianity in Europe and America, is divided, but overall there is an intense loyalty to it; and the experience of nearly all Afghans, shaped by generations of warfare, set them apart, they fervently believe, from all foreigners. At minimum, the Afghans have a unity in their difference from others.
Throughout history, central governments have functioned only intermittently and in sharply limited spheres except in the few cities. Effective government is traditionally primarily a function of village communities: each village runs its own affairs under its own leaders; its inhabitants were economically virtually autarkic, making most of their clothing and tools and eating their own produce.
This lack of national cohesion thwarted the Russians during their occupation: they won almost every battle and occupied at one time or another virtually every inch of the country, and through their civic action programs they actually pacified many of the villages, but they could never find or create an organization with which to make peace. Baldly put, no one could surrender the rest. Thus, over the decade of their involvement, the Russians lost about 15,000 soldiers - and the war. When they gave up and left, the Afghans resumed their traditional way of life, what might be called "the Afghan way."
"The Afghan way" is today manifested in three aspects of government:
first, the central government is weak. Its writ is hardly noticed, much less obeyed, outside of downtown Kabul and a few other cities. Religious law, outside the control of government, is supreme. Secular law exists only on paper. Those who can read it are usually powerful enough not to have to pay any attention to it. Many of the powerful, rich and well-connected have their own private "armies." Indeed, the most striking characteristic of Afghanistan is that it is a country of private armies. Thus, as Thucydides wrote of the ancient Greeks, "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Poorer Afghans live in fear of theft, kidnap or murder. Their only recourse is the payment of protection money. It follows that such government as exists, at least outside village communities, is corrupt at every level, from the traffic policeman to the president. A UN study in 2010 found that officials and thugs "shake down" their fellow citizens each year to an amount equal to about a quarter of the country's gross domestic product. The sometime US commander, General David Petraeus, described the ruling institution as a "crime syndicate."
A June 2010 report to the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs entitled "Warlord, Inc." detailed one aspect of extortion and corruption to show how millions of foreign assistance dollars are funneled into the crime syndicate. As the report makes clear, there are four major results of this activity: the crime syndicate becomes overwhelmingly powerful; the action of the Karzai family and associates demeans the very concept of government; the participants in the scam will do anything to continue the flow of money into their hands; but, they are hedging their bets by moving their new fortunes and their families abroad with all deliberate speed in full public view. As President Karzai himself already admitted in a well-publicized speech in November 2008, "The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen." Consequently, virtually no Afghan acknowledges the legitimacy of the Karzai government or its edicts. Most competent observers believe that once American
troops are withdrawn, the existing government will collapse. Those now in power obviously agree with this assessment as shown by their rush to get their fortunes and their families abroad to safe havens.
The traditional Afghan means of achieving political legitimacy is not by the system the central government, partly at American insistence, has employed: election. Even if it were, election is discredited today as fraudulent. The traditional Afghan way to achieve legitimacy is by consensus. Every social group, beginning in each village, comes together in a council. In the Pushtun areas, these councils are known as jirgas; in the Tajik area, shuras; and in the Hazara area, ulus. These councils are not, in the Western sense of the word, institutions; rather they are "occasions." They are called into being when some locally pressing issue cannot be resolved by the local headman or a respected religious figure. The members are not elected but are accorded their status by popular acclamation. Often the members are religious leaders. The code they enforce is what the local people see as their "way." That is, what they believe to be fair, right and proper. Throughout Afghanistan the definition of these attributes is
Quranic.
While such councils seem exotic to Americans, they are, in fact, remarkably widespread - the wartime Yugoslav partisans created odbors for similar purposes; as did the Greek EAM andartes. In Greece then, as in Afghanistan today, they were led by men regarded by their neighbors as ipefihinos or "responsible men." Similar needs gave rise to juntas in revolutionary Spain; "councils of public safety" in revolutionary America; comités de salut public in revolutionary France; and soviets in revolutionary Russia. None of these groups came about in elections; indeed, it is the electoral process itself that is exotic in most of the world. It still has not taken root in many places including Afghanistan.
As broader areas perceive common issues, local assemblies then give rise to "elevated" councils. In Afghanistan, local councils joined in regional councils to deal with shared concerns and ultimately coalesced into a single national council, known as the Loya Jirga. The Loya Jirga shares characteristics with constitutional assemblies. Its role in Afghan life was never fully understood by either the Soviets or the Americans. That role is described in the current constitution as "the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan." Its will was thwarted by US interference behind the scenes to impose Hamid Karzai as interim president of the country in 2002. Consequently, the working of the Loya Jirga was regarded by many Afghans as corrupted by foreign forces.
Third, virtually all Afghans share a deep commitment to Islam. In fact, Afghanistan is perhaps the most religious of all the Muslim lands. Religion permeates all aspects of life, literally from the cradle to the grave. And the most common Afghan version of Islam, a variation of the Hanafi School of law, is the most rigid now being practiced. We think of the extremists as members of the Taliban (literally "religious students"), but they would have little power if what they enforced was not what Afghans believed to be proper.
This perception is demonstrated by Afghan history. Twice in the last half century, Afghan governments tried to lead their citizens into a modern (read: "Western") program of reform. In the 1960s and 1970s, the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Maiwandwal seemed to be on the way to turning Afghanistan into a progressive modern state with heavy emphasis on the liberation of women, the spread of education and openness to foreign influences. His administration was easily overthrown; a decade later, the culturally more progressive of the two Communist parties, the urban-based Parcham, took power and set in motion an even more radical modernization program. In reaction, large units of the army went into rebellion, butchering "modernists" and their Soviet advisors. Huge uprisings broke out all over the country, even in larger towns and cities where reformist ideas were more acceptable than in rural areas.
When it conquered most of Afghanistan in 1996, the Taliban government enforced the strictest form of Islam practiced in modern times; many of its draconian actions were derived from the Old Testament and are proclaimed but not practiced in Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and in some obscurantist Christian sects. For implementing them, the Taliban regime has been widely criticized not only by non-Muslim foreigners but also by most non-Afghan Muslims. To our eyes, the Taliban was seen as imposing an ugly, retrograde, "Medieval" rein of terror, but it was not so regarded by many, possibly even most, Afghans. Thus, two of the things to be determined in Afghanistan's future are how rapidly and how much such attitudes can be expected to change. Many intelligent Afghans, including former senior members of the Taliban organization, have told me that such change will come but is unlikely so long as the country remains under foreign occupation.
Afghan society is also notable for its poverty. That has always been true, but during the brutal Soviet invasion and occupation and in the devastating civil war that followed, nearly 1 in each 10 Afghans was killed or died and about 5 million people fled to Pakistan or Iran while other millions - no one knows how many - lost their homes but stayed in Afghanistan. Most living inhabitants have known no time of peace or even minimal security. Large numbers are sick or suffering from wounds and lacking in skills needed to improve their condition.
Public health and education are both near the bottom of the world scale: more than 1 Afghan in each 3 lives on less than the equivalent of US $0.45 (45¢) a day and more than 1 in each 2 preschool children are stunted because of malnutrition. They are the lucky ones: 1 child in 5 dies before the age of 5. Life expectancy is about 45 years. On education, nearly 90% of Afghan women and nearly 60% of Afghan men are illiterate. Only 1 in each 5 Afghan children attends primary school and from ages 7 to 14 at least 1 in each 4 drops out of school to work.
Both the Soviet and American occupation forces have mounted "civic action" programs with the proclaimed purpose of raising the standard of life of the Afghan people. Obviously, the Afghans need help, so Americans - and the Russians before them - have thought that they should welcome efforts to aid them. But independent observers have found that they do not. Based on some 400 interviews throughout the country, a team of Tufts University researchers found that "Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative." We must ask why this is.
The reason appears to be that the Afghans, and particularly the insurgents, understand from published pronouncements that "civic action" is a form of warfare. In their decade of occupation, that is the way the Russians used it; it is the way the American government uses it today. The official position was neatly summed up by General David Petraeus as he fought in Iraq: "Money," he said, "is my most important ammunition in this war." The Afghans take him at his word.
Related to this perception of the actions of foreigners, Afghans generally suffer from what might be called an "invasion complex." Throughout history -- with rare exceptions -- Afghanistan has been more acted upon than acting upon others. In the long period of pre-history, it was the route by which Central Asian invaders (probably the founders of the ancient Indus River civilization and certainly the later Indo-European tribesmen who founded India's later kingdoms) reached the sub-continent. Afghanistan was the route across which Alexander the Great's Macedonians, various other East Asians fleeing from China and invading Turks plunged into South Asia. More recently, it was the scene upon which the conflict between Tsarist Russia and British India, the so-called Great Game, was played. Finally, Russia invaded in 1979 and occupied the country for a decade. A vicious civil war followed until the Taliban took control of about 90% of the country in the late 1990s. Their government was overthrown by the US in 2001.
Supported by some NATO military contingents, America has occupied the country ever since. This long experience has left a residue of fear and even hatred of foreigners that permeates Afghan society.
The country is landlocked, about 500 kilometers from the nearest sea, and is surrounded by Iran, Pakistan, China and the former Soviet Union with frontiers aggregating some 5.4 thousand kilometers. The capital, Kabul, is only about half as far from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, as New York City is from Washington D.C. The area in between, which the British called "the Northwest Frontier," is the homeland of the Pushtuns, a Pashto-speaking, Sunni-Muslim people. Roughly one-third of them --14 million -- live in Afghanistan (where they make up about 40% of the total Afghan population) and the other two-thirds -- 25 million -- live in Pakistan (where they aggregate about 16% of the total population).
Afghanistan's neighbors have undeniable interests in the country: when it is weak, foreigners intrude and when it is strong it reaches into their domains. Particularly in religion, it interacts strongly with both South and Central Asia and Russia where 1 in each 7 is a Muslim and are rapidly increasing. Pakistan's interests are the closest, but it is not alone: India seeks to use Afghanistan to backstop its policy toward Pakistan and Kashmir; China has a new interest in Afghan energy production; the Russian Federation wants to prevent encouragement of Muslim disaffection in its Central Asian provinces and its allies; Iran shares Shia Islam with a major ethnic community, the 1 to 2% who are Hazaras, has deeply influenced Afghan culture including the language of the majority of Afghans and seeks to choke off the pernicious drug trade originating in Afghanistan.
The roles of foreigners have undergone major changes in recent years and these changes will increasingly affect what is possible for outsiders to accomplish. First the Soviet Union and later America and the European Union have each fought for a decade against Afghan opponents. Neither has "won." And, in the course of warfare and occupation, new interests new interests have been created. Among these is the almost desperate need of their leaders to avoid admitting failure.
Foreigners find failure easy in Afghanistan. It is known as the graveyard of empires. The British lost a whole army there in 1842 and two subsequent campaigns ended in failure; a Russian invasion in 1929 was a near catastrophe, and in the 1979-1989 occupation as mentioned above, the Russians lost about 15,000 soldiers. The American invasion and occupation, has so far cost over 2,100 casualties and perhaps five times that many gravely or even permanently wounded. Few believe it can succeed.
These are the key facts forming the pattern in which policies must be accommodated; so what is possible to do that is acceptable to the Afghans and foreigners?
Involving the Taliban in Afghanistan Solution: William R. Polk, Part 3
The Atlantic By James Fallows Feb 25 2013
William R. Polk's first installment in this series, about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, is here; the second, about Afghan realities constraining U.S. options, is here. This is the third and last for now, an analysis of the least-bad way for the U.S. to manage its extrication from Afghanistan. For completeness, his 1958 article on "Lessons of Iraq" is here. The points below follow "Point I. Basic Facts" from earlier today:
By William R. Polk
II. The Essential Objectives of the Afghan People and The World Community:
The fundamental objective shared by the Afghans and foreigners is a peaceful and secure country, able and willing to manage its own affairs and to act as an independent member of the world community;
This objective is brought into sharp focus by the insistence of the member nations of the NATO alliance that Afghanistan, under any government, prohibit the use of its territory or other facilities for acts of terrorism or subversion in member countries and their allies. This, after all, was the justification for the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2003. This is the second objective;
The third objective is particularly important for, but not necessarily understood by, Americans. It is not only to eliminate or cut down on the vast expenditures of money (much of it borrowed) and human resources (much of it wasted in battle or used in unproductive ways) but also to avoid a "blowback" by the warping or degradation of their institutions, comity and laws caused by fear, apparent necessity for drastic action and excessive concern with "security;"
The fourth objective of the member nations of the NATO alliance and particularly of the United States is to end or at least diminish the costs to them of the war. Member nations of the NATO alliance are already acting to accomplish for themselves this objective. Afghans generally do not share it: the Taliban movement, fractured though it may be, is determined regardless of cost to induce the foreigners to leave and to reestablish something like the regime that was destroyed by the American invasion. The Karzai government wavers between the NATO/ American and the Taliban objectives. In principle, it seeks total independence but its power brokers (aided and abetted by influential outside participants) are making vast amounts of money off the occupation and are in no hurry to end it. That is to say, there is a small but significant area of agreement on the objectives but not on timing, on the means to achieve them and on whom will control the action.
III. Objectives Desired By The Afghan People and The World Community:
Although, in current conditions they have not uniformly or vigorously articulated it, we may assume that a desired objective of all the Afghan people is a more adequate standard of living with both an improved diet and an enhanced level of health as well as a level of education that will enable to achieve and sustain a strong economy;
Both the majority of the Afghan people and concerned foreign powers desire a level of stability sufficient to prevent civil strife and invite further foreign intervention;
Member countries of the NATO alliance as well as China and Russia would like for Afghanistan to take a place suitable to its capacities in legal world trade. Specifically, they would like to profit from Afghanistan's mineral resources, to make use of its routes of trade and to get its help in interdicting the drug trade;
Since some aspects of Afghan society, notably the position and role of women, appear to outsiders as ugly and "medieval," they would like to foster the "evolution" of the society along contemporary Western lines. This objective is not widely shared in the country today although, briefly in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the policy of the then Afghan government and was approved by a wide swath of urban society. Under conditions of peace and independence, especially if these are brought about through negotiations, it is likely gradually to re-emerge.
IV. Accomplishment of These Objectives:
Accomplishment of these objectives will be, at best, a complex task and can be accomplished only gradually. Rarely throughout its long history and only briefly in the last century have the Afghans had the opportunity to set their own agenda or to mobilize themselves to accomplish their own aims. Moreover, even discounting for the handicaps under which they have lived, they have not made satisfactory use of the opportunities they have had. (That is, except in the paramilitary field where they have taken on and essentially defeated both the Soviet Union and the United States.) Unless or until the Afghans gain the necessary scope of action to manage their own affairs and even to commit their own mistakes, they are unlikely to make significant progress in non-military endeavors. This scope can come only after an end to foreign control of their affairs. Therefore, the necessary but not sufficient step is true independence.
Costly and disappointing experience should have taught Western governments, and particularly the United States government, that the successful "engineering" of another country's government by foreigners is rare and that the beneficial recasting of an exotic society is even more rare. Foreign powers can contribute only marginally to local initiatives. To succeed, action must be modest.
V. Means of action:
The United States government must acknowledge, as does the Karzai government, that the Taliban claim to a major degree of participation in whatever government evolves cannot be successfully denied. This will be politically difficult for Western governments, but the sooner they, and particularly the United States government, recognizes this fact, the stronger will be its means of action. We must assume that the Taliban knows, as did the Vietminh in their war against the American occupation in Vietnam, that time in on their side. While painful, the Taliban struggle is sustainable at acceptable cost and is fought in their neighborhood while the NATO and American campaign is enormously expensive, not popular with their own peoples and is remote from their concerns. Thus, a wise American policy would seeks negotiations at the earliest feasible time.
Negotiation is the most efficient, fastest and least costly way ahead. The elements that will arise in negotiations are not many but are fundamental.
First is the revamping of the central government to include the Taliban. Absent this, there will be no productive negotiation. President Karzai himself has called for their inclusion. Before negotiations are undertaken, precisely what would be involved cannot be made clear. Hints have suggested participation in a sort of government of national unity with each side staking a claim to spheres of influence or control. The Taliban want more; Karzai wants to give less. This, of course, is the essence of negotiation. Neither Karzai nor the Taliban trust the other to abide by the deal they make. So a careful step-by-step process will be required and probably some form of guarantee will have to be devised to overcome the lack of trust.
Second is the structure of the state. Probably some sort of federal configuration will be necessary, but, at all costs, the country should not be "balkanized." This is because Afghanistan's several ethnic/religious/linguistic communities are so mingled that splitting the country into pieces, as some have suggested, would set off a panic flight that would create millions of new refugees; moreover, the resulting mini-states would be too weak to sustain themselves and so would invite perennial intervention.
Probably the negotiators will agree to continue the traditional, ethnicity-based arrangement of provinces. Exact boundaries may prove difficult to determine but something like the Pushtun south, the Tajik northeast, the Turkic north and the Hazara central massif will constitute the major elements. Afghans will probably agree to keep the current freedom of movement among the provinces; indeed, it probably could not be effectively curtailed.
In this somewhat loosely unified state, the negotiators will probably easily agree that area around Kabul should be a federal district, as it historically has been, administered by the central government. The foreign negotiators and donors of aid should endeavor to get agreement on making the federal district the leader in modernization. For example, strengthening of the university with such associated professional schools as the medical training college, augmented by European and American universities and foundations, acting like the Rockefeller Foundation did in China, will attract potential leaders from the provinces and help to integrate the country. Such a policy will be difficult to sell to the Taliban.
Third, and more difficult to be agreed will be the allocation of military power. Today, it is of two very different kinds: the Karzai regime has, at least on paper, a standing army while the Taliban has, effectively, a guerrilla army. If negotiations are delayed beyond the withdrawal of the foreign, mainly American, forces, it is likely that the standing army will simply implode. Soldiers will just go home. That is what happened in many revolutionary situations, most recently in neighboring Iran. This is another reason, obviously, to undertake negotiations sooner rather than later.
What negotiators should aim to achieve is the creation of a relatively small standing army. It should be small because such limited human and monetary resources as the country has are desperately needed elsewhere and a large army, absent other vigorous public institutions, which do not yet exist, would likely lead to a military take-over and derailment of the development program.
Fourth is the role of the government of national unity in other aspects of rule. Control of foreign affairs would give the central government the means to negotiate with and encourage donors and investors. Since external aid would pass through its hands, the central government could allocate aid projects among the provinces and so exercise a subtle but considerable influence over their policies. Continuation and strengthening of a uniform currency, under control of a central bank, will also help to unify the country, but given the level of corruption and flight of money, this may be stoutly resisted by Karzai's supporters; the Taliban will be less concerned with this issue.
Fifth is the crucial issue of the smaller-scale structure of the state: village assemblies are the backbone of Afghanistan. Their role is absolutely crucial. It should be easy to convince a government of national unity to support them. One way to do this is to give them authority over local aid projects. First on the list could be small, inexpensive, locally-built, farm-to-market roads (to connect with the ring road (see map) so that farmers can get their produce to market before it spoils. Such a program was highly successful even half a century ago, when I first observed it, but it was aborted by invasion, civil war and the break-down of rural order. Such a program in the aftermath of a negotiated end of war would meet locally-perceived needs, give a much-needed example of success and engender a new sense of "ownership." Thus, the village assemblies will be empowered, encouraged to support peace and make a serious attack on the current massive unemployment.
VI Dangers and Costs of Negotiation and Non-negotiation
Since, obviously, negotiations that include the Taliban will be politically costly, the United States government and particularly the current administration is likely to delay or even to avoid action. Given this contingency, a second category of action must be considered. What would it entail?
The first step would be the setting of a clear, firm and reasonably proximate date for the evacuation of foreign forces. Moves have been made in this direction, but they have been weakened by hedging on timing and numbers. So they have not had the effect on the Karzai regime, the Taliban or on the general public that is needed. It is important to understand exactly why clarity and determination are crucial. In summary, it is because they are necessary to change the "political psychology" of the Afghans. And only if such a change is brought about can progress can be made on either the essential or the desired objectives stated above.
Consider the reaction of the Afghans. The Taliban is committed to continue fighting until foreign forces evacuate the country. It is unlikely that they will accept a partial or long-delayed evacuation. If not, the war will continue. The Karzai regime shows two responses to lack of a clear policy: on the one hand, its "power brokers" continues at a truly astonishing scale and speed to profit from the occupation and, on the other hand, they are withdrawing their assets and families to safe havens abroad. Meanwhile, the general population can make no significant contribution to peace but, in part, helps to continue the insurgency by passively allowing or actively helping the Taliban.
The evidence of this is made clear in the way the way the Afghan community has viewed the war. At the present time, the Taliban can not only move virtually at will and draw support from the people but can destroy even such foreign donations as clinics, schools, bridges, etc.. The reason, as stated above, is that the Afghans regard these results of foreign activities as part of the military tactic to dominate them. Americans and Europeans with a sense of history will recall that in the 1950s, the Vietnamese also acquiesced in guerrilla tactics, allowing free passage and providing support, but also destroyed the works of the French (and later the Americans). The Vietcong murdered even doctors, nurses and teachers. Other insurgent groups have followed the same policy.
So, if we believe it is to our shared interest to move Afghanistan toward a degree of security which would allow an American administration to withdraw without a politically unacceptable defeat, we must change the context in which our actions are judged: that is, we must disconnect military tactics - our self-defeating counterinsurgency action-- from developmental programs.
If a firm date in the reasonably near term is believed, the Afghans can feel that their principal, shared objective has been achieved: the foreigners have agreed to leave. At that point, the village assemblies - jirgas, shuras and ulas -- will begin to view the construction in their neighborhoods of a clinic, the opening of a school or the laying of a farm-to-market road as intrinsically valuable; they will want these things for themselves and their fellow villagers.
Will the Taliban and/or local militias under the command of warlords continue to do as it is now doing to thwart this process? Probably. But if they do, they will gradually but inexorably lose the support of the villagers on whom they rely. (Thus, in Mao's often quoted phrase, the "water" will dry up around the "fish.") In this new context, they will be seen as operating against the public good in ways that can no longer be justified as opposition to foreign domination. In short, their cause will have become redundant and their opposition to foreign-financed and conceived beneficial activities will come to be seen as unpatriotic and anti-social.
VII. Anticipated Results:
Over time: Afghanistan can evolve into a relatively peaceful society in which citizens will have a chance for a considerably improved standard of living and, in the context of Afghan cultural norms, will come to share an acceptable form of participatory democracy. More Afghan émigrés, now constituting a drain on neighboring countries and needed at home to replace the over 1 million Afghans killed or died in the wars, will return as about 6 million already have. While results within Afghanistan itself will be modest, the benefits to outside powers will be immense: the enormous drain on the financial resources of the US and other powers will end, the wounding and killing of their soldiers will cease; and the dislocations of their societies in reaction to their perception of threats of terrorism and subversion will lessen as Afghanistan can no longer be used as a launching pad for actions against them. In short, the program laid out here is to the interest of all parties and should be undertaken with all deliberate speed.
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