Category Archives: Afghanistan

Afghanistan – 7/19

Americans won’t accept ‘long slog’ in Afghanistan war, Gates says
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2009

After eight years, U.S.-led forces must show progress in Afghanistan by next summer to avoid the public perception that the conflict has become unwinnable, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a sharp critique of the war effort.

Gates said that victory was a “long-term prospect” under any scenario and that the U.S. would not win the war in a year’s time. However, U.S. forces must begin to turn the situation around in a year, he said, or face the likely loss of public support. [continued…]

Taliban release video of captured US soldier
By Declan Walsh, The Guardian, July 19, 2009

The Taliban have released a video of a US soldier kidnapped outside a US base in Afghanistan almost three weeks ago.

Shaven-headed and emotional, the soldier, named by the Pentagon today as Private Bowe Bergdahl, 23, of Idaho, pleads for American troops to return home.

A US military spokesman in Kabul condemned the video as propaganda and a breach of the rules of war.

In the 28-minute video, which the militants released via the internet yesterday, Bergdahl is shown with a razed head, a light beard and wearing a grey shalwar kameez. [continued…]

Afghanistan-Pakistan – 7/18

Obama’s war
By Tariq Ali, London Review of Books, July 23, 2009

June is never a good month on the plains. It was 46ºC in Fortress Islamabad a fortnight ago. The hundreds of security guards manning roadblocks and barriers were wilting, sweat pouring down their faces as they waved cars and motorbikes through. The evening breeze brought no respite. It, too, was unpleasantly warm, and it was difficult not to sympathise with those who, defying the law, jumped into the Rawal Lake, the city’s main reservoir, in an attempt to cool down. Further south in Lahore it was even hotter, and there were demonstrations when the generator at Mangla that sporadically supplies the city with electricity collapsed completely.

As far as the political temperature goes there is never a good month in Pakistan. This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the United States and its requirements, the religious extremists, the military high command, and corruption, not just on the part of President Zardari and his main rivals, but spreading well beyond them.

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’. [continued…]

Afghanistan’s lost decade
By Paul Rogers, Open Democracy, July 16, 2009

The war in Afghanistan will move into its ninth year in under three months’ time, with the anniversary of the start of the United States bombing on 7 October 2001. This war is now beginning to approach the duration of the Soviet occupation. That started with the invasion by the Red Army on 24 December 1979 and ended with the United Nations-brokered ceasefire of 15 May 1988 and the final withdrawal of Soviet troops a year later.

That earlier conflict, which killed over a million Afghans and caused millions more refugees, was devastating. It was followed by a bitter and complex civil war in the early 1990s that led to a Taliban takeover of Kabul in 1996 and of most of the country by the end of the decade. For sheer civilian suffering, the Soviet occupation far exceeds the conflict of 2001-09 – but this ongoing war may still be in its early stages. Most military analysts believe that if present-day levels of western military involvement are maintained, then – whoever is in the White House – the war has at least a decade to go. [continued…]

Afghanistan – 7/17

Everything that happens in Afghanistan is based on lies or illusions
By Ann Jones, TomDispatch, July 16, 2009

I‘ve come back to the Afghan capital again, after an absence of two years, to find it ruined in a new way. Not by bombs this time, but by security.

The heart of the city is now hidden behind piles of Hescos — giant, grey sandbags produced somewhere in Great Britain. They’re stacked against the walls of government buildings, U.N. agencies, embassies, NGO offices, and army camps (of which there are a lot) — and they only seem to grow and multiply. A friend called just the other day from a U.N. building, distressed that the view from her office window was vanishing behind yet another row of Hescos. Urban life as Kabulis knew it in this once graceful city has been lost to the security needs of strangers.

The creation of Hescostan in the middle of Kabul is both an effect of, and a cause of, war: an effect because it seems to arise in response to devious enemy tactics that are still relatively new to Afghanistan, such as the use of roadside bombs (IEDs) and suicide bombers (though there has actually been no attack in Kabul for six months now); a cause because it is so clearly a projection, an externalization of the fears of men out of their depth. It is a paradox of such “force protection” that the more you have, the more you feel you need. What’s called security generates fear. Now comes a documentary that projects that fear onto the screen. [continued…]

EDITORIAL: Who comes first?

Who comes first?
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, November 16, 2008

The tribal areas of western Pakistan along with the least developed parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan have become the epicenter of international handwringing.

On one level, “the problem” revolves around government military forces being constrained by an international boundary, while their opponents can use that constraint to their advantage. On another level, there’s a struggle to find a suitable balance between bullying and helping as Nato pursues its bomb and build strategy.

The one constant is that no one seems to think that the indigenous population has the preeminent right to determine its own future.

Consider the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan and the people who inhabit this rugged terrain. A fascinating photographic essay in the Boston Globe last week sheds light on some of the inherent contradictions in western efforts to impose a military solution on a topographical reality.

Look at the human craft in the physical structure of this mountainside settlement — something that might not be immediately apparent when viewing this hamlet down the barrel of a gun:

Note, there are no roads. To the western eye, this is a development problem.

At the same time it is also an extraordinary indigenous accomplishment. Men and women and donkeys alone did all the heavy lifting. But instead of admiring the ability of people to master the art of survival in a challenging environment, we regard them as living in a state of deprivation. With a road, life would be better — or so we think.

But do they want a road? Apparently not. The report says: “U.S. and Afghan officers tried to convince the [Korengal Valley] elders to accept a new paved road through the Korengal Valley as part of a large American development project. The elders refused the road, however, saying that they would prohibit anyone in their valley from working on the project.”

What would a road provide for the people of Korengal? Most predictably, the means for Americans to establish larger and more heavily equipped military bases. Beyond that, a road would provide the means to tame a harsh environment. It would diminish the value of the resilience of those who for centuries have survived without a road.

Where a people invest their pride, we see their backwardness and then are perplexed when they spurn our goodwill. We suffer from the burden that dogs every evangelist: how can you insult someone and help them at the same time?

Meanwhile, the narrative that drives out all others is that Afghanistan is now in a downward spiral with the Talilban having established control over a substantial portion of the country.

Counterinsurgency expert, David Kilcullen, tells The New Yorker:

We have built the Afghan police into a less well-armed, less well-trained version of the Army and launched them into operations against the insurgents. Meanwhile, nobody is doing the job of actual policing—rule of law, keeping the population safe from all comers (including friendly fire and coalition operations), providing justice and dispute resolution, and civil and criminal law enforcement. As a consequence, the Taliban have stepped into this gap; they currently run thirteen law courts across the south, and ninety-five per cent of the work of these courts is civil law, property disputes, criminal matters, water and grazing disputes, inheritances etc.—basic governance things that the police and judiciary ought to be doing, but instead they’re out in the countryside chasing bad guys. Where governance does exist, it is seen as corrupt or exploitative, in many cases, whereas the people remember the Taliban as cruel but not as corrupt. They remember they felt safer back then. The Taliban are doing the things we ought to be doing because we are off chasing them instead of keeping our eye on the prize—securing and governing the people in a way that meets their needs.

Kilcullen could have said, “The Taliban have established law and order across much of southern Afghanistan. What can we learn from their success?”

Most importantly, in a war that was originally billed as being driven by a moral imperative, how has it come to pass that in this “good war” our allies are corrupt while our opponents are able to establish some system of justice?

To ask such a question is not to excuse the brutality of the Taliban, but merely underline how utterly lost we have become in a country and a region we insist on trying to reshape even while it still eludes our understanding.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR – John Robertson: Is the US headed for a third war?

Is the US headed for a third war?
By John Robertson, War in Context, September 13, 2008

Don’t look now, but the US is perhaps heading for a third war – this one, with an ally (or so Mr. Bush has told us, and them, for the last eight years): Pakistan. The head of Pakistan’s army has reiterated his earlier warning to the US, that Pakistan cannot tolerate US ground and air forces (which killed another 12 people yesterday – some of them “bad guys,” but some of them reportedly women and children) repeatedly encroaching on Pakistan’s national sovereignty with such impunity.

Are al-Qaida and Taliban elements (including, most probably, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri) sheltering in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier states and launching operations from there? Yes. Do most Pakistanis therefore believe that the US has the right to send in Navy Seal teams (that happened just a few days ago) and dispatch unmanned Predator planes to bomb people in Pakistani territory to smithereens? No.

Across Pakistan (to borrow the memorable line exclaimed by the actor Peter Finch in the movie Network more than 30 years ago), people are getting mad as hell, and are not going to take it anymore. The vast majority of Pakistanis never bought into Bush’s “war on Terror” as being their own fight (they see it as America’s war, not Pakistan’s), they resented how Bush continued to support Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf as his “guy” even while Musharraf undermined Pakistan’s democratic institutions (wasn’t the US committed to promoting democracy?) – and now they see the US killing people, fellow Muslims all, wantonly inside their country, after oh-so-many years of watching the US kill fellow Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, support Israel’s killing of them in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon (and, for that matter, support its old ally Saddam Hussein’s killing of them in Iran between 1980 and 1988), and threaten the killing of them in Iran and Syria.

And at the same time, the US has been burnishing its relationship with the country that Pakistanis have seen as their most mortal enemy and most serious existential threat for 60 years. I mean India, of course – the same India that developed and tested a nuclear weapon completely under the radar of the US intelligence community, to be followed down that road by Pakistan, which felt compelled to develop its own nuclear deterrent against its larger, wealthier, more powerful neighbor. After a several-years-long fit of pique against India, the US in recent years has rushed to embrace India as an economic and strategic partner, even to the extent of pursuing an agreement that (in direct violation of internationally recognized nuclear-proliferation agreements) will provide India with advanced nuclear technology, and that more or less signals the nuclear-weapon wannabes of the world that (as Newsweek‘s Michael Hirsch has put it) “You too can rejoin the international community if you wait long enough! So keep at it.”

On the eve of his 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, most observers with any depth of awareness of that country’s historical and ethnic complexities warned Mr. Bush that he would be opening a Pandora’s box, and that US forces (like so many other invaders, from the phalanxes of Alexander the Great to the troopers sent there to maintain the British Raj in India) might be sucked into a black hole. We’ll never know if the US forces that were sent to Afghanistan might have broken that string. Mr. Bush’s poorly conceived and ill-fated digression, the hubristically and tragically misnamed “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” torched any momentum that the US had built up along any projected pathway to stability in Afghanistan.

The Bush administration may have once believed that by 2003 it had more or less closed Pandora’s box in Afghanistan. According to the ancient Greek myth, when Pandora opened her box (which was, actually, a large jar), she loosed all manner of evils into the world. But we tend to forget that she was able to clamp the lid back on quickly enough to keep one thing inside: hope. The chaos now brewing in Pakistan is surely one of the box’s escapees of 2001, nurtured to deadly maturity by its fellow escapees, the evils that have befallen the region over the past seven years. Mr. Bush (or more likely, his successor) must now find a way to get the lid back on – finally, firmly, and quickly – if he is to prevent full-blown civil war (or worse – remember, Pakistan is a state with nuclear capability). Otherwise, hope – for a stable Afghanistan, or even South Asia – may already have escaped that box as well.

John Robertson is a professor of Middle East history at Central Michigan University and has his own blog, Chippshots.

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Peshawar “could fall” to the Taliban

The Taliban’s advance threatens Pakistan
By Paul Woodward, The National, June 29, 2008

“The security situation in Peshawar is grim. Officials in the home department, who evaluate the situation on an almost daily basis, believe declaring a state of red alert is now only a matter of time,” Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported on Tuesday.

“With militants knocking at the gates of the capital of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), even the more circumspect government and police officials now grudgingly concede that Peshawar, too, could fall in a few months.

“‘Peshawar is in a state of siege and if Peshawar falls, the rest of the districts in the NWFP would fall like ninepins’, a worried senior government official told Dawn.”

Pakistan’s Daily Times noted: “These days Taliban fighters do not sneak in to Peshawar. They arrive in broad daylight on the back of pick-up trucks, brandishing automatic weapons, and threatening owners of music stores to close down. ‘They had long hair and flowing beards, and were carrying Kalashnikovs. They told me to close down the shop or face the consequences,’ said Abdul Latif, a clean-shaven 20-year-old, whose video store received a visit from the vigilantes last week. ‘I asked police for help but they said they are helpless,’ he said.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The Democratic Party national security posture has for several years been to claim that a clear-eyed Democratic president would “finish the job” that George Bush started in Afghanistan and from which he got distracted by Iraq.

In 2009, assuming Obama wins the election, the Democrats and the rest of America will be in for a rude awakening. A war in Afghanistan — originally dreamed up by Zbigniew Brzezinski as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam — is destined to become for the US more like Vietnam than even Iraq has been. But whereas Vietnam had the natural containment of Vietnamese nationalism, Afghanistan has no such boundaries.

The fantasy of a border between Afghanistan and Pakistan — the Durand Line — is the reason the war in Afghanistan is so difficult to prevent becoming a deeper regional conflict. With the Pakistani side of the “border” defended largely by the Frontier Corps, it’s not hard to understand why the NWFP and FATA provides the Taliban with a comfortable refuge. Created by the British, the FC retains a colonial structure: 80,000 soldiers drawn from the local population, commanded by officers from outside the region who apparently often “disdain the assignment.” FC soldiers are naturally ambivalent about fighting fellow Pashtuns, but the more heavy-handed the Pakistani Army becomes, the more the concept of Pakistan comes under threat.

American pressure on the Pakistan government to crackdown on the militants, risks provoking a civil war. In that event, the chances for NATO finishing the job in Afghanistan will be reduced to precisely zero.

A useful question to pose both presidential candidates might be this: Where do you anticipate American troops fighting for the longest? Iraq or Afghanistan?

NEWS & ANALYSIS: The geopolitical turbulence centered in Pakistan

U.S. plays matchmaker to Pakistan, Israel
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, January 31, 2008

[A] geopolitical turbulence … is steadily enveloping the South Asian region. Much of the turbulence is being commonly attributed to the concerns of the international community over radical Islam and terrorism in the region or over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons or of the specter of the Pakistani state withering away into anarchy under the sheer weight of its current political difficulties. But the factors underlying the volatility go deeper than that.

What is becoming apparent is that a series of maneuvers by regional powers is gradually building up in the coming period. Arguably, the heightened tensions around Pakistan are as much a symptom of these geopolitical maneuvers as of an intrinsic nature. Democracy deficit, political assassination, ruling elites, misgovernance, corruption, popular alienation, poverty and economic disparity, religious fanaticism – these are common to almost all countries of the South Asian region. Pakistan is certainly not an exception.

At the epicenter of the geopolitical turbulence in the region lies the rapidly expanding strategic partnership between the United States and India. The developing US-India strategic axis is triggering a large-scale realignment among regional powers, especially involving Pakistan.

As a leading commentator of the official Russian news agency put it recently, “Not without help from the great powers, India has gone so far ahead in the sphere of arms that it is pursuing its national interests from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca archipelago. Islamabad justifiably believes that the United States is ready to support India’s claims to the status of a world power in exchange for its efforts to deter China and Iran … [while] Pakistan still remains the main partner of the United States and Western Europe in the region’s anti-terrorist coalition.” [complete article]

U.S. homes in on militants in Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 30, 2008

Another piece of the United States’ regional jigsaw is in place with the completion of a military base in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, just three kilometers from Bajaur Agency in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Pakistani intelligence quarters have confirmed to Asia Times Online that the base, on a mountain top in Ghakhi Pass overlooking Pakistan, is now operational. (This correspondent visited the area last July and could clearly see construction underway. See A fight to the death on Pakistan’s border Asia Times Online, July 17, 2007.)

The new US base is expected to serve as the center of clandestine special forces’ operations in the border region. The George W Bush administration is itching to take more positive action – including inside Pakistan – against Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda militants increasingly active in the area and bolstering the insurgency in Afghanistan. [complete article]

Pakistani Taliban grows bolder, taking fight to doorstep of frontier city
By Tim Johnson and Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy, January 28, 2008

Islamic militants known as the Pakistani Taliban have extended their reach across all seven of Pakistan’s frontier tribal regions and have infiltrated Peshawar, the provincial capital, heightening U.S. concerns that an insurrection may be broadening in the nuclear-armed nation.

Fighting over the weekend spilled into previously peaceful parts of the tribal belt that borders Afghanistan and intensified in South Waziristan, Bajour and Mohmand. In Bannu, southwest of Peshawar, gunmen fleeing police took dozens of schoolchildren hostage for several hours Monday before tribal elders brokered a deal offering them safe passage, state-run television reported.

“It’s worsening day by day,” said Safraz Khan, a political scientist at the University of Peshawar. “People feel vulnerable. People feel scared.” [complete article]

ANALYSIS: An Afghan snub

U.S., Britain stung by an Afghan temper
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, January 29, 2008

What lends urgency to [Admiral William] Fallon’s mission to Tashkent is the criticality of the Afghan situation. Much thinking has gone into Fallon’s mission and it was preceded by months of mediation by the European Union between Washington and Tashkent. Karimov took time to relent. Yet, ironically, the fragility of the overall situation in Afghanistan is such that the thaw in US-Uzbek relations was overtaken within 24 hours of Fallon’s mission by dramatic developments in Kabul.

In a series of statements over the weekend, President Hamid Karzai’s government rubbished a major decision taken by Washington and London on the appointment of Lord Paddy Ashdown as the United Nations’ super envoy in Kabul.

Kabul knew for months about the impending appointment of Ashdown as a key step in a new NATO strategy spearheaded by the US and Britain, aimed at stabilizing the Afghan situation. Karzai knew detailed planning had gone into the move involving NATO, the EU and the United Nations Security Council. But Karzai waited patiently until the eleventh hour before shooting it down publicly on Saturday in a interview with the BBC while attending the World Economic Forum meet in the Swiss resort town of Davos. The move was pre-planned and carried out in a typical Afghan way with maximum effect. [complete article]

NEWS: Pakistan Taliban directed to focus on NATO; retired officers call for Musharraf to resign

Taliban wield the ax ahead of new battle
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 24, 2008

With the Taliban’s spring offensive just months away, the Afghan front has been quiet as Taliban and al-Qaeda militants have been heavily engaged in fighting security forces in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

But now Taliban leader Mullah Omar has put his foot down and reset the goals for the Taliban: their primary task is the struggle in Afghanistan, not against the Pakistan state.

Mullah Omar has sacked his own appointed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, the main architect of the fight against Pakistani security forces, and urged all Taliban commanders to turn their venom against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, highly placed contacts in the Taliban told Asia Times Online. Mullah Omar then appointed Moulvi Faqir Mohammed (a commander from Bajaur Agency) but he refused the job. In the past few days, the Pakistani Taliban have held several meetings but have not yet appointed a replacement to Mehsud. [complete article]

Prominent Pakistani group urges Musharraf to step down
By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2008

President Pervez Musharraf should immediately step down as a way to promote democracy, combat religious militancy and restore the reputation of Pakistan’s military, according to an influential group of retired officers.

The Pakistan Ex-Servicemen’s Society made its demands late Tuesday, two days after Musharraf left on an eight-day European swing to assure world leaders that Pakistan — and its nuclear arsenal — were in safe hands.

“This is in the supreme national interest and it makes it incumbent on him to step down,” said a statement released after a meeting in Rawalpindi attended by dozens of former army generals, three air force air marshals and eight naval admirals. [complete article]

NEWS & ANALYSIS: Developments in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Pakistan military retreats from Musharraf’s influence
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy, January 18, 2008

As President Pervez Musharraf grows more unpopular in Pakistan, his newly named successor as army chief is seeking to distance the institution from the Musharraf regime and pull back its virtual occupation of the top senior ranks of civilian ministries and state corporations.

Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was named to the top military job in late November, took two steps this week. First, he barred all senior military officers from meeting directly with Musharraf without prior approval and prohibited officers from having any direct involvement in politics. Second, he recalled many army officers from civilian job assignments.

Kayani’s new path could help restore the image of a military that’s bruised by association with Musharraf’s excesses during eight years of rule since a 1999 coup and weakened by the worsening domestic security situation. [complete article]

Frontier insurgency spills Into Peshawar
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, January 18, 2008

At the core of the troubles here, many say, lie demands by the United States that the Pakistani military, generously financed by Washington, join in its campaign against terrorism, which means killing fellow Pakistanis in the tribal areas. Even if those Pakistanis are extremists, the people here say, they do not like a policy of killing fellow tribesmen, and fellow countrymen, particularly on behalf of the United States.

The Bush administration is convinced that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have gained new strength in the past two years, particularly in the tribal regions of North and South Waziristan and Bajaur. It has said it is considering sending American forces to help the Pakistani soldiers in those areas. Mr. Musharraf has scoffed at the idea.

Any direct intervention by American forces would only strengthen the backlash now under way against soldiers and the police in Peshawar, said Farook Adam Khan, a lawyer here. That reaction spread last week to Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, where a suicide bomber killed almost two dozen policemen at a lawyers’ rally, he said.

“Pakistani soldiers never used to be targets,” Mr. Khan said. “Now we have the radicals antagonized by Musharraf and his politics of cozying up to the United States.” [complete article]

Militants make a claim for talks
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 18, 2008

Islamabad has tried to defuse the situation by negotiating with selected Taliban leaders. Most recently, a Pakistani Taliban shura (council) headed by Hafiz Gul Bahadur in North Waziristan responded positively to a government offer of a ceasefire, despite opposition from Takfiri elements who view non-practicing Muslims as infidels.

The backlash was immediate. Militants launched attacks in Mohmand Agency, followed by Wednesday’s mass assault.

This response is orchestrated by al-Qaeda from its camps around the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. Al-Qaeda views any peace agreements with the Pakistani Taliban as a government maneuver to split the militants, and also says Islamabad has been consistently intransigent over the years.

Al-Qaeda demands that it be the chief interlocutor in any peace talks, and it has set its bottom line: guarantees of the withdrawal of all security forces from the tribal areas; enforcement of sharia law, the release of Maulana Abdul Aziz of the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), who was apprehended last year; and that President Pervez Musharraf step down. [complete article]

Talking to the wrong people
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 19, 2008

Throughout 2007, the British Embassy in Kabul under Sherard Cowper Coles made desperate overtures in southwestern Afghanistan to find a political solution with the Taliban, but without Mullah Omar. Multiple clandestine operations were launched and millions of dollars were funneled to the Taliban.

However, it all came to nothing and only caused serious differences between the two major allies – Britain and the US. And all the time the Taliban consolidated their position in the south.

The case of Irishman Michael Semple, who was acting head of the European Union mission in Kabul, is instructive. The fluent Dari-speaking Semple had spent over 18 years in Afghanistan in various capacities, including with the United Nations and as an advisor to the British Embassy in Kabul, before being expelled last month after being accused of talking to the Taliban. [complete article]

NATO hears ‘noise before defeat’
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, January 19, 2008

Ashdown’s real mission [– Paddy Ashdown is the UN’s newly appointed special envoy to Afghanistan –] lies elsewhere, in addressing the core issue: What do we do with the Taliban? No doubt, the Taliban’s exclusion from the Bonn conference seven years ago proved to be a horrible mistake. That was also how the Afghan and Pakistan problem came to be joined at the hips.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf made a valid point in his interview with the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel this week when he said al-Qaeda isn’t the real problem that faces Pakistan. “I don’t deny the fact that al-Qaeda is operating here [Pakistan]. They are carrying out terrorism in the tribal areas; they are the masterminds behind these suicide bombings. While all of this is true, one thing is for sure: the fanatics can never take over Pakistan. This is not possible. They are militarily not so strong they can defeat our army, with its 500,000 soldiers, nor politically – and they do not stand a chance of winning the elections. They are much too weak for that,” Musharraf said.

The heart of the matter is Pashtun alienation. The Taliban represent Pashtun aspirations. As long as Pashtuns are denied their historical role in Kabul, Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and Pakistan will remain in turmoil. Musharraf said, “There should be a change of strategy right away. You [NATO] should make political overtures to win the Pashtuns over.”

This may also be the raison d’etre of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s intriguing choice of a Briton as his new special representative. Conceivably, the inscrutable Ban has been told by Washington that Ashdown is just the right man to walk on an upcoming secretive bridge, which will intricately connect New York, Washington, London, Riyadh, Islamabad and Kabul. [complete article]

NEWS, ANALYSIS & OPINION: The unraveling of the War on Terrorism

The West has not just repressed democracy. It has aided terror
By Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, January 9, 2008

The Pakistani senator gazed at the headline in despair. It read: “US weighs new covert push in Pakistan”. Washington was authorising “enhanced CIA activity” in the country while US Democratic candidates declared they were all ready “to launch unilateral military strikes in [Pakistan] if they detected an imminent threat”. Hillary Clinton wanted “joint US-UK oversight” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. In a country where anti-Americanism is almost a religion, said the senator, this is “an answer to a Taliban prayer”.

I am convinced that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first curse with foreign policy. For the third time in 20 years, the west is meddling with the world’s sixth most populous state. It did so to promote the Afghan mujahideen against the Russians in the 1980s, then to attack al-Qaida after 9/11, and now to “guard” Pakistan’s bombs against a fantastical al-Qaida seizure. Needless to say, the sole beneficiaries are the Taliban and the forces of disorder. [complete article]

Pakistan warns US not to enter northwest
AP, January 11, 2008

President Pervez Musharraf warned that U.S. troops would be regarded as invaders if they crossed into Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan in the hunt for al-Qaida or Taliban militants, according to an interview published Friday. [complete article]

Pakistan takes a step backwards
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 12, 2008

At a time when Pakistan’s national decision-making institutions are suspicious of international plans to make the country’s nuclear program controversial, there is serious consideration for repositioning the country’s foreign policy as neutral in the United States-led “war on terror”.

This would mean non-interference in the restive tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. These are virtually autonomous areas where Taliban and al-Qaeda militants have established bases and vital supply lines into Afghanistan.

Such a move would have devastating effects on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) efforts to control the ever-growing insurgency in Afghanistan.

Following a meeting of the Pakistan corps commanders headed by the new chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kiani, a press release said there would be a review of the situation in the tribal areas and, instead of citing any plans for military operations there against militants, the release said the military’s decisions would be based on “the wishes of the nation”. [complete article]

See also, Bomb kills at least 23 in Pakistan (NYT) and Baitullah Mehsud – the Taliban’s new leader in Pakistan (Jamestown Foundation).

NEWS & OPINION: The administration of torture

Picture of secret detentions emerges in Pakistan
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, December 19, 2007

The director of the human rights commission, I. A. Rehman, said the government had set up a nearly invisible detention system. “There are safe houses in Islamabad where people are kept,” he said, citing accounts from the police and freed detainees. “Police have admitted this. Flats are taken on rent; property is seized; people are tortured there.”

In some cases, detainees recounted that they had been interrogated in the presence of English-speaking foreigners, who human rights officials and lawyers suspect are Americans.

A United States Embassy spokeswoman said she could not comment on the allegations and referred all questions to Washington. A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, Mark Mansfield, declined to comment on Mr. Rehman’s accusations, or on any specific detainees.

One detainee, a Jordanian named Marwan Ibrahim, who was arrested in a raid in the city of Lahore, where he had been living for 10 years, said he was sent to a detention center in Afghanistan run by Americans, then to Jordan and Israel, and was finally released in Gaza, according to an account Mr. Ibrahim gave to Human Rights Watch, another independent group.

Another detainee, Majid Khan, 27, a Pakistani computer engineer who disappeared from Karachi four years ago, surfaced April 15 this year before a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay. His American lawyers say he was subjected to torture in C.I.A. detention in a secret location. Mr. Mansfield, the C.I.A. spokesman, declined to comment, except to say that the “C.I.A.’s terrorist interrogation effort has always been small, carefully run, lawful, and highly productive.” [complete article]

FBI, CIA debate significance of terror suspect
By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, December 18, 2007

According to Kiriakou’s account, which he said is based on detailed descriptions by fellow team members, Abu Zubaida broke after just 35 seconds of waterboarding, which involved stretching cellophane over his mouth and nose and pouring water on his face to create the sensation of drowning.

But other former and current officials disagreed that Abu Zubaida’s cooperation came quickly under harsh interrogation or that it was the result of a single waterboarding session. Instead, these officials said, harsh tactics used on him at a secret detention facility in Thailand went on for weeks or, depending on the account, even months.

The videotaping of Abu Zubaida in 2002 went on day and night throughout his interrogation, including waterboarding, and while he was sleeping in his cell, intelligence officials said. “Several hundred hours” of videotapes were destroyed in November 2005, a senior intelligence officer said. The CIA has said it ceased waterboarding in 2003. [complete article]

Former U.S. interrogator recounts torture cases in Afghanistan and Iraq
El Mundo (via Informed Comment), December 10, 2007

But Bagram has an underworld in which the CIA tortures the leaders of Al-Qa’idah. “One day I went to an interrogation session and as soon as I arrived I knew that it was not a normal case. There were civilians, among them a doctor and a psychiatrist. The prisoner was called Omar al-Faruq, an Al-Qa’idah leader in Asia who had been brought to the prison by one of those agencies”, recalls Corsetti. “I don’t want to go into details because it could be very negative for my country, but he was brutally beaten – daily. And tortured by other methods. He was a bad man, but he didn’t deserve that”. Al-Faruq escaped from Bagram in action which, according to some, was tolerated by the USA and was killed in April 2006 by the British in the Iraqi city of Basra.

Corsetti says that he never took part in the torture. “My sole job was to sit there and make sure the prisoner didn’t die. But there were several times when I thought they were about to die, when they were interrogated by those people who have no name and who work for no-one in particular. It’s incredible what a human being can take”. A resistance similar to that of the memory of those torture sessions. Because Corsetti, a veteran of two wars, says: “I have seen people die in combat. I shot at people. That is not as bad as seeing someone tortured. Al-Faruq looked at me while they tortured him and I have that look in my head. And the cries, the smells, the sounds, they are with me all the time. It is something I can’t take in. The cries of the prisoners calling for their relatives, their mother. I remember one who called for God, for Allah, all the time. I have those cries here, inside my head”.

“In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them”. And the fact is that at times the torture had no other goal that “to punish them for being terrorists. They tortured them and didn’t ask them anything”. That is the case of the practice known as “the submarine”: to simulate the drowning of the prisoner. “They have them hooded and they pour water on them. That makes it very difficult to breath. I think you can’t die with the submarine. I certainly never saw anyone die. However, they do cough like crazy because they are totally submerged in water and that gets on their lungs. Perhaps what it can give you is serious pneumonia”. The civilians who took part in the interrogations used the submarine whenever they wanted. They gave it to them for five or 10 minutes and didn’t ask anything”. [complete article]

The president’s coming-out party
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, December 15, 2007

The Justice Department has announced an “initial probe” into the destruction of the CIA torture tapes. There is no credible basis upon which this can be viewed as anything other than a conscious crime. The tapes were destroyed, even according to sources within the CIA, because of imminent fear that they would constitute evidence in a criminal prosecution of persons involved in the acts of torture. And even beyond this more general concern, they were destroyed so they would not be turned over to a federal judge who was demanding them. They were destroyed to protect a series of false official statements about the way individual prisoners, whose statements would be used in evidence, were in fact being treated.

Remember, in these trials, a defendant can seek to exclude evidence if it was secured through torture. But the defendant has an obligation to prove this contention. The tapes would have provided such proof. Destroying them would therefore help make the evidence admissible.

Note also, no one has ever even raised the possibility that the destruction was inadvertent or accidental.

All that being said, we should ask: why do we need an “initial assessment”? Things couldn’t possibly be more clear. It is as if Julius Caesar was stabbed to death on the floor of the senate with a hundred onlookers, and now the Justice Department wants to weigh carefully whether there is evidence sufficient to justify a homicide investigation. [complete article]

Congress defies Bush on CIA tape probe
By John Cochran, ABC News, December 17, 2007

House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes told ABC News today that he will ignore the Bush administration’s request to drop its investigation of why CIA interrogation tapes were destroyed.

“This is an administration that frankly does not have a good track record of policing itself,” Reyes said. “We intend to go forward and issue subpoenas next week because we are a whole equal branch of government.”

After telling Congress to get out of the way, the Justice Department took the highly unusual step of telling the same thing to a federal judge.

In 2005, Judge Henry Kennedy ordered the government not to destroy any evidence of mistreatment or torture at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Administration says that because the destroyed tapes were interrogations of two suspects in secret CIA prisons, not at Guantanamo, the judge should not interfere.

“This is becoming increasingly bizarre,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School. “The Justice Department insists it will essentially investigate itself and then tells the court that because it is investigating itself it won’t turn over evidence of its possible criminal misconduct. It’s so circular, it’s maddening.” [complete article]

NEWS: Taliban active in over half of Afghanistan

Afghanistan ‘falling into Taliban hands’
By Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, November 21, 2007

The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into the group’s hands, according to a report by an independent thinktank with long experience in the area.

Despite the presence of tens of thousands of Nato-led troops and billions of dollars in aid, the insurgents, driven out by the US invasion in 2001, now control “vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries,” the Senlis Council says in a report released today.

On the basis of what it calls exclusive research, it warns that the insurgency is also exercising a “significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people, who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change”. [complete article]

FEATURE: Is the return of the Taliban inevitable?

A mullah dies, and war comes knocking
By Sarah Chayes, Washington Post, November 18, 2007

The only reason Pakistan’s invasion-by-proxy has morphed into something even vaguely resembling an insurgency is that the Afghan people are at the limit of their endurance with a government that pillages and brutalizes them and lies to them barefaced. Judges demand fortunes for positive verdicts. Customs agents expect kickbacks for every transaction. Police officers shake people down or kidnap them for ransom. Six years of depredations by the government have led to its rejection — and to resentment of the international community that installed it and then refused to supervise it. From those feelings of anger have spread pools of collaboration with the Taliban.

Meanwhile, have the Taliban changed their approach to the exercise of power? Not in the least. They still seek to gain control via terror — by hanging bodies upside-down from trees, by placing pieces of men in gunny sacks like quarters of meat to horrify their neighbors.

So what has changed in six years, except the West’s failure to provide a palatable alternative? Is this to be the world’s response to that failure? “Oh, we weren’t able to do any better for the Afghans than the Taliban, so we may as well bring them back in and get the place off our hands.” [complete article]

FEATURE: The Taliban’s confederation of warlords

The new Taliban
By Jason Burke, The Observer, October 14, 2007

The bomb was far from the biggest seen on the North-West Frontier but it did its job well. Placed in a water cooler, it ripped through the Nishtar Abad music market, sending shards of glass and splintered CDs in all directions. ‘Miraculously, no one was killed,’ said Mohammed Azam, who was shopping for presents for the Muslim holiday of Eid this weekend. Twenty people were injured, three seriously, and a dozen shops gutted.

For the police chief of Peshawar, the dusty Pakistan city 40 miles from the Afghan border, it was clear who planted last Tuesday’s bomb. ‘We suspect the involvement of those people who in recent months had sent letters to the CD and video shops, warning them to shut their businesses, saying it is against Islam,’ Abdul Majid Marwat said.

The ‘Pakistan Taliban’ – or one of the various groups claiming the name – had struck again. Within hours the debris was being cleared away and the blood wiped off the walls. ‘This is the life we lead,’ said Azam.’ We have no choice but to continue.’

The Pakistan Taliban’s campaigns go way beyond bombing music shops. Fifty miles south of Peshawar last week, a full-scale pitched battle, complete with air strikes and artillery barrages, raged between the Pakistani army and local and international militants dug into fortified positions in remote tribal villages. By the time a fragile calm had settled on the rocky hills, scattered palm trees and desiccated fields of Mir Ali, 50 soldiers, a 100 or so militants and around 100 civilians had died. Given the inaccessibility of the battlefield and the conflicting claims of the military and their opponents, accurate casualty figures are simply not available.

What is not in doubt is the scale of the fighting. It was a bloody week for everyone as half a dozen ragged conflicts raged across a stretch of land the size of Britain, from the Indus river to the central highlands of Pakistan. [complete article]

Terrorists in training head to Pakistan
By Dirk Laabs and Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2007

As Al Qaeda regains strength in the badlands of the Pakistani-Afghan border, an increasing number of militants from mainland Europe are traveling to Pakistan to train and to plot attacks on the West, European and U.S. anti-terrorism officials say.

The emerging route, illuminated by alleged bomb plots dismantled in Germany and Denmark last month, represents a new and dangerous reconfiguration. In recent years, the global flow of Muslim fighters had shifted to the battlefields of Iraq after the loss of Al Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary in late 2001. [complete article]

See also, Taliban use hostage cash to fund UK blitz (The Telegraph).

ANALYSIS: The impossible opening between Kabul and the Taliban

Afghanistan: necessity and impossibility
By Philip Jakeman, Open Democracy, October 12, 2007

According to sources inside Afghanistan, Taliban leader ‘Mullah’ Mohammed Omar sent a secret envoy to President Hamid Karzai earlier this year to discuss his possible entrance into the Afghan government. This remarkable move culminated in Karzai’s recent offer of talks with the elusive cleric, followed by a Taliban announcement that the group would consider speaking with Kabul.

The moment is ripe for negotiations; diplomacy promises benefits to both Kabul and the Taliban’s political leadership. Unfortunately, this window of opportunity will most likely be squandered. For talks to succeed, Mullah Omar must play a central role in discussions between the Taliban and the Karzai government. But it is his centrality to any peace deal that sets a number of key external and internal actors against talking with the Taliban, making negotiations impossible. [complete article]

NEWS: The opium or the people?

Afghans pressed by U.S. on plan to spray poppies
By Kirk Semple and Tim Golden, New York Times, October 8, 2007

American officials thought they had the Karzai administration’s support late last year to begin a small-scale pilot program for ground spraying in several provinces. But that plan was derailed in January after an American-educated deputy minister of public health presented health and environmental concerns about glyphosate at a meeting of the Karzai cabinet, Afghan and American officials said.

Since then, Mr. Karzai has said he opposes spraying of any kind.

“President Karzai has categorically rejected that spraying will happen,” Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s minister of state for parliamentary affairs, said in a recent interview. “The collateral damage of that will be huge.”

Yet in the weeks since the latest United Nations drug report, the Bush administration’s lobbying appears to have made new headway. It has already won the backing of several members of Mr. Karzai’s government and the spray advocates here are now trying to swing other key Afghan officials and Mr. Karzai himself, one high-level Afghan official said.

“We are working to convince the key ministers and President Karzai to accept this strategy,” said the official, who supports spraying but asked not to be identified because of the issue’s political delicacy. “We want to convince them to show some power. The government has to show its power in the remote provinces.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — So a show of power — destroying farmers’ crops and livelihood — is going to win over the populations in the remote provinces is it?

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: When anthropologist becomes counter-insurgency technician

Army enlists anthropology in war zones
By David Rohde, New York Times, October 7, 2007

In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Anthropologists can now save lives and help win the war on terrorism. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people,” says Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. The Pentagon has turned into the Peace Corps! Right.

Not surprisingly, when it’s for internal consumption the story becomes a little different. In a presentation at the Pentagon earlier this year, an official reported that mapping the human terrain “enables the entire Kill Chain for the GWOT [Global War on Terrorism].” And as it applies to the US air force, here’s how the “kill chain” is described:

Because enemies have learned to limit the amount of time they and their weapons are in sight and thus vulnerable, these mobile targets require a different approach. The Air Force must compress its six-stage target cycle of Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, and Assess, also known as F2T2EA, or, more simply, the “kill chain.”

Concerned anthropologists such a Roberto Gonzalez are asking, “Where is the line that separates the professional anthropologist from the counter-insurgency technician?” By the Pentagon’s own admission there appears to be none. Instead of being deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps anthropologists could do more useful work inside the Pentagon itself.