Centering on a new Afghan security...

For reasons potentially specified later on I started another blog over at this address. I will write there a lot, but this is not very interesting for the readership over here. I'm writing there in Hungarian - that's why. But State Failure will not be neglected as I'll always come back here to at least sum up what I said over at Risk911. The thematic overlap makes that perfectly convenient. Though in some cases I might find this site simply the more suitable forum for voicing an opinion on this or that.

So, in my first post over there at the other site I wrote of CNAS' recent policy brief, signed by Nathaniel Fick, John Nagl, Dave Kilcullen and Vikram Singh.

Give it a read, since it's brief, and not bad.

It was the kind of source I liked referring to for starters over at my Hungarian blog, directed as it is at a mostly Hungarian audience. Deals with why we are there and stuff like that.

• It names avoiding a full regional meltdown and a counter-sanctuary counter-terrorist policy as key aims in Afghanistan, which I do not argue with.
• It warns how certain tasks, such as counternarcotics as is implicitly suggested in the given context, can only be handled in a different time-frame than counter-sanctuary COIN and CT. That is again something I don't argue with at all.
• I'm slightly puzzled by the line that the two "no"s are what can provide us with the "yes" on which an exit strategy depends. I would risk saying that planning on "exiting" is something that might make the situation worse, and that not planning to exit could be an important part of the solution.
• Finally, I had fun, rather lengthily, at the way the CNAS brief named power structures that hold sway outside Kabul "religious" and "tribal." Perhaps that could be fun even from, say, Rashid Dostum's perspective - might give him a laugh while he's having some more difficult times. (Although the latest rumours tell us he's not really exiled to Turkey, he only went there the last time around to visit wife et al.)

Anyway, that's what I came up with over at the other site, which is now officially announced, hooray and all that. Feel free to try your luck deciphering Hungarian words. Long live Majaristan!

Concerns about the difficult part

Remember when the talk of the day was about reducing US troop levels in Afghanistan, feeding NATO a comfortably managable, residual insurgency of rural dead-enders in the research-laboratory-type environment of southern Afghanistan, to get the Alliance to develop some basic COIN capability, after many of its members were not fortunate enough to participate in all the fun of the Iraqi Sunni Triangle?

Yep, that was at a time of coming elections, too. Only, those September 2005 elections were much nearer when all the leaking and talking started (to be then confirmed and voiced by Donald Rumsfeld as well).

My concern, related to my previous post, is that the current "surge" may be meant by some of the contributors to be just enough to make the election times tolerable, and provide a sort of false feedback as to what we should want in Afghanistan. And it may not be enough for that in the first place. But even if it is, it's no good for NATO and Afghanistan strategically. For one thing, certain members of the Alliance, who are already deep into the COIN laboratory down in the south, are feeling the fatigue. Meanwhile, others staunchly refuse to think in strategic terms, and see it as ideal Afghanistan policy to field "peace-keepers" in Afghanistan and then bring back from there as many as possible, with essentially no other objective whatsoever. Therefore, if the going gets tougher despite the minor upcoming surge, many will cry Doomsday. If the going gets temporarily easier, some will say that's the right moment to exit. Whatever happens, the discourse may continue to turn into the same direction...

Anyway, if you happen to have 25 spare minutes, here's a link to let you listen to some influential people discuss Afghanistan, on CNN. I won't comment on it extensively, but sure there would be things to comment on.

The difficult part

Russia and Central Asia are likely to gradually open up to ISAF supplies to Afghanistan (more ISAF countries, more cargo, looser regime, so on). The US is sending a good number of troops to Afghanistan this season, and some European countries, more or less reluctantly, will also add troops of their own. Call it a surge if you will.

More troops, better logistics. Mission (to be) accomplished?

This is the difficult part, however, nicely summed up in the opening part of a comment over at Registan:

"NATO and the US put in more troops, which will total to less than half the highest amount the Soviets ever had there.
We still will not really control the territory that we want to, and rural Afghans will continue to rely on the mujahids to give them a rudimentary system of rule that doesn’t run counter to their cultural values as much as the West’s.
The mujahidin groups win a huge propaganda victory when the US and NATO are just as unsuccessful at controlling the place with twice the troops."

That is why I found myself making the point to someone, recently, that the current increases in troop levels are still but indications of a creeping commitment, the dynamics of which hold inherent political risks.

Dexter Filkins indirectly argues with that point right there, however, in his dispatch from the south, where at one point he says there is going to be a COIN-doctrine-conforming number of troops in the south as a result of this year's additions (according to a certain, not-fully-specified way of doing the math area-specifically). I think the additions will certainly restructure the Taliban's presence. But those additions won't structure them out, even with the enhanced mobility coming with the better built-up presence of ISAF's own.

Rockets

Going through Reuters photographers' blog pages about Afghanistan, I came across this post by Fabrizio Bensch. I'll quote a part of it here, for something telling.

"Suddenly I heard a bang. I thought it could have been the sound of a mortar or a rocket, but it could also have been the sound of a firework set off for the Eid al-Fitr festivities. There was silence, so I continued to file my pictures. Then a couple of minutes later there was a second bang and now I was sure this was a rocket attack on the base.

I grabbed my kit and ran to the nearest shelter in the building. We were under fire. The joint operation centre gave the alarm and a coded loud speaker announcement confirmed this was a rocket attack. Seconds later there was a third bang and shortly afterward the sounds of a faraway explosion. Then silence again. In the shelter, the soldiers looked at each other, waiting for the next rocket, but nothing happened.

We waited for hours in our shelter. Fortunately, the base had not sustained any damage. This had been the first rocket attack in two weeks. “That’s normal, daily business in Afghanistan”, said one of the soldiers to me."

Bensch is reporting in this case from a base in Kunduz, where mainly German but also Belgian and other troops are stationed. His dispatch is dated October 13. That is not beyond the regular guerrilla season, and this matters, since in the north insurgent activity has probably maintained more of a cyclical nature (I'd love to have all the data to be able to comfortably confirm this). Regardless, it's still amazing to think of how many rockets, e.g. 107 mm ones, are used by insurgents. I noted with mild shock and awe last year how a particular U.S. unit in the area of Mangritay village suffered 200 rocket attacks within the space of twelve months. This comes not on the same level up in the north of Afghanistan, yet soldiers there still feel the need to talk of it as something they'd better get accustomed to.

Illustration: Photo of discovered Chinese-made 107 mm rockets set up to be fired at a target in Iraq, near Mosul, February, 2004 (source).

The Ahmed Rashid Quote Contest

I'll provide here a non-sponsored link to Ahmed Rashid's book, Descent into chaos: The United States and the failure of nation-building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, on Amazon. The only point that I'll make here is that the points I had made before about setting up "tribal" militias in Afghanistan are ones that are also made by Rashid in his narrative of post-2001 Afghanistan.

Things the attentive reader could notice:

- Complaints about the fact the US military continued to hire and employ local militiamen to guard some of its bases even at the time when the DDR process was on.

- That weapons provided to these militiamen included captured Taliban stockpiles much of which were then just passed on on the black market (therefore it is easily imaginable that a part of these stockpiles went straight back to insurgents).

- Rashid's whole book is partly about the failure of nation-building (or state-building) in Afghanistan in the sense that the latter would have required attention-to-detail, a carefully supported political process, equally carefully nurtured institutional development and a massive commitment of resources, from the start, for all of the listed purposes (in terms of boots on the ground, aid dollars, Western VIP visits, media attention etc.).

- Instead, right after 2001, the U.S. DoD thought that warlord fiefdoms were the most suitable solution to contain terrorist influence, which then resulted in the usual breakdown of stability in the south ("usual," since that's what occurred in the early 1990s, too, before the Taliban came). The insurgents came, and so did, with them, terrorist influence.

So what sort of Ahmed Rashid Quote Contest am I talking about? Well: you're absolutely welcome to offer any of the relevant passages of that book you could quote here, for the attention of those who haven't yet read it. Feel free to use Rashid's influence.

Sidenote: Iago18335, a veteran of Afghanistan, links to an FT article that is beyond a subscription firewall, unfortunately. At his blog, he excerpts it, however, and the excerpt reveals ongoing thinking about a shura-based approach. So thinking is evolving in terms of trying to replicate the arbakai experience even if that thing was somehow not created up till now all by itself in many areas. Weapons provided to the would-be arbakai are promised not to be exported to Afghanistan, but found there, perhaps already in the possession of said tribal groupings. I understand Iago18335's skepticism.

Sidenote No.2.: Some people will probably wonder how I can realistically call for a quote contest. First of all, why bother pointing out the obvious? Secondly, there's comment moderation enabled at my blog to keep suicide spammers from infiltrating, which is a pain in the back for people genuinely willing to comment. Thirdly, this is a contest with no prize (maybe Afghanistan could have it). If, these considerations notwithstanding, some comments do arrive, cheers in advance! Otherwise, I hope this post (touching upon the subject for the thousandth time at this blog) could suffice as well.

Sidenote No. 3.: Our noted loose-cannon cyber-arbakai fellow blogger's post here is endorsed with this particular conclusion of his in mind: "Now outside of these ethnically homogenous enclaves where jirgas have little influence, tribal police aren’t such a great idea. Try them where they might work and try something else in other places."

Some speculative election gossiping

I see Ghosts of Alexander has come up with a good take on the upcoming Afghan presidentials. As a kind of reality-check for me, I note with satisfaction that Christian there (tentatively) is signing up to the assumption that currently the Obama administration may be just making it clear to Karzai that they are not "four-square behind him" (as one of the sources, that Christian quotes, says), with all the pressure that's been mounted on Kabul recently (including Hillary Clinton's having called Afghanistan a narco-state).

A short while ago I wrote a brief piece in Hungarian about the election prospects (unpublished). I was wondering there if the Obama administration -- having talked much, during the U.S. election campaign, about a "regional solution" to Afghanistan's crisis (even while backing off from getting into the Kashmir issue as much as was probingly suggested at times, before the attacks in Mumbai) -- might find Karzai good enough in the end. There may be reason for them to do so, as Karzai could-be kind of least-worst, yes, and because he is moving into a regionally sensitive direction as opposed to a clearly U.S.-guided direction, since a while now. (This may be carried away as Karzai is now talking about vague future defence cooperation with Russia, just when U.S. policy and his stance could seemingly be reconciled in our analysis. Although this may as well be a way of resisting pressure for Karzai, while that pressure is on).

Meanwhile, I can't say the same thing about Great Britain -- that they could re-learn liking Karzai somehow -- and NATO as such is turning increasingly critical as well, of corruption and the Afghan government in general.)

Of course, security is the main issue of the day. Will the presidential elections be sabotaged, turned into a massacre at the polls or anything like that? Or will they be staged at all, given such considerations?

An indication of things to come is the voter registration process. It started on October 6 last year. The Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan's press releases announced having launched the second phase of voter registration by November 5, seemingly moving past the first phase, which included a round of registration in the province of Ghazni, without major complications to mention. But there were, in fact, major incidents during the first phase. For example, it was because of what happened in Ghazni (one person killed and several wounded in an attack on October 20) that the government made the decision to refrain from setting up registration sites at health centres (basic clinics). On November 3, the registration process was even extended for 10 days in Ghazni, since it couldn't be completed, as it was aggressively obstructed by local Taleban. The second phase was launched, still.

One has to add that there wasn't really a final deadline for voter registration in the form of the set date of commencing the next phase (in fact that date was set only shortly in advance). One fixed registration centre stays open in every province, so in theory it's no problem if the "registrators" could not get everywhere.

The stakes in the registration process are somewhat limited. Quoting IEC of Afghanistan here: "the previous voter registration cards would be considered valid as well." Therefore it is only important (counting with criteria relaxed with regard to the security situation) to reach a critical number of non-registered, wannabe voters (those who have lost the old card they had, who have turned 17, and who have not registered at any time before so far; and finally those who have recently immigrated to Afghanistan).

That there are problems even with realising these goals is certainly an indication of trouble to some extent.

Take a look at the upcoming fourth phase of the registration process, and at which provinces are to be covered this time around:

"In fourth phase, Kundahar, Orzgan, Nimrooz and Helmand"
(some unusual transliteration, taken from IEC itself)

In Kandahar, the process sets off today. May Allah keep the voter registration process from becoming a reason for people not to see another day there.

A peculiarity of elections in Afghanistan is that mobile registration centres are used, and not only because of wandering nomads, but because of the many difficult-to-reach locales. Shipping ballots (uncast and already-cast) will be done by donkeys in some places. Why am I bringing this up? Well, "mobile" in some cases might mean militarily-escorted and getting-in/getting-out type execution, especially at the time of the elections, in the end.

Whether this is good for legitimacy is a good question. We do not yet know how the Taliban will react exactly, and their reaction may vary from area to area (depending on what "locals" want; on what the "Taliban" want; on whether there's an overlap or a difference between the two categories in a given place; and if there is a difference or only a small overlap, on whether the latter have to respect what the former want and how much). So we will see, but ultimately only at the elections, really. The voter registration process is only semi-indicative of anything, as a test-run of a kind.

Democracy in Afghanistan and the issue of empowerment

Remember what I wrote a couple of days ago of what a broad interpretation of "empowerment" could/should be in the case of Afghanistan?
Here is Morgan Sheeran, a US National Guard veteran of Afghanistan commenting on an article that wasn't nearly as smart as the comment he sent in.
If you follow the link, you need to scroll down for Sheeran's comment patiently. But I will paste a part of it here:

"I believe that Afghans do, in fact, have a tradition of democratic practices (after a fashion.) Their local "informal" governance is generally provided by jirga and shura, practices which are semi-democratic. Representation at these councils is by elders, who while not elected in the Western sense, represent through consent of the represented. When a loss of confidence in an elder is established, that elder no longer bears the same weight. While this consent is not as quantifiable as an election, the elder so chosen often has more of a mandate than say, Sen Al Franken will have after the many recounts. If it turns out that he is the winner of the election, his margin is so slim and doubtful as to to be much less than the mandate that a local elder has in a district Shura. It is Afghan, and it works. Many Afghans who are familiar with democratic practices are supremely disappointed with the central appointment of provincial governors and district sub-governors.
Afghans crave good governance, and most of all crave impartial justice. While good governance and dispensing with corruption are things that can be mentored, Islamic justice is not something with which we have experience and provides a specific and critical Islam-related challenge that must be solved.
Some of our Western values will seep in over the course of generations, and while regretable, truly need to be shelved at this point. Stressing equality of the sexes at this point, for example, only feeds insurgent messages of anti-Islamic Western values. The change there will need to creep in through the same means by which they crept into each of our societies; via education, slow influence, internal change and demonstration of other ways such as in popular media. This is not what some will wish to hear, but the problems in Afghanistan at this point are so fundamental and tenuous as to be easily swept aside by pushing our values to that point."

Peculiarities

Pakistan is a country from which ISAF supplies and militants fighting ISAF forces cross the border to Afghanistan. It is a country in the cities of which many Kabul-based internationals keep their families, while a number of al-Qaida and Taliban VIP types do the same thing, too. Quite a peculiar situation indeed. And more peculiarities can be noted about the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan all the time. I'll draw attention to three of those here, a small selection from what the broadly interpreted media offered recently.

1.) Drugs, border crossings and ISAF supplies
Problems at the border crossing at Chaman/Spin Boldak (Reuters, reporting from Chaman, January 13, Tuesday).

"The other supply route through the border town of Chaman in Baluchistan province, to the southwest of Peshawar, leading to the Afghan city of Kandahar, has been largely free of attacks, at least on the Pakistani side.
But ethnic Pashtun tribesmen, protesting against security force searches for militants, have been blocking the road to the border since Saturday. "Not a single truck has gone to the border in the past three days. We're in talks to settle things down," senior provincial government official Khaliq Nazar Kayani told Reuters.

Kayani is based in the town of Qila Abdullah, about 70 km (45 miles) southwest of the Chaman border crossing, where the protesters have been blocking the road. Tribal elder Abdul Qahar Wadan said the blockade would go on until the government punished those responsible for what he described as unjust searches. "They have no right to enter our houses without proof. It's against our customs and honour," Wadan said.

Hundreds of trucks have been stopped and are parked by the side of the road in Qila Abdullah, residents said. Usually, about 100 trucks cross into Afghanistan through the Chaman crossing every day, compared with about 300 through the Khyber Pass crossing at Torkham, customs officials say."

A source that's more informative about the origins of this particular conflict (Riaz Khan, AP, January 11), revealing more about the connection to the drugs trade:

"Also Sunday, tribesmen were blocking the southwestern supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan at Chaman with burning tires and felled trees. They were protesting the killing of one of their members in a raid by Pakistan's anti-narcotics force."

We're beyond the stalemate now, as Matiullah Achakzai of AP is reporting:

"The protesters withdrew on Wednesday after police promised to take their complaints to provincial authorities, tribal leader Abdul Kahar Khan Wadan said.
Shortly afterward, about 100 trucks carrying NATO and U.S. supplies crossed the border, Chaman police officer Abdul Basir said. A convoy of another 100 vehicles was expected to reach the frontier by nightfall, he said. "

Illustration: A man from Qila Abdullah, at the time of last year's general elections in Pakistan (source)

2.) Calling 1-800-HAQQANI
An intelligence intercept revealed about what I usually term as a "sinking boat operation," a number of which have been carried out over the past couple of years by Pakistan - if you have already read about this earlier, sorry, I only learned of this now, so I'll note it here (the article I'm linking to is about nuclear safety in Pakistan, how the country is looking to preserve it with U.S. help, without revealing much to the U.S. or others).

"Washington’s sanguinity was not increased when Pakistan’s new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, arrived in Washington over the summer for what turned out to be a disastrous first visit. Gilani, as the country’s first civilian leader in more than a decade, was under huge pressure to show he could bring the intelligence agency, and the country, under control. He couldn’t — a brief effort to force the ISI to report to the civilian leadership was quashed — but he thought he had better show up with a gift for President Bush.

Gilani wanted to tell Bush that he had sent forces into the tribal areas to clean out a major madrassa where hard-line ideology and intolerance were part of the daily curriculum. There were roughly 25,000 such private Islamic schools around Pakistan, though only a small number of them regularly bred young terrorists. The one he decided to target was run by the Haqqani faction of Islamic militants, one of the most powerful in the tribal areas.

Though Gilani never knew it, Bush was aware of this gift in advance. The National Security Agency had picked up intercepts indicating that a Pakistani unit warned the leadership of the school about what was coming before carrying out its raid. “They must have called 1-800-HAQQANI,” said one person who was familiar with the intercepted conversation. According to another, the account of the warning sent to the school was almost comic. “It was something like, ‘Hey, we’re going to hit your place in a few days, so if anyone important is there, you might want to tell them to scram.’ ”

When the “attack” on the madrassa came, the Pakistani forces grabbed a few guns and hauled away a few teenagers. Sure enough, a few days later Gilani showed up in the Oval Office and conveyed the wonderful news to Bush: the great crackdown on the madrassas had begun. The officials in the room — Bush; his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley; and others — did not want to confront Gilani with the evidence that the school had been warned. That would have required revealing sensitive intercepts, and they judged, according to participants in the discussion, that Gilani was both incapable of keeping a secret and incapable of cracking down on his military and intelligence units. Indeed, Gilani may not even have been aware that his gift was a charade: Bush and Hadley may well have known more about the military’s actions than the prime minister himself."

3.) A joint relaxation operation by government and insurgents in Kandahar
Read about some of the Taliban and their relations to the Afghan government, to listening to music and to visiting shrines (btw, in Pakistan there are some shrines even for fallen AQ fighters!). Link to Alex Strick van Linschoten's post and brief excerpt below - but make the leap and follow the link rather; it's compulsory reading over there (while right here this is the end of my post).

"Back out in the desert, people started to arrive as word had spread that some musicians had come to perform at Ibrahim Khalifa Baba, the shrine of an old ’saint’. I sat next to the head of one of Kandahar’s government administrations, who had also come out to the shrine. He received a call from one of the police checkpoints further north of where we were.
“I have 8 Taliban with weapons in a car who say that they want to come to Ibrahim Khalifa Baba. What should we do with them?” the policeman asked. “Let them come!” my friend replied. “They’re probably just coming to enjoy the music. Who are we to stop them?” "

Critical mass - The Gaza experience

In an excellent essay over at his blog, Stealth Conflicts, Virgil Hawkins addresses the issue of why the Gaza/Southern Israel conflict became the "chosen conflict" it is, one getting a huge amount of media attention, even while in terms of human suffering or casualties it ranks below other, more lethal and destructive conflicts, some of which are ongoing as we blog.

Of course, the relative toll matters, too, the percentage of the population in an area getting hurt, as well as the time frame - in under what time have so many people been injured or killed? But still this is an interesting question to ask, and I, for my part, always had my suspicions in Europe's case regarding why it's Israel that gets this much attention around here.

Anyway, there is a significant mass of people willing to pressure Israel in ways they can to abandon the full achievement of its objectives with the current military campaign, and they mostly refer to the human suffering inflicted on civilians/noncombatants/innocents (whichever term is more fitting in a given, unnecessary victim's case) as the ultimate reason to do so. Meanwhile, Israel is looking to inflict a critical amount of suffering on the networks that maintain the missile strike campaign against it. This presentation, given at a conference by Isaac Ben-Israel, a former head of the Research & Development Department at the Israeli Ministry of Defense, gives a clue regarding how they wish to bring this about, and based on what premises.

Clarification. No, this blog hasn't suddenly begun to pay attention to the Israeli/Palestinian issue. And I won't bring it up even as an analogy that frequently. There would always be people who would look for my moral stance on the issue, no matter how purely my effort would be about investigating relationships between variables and nothing else.

This is an exception in that here I would use the Gaza case as an analogy. The reason why I'm suggesting you should read the text linked to above is because it allows you to reflect on a particular scenario often considered as the going is getting tough in Afghanistan.

Some are suggesting that there's no reason to keep soldiers there in Afghanistan. The place, they say, is just not important enough somehow. If terrorists set up shop there, they argue, they could be taken care of from the air, with drone strikes and the like.

Dealing only with the latter part of the argument, the one about our aerial capabilities, Gaza is the answer those people should consider. Israel, a country with good intelligence capabilities and a decent fleet of assets in the Palestinian territories, is having a hard time inflicting said critical amount of pain on Hamas and others. How exactly would a bombing of Taliban-held Kandahar be handled? Would there be less civilian casualties? How good intelligence would one have there, on the ground, once all current allies are left behind?

The Arbakai, the Salwishti, the Paltanai etc.

This paper by Mohammed Osman Tariq is very much worth reading (thx to Joshua Foust for providing a link to it here). Gordon Brown indicated towards the end of 2007 that one, perhaps, should be thinking of fielding arbakai forces (a mixture of traditional community police and COIN proxies, from a dreamworld perspecitve) in Helmand, after all it's such an Afghan tradition. This was partly what started the whole "let's arm the tribes against the crazies" discussion.

Tariq's paper gives much insight into what the institution of the arbakai actually is, in the small corner of Afghanistan where it works and exists, in the Loya Paktia area (it also works and exists in parts of Pakistan, right across the border).

Several points I'd highlight are (but you should read the paper for context):

• One doesn't do well to think that there's only one Pashtunwali, and only one thing called arbakai, and that the latter is something that means the same to everybody making a reference to it. And whatever may resemble the arbakai may be called a different name in other parts of the country. In Kandahar it may be called Paltanai, while in the FATA in Pakistan "it is called Salwishti or Shalgoon." (p.3.)
• Where arbakai do exist, even while it may be something welcome by the authorities, including the police, it's still a headache to tell how their existence could be reconciled with modern statehood and the supposedly necessary state monopoly over the use of force. So let's create some more arbakai?
• As it was experienced in Kapisa, in Tagab district, creating an arbakai force with a top-down approach, on behalf of not the local people but someone else, is of dubious legitimacy and likely doesn't function (the paper deals with that case in more detail).
• On the other hand, the arbakai forces that exist all by themselves, may work so legitimately and acceptedly, that their legitimate operation itself may outshine the state in the end, and turn the population against the state's potentially corrupt, weak local agents.

And finally here is a most interesting example of an arbakai force having formed outside the areas where the institution traditionally exists; it comes on pages 8 and 9:

"The Arbakai were used to maintain law and order in some Afghan refugee camps, including camps number 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the Haripur area of the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan. It is worth noting that the people who lived in these camps were not only people from the south-east. Indeed, the majority of people living in these camps were from other regions of the country, particularly from the northern and north-eastern regions. Respondents explained that when they were living in these refugee camps during the 1980s there was an increase in anti-social behaviour by youths, which affected security. Actions included students playing truant, the increased use of drugs, harassment of girls and women by teenage boys, and theft. Attempts to control security were initiated by various informal groups of people trying to stop such activities. Finally, the elders, teachers and religious scholars agreed to establish a committee called the ‘Reformation Committee or Council’ and under the supervision of this committee they established an Arbakai system. There were twenty five Arbakai from twenty five mosques who would attend daily to perform their duties under the committee. One of these twenty five was selected as Ameer to lead the group. The group was responsible for patrolling the area day and night. If they found somebody guilty, they handed him over to the committee, which was then responsible for making a decision about the appropriate punishment. The Arbakai had representatives from every cluster of families in a shared mosque. This eliminated the risk of personal rivalries interfering with community policing."

See what happened when an arbakai was badly needed, at a time when people coming from very different (tribal and other) backgrounds found themselves in a radically new, challenging and, in many ways, degrading environment?

Oops... the mosque communities had to play a role... the ulema was involved in mediation... all of that to reduce the perils of rivalries breaking up any arrangement. On a micro-scale, this reminds one of how the Taliban emerged. Bad news.

So, in the end, the truth is simply that one cannot find a one-fits-all sort of solution for Afghanistan. The insurgents had to show much flexibility in order to become able to operate in as many areas as they are able to nowadays. The same is needed on the counterinsurgent side. No surprises there, but this is something that a simplistic narrative of what happened in Iraq might make certain people forget.

Empowerment II.

Here follows the promised second load on the issue of what "empowerment" could entail (link to first part here), beyond "we are empowering you to shoot our enemies on our behalf, at your peril."

This is also going to be a relatively short one.

In Afghanistan, qawms matter a lot. One's primary network of loyalties (which is not necessarily all about blood ties). The mosque community one belongs to, the feudal ties one is involved in, family and clan relations etc. The word qawm is sometimes used as a synonim of one's homeland, I was once told by someone wise whom I may return to quote more extensively in the upcoming days. This will be well-known by some, of course. What should follow from this, is what matters here. The "local" level, i.e. the level of largely isolated, small or not-so-small groups of populace, those matter a lot. Accordingly, essential democracy in Afghanistan cannot come with a strongly centralised state, yet that's the only thing being tried at the moment.

The West has Hamed Karzai to turn to/complain about, and that's it. Karzai could have all his attitudes and decisions even about his breakfast micro-managed by Western politicians if he would wish to conform to all expectations. Meanwhile, others around him, and below him, are pushing to have their way, too. On many issues, Karzai cannot be circumvented, but on the other hand he doesn't have the chance to exert real influence in some areas of the country.

At the same time, his views and decisions are not informed by the pressures of well-aggregated, structurally more stable interests from the direction of the parliament, where parties do not play an important role, and the game of parliamentary factions doesn't work much, given the way MPs are elected.

What happens on the provincial level?

Karzai appoints and sacks governors, in some cases with much frequency (Baghlan province, where the Hungarian PRT is, had a lot of governors in the last couple of years, for example). These governors then interact with the provincial council's elected members. Who has more say? The one who was appointed by the centre, the governor. At least formally. Most Afghans voted, in September, 2005, to elect members of the provincial councils, without being properly informed about the duties and responsibilities of these councils (details of which were worked out only by August that year).

Some relevant articles of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan:

"Article One Hundred Thirty-Eight
There shall be a provincial council in every province. Members of the provincial councils according to law, shall be elected for four years by the residents of the province, proportionate to the population, through free, general, secret as well as direct elections. The provincial council shall elect one of its members as President.
Article One Hundred Thirty-Nine
The provincial council shall participate in the attainment of the development objectives of the state and improvement of the affairs of the province in the manner prescribe by laws, and shall advise the provincial administrations on related issues. The provincial assembly council shall perform its duties with the cooperation of the provincial administration.
Article One Hundred Forty
Councils shall be established to organize activities as well as attain active participation of the people in provincial administrations in districts and in villages, in accordance with the provisions of the law. Local residents shall elect members of these councils for three years through free, general, secret as well as direct elections. Participation of nomads in these local councils shall be regulated in accordance with the provisions of the law."

This system can produce all sorts of governors. No concrete examples here, just think in an abstract manner. A governor in this case can be a total outsider who will just try to balance different interests as much as he (almost inevitably a "he") can. He can do it clumsily. He can do it in a selfishly rational way, playing off one faction against another and then happily watching the fighting. In some cases, the governor could be from one particular faction and play accordingly. Meanwhile, Wolesi Jirga and Meshrano Jirga members from the province can well be trying to smoke the guy out from his position.

Decisions like the appointment of a district police chief, or the distribution of money from the budget, those all hold significant conflict potential. The governor can easily act like a forced or a dishonest broker mediating between factions, as one, however, who wields formal power over them.

What about the picture overall?

The formal-institutional aggregation of interests does not really work in Afghanistan on either the central or the provincial level. This makes it more difficult to settle clashes of interests in formal-institutional ways in any case. The abundant availability of guns, on the other hand, in areas struck by multi-layered conflicts since decades... (insert educated guess here)

All this, for an important example, is something like the opposite of empowerment.

Empowerment

The idea of arming people in Afghanistan to counter the problems stemming from having armed the people of the country for so long is quite worrisome, and to run the point home yet another time, I'll reflect here, in a two-part mini-series, on that most cynical way of putting this that one hears sometimes with regards to what happened in Iraq. Empowerment? Some will say the Sunni tribes were empowered in Iraq.

This first, brief post here offers an excerpt of Antonio Giustozzi's 2007 book (Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan), to show the potentially rather chaotic consequences of such empowerment. Other examples could be made, other narratives presented, but let this one suffice for this basic post. (The next one will focus on what "empowerment" could mean if interpreted in a more sophisticated way.)

Quote from Giustozzi's pp. 67-69. (OMG, I'll have to type it in...)

"Soon Amanullah Khan, a strongman from (Shindand), emerged to unify, in part, tribal opposition (to Ismail Khan in Herat). Throughout 2002-4 Amanullah Khan survived all attempts by Ismail Khan to overcome him and even launched occasional counterattacks. His mere ability to survive politically and militarily turned out to be a winning card. He began to attract the support of disgruntled Pashtuns throughout the province and beyond. Hundreds of Pashtuns from Ghuryan and other districts joined his ranks. In Farah a former Taliban commander, Mullah Sultan, supported him. At the decisive moment he succeeded in mobilising support from as far afield as the southern provinces, obtaining the help of Gul Agha Shirzai and other strongmen, who sent hundreds of volunteers to fight in his ranks as well as money and weapons. By the summer of 2004 he was able to field a force of a few thousand motivated fighters, many of whom had suffered at the hands of Ismail Khan's men. With some support from Kabul, at least according to Ismail Khan, Amanullah Khan emerged as the leading player in an offensive organised with other disgruntled strongmen and warlords of the region, which in the summer of 2004 weakened Ismail Khan sufficiently for the central government to sack him from the position of governor of Herat. Following Ismail Khan's removal, tension and incidents continued in the region, as the anti-Ismail alliance proved unable to control the situation. The fact that there were no active remnants of the Taliban in the province until 2005 slowed the attempts of the insurgents to exploit the situation, but in that year the first reports of Taliban infiltration emerged with the capture of some emissaries in Herat city. Soon a terrorist campaign started in and around Herat. During 2006 the first manifestations of guerrilla activity emerged in Adraskan and Gulran districts, both populated by the most disenfranchised Pashtun communities. The alliance with Kabul of Amanullah Khan might have contributed to prevent the Taliban from infiltrating the countryside more effectively, but the killing of Amanullah in a tribal conflict in October 2006 removed the last barrier to Taliban penetration and the deteriorating security situation in the district forced the police to deploy new security posts there. Open warfare reached Shindand in April 2007, when following the killing of an American soldier a major operation was mounted, leading to the killing of over a hundred Afghans, including many civilians. Judging from the subsequent wave of protest, it would appear that local opinion was turned decisively against the foreign troops as a result of the violence."

I hope this one excerpt does it as a suitable analogy. In this particular plot, Ismail Khan was something like the insurgent/challenger and Amanullah Khan the "empowered" (already strong man) supported by the centre and allies of the centre such as Gul Agha Shirzai in Kandahar. AK got guns and men, and he was successful. Then he was killed and his coalition submerged in infighting. With his killing, political power fragmented to a level where it can only be micro-managed now, and not entirely satisfyingly. And let's not forget that the Taliban took gains. Look at this as a scenario of the possible.

Amir Taheri on Afghanistan (and on Iran, as an aside)

Looking through yesterday's media produce, I came across this piece by Amir Taheri. There are some interestingly formulated sentences in that text that might inspire new ideas. Some of them are, however, funny, like when Taheri says that prez Karzai has more power nowadays than any Afghan king ever dreamt of, and the only problem is he just can't use it without provoking resistance (this reminds me that you and I, we also have more power than any Afghan king could ever have dreamt of, we just can't use it). And then there are some dubious statements, most of all this one:

"Iran is also using a number of Pushtun groups under the umbrella of Hizb Islami (The Islamic Party) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to divide the Pushtuns and weaken Karzai's US-backed administration"

So what about that?

Sure, Hekmatyar stayed for a long time in Iran, after he had been dumped for the Taliban by Pakistan. It's certainly possible that the Iranians retained loose connections with him, even after Hekmatyar's return to Afghanistan/Pakistan. And some of the Hekmatyar-sponsored insurgent cells are no more closely connected to a central network hub, than some of the Taliban Quetta Shura's are - some of the insurgent cells operating in Afghanistan take patronage from many directions, as the Uzbeen valley example of a certain commander Rahmatullah likely shows. There may seem to be an opening for those interested in shopping around, with such groups wandering around. On the other hand, Iran may not be so interested in doing this in eastern Afghanistan in particular. If subversion is revealed there, it is more unnecessary trouble for them than a strategic message (it would be sponsoring allies of dubious convenience, who are helped by others anyway, in an area of less strategic importance for the US as a staging ground for potential military moves against Iran). Moreover, Amir Taheri has a track record of making controversial claims about Iran. So one just wonders.

Baghlan bombing update, from end-2008, thx 2 Péter Wagner

Back in 2007, I wrote an entire series of posts reacting to the November 6 bombing outside the New Baghlan sugar factory. It killed scores of schoolchildren who were made to line up along the street in expectance of a parliamentary delegation from Kabul. In the chaotic aftermath of the explosion, confused bodyguards and policemen ended up exchanging bullets and killing even more by-standers. This was the attack in which, among others, Mustafa Kazemi was also killed (he has much of a posthumous cult by now, among Shiites, apparent at the time of Muharram).

What I have to note now is something Péter Wagner drew attention to, at his blog: another one of the suspected perpetrators/planners was captured recently, in Pul-i-Khumri, the capital of Baghlan province. Link and excerpt:

"Afghan army commandos and coalition forces yesterday captured a suspected insurgent commander believed to be responsible for a deadly bombing in Afghanistan's Baghlan province, military officials reported today.

The combined forces nabbed Mullah Dahoud during an early morning raid on a compound in Pol-e-Kohmri, outside of Kabul, reported to be Dahoud's home and a transit point for insurgent fighters.

Dahoud and his insurgent fighters are believed to be responsible for an attack on the Baghlan district headquarters in October that killed Afghan officials and civilians, and for the Fobrica sugar factory bombing in 2007 that killed more than 50 civilians.

"The Afghan commandos captured this murderer," Afghan Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, chief spokesman for the Afghanistan Ministry of Defense, said. "The innocent people affected by this criminal net can now have justice." "

Over at his place, commenting on the article, Péter notes with irony that a US/Afghan raid on a suspected militant's hideout may not be entirely well-conforming to what Hungarian officialdom suggests, that "Hungary guarantees security in Baghlan province." In fact, this is not a first that other countries' SFs (incl. Afghans) are doing jobs like this in Baghlan. Of course, popularising slogans of the kind mentioned above are not the greatest rhetorical wonders one can encounter in the European discourse(s) on Afghanistan. For me, the greatest one is still the tendency to describe soldiers deployed to Afghanistan as peace-keepers, a tendency that is alive and well.

Corruption and insurgency: A look at road security

A few thoughts here, relating to this article in the Sunday Herald (detailing problems in Wardak province, running through which you find a section of the Kabul-Kandahar road). In fact I'm reflecting for a start here on an AP report mentioned there, that came out in the previous days (it's just more convenient for me to link to the SH piece than to the AP one which I won't try to look up now). It's also a good occasion to touch upon some rather well-known phenomena in general (WRT corruption, the insurgency and road security), after which I'll still come back to the Sunday Herald in the end.

"News agency AP reported several days ago that checkpoint police in Wardak sometimes wear traditional robes so they can pass themselves off as civilians at the first sign of trouble."

These sort of issues are being discussed all the time - usually under the overarching theme of Afghan police corruption, fitting into a wider set of issues related to corruption in Afghanistan. What I see missing from assessments in general, which may, however, be read out from this excerpt above, is the causal connection between the insurgency and corruption itself. The usual underlying statements of the discussion are that insurgents just do what they do, while the Afghan government in general and the Afghan police in particular are making the error of behaving in a corrupt manner, in a kind of suicidal way, short-sightedly, in circumstances in which they act to the insurgents' advantage. Not without a basis, one theory of the geographical spread of the insurgency (the contagion of new areas) rests on the assumption that weak governance creates the grievances that subsequently provide ample ground for the intrusion of insurgents into a district. There is much empirical evidence one can offer here, but still I will argue that the picture is more complex. Contrary to the logic that the insurgency in many places appears partly because of corruption, I would say that sometimes, to a degree, corruption is generated directly or indirectly by the insurgency.

Of course, by far not all that's corrupt in Afghanistan nowadays is because of the insurgency. No way would I try to make such a naive statement. But the climate of fear generated in insurgency-struck areas doesn't encourage much else than looking to secure oneself as much as one can, in the short run. For an official, this can include taking bribes or asking for a protection racket. Also, since the local economy just cannot start to function normally, with bombs and assassinations keeping NGOs, aid officials and government out of a lot of areas, the generally bad prospects are also an incentive for trying to earn as much as you can - the rainy days are here, and it seems they are not going to be over soon.

Getting back to the excerpt from the SH piece, in this case you see policemen working "under cover," well, sort of, at a checkpoint, mostly in order to protect themselves from being killed as policemen. This opens up the opportunity for a "less benign" form of corruption for them (talking about less benign corruption does not entail that "benign corruption" or rather the "not purely and simply selfish, greedy corruption" of any kind is less destructive or less harmful for its victims.) A policeman can transform himself into a robber much more easily in conditions like those. And the security situation guarantees that there won't be many who could expose informal toll-taking (by bandits or policemen) easily.

As Graeme Smith noted in an article in The Globe and Mail:

"People who work for the government, or have any association with the foreign presence, now travel covertly on the main highways of southern, central, and eastern Afghanistan. They disguise themselves as rural peasants, carry no identification cards, and erase numbers from their cellphones that might connect them with the government."

The Taliban thus create an opportunity for themselves. They can capitalise on the context resulting partly from their actions. They can do things like this, when convenient:

"As an example of the rough justice meted out, he cited a robbery in late summer when eight trucks of wheat disappeared. The Taliban investigated, found the trucks and returned them to their owners. Militants shot the leader of the robbers in the head, and let the others go with severe beatings and after extracting promises that there would be no repeat offence. Other Taliban punishments include parading criminals with their faces daubed black or amputating the hands of robbers. "

The public perception that emerges as a result?

"One of the ways the Taliban are trying to broaden their appeal is by proving themselves better than the government at providing road security. It's a propaganda move aimed at people such as Del Aga, 40, a bus driver, who says the police have robbed him more often than bandits or insurgents. He usually doesn't slow his bus for men with guns because he's afraid of criminals, he said, but he feels obligated to stop for uniformed police with marked police trucks. “I stop for the police, and they rob my passengers,” he said.
Even when the police aren't directly implicated in the shakedowns, Afghans often blame the government forces for failing to stop them."

The impact of robberies can be dreadful on the lives of people who have to take huge risks if they want to join up with a working economy somewhere away from their home and then come back home with their earnings:

"Mohammed Amin, 52, a shopkeeper, said he was driving on a winter morning toward Kabul from Kandahar in a convoy of five buses when they were stopped by a roadblock. Criminals searched all the buses, he said, taking money, cellphones, and other valuables from the passengers. A man sitting beside him lost all the money he'd saved from working six months in Pakistani coal mines."

That is why the Taliban are playing the roads as one of their royal options. It's a particulary good opportunity for them to make the Afghan security forces look powerless at best.

Any downsides to this approach for them? There actually are some. When the Taliban look to aggravate the choking effect on ISAF logistics in the south, they have to break the road connections, and that holds harsh consequences regarding hearts and minds they look to win:

"“We had the infrastructure attacked – which was a first, you know, the insurgents had not destroyed bridges before,” he (Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette - P.M.) said. “The farmers couldn't bring their products any more, and it choked the economy.”"

Also, the insurgents' vigilance is not reassuring for people who fear they may be mistakenly executed (still with Graeme Smith here):

"Taliban checkpoints also terrify many travellers, if they have the slightest connection with the government or reason to worry that the insurgents might get suspicious.
A man who identified himself only as “Matin” said he was riding a bus to Kabul from Kandahar with friends when the vehicle was pulled over by insurgents.
“My friend looked like a military guy, because he was tall and clean-shaven,” the young man said.
“The Taliban pulled me aside with my friend. When the bus was driving away, I slipped back into the crowd and got inside the vehicle. My friend was captured.” His friend worked for a logistics company and the Taliban eventually released him, after local notables petitioned for his freedom."

Meanwhile, other sources indicate that the Taliban are not generally against the idea of toll-taking. They just do it in a politicised fashion. They don't always look to destroy or attack convoys that supply ISAF troops from Pakistan. Sometimes they just take money for protection, which of course also plays into their hand. Below is what an unnamed fuel supplier told the London Times (Note that the Taliban are not the only ones taking money from subcontractors, i.e. truck drivers. About 75% is anybody else that might stand in your way along the road.)

"We estimate that approximately 25 per cent of the money we pay for security to get the fuel in goes into the pockets of the Taleban,"

is what the fuel supplier said.

Now, before closing off, I'll add just one more excerpt from the SH article, describing the Taliban's road intelligence network in Kabul, as an aside, providing some context regarding why a brigade of the US 10th Mountain Division is now being sent to Wardak and Logar provinces:

"A key part of the Taliban's success in Wardak is its network of informants. Gulbuddin, another young Taliban fighter, said there were around 70 spies in Kabul on the Taliban's payroll, providing information about convoy movements, individuals visiting the province, and their families. At roadblocks, which can vary from a handful of militants waving down traffic to as many as 40, the insurgents have the registration numbers of approaching vehicles and descriptions of the passengers they carry.
"When my cousin was arrested, making a visit home, there were 40 men who came to get him," said Hakimi. "All private taxis to Wardak leave from one specific location. That's why it's simple for them to know who is coming." "