New ECFR report on European policy towards Afghanistan

Daniel Korski is shaping Europe's Afghan surge in the European Council on Foreign Relations' new policy brief.

Daniel Korski: Shaping Europe's Afghan Surge. European Council on Foreign Relations policy brief, ECFR/11, March 2009, available at http://ecfr.3cdn.net/4599862142844e090e_oum6bzv4y.pdf, downloaded on 30 March 2009.

I found the brief interesting all the way, but even so I have to frankly say that I cannot endorse everything that is in there. For me, talk of arming Pashtun tribes or of getting Karzai to become ready to meaningfully negotiate with the Taliban is just something that doesn't conform to my understanding of the situation in Afghanistan at all. Afghanistan is not tribal, and the question is how to get the Taliban to meaningfully negotiate with us (not the other way around). I also made the point, several times, that the problem in Afghanistan is not a "liberal state-building project," but any kind of state-building project that was talked of a lot but was not adequately resourced or realised.

Otherwise the brief does offer food for thought in its proposals. For an example, what do you say about a PRT for the capital Kabul? How is that for an ink blot approach to the problems in Afghanistan? Honestly, I have to say it doesn't sound entirely good to me. The political head of such a PRT would remind me of a Kabul-based superenvoy, taking further ground from under Karzai's feet. And with only a tiny little fraction of the ridiculously low amount of money spent on Afghanistan spent by the Afghan government itself, I'm not sure it's less of the Afghan government that we want in the name of state-building.

There is much talk of the light footprint approach being practiced in Afghanistan up to these days. But if we look at the footprint left by the donors on the aid flow, that footprint is not light at all, in terms of its proportions.

Talking about the money, here are some measures from the very telling data provided in the ECFR policy brief.

Firstly, from page 11, data on how important Iraq was, for a long time, even in the European Commission's spending, compared to Afghanistan.

Secondly, from page 12, data on a sample of EU countries and their aid in 2007 to a number of key recipients, including Afghanistan. Watch out for an interesting indicator of Germany's stance on Iraq.
The brief draws attention to this irrationally unconsidered aspect of the Afghanistan project. Just a couple of days ago I was telling people at a lecture how the above-700-billion dollars were spent by the US in Iraq, while Pakistan received more than 10 billion from the US for its part since 2001 (some of which was counter-productive; some of which financed weapons purchases from China against India). Those figures in themselves are frustrating enough when one hears people finding it a waste to spend one more dollar in Afghanistan. But when one is even faced with higher or similar EU aid flows to countries not experiencing problems on the same level, it is a tipping point.

It is at this (tipping) point where one has to draw attention to the fundamental obstacle to the endeavour that Europe should shape Afghanistan policy. Saying that we are going to run away, and do not have much (time, money and human sacrifice) to spend there, is not a good bargaining position from which one could have a very decisive say.

President Obama's speech about a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Normally I reserve this blog for observations and commentary. But I was asked to forward President Obama's speech, and I will comply. The reason is that this is an important speech. And of course I will come back to comment on it in a separate post.

Up until then here is a short excerpt that I feel I could highlight, and below is the link as well to the transcript of the full speech at the White House website.

Keywords you could look out for: comprehensive strategy (or approach); more troops; more trainers specifically; more civilians (an increase in the numbers of whom will be "ordered"); asking more from partners as well; the upcoming conference at the Hague.

So click on the link. Or read the excerpt first and then click on the link.

* * * * *

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

_______________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release March 27, 2009

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
ON A NEW STRATEGY FOR AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN

(Excerpt)

"(...)

I've already ordered the deployment of 17,000 troops that had been requested by General McKiernan for many months. These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and the east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan security forces and to go after insurgents along the border. This push will also help provide security in advance of the important presidential elections in Afghanistan in August.

At the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan security forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That's how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our own troops home.

For three years, our commanders have been clear about the resources they need for training. And those resources have been denied because of the war in Iraq. Now, that will change. The additional troops that we deployed have already increased our training capacity. And later this spring we will deploy approximately 4,000 U.S. troops to train Afghan security forces. For the first time, this will truly resource our effort to train and support the Afghan army and police. Every American unit in Afghanistan will be partnered with an Afghan unit, and we will seek additional trainers from our NATO allies to ensure that every Afghan unit has a coalition partner. We will accelerate our efforts to build an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 so that we can meet these goals by 2011 -- and increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed as our plans to turn over security responsibility to the Afghans go forward.

This push must be joined by a dramatic increase in our civilian effort. Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency. The people of Afghanistan seek the promise of a better future. Yet once again, we've seen the hope of a new day darkened by violence and uncertainty.

So to advance security, opportunity and justice -- not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces -- we need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers. That's how we can help the Afghan government serve its people and develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs. And that's why I'm ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground. That's also why we must seek civilian support from our partners and allies, from the United Nations and international aid organizations -- an effort that Secretary Clinton will carry forward next week in The Hague.

(...)"

Breaking news: Pakistan is failing!!! But at least it's not unstable!!!

I am getting confused by all the information I have to digest these days.

On the way to work this morning I was reading the article in the New York Times telling us about the Pakistani ISI's S Wing and its contacts to Taliban, Haqqanis and Hizbis.

Btw, URLs can contain interesting information sometimes. Let me paste here the NYT article's URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/world/asia/26tribal.html?hp
Notice the word "tribal" in there?

Shocking, shocking, shocking... as Barnett Rubin once said.

This can only mean that Pakistan, unbeknownst to some of those responsible for it, is failing. Militancy is spreading while some in the security sector think they have neatly devised policies resting on foolproof distinctions between militancy-spreading militant and militancy-spreading militant.

But then I had to calm down... The Pentagon's annual report to Congress about China's military capabilities just came out. And on page 57, after casually discussing 7 billion dollars worth of conventional weapons sales by the PRC to Pakistan in 2003-2007 (financed partly by the American taxpayer), it turns to the more serious issue of Chinese sales of weapons to "areas of instability." That is, to countries like Iran...

So it can't be so bad in Pakistan then, can it?

Planting prime ministers...

Just like Joshua Foust one blog (and a couple of thousand kilometers) away from here, I also read the report in the Guardian saying that

"The US and its European allies are ­preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president..."

Thinking of things familiar from my country's past, such as the Brezhnev doctrine and similar stuff, I was thinking of writing comments along the lines of:

"What the %)Ü"(/ÁÖ,.-é!'+'="

But now, instead of thinking that it's all just pure nonsense, Richard Holbrooke's words made me realise something. He said, of the article in the Guardian:

"It doesn't reflect any views that I am aware of in the government I work for..."

Which, along with the fact that the report came out in the Guardian, reminded me of these two pieces I wrote a while ago about British citizens of note in Afghanistan. And also of this article from last year that Registan links to. And many other things that I won't exhaustively list here.

Forecasting "state failure," i.e. something: A possible indicator

As you will notice by first glance, this blog is about "state failure." I define the notion of state failure in one particular, peculiar way myself, and you can always read my working definition on the right flank of the blog, if you scroll down for it. But terms like "state failure" and "failed states" refer to not exactly the same thing for others in academia. Some of them in fact do not bother too much to define "state failure" in too exact a way, so you could truly operationalise in research what they mean by it.

In some cases, putting the "state failure" stamp on a country implies that it's a "bad, bad, bad" place to live. For whatever reason and for potentially all sorts of reasons - of which brief or exhaustive lists are provided in some cases.

The really problematic aspect of this is that there is even a debate among scholars about how state failure can be accurately forecast. And some of the participants of this debate are of the creed that even come up with quantitative models to pull this off.

But many do so even while lacking a truly exact definition.

So here is a very scientific statement from me that is certainly up to the scientific standard of prediciting undefined, bad, bad, bad developments coming up, using some sort of indicator.

Read this sort of article, in the leading Pakistani daily, founded by Mohammad Ali Jinnah himself. Take your time to understand its argumentation, its not-so-coherent premises and so on. And voilá, you will know Pakistan is in trouble. The bad news is, even others around it share this situation with it.

The power of the queue and rifle shots that cannot be taken

A mere five days after it happened, AP summed up Monday's Pakistani political deal that was struck partly about reinstating Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry - who was removed from his position by former Prez Musharraf for the reason that he started behaving like somebody actually having something to do with justice - in this way: "the government agreed to (...) reinstate several judges ousted by Musharraf." Highlighting from me, of course.

As you remember, nu prez Zardari decided not to do this earlier, because the CJ might have raised the issue of his past as the legendary Mr. 10 percent. Anyway, an editorial in the Washington Post is now calling on the CJ to show restraint and, again, not to act so much like a CJ really. I see an interesting analogy here with Sudanese Prez Omar al-Bashir's case. Stability is the name of the game, so you should try to get the powerful by legal means only if it doesn't mean you mess up everything... Only, this is not some supranational rule of law that we do not necessarily wish to see function here, but the internal rule of law in Pakistan. There is an element of importance to the advice about softer rules of engagement with the idea of the rule of law, for sure, but there is a touch of absurdity in it as well.

The soap opera of domestic Pakistani politics, where lethal suicide bombings and gun-spraying attacks on randomly selected soft targets in or outside Pakistan are an increasingly often-seen plot device, and where creeping Talibanisation is the constantly heard score, gives the temptation to the observer to go off road. To use harsher words and to conclude that this is all entirely not serious, just, "only," bloody real - for an actually improved analytical approach.

Exceptionally, in the case of this post by KO, I for once found myself going more off road in my judgement. I did not find it so surprising the Army did not stage a coup. And I don't think the lawyers' victory, which was aided by opportunistic political support from the Sharifs' party, will change that much.

Zardari was losing this all the way. He faced increasing and more united domestic political opposition, while he has already upset the Saudis with things like handing them a reduced number of hunting permits, while Beijing even hosted a Jamaat-i-Islami delegation in February, out of concern for Chinese citizens and interests in Pakistan, and with a willingness, demonstrated this way, to support allies of Nawaz Sharif's Saudi-favoured PML-N. (There you just had two of Pakistan's usually most important allies mentioned.)

In fact, still there is an ongoing struggle in which Zardari's cards are just not looking so good. Does it mean something big if he, Mr. 10 percent, eventually loses out entirely, in terms of a change for the better to Pakistan's political economy? Or will those asking favours for favours just line up at somebody else's desk? Sceptically, one should be rather conscious of the inertia of structures of corruption (i.e. partly informal and non-meritocratic resource distribution). One cannot just become Mr. Democracy or Mr. No 10 percent! The people in the queue might get mad at you, if you step in front of them and tell them there's no point in queuing.

(Meanwhile, you hear that score in the back?)

So what to do, what to do? As Joshua Foust notes at Registan, drone strikes in Quetta are not a smart solution to Pakistan's ineffectual governance structures, the fact, that these structures are shielded by nukes and a number of unidentified crazies who might jump out from the shadows if an external party tries something smarter, notwithstanding.

One shot from a rifle will always be smarter than a drone strike, from a counterinsurgency point of view, if carefully aimed. The problem is it cannot really be taken.

Hearing arguments about Afghanistan

A couple of months ago the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs (HIIA) published a working paper I wrote, with the title "Pomeranian grenadiers in the Hindu Kush: A look at the Afghanistan mission from a (broadly interpreted) cost/benefit perspective." I pasted in the summary here, with some of the most important conceptual arguments of the paper, regarding why the Afghanistan mission is important. In general I argued that the Afghanistan mission is in fact important, even while not necessarily good arguments are usually presented to explain why. And I also pointed to how, given the nature of counterterrorism and counternarcotics especially, it is difficult in the turbulent and complex contemporary security environment to devise predictably effective policies in general. Even while it's still surprising to me that the imperative of "sanctuary denial" is not a no-brainer for everyone.

At KoW, Theo Farrell has just yesterday linked to a House of Commons hearing's uncorrected transcript where he gave evidence regarding some of the same issues. It was a mighty interesting thing to read for me, contrasting it with my views. I will refer to it in my upcoming doctoral thesis, too. (Yes, I am just in the process of writing, or more exactly finishing, one. From an analyst's selfish working point of view, I hope Pakistan - rather than Tajikistan, dear ICG! - stays where it is until I finish, or I'll have to seriously reconsider everything I'm writing.)

As an aside, getting back to the link I provided a couple of days ago, to leaks about British citizen guerrillas overheard chatting on the intercom in Helmand, both Theo Farrell and Colonel Langton (also giving expert testimony at the HoC) deny having heard anything specific related to this. Me, I don't know. The timing of the leak is interesting (i.e. doesn't seem to be very random). But then people like Rashid Rauf are blasted in that conlict zone from time to time. Why couldn't more British citizens of Pakistani origin be active in Helmand? Even a German of German origin can turn up in that part of the world for the fight, so this at least can be expected.

Along the links of...

... the following articles.
Brief pointers to just this and that, loosely connected. Lest I be accused of writing lengthy pieces ALL the time.

Look who's fighting in Helmand...
Exclusive: Army is fighting British jihadists in Afghanistan
(Kim Sengupta, The Independent, February 25)

"British soldiers are engaged in "a surreal mini civil war" with growing numbers of home-grown jihadists who have travelled to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, senior Army officers have told The Independent.
(...)
But it is in Afghanistan that British forces are now directly facing fellow Britons on the other side. RAF Nimrod aircraft flying over Afghanistan at up to 40,000ft have been picking up Taliban electronic "chatter" in which voices can be heard in West Midlands and Yorkshire accents. Worryingly for the military, this has increased in the past few months, with communications picked up by both ground and air surveillance, showing the presence of more British voices in the Taliban front line."

(h/t to Myra MacDonald)

Where wannabe recruits may soon also travel, if this analysis happens to be correct...
March 4th 2009: The End of Sudan?
(Anders Hastrup, CUMINet, February 24)

"On March 4th, 2009, the International Criminal Court in The Hague, ICC, will make public their decision about whether or not they will issue an arrest warrant on Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir accused of genocide in Darfur.
(...)
... with 2 years experience as a relief-worker in Sudan, primarily in Darfur, scepticism is my immediate response and I am preparing myself for a worst-case scenario."

From the AIV-GIV hydra to the Wardak APPF and Pakistani rifles

This is what happens nowadays when I at least try to read something not Afghanistan-related. I fail. I was preparing for a lecture about conflicts and insurgencies in the Central African Republic and Chad, and I came across Steve Reyna's study of "structural violence" in Chad.

Reference: Steve Reyna: Imagining Monsters: A Structural History of Warfare in Chad (1968-1990). In: Globalization, the State and Violence, edited by Jonathan Friedman, AltaMira Press: Walnut Creek - Lanham - New York - London, 2003, pp. 279-308.

It gives us a rather interesting insight with the concept of the AIV-GIV hydra. I don't want to tear out excerpts here to outline the essence. I'll rather say my own words, especially since I'm looking to somewhat reconfigure this concept to fit what I want to point to. The abbreviations AIV and GIV stand for Autonomous Institutions of Violence and Government Institution of Violence. It is a commonly observed phenomenon, seen in a number of cases, that in extremely poor states, with large areas characterised by abdicated governance, you just see conflicts in the so-called centre, zero-sum games between the powers-that-be and the powers-that-would-be, for the resource of international legitimacy and all that it can practically entail, with spillovers to the peripheries and potentially even beyond the largely administrative borders of the country.

The point about calling enduring struggles between AIVs and a GIV, with the status of GIV taken on in the revolving-door process of a continuous string of violent takeovers of power by one AIV after the other, a "hydra," is that they seem never-ending. Marxist /structuralist authors call this "anarchy" in the sense that there are "no stable relations of domination in these forcefields."

(For an interesting aside, Virgil Hawkins effectively and eloquently debates whether this is "chaos" here.)

In my reading of the concept, and it takes somewhat beyond what Reyna's version of it strictly is, is that a continuous flow of arms and great-power intrigue created the hydra that cannot be killed. Going beyond this in time, as Reyna's study is originally from the beginning of the 1990s, what happened after the Cold War was that in the end the hydra's heads became smaller but more numerous. Arms continued to flow in ways, and AIVs needed sources of financing other than external powers' now not-so-generous and not-necessarily-forthcoming support. Fragmentation occurred therefore, as the exploitation of local resources empowered lower-level commanders. Meanwhile, GIVs were affected as well, since their sources dried up to a degree, too. Soldiers turned rebels in some cases - this is what is called the phenomenon of "sobels" by some, mostly in some African contexts.

Does this say something about Afghanistan then? There some of the external intrigue was gone in the 1990s, with Soviet and American withdrawal of interest. Arms remained and continued to flow. Some further fragmentation occurred...

And what are we doing now? And, on the other side of the Durand Line, what are they doing at the same time, handing out rifles, justifying it with reference to our intentions?

We are all about to create quasi-GIVs... Many. Us, we call them Afghan Public Protection Force militias. The other side of the Durand Line calls them village lashkars or what. We try this in Wardak first.

The author of the piece about the Wardak programme that I just linked to, Virginia Moncrieff, half-sympathetically says this in reaction: "When thinking of ways out of the Afghanistan miasma, arming young, uneducated men with guns, as a "protection force" does not immediately spring to mind as a great way forward." (You know, I don't really like the part about calling a country a miasma. Why? Wasn't it Afghanistan rather that caught all sorts of miasmas coming from beyond its borders? Wouldn't Afghans be entitled to call a whole list of other countries a "miasma"?)

Anyway, the potentially most discouraging structural reading of this, continuing along Reyna's unfinished lines from the early 1990s, is that our corrective reaction to what was the monstrous child of the AIV-GIV hydra aims just to create an IV hydra, with unclear boundaries between AIV and GIV. A sobel-hydra. This may kill the monstrous child, but merely through a reincarnation of the old monster turned against it.

Anyway, let's hope that another, this time extremely careful injection of guns and gunners is what will bring protection to the people. That would be the main aim of the APPF after all.

Potentially, it ain't no fun in Punjab

Sorry for the idiotic title, but this is really something I cannot make sense of. How the Pakistani-state-as-such missed this development that even I have also been warning of since a while now - me, i.e. the total outsider.

I mean it's one thing when one uses 4GW enthusiastically against one's closest and historically most important enemy (India) after one had experienced 1) this thing being successfully used against oneself (when East Pakistan/Bangladesh broke away), and 2) successfully using the same thing oneself, against a superpower for a decade (in Afghanistan, against the Soviet Union). The latter kind of saved one, potentially, from being torn to pieces as a state (with e.g. Baluchistan and Pashtunistan carved out).

It's yet another thing to support a regime (the Taliban in the 1990s) in a neighbouring country in hopes that it might in the best of cases even recognise one's common border with that country (the Durand Line... but of course the Taliban did not recognise it, eventually). Or at least this might aid one in one's regional trade and avoid having said neighbouring country become part of a gigantic military pincer move helping one's already mentioned close and historically most important enemy undermine one's conventional defence plans... (focused partly on making a grand stand at one's wide-flowing rivers, safe from the back, before converting one's forces into the largest guerrilla army in the world, defending Islamabad from the strategic depth of Kandahar... plans, that were a bit more significant while one was not in a position to contemplate the alternative: wiping a few towns off the map in India, with a lot of Muslim inhabitants by the way, as a trade-off for having one's country wiped off the map, in the nuclear stage of the regional insecurity complex).

But what about giving up area after area to an insurgency, upon agreeing to pull soldiers out, leaving justice affairs to the insurgents, paying them compensation, and then deterring outsiders from more freely intervening? That is a completely different thing. And it seems that is essentially the Pakistani 3D approach as Zardari put it the other day, "democracy, development and deterrence." I almost forgot, add 30,000 rifles to villagers' hands for greater horror effect.

Now - thanks for the link to Jari Lindholm - here is this good article from The News' Ayaz Amir. Not everything agreed in it on my part, but with much to tell us. I'll excerpt something Jari did not focus on so much.

"Far from being defeated, much less crushed, this revolt is spreading. Hitherto it was confined to the Frontier Province. But on February 7 we saw this revolt cross the River Indus for the first time when a police check post in Mianwali (Qudratabad near Wan Bachran) was attacked by Taliban fighters. On Feb 11 another police outpost near Essa Khail came under attack.
Mianwali and Bhakkar along the River Indus are vulnerable districts, open to infiltration from the Frontier. If the Taliban acquire any kind of foothold here, God help us. My district of Chakwal is a short ride away, as are the districts of Sargodha and Khushab. From there to central Punjab is but a short haul."

Of course, Jari points out the most interesting section of the article with safe hands. "Beware of Punjab's underclass," "the have-nots are flocking to Mehsud's banner." "If this were Nepal this would be a Maoist uprising." "Every Punjab town, large and small, has a mosque, if not more than one, sympathetic to the Taliban brand of Islam. So at least there is a handy network."

Illustration: Caught Mumbai attacker Ajmal Kasab's home village, Faridkot (in Punjab), with a sign on a wall that says "Go for jihad. Go for jihad. Markaz Dawat ul-Irshad," according to McClatchy's Saeed Shah.