Swat déja vu

The BBC is offering video, text and photos about what Mingora looks like after the highly kinetic military operation that swept across the Swat valley in Pakistan. Actually, Loi Sam looked much-much worse after the Bajaur operations last year - get a glimpse of that at one point in this lengthy documentary. This is not to say that Mingora is not heavily damaged.

Now, let us rewind the clock, and see what the aftermath of the 2008 Swat operations was like. Then, "only" 20,000 military troops were needed - Ahmed Rashid did complain, though, that if intervention would have come earlier on, and militants would not have enjoyed a free reign over large areas for so long, a major police operation could have been sufficient.

So you get the point. This thing has just now been repeated, only on an even bigger scale. Much bigger scale... And last year people were asking what good comes out of this if the Tehrik-e Taliban and, especially, its leadership do not suffer major casualties, but just leave the area behind early on, for the mountains or for some place under firm Taliban control, while a few stay on to fight rearguard action?

Weaving narratives

The Ministry is working. Extra hours even. The reason for not making it very visible at this point (the reason for the light to nonexistent blogging in recent days) is that it is work in progress that we are talking about: the shadow minister at the head of this Ministry, P.M., is writing his doctoral thesis!

But here is something we have bumped into, in the course of arranging files to help with this work. Some old UNODC reports about the wind of the cocaine trade picking up in West Africa. This is how they explained it in 2007 (see page 17):

"After years of effort, the governments of the Western Hemisphere have scored significant gains in stopping cocaine supply to the United States. The crackdown on cartel leaders by President Calderon’s administration in Mexico appears to have significantly affected trafficking."

Ouch. It hurts reading it, doesn't it?

UNODC is just not in a position to reach a conclusion that counter-narcotics measures do not bring success sooner or later. (You probably do not need this overworked Ministry to look up a link regarding the current situation in Mexico.)

Of course, another issue, to save some face for UNODC, is that the drugs trade is just not such a centralised affair as running a Ministry. It is all over the place. We just found a very useful, relatively famous quote from the 1980s, regarding terrorism, from Duane Clarridge, the first director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (set up in 1986) - it is relevant in the context of the drugs trade as well, to a degree:

"It never fits one particular piece of real estate. It is effective precisely because it spreads all over the map" (quoted by Coll, 2004: 140)

This is relevant with regards to the drugs trade in that a lot of people are involved in the latter, and some of them are quite pro-active in earning their living. They have a habit of defying narratives.

Lesson learned: make counternarcotics a focus in Afghanistan with this in mind. See also Joshua Foust's related piece at Registan.

Where imaginary Taliban attack

Imaginary Taliban have just recently caused Kashmir's tourism industry a minor catastrophe.

P.S. (answer to a question asked by an imaginary journalist): Yes, micro-blogging is possible, even on Blogger, and even institutions such as the Ministry may want a piece of the action, every now and then.

Quick update on the Afghan presidentials

Hamed Karzai has really delved into this big time, as did many others. Let's see!

His running mate for vice president is Mohammed Qasim Fahim who may have been present on an occasion when Karzai was more or less beaten up by the muj government back in 1994, on suspicion of conspiring with ISI (Fahim's men definitely were there when this happened).

Now we have heard of Karzai's plans for discussions with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose HiG may be offered all sorts of positions - provided it was someone else trying to kill Ahmed Wali Karzai in Sarobi... Does the assassination attempt mean that the talks have already foundered? A task force shall be devoted to examining this, and the results may or may not be made public thereafter.

Plus, keeping all this in mind, it now seems like even Zalmay Khalilzad may want in.

Wow!

Let the Ministry try and digest all this...

No, seriously... Wow!

Zalmay Khalilzad, Mohammed Qasim Fahim, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, all behind one government, this would be... The Ministry is an objective institution. It shall leave the quest for finding appropriate adjectives to the readership.

Riedel comparing two Afghan wars, and Pakistan with Pakistan

The CTC Sentinel's latest issue came out, and the Ministry feels the need to put out a statement, reacting to Bruce Riedel's article (Riedel was recently policy-overhaul minister for the new "Af/Pak/Af" strategy in the U.S.), Comparing the U.S. and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan.

First we are recommending a correction to one of the article's passages. Here is the original version:

"The campaign to assist the Afghan insurgency, the mujahidin, enjoyed the backing of countries around the world including China, the United Kingdom, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and others."

With the recommended correction then (modifications in capitals):

"The campaign to TRAIN AND ARM Afghan INSURGENTS, the mujahidin, enjoyed the LARGELY COVERT backing of countries around the world including China, the United Kingdom, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and others, AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, PAKISTAN."

These modifications are important if we do not want a naive reader to assume that worldwide condemnation of the Soviet intervention in 1979 means that pumping all that money and all those arms through ISI was an exercise in (good) global governance (with kind assistance from facilitating organisations such as Miktab al-Khidmat, and networks such as the Golden Chain).

Ok, but that is history. As far as the policy-relevant part is concerned, here is something else the Ministry wishes to react to.

Riedel rightly argues that key changes need to come from Pakistani minds. This is a position that this Ministry is voicing since a while now. But then Riedel argues that "the United States needs to engage intensively to convince them of this reality."

As far as the Afghanistan part of convincing is concerned, here is full support to the idea. Convince the key players that Afghanistan is not a place where you are mostly interested in finding the exit (which then may be open to people coming after you). Go ahead. As far as telling Pakistanis directly, that they have to do this or that, is concerned, because you know it is in their interest - no, that is not necessarily good. Opinions need to be known, of course, but if you are wielding carrots and sticks all the time, you may be just manufacturing consensus on the surface, instead of getting people to agree with you.

The Ministry has just recently authored an article for a Slovak journal, the Euro-Atlantic Quarterly (not published yet), and here is an excerpt from that piece, one that is relevant to the argument above.

"The (Pakistani) military’s standard procedure seems to be the heavy use of available air assets and artillery, and a dispreference of close-quarters combat by infantry. Problem number one with this approach to counterinsurgency is that it kills a lot of civilians – that is what makes the people flee the villages and other settlements that become targets in the military operations. Problem number two is that this approach likely does not kill many insurgents, despite claims to the contrary. „The Pakistani military levels large areas, claims success, and thinks we'll be conned into believing it if they pump up the Taliban body counts,” as one U.S. military intelligence official is reported to have summed this up recently.

(...)

... whatever NATO says or does, in Pakistani eyes this is a U.S.-sponsored offensive currently ongoing in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, and thus, to a degree, it is also NATO’s offensive. If done in a smart way, it could be in Pakistan’s interest. But it is not, and the U.S. and the West are seen as having recently pledged heavy billions of dollars of financial assistance both to Pakistan’s military, and to the Pakistani government, in order to pay for the devastating attack on millions of ordinary villagers."

Besides, let us do a little creative thinking. The militants were happy in the Swat valley for now. Some of them were pushed there from Bajaur, after last year's military operations there. Now they are likely to be pushed out of at least some of Swat.

So where will they go now? Peshawar? Karachi? Waziristan? Afghanistan?

Update (about 5 minutes after posting the original version): Having just read Mukhtar A. Khan's brief profiling of Quetta and Baluchistan, which follows right after Riedel's article in the CTC Sentinel, let us add to the previous list of questions: "Quetta? Baluchistan?" With 1,300 madaras and 13 refugee camps, that is one more destination where some may be booking tickets, post-Swat.

This is happening

The Ministry feels it is time to point out something blatantly obvious: this is not normal.

"ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 13 (UNHCR) – The number of people who have fled the fighting in northwest Pakistan this month and been registered or recorded by authorities reached 670,906 on Wednesday, up from just over half a million the day before.

The majority of those registered by Pakistani authorities with the assistance of UNHCR are staying in the homes of friends and relatives or camping out in the open; a fraction of the total – 79,842 – are now living in camps.

Together with more than 550,000 registered displaced people in the North West Frontier Province and some 21,000 in the capital Islamabad and urban areas of the Punjab, the continuing exodus brings to 1,248,715 the total number of people displaced in Pakistan since August, 2008."

End of message.

Supplement: read Mosharraf Zaidi's take on this.

Opium roads

"In the green zone, everything is irrigated, and everywhere there's a field. That's a problem, because the Taliban, instead of wanting to fight with us, they plant mines, so we have to drive in the fields. Now, what the talking was about - it was about - we've been driving on the fields, we try to drive on poppy, but sometimes we also have to drive on their wheat. If we can establish that the claim is valid, we have a CIMIC team who can pay compensation for it."

Quote from Jon, a Danish army interpreter, who speaks about half a dozen languages. In: "Complex Working Environment" - video available at the NATO Channel TV. Direct URL cannot be provided, as the website does not work that way; you will see.

The Ministry is not able to say that much, for now, about what Jon's company could do about this. Force protection is important to them, especially to their political leaders back home, and they won't give up on armour when they enter the "green zone" (which ironically means the opposite of what it used to mean in Iraq, in terms of security).

The interesting thing to note is the contrast. When the look of this website was changed a while ago, at the time when the Ministry took over running this place, an incident was mentioned here where U.S. Marines paid compensation to an opium poppy farmer for having a C-17 airdrop land on his field, crushing some plants. Back in December last year, another incident was covered at this site, whereby a U.S.-led police team, there with an escort of Canadian soldiers, thought it the best approach to winning the hearts and minds of an outlying village in Kandahar province, to destroy all the marijuana plants that were found there. We have written of Polish soldiers participating in destroying opium poppies hashish plants in Ghazni, and of Dutch forces only reluctantly helping an Afghan Eradication Force/Dyncorp team once they got into trouble back in 2007 (originally covered by Mr. Anderson for the New Yorker). I know of countries that would not care a bit if somebody would grow poppies beside their main base, mainly not to get into trouble because of that, and now I learned that for the Danes, theoretically, it is cheaper to drive on poppies than it is on wheat (provided they are really not ready to pay compensation on occasions when they drove on somebody's poppies, if that is really what Jon may be implying).

Trying to deal with a rural insurgency, why would it be important to have a coherent approach to these issues... like, what to do about farmers' crops and all that...

Pat Porter, discussing the proposition that more Pashto speakers would be needed by Western armies in Afghanistan, ironically asks: "How do you say ‘we are destroying your opium crop’ in Pashto?" Jon, quoted above, knows that, and Pat Porter is right, it probably doesn't help all that much. Otherwise, the Ministry's position is still rather that it would be mighty good to have a thousand Jons out there.

ISAF logistics: Reloaded (through Uzbekistan)

Looks like our Ministry picked an interesting day for the publication of its background notes on ISAF logistics. On the very same day those were posted here, answers were delivered to some of the questions that were raised, in the form of developments in Uzbekistan.

We shall provide a vital link here, as well as two excerpts, revealing some of the most important details:

"Uzbek President Islam Karimov revealed on May 11 that a cargo airport in the city of Navoi is already being used for the airborne transport of NATO non-lethal supplies destined for coalition forces in Afghanistan."

(...)

"Goods flying across the Pacific will be carried by Korean Air’s Boeing 747-400s; goods requiring air transport from northern Europe will be by flown by Uzbekistan Airways’ Airbus 300-600s or Ilyushin-76s from Navoi to Afghanistan. As of late April, Uzbekistan Airways has reportedly been leasing the Airbus 300-600s from Korean Air.

Korean Air claimed it could get non-military goods from Europe to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar by plane in 12 hours, and from the east coast of America to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 25.5 hours."

The latter part of the article at Eurasianet focuses on how this is a major success for Foggy Bottom, over the Russians, who now spent 2.15 billion largely counter-productively on Kyrgyz hydropower projects that cause concerns on the (downstream) Uzbek side.

This Ministry would never deny an achievement out of jealousy over another (ministry, department, or whatever). It is not that sort of ministry. But even this Ministry has to caution readers not to lose sight of the fact that with a throughput of 300 tons per day, the Uzbek Navoi airbase will only handle some 182,500 109,500 tons per year. This equals 8,690 5,214* TEU containers (if one divides the figure given in tons by 21), out of as much as 70,000 needed overall.

In other words, it will still take Closely Observed Trains from Russia, or jingle trucks from Pakistan, or both, to get what ISAF needs in Afghanistan.

* The Ministry expresses regret over messing up its notes: the 182,500 and 8,690 figures were for 500 tons' throughput per day.

ISAF logistics

The following background notes were prepared by one of our employees who is currently on non-paid leave. That is, PM (stands not for prime minister) - the guy who usually updates the Ministry's blog.

"Russia's support to ISAF, officially in allowing for the transit of nonlethal supplies only, to countries such as the U.S., Spain, France and Germany, is absolutely important, even if it is not a perfect solution to save us from the troubles in Pakistan. That is what one finds if one does the counting based on numbers that are openly available.

Annually, ISAF needed around 70,000 containers of supplies, as things stood at the beginning of the year.

One may count with standard TEU containers for a projection. These are so-called Twenty-foot Equivalent Units, capable of containing cargo up to over 21 tons. Thus 70,000 TEUs may translate to 1,470,000 tons of stuff.

From the direction of Pakistan, at around January, there were a hundred trucks "crossing" the border through the Bolan Pass, at Chaman, every day, and there were around 300 in the Khyber Pass, at Torkham.

If we (very optimistically) assume that each of these trucks carries a TEU-load of supplies for ISAF to Afghanistan, that means 400 TEUs a day, or 8,400 tons. Per week, that is 2,800 TEUs. Per month (weekly figure multiplied by 4.5), that is 11,200 TEUs, per year: 134,400.

But. There are "minor" objections one can raise here, instead of concluding that ISAF comfortably gets its supplies.

1. All sorts of trucks carry stuff for ISAF - and one should count with 0.5 TEU per truck rather. Perhaps that is more realistic. Then you halve your figure already: it is just 67,200 TEUs a year.

2. ISAF's need of 70,000 containers is probably not what ISAF would need if it could have everything on its wishlist.

3. Not only ISAF forces need to be resupplied in Afghanistan, but also OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) forces, as well as Afghan Security Forces.

4. On holidays, traffic stops, and guerrillas may feel the urge to take some lucky strikes with RPGs at parking trucks. So deduce some...

5. Trucks "crossing" the border may not carry supplies for ISAF. They may be crossing from the other direction...

How much does Russia matter? Well, a lot. The original plans at around February said that 20 to 30 trainloads would be brought down from Riga harbour in Latvia, through Russia, to some non-clarified destination in Central Asia (where one presumes that all the stuff has to be re-loaded to trucks or planes in the end). A train can bring down around a hundred TEUs, so that would be 2,000 to 3,000 every week, 9,000 to 13,500 every month, and 108,000 to 162,000 TEUs every year. Restricted to nonlethal supplies, by agreement.

But are we there yet, at that throughput?

Meanwhile, the indications remain that the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan is gone for NATO. How much does that mean? According to one source that I eventually found, it put through "500 tons of cargo" a month. Nice, nice... But it's wrong! Or one gets the feeling it must be wrong... Hell, the Kyrgyz-Tajik Student Forum of Eternal Friendship could offer us a 500-tons-per-month throughput if they would form a human chain from Bishkek to Mazar-i-Sharif...

Anyway, added to the more or less available Russian supply route, NATO would not oppose it if some of its member states could come to agreement with Iran over having some supplies transiting there. That could mean the situation is not so bad. But of course ISAF is expanding, and so are Afghan security forces. It will probably take more than 70,000 TEUs annually in the future to re-supply them. Some of this can be put in the air, but not endlessly.

Anyway, here's a NATO video about the Torkham crossing, and the new Theatre Movement Coordination Cell. I don't know how the TMCC would solve the problems of a truck driver who is stopped by insurgents near Peshawar, but they say that road security for the supplies in Pakistan has improved recently anyway."

The Ministry is of course interested in further studying the situation, as well as if any of the figures cited in the above background notes are correct or incorrect.

Expression of thanks

"Wandering Afghan goatherd holds up lethal attack on Taleban roadside bombers"

The Ministry hereby issues the following press statement:

Thank you for not bombing the goatherd who was so irresponsible as to walk his goats out there in the Afghan middle of nothing!

Thank you for not bombing the bridge in a country we would like to see "reconstructed," and where giving farmers the chance to use a decent road infrastructure - among other things - is the only hope for the long run to rid the country of opium poppy cultivation.

And now for the more serious part. Maybe the Ministry should set up a new working group to examine how four people involved in doing something bad in the middle of the field can be stopped in any other way than using F-16s and a hundred armed men.

And look! This Ministry is working fast! Here are the conclusions! Already!

The answer is so damn simple. Collect intelligence. Follow where the guys are going, get to know at least which village they are headed to. Mark the location of the IED. Get rid of the IED later on. Go to the village where these guys came from. Oops... you cannot go there just like that, as there are hundreds of AK-wielding Taliban in there? Maybe that is a bigger problem! Or, alternatively, if you can go there, maybe you should ask some questions. Maybe you should wonder what the village could be offered to get them to do what you want. Protection? Participation in that project in the vicinity that they were excluded from?

The alternative of using A-10s (the Ministry expresses uncertainty whether these were A-10s) to spray bullets at IED planters is a second-best option. At least it is not so damn reckless. But of course then you do not get the nice part of knowing who on earth live around you on that unknown planet you and your comrades were deployed on, which you might do if you ask questions from people who may know some answers.

In other words, do not be so enemy-centric.

Incoming message about Turkey, subject: "Wardak etc."

The Ministry receives all kinds of crazy stuff with its incoming correspondence. It cannot possibly cope with this. It is regularly overloaded with nonsense. Some of what is coming in is interesting, though. Like this piece of news from Turkey, delivered to the All Things Reminiscent of Afghanistan Working Group:

"41 killed in attack on wedding in Turkey
(...)
NTV says the motive for the attack was a feud between rival groups of pro-government village guards who fight alongside Turkish troops against Kurdish rebels."

The colleague at the ATRA WG, who sent it along, simply wrote "Wardak etc." into the subject line.

Triage Lite - Before a Great War on Poppies?

The Ministry is in disarray. People are rushing up and down the corridors, phones are ringing - signs of bureaucracy trying to make sense of new stimuli from its environment. The reason? No one is entirely sure here since when has a "strategy" of "clear, leave, and sometimes return to abandoned villages to fight firefights" replaced the old COIN imperative of "clear, hold, build." But Canadian and Afghan forces in Kandahar are acting as though this would already be the new leading principle, and, yes, they are even referring to it as a "new strategy." They are leaving outposts behind, executing a precise reverse of the "surge (in among the people)" approach.

In one drawer, somebody found some old report in which Canadians are mentioning a "triage" approach to protecting only the key and more supportive districts of the province. It was something that did not seem odd at the time. With the manpower they had available, that was as much as they could execute, of an ink blot approach. The hope was that constantly incoming Afghan and additional U.S. troops would eventually allow for these ink blots to spread. Instead, this time, a "triage lite" of sorts is being applied, apparently, dubbed "Operation Deny." An entire, poppy-cultivating "peninsula" is about to be left behind - upon hearing the word "peninsula" somebody suggested we should set up a working group devoted to studying "ignored details of Afghan geography" over here, at the Ministry, but fortunately that initiative died down as there was enough work for everyone to do. So what is this? We are studying developments.

For now, working hypotheses include that the incoming U.S. troops later on may eventually move into the poppy-cultivating areas instead of the Canadians and the ANA. People at the counter-narcotics department of the Ministry are (high) on vacation at this point, and the hope for the rest of us is that the incoming troops will not really be given the task of "killing all poppies."

The secretariat - the people who are aware of all the deadlines and do the actual work at the Ministry - is even suggesting that by the time additional U.S. soldiers fully set up shop in the south, much of the harvest may be accomplished. See relevant video below (many are hoping for some promotions here, as a reward for pointing out this report from "al-Jazeera," i.e. the "poppy-filming peninsula").

Update: An overeager employee of the Ministry wanted to sound funny and cynically remarked that what the guy from the UK really means in the vid is that in some places "they are growing weed instead of poppy, that's a success." We fired this employee. One should really keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of Afghan farmers is not involved in cultivating opium poppies or hashish - even while a major part of Afghan society and the economy is affected by the drugs trade in all sorts of ways, one of them being how its revenues circulate around.

Site announcement

Expect some minor surprises here in the upcoming hours, as I'll be experimenting with changing a few things about the look of this blog.

I will also change its name, a little bit. Feel free to (keep) refer(ring) to the blog as it is called now used to be called. Back at the very beginning of things I wanted to be modest by calling it "my" state failure blog. I thought somebody, with a few more publications in peer-reviewed journals than me, may want to start another one some day, so I should not look to monopolise the representation of the academic discourse in the blogosphere - not even in name.

This is not a concern any more, hence the change, desired otherwise stemming from a wish to avoid the semblance that this site is a personal diary about, uh, well, say, my state of failure...

Update: I am almost done. Now I can just sit back and contemplate whether I was totally wrong in messing up the earlier look of the blog. Care to share your opinion? I'd appreciate that.

Meanwhile, I added a picture to the header which will change from time to time, just like it does over at Ghosts of Alexander for example.

The current picture is cut from a photo that was made by John Moore for Getty Images on March 22, 2009. You can find the original published here in large size. The story of the image is interesting enough: the C-17 airdrop was destined for Marines in Qalanderabad, and it accidentally fell on an opium field for which the farmer of the field was (rightly) compensated by the soldiers. But I am using this image here to fit the theme of the blog in a more general way, out of its actual context. Feel free to interpret this on your own, of course.