Brand new week, brand new header (and key metrics cont'd)

The pic that is currently up there is the small detail of a picture that I found here.

The original photo was taken by Mohammad Shoiab for Reuters, in Herat city, in western Afghanistan (right near the Iranian border), in a burqa shop, where the owner of the place has recently started thinking of investing in the less conservatiave variants of the Islamic dress code for women. His burqa sales are said to have dropped by 50%. He is still selling burqas, so it's a half-empty, half-full glass sort of thing, depending on which way you measure progress.

Update: I'll be working on non-blog-related matters for a week, so expect no new posts during that time. Meanwhile, read Thomas L. Friedman for a daily dose of lunacy on Afghanistan (it's relatively old stuff, I just happened to notice it now). "Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles." That's what he starts out with. But no worries, he realises that Afghan schoolgirls are cute and deserve education, so he is not (yet) prepared to contemplate shooting up their country with cruise missiles. (Making it something like a huge Gaza strip I guess, the difference being much better chances of survival for anyone in particular from AQ than for anyone in particular from Hamas.)

Introducing CR2P: The Causal Responsibility to Protect

We will come back to Afghanistan in this post, of course. But for a detour, I would like to put Kiribati (Keer-i-bass, as it has to be pronounced) in the limelight for a start. Watch this video first (embedded below), warning of the partly anthropogenic-climate-change-induced doom of the islands. Their fate shall be sealed by 2050 according to the video, which of course is just one estimate out of the many that are available, relying on a (huge) number of different models.

To make it clear, I am taking Kiribati's fate seriously.

But the video itself is almost counterproductive as a documentary, one that is supposedly meant to help create awareness. It raises awareness of things like how an old guy finds the heat much worse than in his heydays. Khm. It also raises awareness of vegetation dying out on an island after... after a causeway had been built nearby. It's just not working very well...

What it should focus on with much more persistence, and citing hard data a lot, is how unusually high tides, and the flooding/inundations brought about by them, occur more regularly. It is just too eager to show worrying signs everywhere.
Sea level rise is the key challenge. It is not fully anthropogenic. But human activity does contribute to global warming, and through that it does contribute to the melting of glaciers, the reductions in the perennial ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, and the thermal expansion of the oceans. Sea level rise doesn't have to lead to a complete submersion of Kiribati under the ocean. Kiribati doesn't have to become a "modern-day Athlantis," as is fashionable to say, for it to become uninhabitable. And of course it is not just Kiribati that can be threatened by sea level rise, but other islands and coastal regions elsewhere as well. Countries like Kiribati are special because they are sovereign countries that could disappear as soon as their state territory becomes just a bunch of barren objects in the middle of a large body of water.
"The clock is ticking," as they say, for example in the Global Humanitarian Forum's now well-known "tck, tck, tck" initiave. For countries like Kiribati it certainly does seem to be.
Debating climate change takes on very direct political relevance in their case. If "polluting countries" are, say, an x percent responsible for global warming which translates into y milimetres of all of the observable sea level rise, than that could as well be expressed in economic losses denominated in dollars, yens, yuans and euros, whichever you prefer. So at least to that extent, the countries concerned would be causally responsible to protect Kiribati as much as possible, or to compensate people there for what will, to an extent inevitably, happen. But of course it is not really feasible to establish which country is responsible to what extent. And some would deny all responsibility, or even that there is anything to be responsible for.
How does this become relevant in Afghanistan's case? What analogy do I see here?

Well, think of how interventions in general are usually conceptualised in Western discourse since the end of the Cold War. There is talk of humanitarian intervention, which many think in some extreme cases should be more than just a possibility, or a right to intervene: that is why the principle of R2P emerged - as a responsibility to protect state populations potentially even against (not-so) sovereigns, when war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide or ethnic cleansing occur.
And then there is also what I sometimes refer to as the 9/11 "Aha!" experience in the discourse of intervention, when it was brought home to many more people than before that intervention will sometimes not really be such an altruistic business after all (as in fact it never was), and it could as well, say, stem from a country's security needs and interests to enter the picture in force somewhere.
So, in a place like Afghanistan, it is not really a humanitarian intervention that occurred, as some point out from time to time, but something that was dictated by the West's security interests... (Which used to be kinda obvious directly after September 11, 2001.)
But that's hardly all that there can be to interventions. Security needs cover a wider set of issues than just threats from weak states - and whatever spills over from them every now and then. The Cold War's history is full of interventions that served geopolitical aims. Denying a stable foothold to an adversary somewhere. Or fighting off a challenge from the other in support of the incumbent against the insurgents. That's how proxy battlegrounds, such as Afghanistan, emerged.
And of course economic interests should not be forgotten, either, if this enumeration of possible causes and motives behind interventions is to be as near to being comprehensive as possible. Economic interests may dictate interventions, too.

(Perhaps it is needless but let's say it anyway, "intervention" shall be interpreted in a broader sense here: adding game-changing financing, military technology, assets or even just training to certain parties of an intra-state conflict may already amount to intervention in my interpretation here - so interpret my remarks about the Cold War era with this in mind).
Why is this important?
Because it is not really either a case of fighting for our security interests in Afghanistan, or being there just because we care too much about Afghans, and we want things that are hopelessly too good for them, such as democracy. It's not really a case of EITHER kill-or-be-killed OR luxury altruism.
The way that choice is framed is deceiving, at least from an ethical point of view.

I would never say that there are no security interests for the West in Afghanistan (those who think so are in for some big surprises, should they get the upper hand in the current policy debates at some point). The point is that there is something else beyond the possibility of being so good as to care about Afghans even if one doesn't see security interests in their country any more. This is something that a principle like R2P doesn't take account of. R2P is a remote opportunity to be beautiful, from time to time, in an international (I should really rather say interstate) beauty contest, in some of the more convenient cases, the way it currently functions.

In the case of a country like Afghanistan, acknowledging a causal responsibility to protect could come up as well. Give it a nice abbreviation, such as CR2P, if you like.
That is why the "saving Afghanistan/don't let it fail again" discourse is soooo bad to listen to. Some of the countries there to save it, and worried about its failure, involved in state-building now, have been part of state-destroying there for over a decade. All that came to happen, and all of the implications up till today, definitely aren't all their fault. The reasons of all the problems in Afghanistan cannot be simply externalised, not even if one goes back to the age of the Great Game. But there is responsibility for what happened, there is a need to see that Afghans and Afghanistan are the way they are at the moment partly because of the past policies of many countries there now to "save" them, and there is a need to understand that, from a moral point of view, walking away at a certain point holding one's hands up saying sorry, by this time we had enough of luxury altruism, is not so clearly alright.

Feel free to say "But that's not how politics work! Keep morals out of this!" And yet all the consequences of a world politics without ethical considerations playing at least an indirect role, forcing actors to behave in certain ways rather than in others, structuring actions and reactions, would probably not make you feel very comfortable. And it is not really that sort of world that you're living in at this point.
So perhaps it is not such a big thing to suggest that one can, at times, step back a little, take an abstract perspective, and understand how differently things might look from a new vantage point. To use some illustration here, here's a pic of Afghanistan from an altitude of 35,000 feet. Or so the caption says where I found it. Is that high and far and fresh enough for a new vantage point, to see some validity to my arguments regarding CR2P?

Now that is radikäl...

Bruce Riedel wrote an essay for the National Interest which is quite radikäl IMO. An Armageddon scenario for Pakistan... A joint Taliban/LeT takeover of Pakistan's government... A parallel army set up to control Pakistan's vast military... Then war by others against Pakistan to stop the sponsoring of terrorism and insurgency... A few nuclear strikes here and there, in India, Afghanistan, some Gulf states, possibly in the US (the means of delivery being humans in the latter case)... Pyrrhic victory over a jihadist Pakistan...

I still think what I wrote back on June 8, which is: "In the end, the greatest concern was not that the Taliban would end up occupying Islamabad or Karachi in a continuous expansion out from the FATA. It was rather a gradual spread of their ideological appeal in the rural areas on the one hand, and the generally bad consequences of the growing extent of areas within Pakistan affected by the fighting."

It is probably not just a question of time-horizon that there is, as a debate between my position and Riedel's. I am not simply arguing that the bad things Riedel is talking about could only happen much further down the road, and only depending on a number of variables that shall shape conducively to this kind of worst-case scenario. There are important conceptual issues, too, that I would take up when it comes to an interpretation and a critical evaluation of the "jihadist state" scenario. Like, definitions of "jihadist" and "state," for example.

Update: This is a sentence from Riedel that I find thought-provoking (or maybe just simply provoking): "Pakistan today is a country in the intensive-care ward of the global state system." I just wanted to highlight it, while I will leave it to you to reflect on it.

Is that radikäl enough?

Joshua Foust wrote a terrific essay for Reuters, its message being that no counternarcotics policy would be the best counternarcotics policy for now in Afghanistan (with a modestly added perhaps). I am arguing for similar things at this site since a while now, so you will not find me in much of a disagreement with what he says. I will still name some points of contention.
- For Josh, this is nothing new, and I'm sayin' just to make the argumentation clear here: neither Afghanistan, nor we - neither of us - will be helped by generalisations in the Afghan context. Something working here is not what may be working there. Examples of provinces (in eastern or southeastern Afghanistan) where there is either continuously expanding insurgency-related violence (Variable 1) and on-and-off poppy cultivation (V2), or of provinces where insurgency-related violence has a stable presence (V1), while there is virtually no poppy cultivation (V2) are important. But since there is no homogeneous insurgent movement in Afghanistan, and especially since the insurgency in Greater Kandahar can be seen as distinct from the insurgencies in Loya Paktia and further to the north in eastern provinces, one has to somewhat deduce from the value of these arguments regarding the current area of focus for counternarcotics, Helmand.
- But before somebody would think that I am therefore backing counternarcotics in Helmand, I would say it depends. It should depend on many variables, and on the expected shifts of those variables in reaction to interventions (raids, kills, arrests, interceptions etc.). In some cases, a hands-off approach may not be radical enough, should one's priority be defeating the insurgency... then working together with "collaborative kingpins" (actually a well-known approach to CN officers) may be the right policy... Of course, this all depends on what one's priorities are. Is the insurgency and a possible comeback of al-Qaida to south Afghanistan the greater challenge? Or is heroin coming from Afghanistan the primary concern? Priorities/preferences should be clear, because sometimes there is a choice to be made. Not acknowledging this choice doesn't help: wishfully thinking ourselves into a belief that combating both insurgents and drug-traders always amounts to hitting the same bird with as many stones as it takes doesn't help. It will only be the same bird in some cases.
Having read all this, you may see I am somewhat concerned about the planned surge of DEA agents to Afghanistan. And one imagines that the fact that they are going to lead the interagency "Afghan Threat Finance Cell" indicates that DEA won an important turf battle by bureacratic arms-twisting within the Obama administration (a turf battle about what the result of a proper analysis of insurgency finances should be) - this happened essentially REGARDLESS of Afghan realities (whatever they are), and that is the point right here.

Key metrics for sh*t-hot COIN-watchers

I have my concerns about the ongoing operations in Helmand just as Joshua Foust does. In fact, ever since I have read about 200 pages of Stephen Grey's Operation Snakebite in one proverbial breath, I have those concerns in even more dimensions.

Anyway, so there was recently a debate, influenced by input from Abu CNAS et al., about what the key metrics should be to measure progress in Afghanistan. Jari, one of the world's wisest Wordpress bloggers around ;-), already gave a very basic, critical reflection on this that's worth keeping in mind.

And now I'd like to offer a short excerpt from Grey's book that you will surely find very relevant here (from page 68 - the part in italics is added by me for necessary context, loyally to how that context is outlined in the book).

"At FOB Arnhem, Bell figured they had already got this lesson. That morning at dawn, as he looked out from the base across the green zone, he could see a stirring. Smoke from cooking pots began to rise from the adobe compounds, and then their creaky metal doors began to open, and turbaned farmers began their daily trudge to their fields, some accompanied by young children with wheelbarrows to clear up rocks or herding out flocks of goats with wooden sticks. As his company prepared to leave this base, he could see the 'daily commute' from the desert mud huts (the routine of coming to the green zone only after morning prayers, to do some work, and leaving before dusk, to avoid the frequent fighting) was over, at least for now."

In case this got you interested in Grey's book, I will provide a link to its page on Amazon (UK). And here is the cover image as well, for visual effect.

Hideaway...

At the end of this previous post (in May) I asked where militants from Malakand will wind up, having infiltrated out from the area when the large kinetic operations by the Pakistan military came their way. Of course many must have gone to places like the Waziristans, no question about that. But many may have gone to Pakistan's major cities, including mega-city Karachi.

That's why I recommend viewing this video from Frontline (and the NYT). Get a glimpse into the Pashtun quarter of Karachi, and hear concerns from Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns. Some things you should keep in mind:

- 20,000 IDPs arrived from Malakand only recently, joining Pashtuns in Karachi.

- Current economic trends provide scarce opportunities for employment which aggravates tensions.

- These tensions (and the recent "ethnic" riots, including attacks on IDP camps in Karachi's vicinity) have a past, of which you can get a sense here for example - bear in mind that the link goes to anything but a balanced view, and I would be interested in reading a similarly nuanced Pashtun recounting of events.

- Given how some people, as mentioned in the video, commute from season to season from the fight in Afghanistan (or somewhere in Pakistan) to doing some job in Karachi or elsewhere (and this of course is not an unfamiliar phenomenon at all, from the 1980s), one has to realise that the "AfPak war" is a sector of the region's economy. Regard the U.S. and other militaries in the region as a major employer, not just in a direct but in a structural sense as well, if you like - a war economy has emerged (long ago).

Meanwhile, I said cross-border activity would be a key metric, and I'm focusing on it as promised. The interest in this arises from an interest in seeing if some militants are just pushed across the Durand Line, tossed there to the fight on the other side with the increased pressure on the Pakistani side. I can quote the July 20 issue of Time this time, again with the answer being "negative" (which would be very positive):

"Perhaps the most important military action in the region isn't happening in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan, McChrystal says, are ''unique situations that are linked inextricably." Islamabad's fitful offensive against the Taliban in Pakistan has successfully drained resources from the Taliban in Afghanistan. "Money is drying up," Colonel John Spiszer, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, along the border, saind on June 23. Over the past year the going prices for guns and ammo "have almost doubled," he noted. "That's a great sign." Such pressure on safe havens in Pakistan will reduce hit-and-run attacks across the border."

Of course, Spiszer's claim is from June 23, as pointed out in the text. I would be interested to see trends since then, and I'll try to. It is interesting that the U.S. military seems to have a consistent line on this issue (by the end of June).

As to the price of guns in Afghanistan - that is surely important, but weapons can also be bought elsewhere. The gun pipeline from the north of Afghanistan is just one source. Prices elsewhere, including the FATA, with its own weapons industry, would be interesting as well (obviously they should be interlinked to a degree).

Jackie Chan, malfunctioning thermostats, and the contemporary security environment

Here is one of the best fight scenes from the Jackie Chan movie "First Strike." Skip the first twenty seconds to get to the good part. There is a reason why I am bringing it up, of course. A professional one.

The reason is that I long since wanted to do a review of Joshua Cooper Ramo's book "The age of the unthinkable: Why the world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it." And it is not really the sort of book that easily lends itself to have a conventional review written about it, one that would do it justice. Maybe Jackie Chan can help us instead - I hope you will agree later on.

There have been some conventional reviews written about this book, such as this one, by Gary Rosen, in the New York Review of Books, or this briefer one in The New Yorker. Recurring elements in these critical reviews are that Ramo exaggerates the potential for change today; that he overestimates how much states matter less in and of themselves in world politics today; and that his book represents no real novelty in doing all this.

There is some validity to the points behind these criticisms. From James Rosenau's Turbulence in World Politics to John Robb's Brave New War numerous works have attempted to update our conceptual thinking based on new realities, on different levels of analysis, all reflecting a need to question our fundamental underlying assumptions of everything. Rosenau's book is basic reading for IR scholars - John Robb's book is more accessible to a wider audience, albeit mostly the truly innovative and open-minded can really appreciate its progressivity. So indeed, Ramo's book is not the first on the shelf warning us of the significance of accelerating change.

Here lies something that needs to be highlighted regarding why the above mentioned criticisms about Ramo's book are misplaced: it is important to define to whom and for what reason this book was written. It is accessible to a general readership, and while it talks about the need for a new grand strategy, it is not really written to be read as one. It is more a "mirror for princes" of sorts, but prince here is not restricted to heads of state and government (and the bureacracies behind them). You are all princes of your lives, or could be. Ramo's is a book that emphasises how change and innovativity has to be embraced by everyone. Thus it brings together the genres of mirrors-for-princes and personal guides to success. This is a very logical mashup, you could say. And indeed, that is what makes it relevant.

The general message of the book is somehting akin to that there is no choice but to empower and become empowered (or else). Of course this is not to say that doing that is possible in all cases. Or that it would be clear what exactly this should mean in given cases. But "change" is something even individuals alone can increasingly contribute to, and the more accurately they all perceive the extent to which this is happening, the greater their potential is to successfully contribute to, and harness, this process.

The book is not really looking to tell the exact how. It would be contrary to its essence. It looks to give the reader a peculiar perspective on, as opposed to a panorama of, the world today. This is its essence in my view.

Of course a critic may wonder, seeing all the metaphors and analogies from the world of physics and other disciplines enter Ramo's discourse, about exactly how one should operationalise these ideas. Do I see a sandpile there, that I could expect to collapse into multiple piles at any moment? Do I see a rigid policy there which functions like a bad thermostat and needs to be fully reconceptualised? Is it resilience if we can continue to pour dollars into a flawed-looking policy in the long run? Should a wish to empower include transfers of knowledge in all fields and to all possible recipients? Creative mashups are cool, but what exactly should be mixed to create some new common good? And so on.

The book's point is that one should ponder these questions, and wonder, not more. It does not look to give a recipe for concrete situations. Rather it infects you, if you are receptive to that, with a whole bunch of thought-provoking concepts.

For security policy, the implications of its thinking are profound - even while they are not new to many of those involved in the analysis or the scholarship of security issues. "Threats," as much as they can be objectively identified and described, and as much as intersubjectively they are defined at all, can not really be terminated.

That is just why that fight scene with Jackie Chan was brought up at the beginning of this post. Security policy has to redefine itself, as well as every object it can possibly relate to, all the time. It has to deal with trade-offs. Even accept being hit in certain cases for other options may be worse, with different time-horizons in mind. And so on. Jackie Chan perfectly illustrates this to us in the excellent fight scene above.

This is relevant even with regards to the relation between one's wider interests and Afghanistan policy - be it, say, the US' policy towards Afghanistan (and its relation to US grand strategy).

Think in terms of decades. There goes a punch at the Soviet Union, a punch at Russia, a punch at Iran, a punch at Islamist extremists etc. Providing training, selling weapons, or deploying one's own troops, while more complex effects might be achieved by other means (by timely, well-placed and well-spent aid, for example, or smarter diplomacy; or just one less punch maybe in one direction, or a smarter punch in another...). Elements within the U.S. government (State, CIA, White House staff, FBI, DEA, Pentagon) undermining each other's efforts from time to time (just read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars to see how), behaving too much like bad thermostats, unable to adapt to the requirements of teamplay which constantly evolve with the change of circumstances. Trade-offs needed, to be made all time, for example in order to be able to resupply operations in Afghanistan - our proverbial Jackie Chan needs to leave his back vulnerable to currently only-just friendly by-standers to be able to deliver punches to, and defend from, the Taliban et al. Meanwhile, he cannot really afford to fully retreat from this fight. But there is uncertainty over whether so many punches could really be delivered, as it would take to win. And what else could do besides punches? How to make the other Jackie Chans around give up on some of their goals, help with some of our Jackie Chan's goals, while at the same time achieving meaningful and lasting success where one is fighting right now? And what would make one resilient in general, when one regularly has to face situations such as this one? What is it that needs to be defended in our lives (and in our ways), and what is it that needs to be changed or abandoned?

I will finish this post with these questions. I wanted to present Ramo's book here, and it is more a set of interesting questions than ready-made answers to a herd of sheep. So it is more fitting to finish its review in this way. Of course, this blog is very much involved in discussing the sort of questions listed above, on a regular basis. And I will come back to some of Ramo's concepts here later on.

Key indicators - July 7, 2009

The Ministry is once again in trouble, it has so much work to process. Hence it will just continue delivering the new feature at this blog: pointing out key indicators here and there. For us here at the Ministry, four were particularly newsworthy in the daily press in the last two days.

1. An indicator of amazing ignorance

Some at the Washington Post still don't know better than to call one Afghan presidential candidate, Ramazan Bashardost, an "eccentric crusader."

2. An indicator of cross-border activity

Saving face for WaPo, and for embedded reporting in general, Greg Jaffe filed a decent report from the Afghan-Pakistani border, worth reading all the way. A slight problem is that the thing that really caught my attention is not something he picked up in person, but something he likely heard at some briefing. How much may this be true?

"U.S. commanders have been able to slow the flow of Taliban fighters across the 90-mile stretch of border by winning over Afghans who live in the Konar River valley, which the insurgents must traverse as they move deeper into Afghanistan."

3. An indicator of the polio situation

Back in October 2007 (and before that) we wrote about the polio eradication campaign in Afghanistan - the eradication campaign this Ministry is ready to wholeheartedly support. It is important. Polio is one of the threats that would come to one's door if one abandoned Afghanistan. It is a threat that made Pakistani health ministers in the past realise that "when it comes to the threat of polio, Afghanistan and Pakistan are one country" (which is a nice beginning towards realising many other things relevant from Pakistan's perspective). Here's the heads-up from IRIN News.

"Only 13 percent of children in the southern provinces routinely received oral poliovirus vaccine compared to 47 percent in the southeast, 66 percent in the east and 69 percent in central areas, according to a WHO weekly epidemiological record in March 2009.

About 200,000 children miss out on polio drops every time the vaccinators conduct a nationwide immunization drive, it said. “Three things impede polio immunization in Helmand Province: First the insecurity, second a lack of public awareness, and very low payments to vaccinators,” said Jan Agha, a local health worker.

“The Taliban often oppose vaccinations. They threaten and beat vaccinators and break their vaccination kits… so people don’t want to risk their lives for 150 Afghanis [US$3] a day,” said a vaccinator in Kandahar Province who declined to be named.

Also, the return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan and unregulated cross border movements between the two countries have contributed to the movement of the poliovirus, health officials say. "

4. Indicator of increasing sophistication in Taliban info-ops

An information operation clearly aimed at the Western press and Western audiences. Impressive, in a way.

"Operation Foladi Jal, Pashtu for "iron net", would teach the Marines "a lesson". Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP by telephone from an unknown location."

"In response to Operation Khanjar by the invading forces, we have launched Operation Foladi Jal," Ahmadi said."

"Their Khanjar will get stuck in our Foladi Jal," the rebel spokesman said." "

So much for today. The Ministry is sorry we cannot post something more substantial for now. We have to get back to messing with paperwork.

Key indicators pt. II.

This is another thing to watch out for, as I warned in last November. Islamist charities preaching to people lining up for their daily rations in the Pakistani IDP camps.

"Mr. Hassan was busy checking new temporary schools, health clinics and four ambulances on 24-hour service that Al Khidmat had set up.

Every day, he said, he personally supervised the distribution of food at three different places — sometimes at a home, sometimes in a camp. So far, he said, he had covered 400 of 450 villages near the city of Swabi. Always, he said, before the food is distributed, he delivers his exhortation to jihad.

By contrast, although a substantial amount of American aid is getting through, it is not branded as American, and Pakistani authorities have insisted that it be delivered in a “subtle” manner, General Ahmad said."

As to how the offensive in Malakand was perceived, one has to deflate the value of "Pakistan realised this, Pakistan realised that" narratives a little. See this: "There were many Taliban in the displaced camps, and they believed the Pakistani military was fighting against them in Swat on orders from Washington." And see this: “I said they couldn’t fly in Chinooks, no way,” General Ahmad said, referring to American military helicopters. The United States, he said, was seen as “part of the problem.”