Afghan refugee returns

Contrary to my earlier view of the prospects of posting more today, I have to return here with this: ICG's latest report on Afghanistan, dated August 31, is now out, and it is about a subject I long since wanted to read something more comprehensive of. Refugee returns. The state of affairs in Iran and Pakistan. And so on. While the report mostly reveals to me how uncertain our knowledge still is about even the basic numbers, like regarding how many people still remain in the two main refugee host countries Iran and Pakistan, and how many keep crossing there and back in the meantime, I still recommend it, as it is as good as it gets, currently.

An important trend, discussed in the report, that I would highlight here, is:

"The past seven years of refugee return, internal displacement and secondary migration have caused rapid urbanisation. Although cities have always attracted labour migrants from the countryside, ongoing conflict has replaced a largely seasonal and male presence with longer term settlement of entire families searching for security in towns and cities."

And so did Kabul grow from a city of approximately 1.5 million to 4.5 million, in about seven years...

Meanwhile, of course, in the rural areas, too, refugee returns can very much become an issue from the point of view of local stability and conflict, as, for example, this is observable in the case of Pasthuns willing to return to northern provinces, such as Takhar, for example. Or in Baghlan, where I have met such people myself, as IDPs.

Altogether, the issue is interesting from an analytical point of view, because it can be looked at in so many ways. Returnees can be motors of economic growth, motors of organised crime, carriers of conflict, sources of conflict, or, say, possible recruits for an insurgency. They hold potential in so many ways... In a country that would, ideally, clearly need them.

But the current conditions make everything much more complicated, in case anyone failed to notice. As the report notes, Afghans, be they Pashtun, Hazara or others, organise into permanent transnational solidarity networks (btw, here's a lengthy but excellent paper about those) in growing numbers - as the temporary becomes permanent in their region; London, Dubai, Peshawar, Quetta and other such places being major geographical hubs, out of many, for these networks...

Else then.

The ICG report reminded me of something, as it described in detail how Iran and Pakistan turn on the refugees from time to time, and how for example Iranian authorities push Afghans out of the country. While it is a concern what the two aforementioned countries do, one should also keep in mind that even with far smaller numbers of migrants, countries like Greece and others do very similar things. See the links below:

NYT's article about young Afghan refugees in Europe.

And a must-see slideshow accompanying it.

The NYT article even provides a hyperlink to this Human Rights Watch report about the truly bad treatment of Afghan and other refugees in Greece. Forcing refugees to cross the river Evros at night, back to Turkey? Aren't there mines even, along that border between NATO allies Greece and Turkey? (Yes, there are. They killed about 31 people since 1999, up to October 2003.)

I would naively point out that it can't be so bad here in Europe that such an approach would really be necessary in my view... still even the NYT article says, at one point:

"The boys pose a challenge for European countries, many of which have sent troops to fight in Afghanistan but whose publics question the rationale for the war. Though each country has an obligation under national and international law to provide for them, the cost of doing so is yet another problem for a continent already grappling with tens of thousands of migrants."

Can't imagine what it must be like in Pakistan and Iran... Though I also seem to remember that Europe's economy kind of needs the influx of these people.

Guns, as culture

I'm afraid I won't be able to write much today, so, to make this look good, at least I am again changing the header image. What you can see up there now is a Kalashnikov assault rifle, painted on the inside wall of a house somewhere in the Deh Rafshan area of Uruzgan - the photo was taken during a search operation there by Dutch, Afghan and other troops, and it is from two years ago (it's not my photo of course, and I'd link to the original if I could find the source). What strikes me as odd about it is how an actually missing Kalashnikov, in a country where there is no absence of weapons, is made up for by a painting on the wall, at a point where one over here in Majaristan would want to have some nice decoration, say a still life or a landscape painting. I upload a detail of the original photo here as well, so once I change the header again, and somebody then reads this post, it won't be a clueless puzzle what I was writing of here.

Cracking (on with) the Helmand almond

Here's some interesting reading about Helmand today, and my brief notes regarding the things I would highlight.

First off I shall link to Michael Yon's dispatch from Sangin, Helmand - a post that is in general very informative about British operations there. Nothing too unfamiliar brought up there - but more discussion of the enormous challenge southern Afghanistan's socio-spatial evolution holds for anyone looking to centralise social control there, with all the walls of fortress-like compounds around ("if the people spent as much time building roads as they do building walls, this place would have more roads than California," Yon notes at one point); and more discussion of the IED threat. Regarding the latter, here is an excerpt revealing the extent of the collateral damage caused by the insurgents.

"Word came that a local person was pulling parts from one of the vehicles that were dragged off Pharmacy Road. He encountered a Taliban booby-trap and he was killed. EOD had not cleared the vehicles of booby-traps; the two vehicles had merely been pulled off the road. Next day another local was killed on a parallel road that he thought the British had cleared. It had not been cleared. The Taliban blows up a lot of local people in Sangin."

Secondly then, I want to refer to Stephen Grey's good overview of the situation in Helmand, from Prospect magazine, which can also be read as an update to Grey's excellent book about Operation Snakebite (which I have mentioned in a post before). Some of his conclusions are very-well formulated, and I want to include them here.

"A lesson of Helmand that seems to have gone unlearned is that it is often better to do less than to risk interventions that stir up, rather than snuff out, conflict. In great swathes of the country Nato and the Afghan government may just have to accept an accommodation with hostile forces: not a truce or a climbdown but a recognition that western intervention has limited value. Not all enemies can be dealt with at once. If a notoriously bad man runs a village, valley or region but poses a limited threat to anyone outside, then leave him be, for now at least. Forget dreams of imposing “governance” on the entire nation."

This is relevant, for example, with regards to evaluating what the elections meant in Afghanistan in general. Being surprised about the little details of how they went amounts to an admission of being ignorant about Afghanistan. (Which is not to say "Afghans" don't know any better. Of course they do. The question here is what is realistically possible.)

Another thing I would remark, and to a degree this is debating what Grey says: he contradicts himself in the above passage, as earlier on he himself claimed that one has to take a more consistently confrontative stance on the issue of the drugs trade (i.e. the key agro-industrial sector of the local economy). To be less certain about these things, just look at what the south of Afghanistan looks like since people like Jan Mohammed Khan, Gul Agha Shirzai, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada and Haji Bashir Noorzai were either removed from earlier positions, or, like Bashir, removed from the picture altogether. JMK, GAS, SMA - they all alienated a lot of people with their nepotism, for sure. And as to HBN, he was very likely playing a double game of dealing both with the Pentagon and mullah Omar. Yet weakening their influence in the south apparently didn't bring great benefits. Of course it is not too easy to judge the exact impact of their departure. For that, one would need to be able to know counterfactuals as well. Like, what if the old Karzai-nurtured, post-2001 southern elite would have remained untouched and ISAF's Stage-3 expansion would not have occurred. If U.S. counterterrorist operations would have been more careful. If Pakistan's policy would have been/would be different. If the Kashmiri earthquake would not have happened in 2005, opening up a critical gap in Waziristan. Or if Iraq would not have ceased to be such a permissive area of operations for al-Qaida. And so on. Let it be the point that there are difficult questions to answer, and one cannot totally break free of moral considerations (some misplaced, some important) in the name of pragmatism and policy efficiency. And probably there wouldn't have been a perfect solution in any case, anyway.

For now, this one of Grey's conclusions is very important to keep in mind:

"...all of these dreamed-of reinforcements would never be enough to garrison all the areas of rebellion, never mind the whole country. Unlike in Iraq, we have reinforced before we know how to win."

Building up a robust albeit still insufficient force against all that looks like enemy in Afghanistan, without the resources to commit to real population-centric counterinsurgency, and without the means to address what is going on across the border in Pakistan really effectively, the perverse arithmetics dynamic appears to apply.

Grey, for his part, refers to sources within British intelligence who estimate that "after three years of battles, which the Taliban were always said to lose, British intelligence estimated that the number of active Taliban fighters had actually doubled in the province." The new COMISAF COIN guidelines try to address this as well - rather inappropriately (IMO) identifying family ties as about the key and only reason why this dynamic can be observed, apparently believing that one dead Afghan insurgent only makes more because Afghans are like these revenge-making machines in its view.

On the other hand, one should not develop learned helplessness. Pick battles more carefully and see if the math works against you to the same extent. Or if it does, at all. That's what Grey suggests in the end as well.

As to strategy, I will again have up here a post with some truly basic remarks about teh strategy, in a couple of days. No shit, I will.

A bunch of links: northern Afghanistan and Kenya/Somalia

Want to read something fresh and interesting out of northern Afghanistan? Here is an interesting article from the Guardian (h/t to Joshua Foust). And another one, also from Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, that came out on the same day. Both are must-reads in my view. Things I would note, quickly listed here, are "seven Taliban checkpoints" west of Kunduz, not far from the city, parallel ethnic chains of command, apparently, for Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Turkmen under the rather well-organised local Taliban Committee, daring talk of taking the jihad beyond the Amu Darya when that will become possible, and the already non-surprising news of the recent influx of Uzbek fighters in the north (the article assumes they came from the south of Afghanistan, but this is about the only detail I would have doubts about - the wording, that they were supposedly "fleeing" fighting in the south, doesn't feel accurate). Also interesting is the look at the arms trade through the example of a trader based in Ishkashim, Badakhshan - China is named as a key source of weapons, and Tajiks as buyers on occasions, rather than clearly re-sellers as you could assume. And Baghlan province seems to be a logistically important handover point for shipments delivered to the Taliban, to the south of Afghanistan, which I also found significant. In general, the two articles offer a glimpse at the process of how conditions overall deteriorate in the north. Local authorities' corruption plays into it, a lack of really promising economic opportunities leaves the business and the conduct of war as one of few such opportunities, drugs cross the area, the organisers of the insurgency are poised to establish more of a foothold in these areas etc. A dangerous constellation...

Talking about how populations can get sucked into spreading armed activities, here is a bunch of links now on something else: the process of radicalisation and how it supplies fighters to al-Shabaab's fight in Somalia. CSM offers two great, more or less recent, pieces on the subject, by Heba Aly. One is a look at the Somali enclave of Eastleigh in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, and notorious recruiting places such as the Sixth Street mosque there. The other is the story of a young Kenyan Somali man from the ethnically mixed, "multicultural" you could say, Kenyan town of Isiolo, whose long radicalisation saw him frequent the Sixth Street mosque in Eastleigh as well, for a while. He is dead by now, fallen in fighting somewhere in Somalia. Just like Americans Jamal Bana and Shirwa Ahmed, who travelled, joining others like them, to Somalia to fight with al-Shabaab there, from Minneapolis. Meanwhile, al-Shabaab is also known to recruit fighters in refugee camps where a lot of Somalis live in Kenya, such as the Dadaab camp (one of the world's largest refugee camps).

All sorts of people, joining the same cause for all sorts of reasons. Some seem like the al-gaida that Nushin Arbabzadah wrote of the other day, some follow a more "textbook" path, arriving at joining what they hold to be righteous jihad through first turning inwards, and carrying out tabligh, and some seem relatively well-off but out-of-place and seem to want to cope with awkward lives through radical steps they might not entirely understand at the time they take them. Diverse as they are, they all end up in the same places - where any recruit from the West, defensively ridiculed as an Islamic-Fight-Club-enthusiast-cum-jihobbyist as he may be there, is caught up with all the al-gaida, and all the accidental guerrillas of David Kilcullen, and all the actually deeply committed jihadists such as the guy from Isiolo, whose story CSM recounted in that article mentioned above - and with others yet. And the fighting that molds them together, is then generously funded by wealthy donors and far-reaching transnational networks.

Teh Ministry's remarks on Afghanistan strategy

I recently saw this phrase turn up for the thousandth time in a comment thread about Afghanistan strategy.

"If they (AQ et al.) all now move to Somalia, what interest would the US have in Afghanistan?"

So I thought maybe I should react to it.

If the Afghanistan/Pakistan theatre, ceteris paribus, suddenly empties of al-Qaida, just because AQ, undefeated, really-really wants to puzzle everyone by migrating to Somalia, for no apparent reason and in order to conform to this abstract reasoning... Ok, there's no point in finishing this paragraph, right?

What if AQ are defeated? Well... if AQ are defeated, that's quite good, right?

And what if AQ, at a point near defeat, goes to Somalia? Really-really why could it be a problem for them? They just need to buy airplane tickets, pack the Kalashnikovs and some ammo in a briefcase, and before moving, put up a post at jihadi website for future wannabe recruits that they all are now supposed to be fighting infidels in the Horn of Africa... Ok, so let's imagine they do this. They quit the Afghanistan/Pakistan theatre for Somalia, in the spirit of a dynamic transnational corporation, calculating where they get the highest returns on jihad... Well, an interest then would be to avoid their coming back, right? You don't want to play whack-a-mole forever, do you? And for that you would need some degree of stability and reliable partners ruling Afghanistan, right? Will you get that in that country without a major investment in state-building?

On the other hand, if AQ get what they need in Afghanistan, a really safe haven, unlike the Pakistani areas where they can be sold out at times, or hunted by drones... well, then it will be up to them to set a strategy...

And if they (and their sponsors) decide to invest more in the jihad in Somalia, while their jihad is continuing in Afghanistan and Pakistan...? Based on historical experience where is it more likely that they will be sheltered in case they plot and execute transnational terror attacks? In Taliban-ruled Kandahar or in al-Shabaab/Hisb-ul-Islam (SOM)-ruled Mogadishu? Where would it be more important then to confront them? I am not against watching the Somali scene very carefully if such investment happens there. Or for what the impact of an Arab-sponsored opposition win there would hold for Western interests - to see if AQ may at some point seem to have more potential there. But for now, Afghanistan has much more potential from AQ's perspective. In fact, there are more reasons why, not just "historical experience." Afghanistan is landlocked so for US troops to initiate operations there is just a touch more complicated, you see, to name but one of them.

Alright, take this on the day of those Afghan elections which might just "save Afghanistan" according to the Telegraph... meh, of course not from AQ or South-Asian geopolitics, too bad.

The cash-dispensing machine and the importance of structure for dummies

This article from Spiegel is more than a week old, but still it's quite interesting. Residents of a Namibian village, Otjivero, are being offered a basic monthly income scheme (a so-called Basic Income Grant, i.e. a small BIG payment) by a coalition of mostly German NGOs. No strings attached, supposedly. And, surprise, surprise, it turns out to work quite well for now. The article is obligatory reading for those who staunchly refuse to take into account structural variables and interlinkages when it comes to pushing for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan. You really can't surgically remove money-making economic activities from local economies, especially not in resource-scarce environments, and the article might help "discover" this.

Prosperity is something like a miracle, though not a miracle entirely of course. Richard Holbrooke and others who say that the "Supreme Court test" is good enough to know if we arrive there, are at least partly right, contrary to what Stephen Walt was arguing the other day. Progress is certainly measurable - mostly in a flexible way, and not with pre-set indicators. There are no clear tipping points and critical impulses in achieving prosperity as a result of it. People's mindset slowly transforms as their opportunity structure transforms as well. And while all that's wrong will not disappear even in the best of possible worlds, people will start making decisions that serve a collective kind of good much more often.

If people get a basic income, such as residents of the aforementioned Namibian village do, and they have money to spend, they will make all sorts of economic activities viable with that money, for each other, sustaining each other. Synergies are generated. The more money there is, and the less people are deprived of disposable income, the better. I loved how the suddenly better-looking prospects even injected a dose of gouvernementalité in villagers, as some of them formed a committee for giving financial advice to the others, and arranged it that the shebeens, the local tin-shack bars not be open during the day on paydays.

Having said that, of course I don't think that this Namibian experiment is free of controversy. Not at all. Just look at what exactly happened here. The local star bishop came to the village one day to announce the arrival of a cash-dispensing machine (made in the West)... Read more from the BBC here, and see how people feel less dependent as a result of the cash handouts, which in a way is perfectly understandable, and yet ironic as well, if looked at from another angle...

Where is Steve Coll?

I mentioned Steve Coll in a recent post, and so I thought I should check out what he is doing right now. Well... it was worth the effort. He is reporting from Nigeria... on the "Nigerian Taliban," the Boko Haram movement. For now, the latter seem to have been subjected to a mini-Hama sort of outcome (in a town called Maiduguri). This chapter of Nigerian history was, again, bloody and violent, as others before, in other words.

Indication of cross-border movement after the Malakand battles

Back in May I asked where the militants, who were chased out from the Swat valley and the rest of Malakand, would go eventually. Then on July 21 I noted how the US military seemed to have developed a consistent line of reasoning - that the fighting on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line was seen as diverting key supplies of the insurgency in Afghanistan - already by the end of June. I found this strange (premature and yet oddly consistent; almost as though it would have been a diplomatic gesture towards the Pakistani side), and I promised that I would keep an eye out on this; now in this post I am mentioning something closely connected (contradicting the U.S. military's line).

First we need to pick up another thread. Back towards the end of June, Joshua Foust was already discussing an interesting possibility, citing an e-mail he received from someone on the ground (in Mazar-i-Sharif I presume). I will quote the contents of the letter which he excerpted in his post.

"In the Uzbek areas of northern Afghanistan, we’ve been hearing the IMU and Tahir Yuldash invoked more and more often over the past year. The IMU name has shown up on night letters, and local government figures (initially dismissive) are now publicly claiming that Yuldash is behind the recent escalation of insurgent activity in Jawzjan province — especially in southwestern Darzab district and Qush Tepa district, where anti-government forces carried out a dramatically successful assassination of the district governor, police chief, and head of intelligence back in March."

This may of course be just about rebranding, as Joshua Foust noted: an armed group, or armed groups, affiliated earlier on with the Taliban, now claiming to be something else entirely. But Abbas Daiyar mentions another possibility as well. And this is where all this becomes relevant to discussing the aftermath, and the second-order consequences, of the Pakistani military operations earlier in the year.

"According to the Afghan Ministry of Defense, these men have moved to the northern parts of Afghanistan after the recent military operation by the Pakistani Army. Spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, General Zahir Azimi, gave a press conference on July 22, 2009 with the spokesman of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The General pointed out that the reason behind the increasing militant attack in Kunduz is because of the agreement in Moscow allowing US military supplies through Russian territory across Northern Afghanistan. He confirmed that the arrival of Tahir Yaldosh's men in the north have disrupted the electoral process. Prior to this operation, the Ministry of Defense had confirmed the arrest of some foreign nationals from Kunduz."

This is interesting. I failed to notice news of this press conference on July 22. Even if one has to be automatically a little sceptical about any news discussing Uzbeks in Afghanistan, indications of some kind of IMU presence are now regularly coming in. Something that is interesting to ask is how Uzbeks, say, from Uzbekistan, living for years in places like Waziristan, then making some trouble in Malakand, would then make a decision to go and make trouble in Jowzjan, Sar-i-Pul, Kunduz etc.? I mean, you can't just set out for there one day, when the going gets tough in your earlier place of residence, can you?

Update (17:45): interesting to see this post by Joshua Foust, too. Mentions three predominantly Tajik districts in Kapisa province (Kohistan, Mahmud Raqi and Kohband), recently inundated with apparently well-organised insurgent teams, busy shipping into and across the area arms and explosives - teams made up mostly of recruits from Pakistan if the source of the information is correct.

Quote of the day for August 12, 2009

From the Taliban's position on Sarkozy's position on some of France's Muslims' position on the proper female dress code:

"The French Coastal Areas Represent "The Kind of Freedom and Character Sarkozy Wants for Muslim Women"

"Mr. Sarkozy and supporters of his views want to drag Muslim women to the miserable level of Western women, who have lost both their decency and character by exposing their bodies to nakedness. They have become a showpiece for fornicators, especially during their youth. These licentious men hang naked photos of women everywhere, even on valueless items like shampoo, toothpaste, etc. If one happens to see the coastal areas of France, then one very easily reaches the conclusion of the kind of freedom and character Sarkozy wants for Muslim women.

"In France, London, and other European countries, women are forced to turn to pornography. Thousands of women are smuggled from Russia and the Caucasus; young girls are surreptitiously brought to pander to the sexual desires of unscrupulous lascivious persons. The question is why they do not make any effort to save these miserable women from this humiliating life and to protect their characters. But Mr. Sarkozy and some of his Western supporters, who are born and raised in a family environment where they are attached to such a way of life, are now bent on jeopardizing the Muslim women personally."

Source: Taliban Statement on Sarkozy's Islamic Veil Comments: 'Anti-Islamic' Sarkozy 'Wants to Arrogantly Force Muslim Women to Lose Their Identity by Mingling in the Lascivious Western Culture' (published yesterday, on August 11 @ MEMRI; originally from July 9, according to the first footnote).

Some (relatively) deeper thoughts first:

1) How on Earth do the Taliban get to connect to the "coastal areas of France" so strongly? "If one happens to see the coastal areas of France" is a rather personal way of putting it... It's not like saying "hey, we checked out Google images for ideas regarding the proper hijab, in this awful internet café in Quetta the other day, and what we found there was beyond anything we could ever imagine..." Is the cited reference just indication of a connection through digital space; proto-Salafism in a computer-mediated environment (to link to an interesting article just per chance)? Or has somebody from the Taliban's ranks been there (somewhere) and seen that (something)? Or was that someone someone from the Taliban at all? How much does the statement itself come from the Taliban proper? Has an Arab friend of the Taliban tried to give an edge to a Taliban media operation targeted at the Middle Eastern and the French public in this way, maybe?

2) In this conflict over interpretations of how one should properly "be in the world," like it or not, women have become subjects and objects of bargaining. Multi-dimensional globalisation has connected us to such a degree that (this will sound dreadful, I know, but it is an element of reality that I am trying to describe...) standards of femininity are being negotiated symbolically and at times violently. Incompatible standards (over other issues as well, of course) are in fact driving conflict themselves, to some extent. Ok, I know I noticed nothing new, but this "coastal areas of France" thing has really brought this home to me.

To chill out a little, and forget about the world of conflict in the name of world peace, here is a great picture from the coastal areas of France.

Mont-Saint-Michel

UAVs and warfare from Nevada

For some cheap blogging, I will embed (if I can) three fresh videos from CNN here. Nic Robertson's special report on remote warfare. It is not very deep and it is not very informative. But it does bring home how the war one wages in front of a computer screen in Nevada can never be the real thing (even if one can see things in its course that will haunt one for long afterwards). Sorry, the operators may have the best intentions, but even so I just don't buy it that one will give such thought to civilian casualties in their situation, as a soldier who might have to go back to the village concerned the next day might...

Oh, by the way, before you start watching (if you do), I would just briefly note that CNN is still totally not serious about Afghanistan. If they would be, they would have been aware of how much it was the pre-2001 quasi-hunt for Ossama bin Laden that got the whole UAV development to take off. (Well-documented in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, if you are looking for more reading on this.)

Anyway. Here it is, at the indicated URL, and embedded below.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Cracking the tough almond, Helmand

Illustration (Wikipedia Commons): almond, uncracked (left) and cracked (right)

The title serves one very basic function: to move away from any play on words referring to hell, in connection with Helmand. This is the first step towards moving away from a narrative that I do see spreading myself as well: that the additional U.S. troops moving in to Helmand are supposedly there to take over from the non-Americans (in general) who proved to be incapable of handling the situation and are not really good at either COIN or even at shooting (back) at the enemy. That is a fundamental misconception, and if you wish to study the British counterinsurgency effort thus far, you should not try to work around Theo Farrell and Stuart Gordon's COIN Machine: The British military in Afghanistan. The link I am providing does not take you to the text proper: that can only be accessed (for credits) if you are registered with RUSI as a user.

COIN Machine is concise and comprehensive reading. Theo Farrell needs not being introduced to those familiar with Strategic and Security Studies, while Stuart Gordon, Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, was one of the authors of the Helmand Road Map (the current British strategy in the province).

Firstly, the authors argue the obvious: that U.S. soldiers are not moving into Taliban country, but into a province where British forces have already done what their resources permitted them. They also argue that British troops have done so with increasing efficiency as they gradually re-learned some of the institutionally lost knowledge about counterinsurgency; as forces came to be better equipped; as a strategic approach was at last developed in the place of the initial rather non-strategic one; and as whole-of-government cooperation, especially between the MoD and DFID, improved. This process is extensively detailed in the paper. Go get it.

I have two basic, critical comments to make regarding the following issues:

- "Eighteen months of strategic drift" (as the authors themselves put it), the almost two years while the British government tried to maintain that peace-keeping was the required task in Helmand, was not a point from which improvements to strategy can really be identified - with, let me remind you, then defence secretary John Reid publicly hoping for "no shot" being fired by British troops during their peace-support vacation in southern Afghanistan, after which almost 4 million bullets were (unsurprisingly) fired by British troops in the period between August 2006 and September 2007 alone. Such flawed, wishful thinking, staunchly maintained in the face of reality, was a point from which fundamental corrections needed to be made, for progress in this dimension to begin at all. It is with that in mind that the latter should be measured.

Another passage which I simply do not like is the one referring to Pashtun xenophobia. Such remarks should not find their way into a quality paper such as this one, and yet this occurs twice. Xenophobia is "fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign" (source of quotation). It is really not a bunch of embedded psychologists that Helmand needs for success, rather ways of addressing sources of any villagers' lack of trust in the contested (and also in the held) areas on the one hand, and addressing all cross-border sources of the troubles on the other (I know the latter takes us waaaaaaay beyond British strategy).

Otherwise, I have no more objections. And I would especially endorse the finishing passage of the paper, suggesting that the current troop levels are still only adequate rather for a counter-terrorist mission (a robust one, as opposed to the earlier light-footprint mission), than for real, actual counterinsurgency, one with any hope of a successful, textbook, clear/hold/build evolution.

"Shelling" in itself will not unshell the almond, I'm afraid.

Bigger picture

I will put up something more substantial later on, but for now here is an essay from John Horgan with a big-breath kind of take on mankind's history of war-making.

Four caveats to keep in mind, reading it, that I can think of right now:

- He fails to notice any international wars after 2003, but what about Georgia, 2008? I am not saying it was not an exceptional and complicated outcome in a complicated context, but still it is there to be reckoned with.

- He takes a restrictive view on warfare, so it is not just the more conventional "international" (interstate) wars between states that he does not notice. But also the many instances of subversive, indirect, deniable warfare between them - the "fourth generation warfare (4GW)," if you wish to use William Lind's vocabulary.

- Asserting SIPRI's claim that armed conflicts only produced 25,600 casualties last year ("Last year, 25,600 combatants and civilians were killed as a direct result of armed conflicts, according to the 2009 Yearbook of SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, to be released Aug. 17. Two thirds of these deaths took place in just three trouble spots: Sri Lanka (8,400), Afghanistan (4,600), and Iraq (4,000)") is not really fine like this. Being "killed in action" is not the only way war can harm one's life. Consult Virgil Hawkins on this issue; he offers a lot of data on the indirect casulaties of war who may die because of the generally dreadful conditions in war zones. (Oops, correction, it turns out I skipped one para in John Horgan's article at this point, but the SIPRI figures cited there for indirect victims are lower than several other of the available estimates.)

- Which brings us to my fourth point here: hunter-gatherer and other early societies did not lay mines, did not cause such intensive destruction to basic infrastructure with the kind of kinetic effects that they had at their disposal, and they did not exist at the level of vulnerable, fragile complexity that most modern societies do. So the indirect consequences of war are indeed very important. (Btw, mentioned societies did not have nuclear weapons, either, and those might give a whole new meaning to war and its potential implications as well.)

Still, as I noted at the end of a previous post, it can be interesting to take the 35,000-feet-high perspective at times.