The Spanish AO

In the spring of 2008 I was wondering why we don't hear more, either in the form of scholarly studies or in the form of news stories using information disseminated by official sources, about the evolution of the insurgencies in Spain's (and Italy's and others') area of operations (AOs or AoOs) in the west, from the Spanish and the Italians and all the others themselves. Not that I couldn't imagine a reason, or two, for this, on the part of officialdom in these countries. One always had to expect whatever good was to come from journalists venturing into these areas.

A number of well-written reports appeared in the press since then (see for an example the story of Ghulam Yahya; or this other story of Taliban part-timer "Abdullah Jan").

Here is now an outstanding report (Google-translated into this raw form from Spanish) from a journalist - the result of long, adventurous investigative work; a very impressive feat by El Pais correspondent David Beriain and his team. You can also check out the at times quite shocking documentary shot by them, with lots of interviews with Taliban commanders all over Western Afghanistan. Taliban, that are very different from mullah Omar's stereotypical Taliban, yet insurgents nonetheless... One of the most striking phrases I'd recollect now, having just read the text is this, from mullah Moshlé Sayed Shah: "When I came to Herat, I was not welcome. 85% of the people supported the government and foreigners."

(H/t to András)

I will embed the video below:

Back to Kunduz

It is good to see that the German edition of the Financial Times may now move beyond this ridiculous misrepresentation (by an external contributor) of what German-American debates were about in terms of tactics and operating procedures, as well as a downright absurd interpretation of "deterrence" as killing-a-lot-of-people-just-for-the-deterrence-of-it. The Kunduz airstrike was just bad, bad, bad, and they may be getting at this with the new bits of information that are constantly coming.

According to a recent report by FT (GER), relayed by Expatica, anonymous NATO officials (not my favourite source of information, of course) say that even a dreadful misunderstanding contributed to making the Kunduz airstrike happen ("Are you in contact?;" "Yes, visual contact"). To be exact, these anonymous friends of intra-alliance harmony are saying that Colonel Klein lied, but that seems to be beyond what necessarily has to be concluded at this point. I have some other questions, though, that have not yet been addressed - perhaps we will see clearer once that NATO report comes out.

The Economist on Guatemala - "no, not Africa..."

The Economist's August 29 issue recently made its way onto my desk, and on page 41 I found the following image with a remarkable caption below it - "no, not Africa, this is Guatemala." I'm putting it up here. What can one say? No, this is not a joke, this is from the Economist. And the on-line version is the same.

Quote of the day (September 14)

First it may seem awkward, but if you come to think of it, this analogy could be quite sophisticated. COMISAF McChrystal, speaking to the press in the Netherlands, on September 11:

"My position here is a little bit like a mechanic. We've got a situation with a vehicle and I've been asked to look at it and tell the owner what the situation is and what it will cost to make the vehicle run correctly and I will provide that. Now I understand that the vehicle owner then has to make a decision on what the car is worth, how much longer he intends to drive it. Whether he wants it to look good or just run."

What it could be suggesting is that short-term results may be lost in the long run if certain variables beyond Afghanistan remain unchanged. The end result may show no elasticity to resources spent and committed, while the latter do determine what kind of vehicle General McChrystal has a chance to drive...

Sophisticated criticism of this idea could be about examining whether more resources really automatically translate into gains in the short run, with consistent marginal returns on marginal units (of aid or troops or whatever) added. I am not taking a position as to that question here - I am merely looking at this droplet of a speech-act from the sea of the wider discourse as it is, assessing its internal logical structure.

Buzkashi

I lengthily tried to say something that was on the tip of my tongue two days ago, when I collected some thoughts and reflections about the way the West views the Afghan elections and the Afghan president's job (and Karzai's performance so far). But then Derek Flood, AfPax Insider, found exactly the words I wouldn't find myself: "While the international community is focused on the 'end' of the political process, it is actually the beginning of the political frenzy." And a nice, well-outlined analysis follows there, one that may perhaps get carried away in some places, but is still useful contrast to (and has for more link to reality than) the general U.S. assessment of the situation (≈ "Karzai's government was/is corrupt and now he cheated to remain in power; oh, we will have a totally illegitimate Afghan government now").

It also reflects on the ongoing scheming against former Northern Alliance, currently United Front figures, which seems truly astonishing given how they will be needed as a counterbalance for any successful negotiation with the Taliban in the end. MK Bhadrakumar takes the time to examine the killing of Dr Abdullah Laghmani, the deputy head of the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS), in light of this; also very much worth reading.

Meanwhile, as Baba Tim noted on September 2, Laghmani's killing is part of a series of assassinations against the NDS and the Afghan security establishment, by ghosts from the shadow. He says: "Dr. Abdullah and Mr. Imadudin join the Jani Khel district of Paktya Chief of Police and a senior CT (counter terrorism) commander in Khost as well as many more minor security officials in being “martyred” within the last six days." Earlier on, an NDS officer was kidnapped in Kunduz province, and he was found three days later, hanging from a tree, in Baghlan city. And yesterday there was a possibly connected, unsuccessful attack (although it did claim two by-standers' lives) on an NDS detention facility in Kandahar city.

So one ought to forget fairytale assumptions of Afghanistan in need of either just a good president instead of a bad one or having its current president pressured into becoming good enough.

The "magic" of making history

This is a good piece in the Middle East Report's Summer issue. If you haven't read Zahid Hussain's Frontline Pakistan yet, it provides a useful recap of what happened in Kashmir post-2001 and the transformation of the jihadi scene in Pakistan, as well as interesting analysis of more recent developments. It presents an image of selective counterinsurgency, dual track policies, in general a murky world... And just look - that's what I was thinking - the end result of all that's going on is what people perceive as either "awful, there is oppression and insurgency in Kashmir" or "oh, well, there's stone-throwing but it's really not so bad as it used to be." Elsewhere the result is: "oh, there's this insurgency in Afghanistan that is, like, hopeless to defeat, obviously, after all it's, like, the graveyard of empires, you know." Previously, I have quoted at this blog how Indian intelligence estimates say about 3,500 insurgents formed the really hard core of the insurgency in Kashmir at any stage. Well, if 3,500 are ready to do almost anything, and they have favourable terrain, external safe havens and local constituencies, they can make "history," which is to say that they can define narratives of it. Conflict is not gone in Kashmir, just because nowadays more stone-throwing is reported than heavy fighting... And of course Afghanistan is not simply a "graveyard of empires by default."

Meanwhile, I should also refer back to an earlier post of mine today. Perhaps the experts are right that there are only 200 hard core al-Qaida operatives nowadays in the Pakistani border areas. You could realise that 200 can do a lot if they have supporters. And also keep in mind the transformed jihadist scene in Pakistan, where quite sophisticated organisations' operatives have gone on the loose in cases, setting up collaborative projects with likeminded people.

Redirecting...

Now that you're here to read this blogpost, let me redirect you here (after reading my remarks of course...).

The link goes to Stephen Farrell's account of how he was kidnapped with his translator/fixer Sultan Munadi, near the site where two stolen fuel tankers had been bombed by an F-15 on the orders of a German officer the day before. And how they were taken from one hideout to another. And how he was rescued eventually.

There was much debate in the latter days in comment threads whether Farrell and his teammates were acting irresponsibly when they went to where they did, and whether one should be outraged that a British soldier had to die while rescuing them. Good arguments came in defence of them: the two I would highlight are firstly that journalists need to go out of the wire as well, to produce really informative stories, so being force-protection-centric works against their professional interests as much as it does for soldiers (and it would deprive us of much useful insight, of the sort that Farrell's account now provides us with). Secondly, as Kenneth Payne pointed out, journalists might generally be regarded as worthy of being saved in an armed conflict where the war of ideas is just as important as the war of the people firing bullets on the ground - they need to be saved even if somebody is angry with them. Now, as far as reality is concerned, of course it turns out to be more complex than how any of these abstract debates conceived of it. Apparently Stephen Farrel and Sultan Munadi could have driven away from the place where they ended up kidnapped, if only they would have had the keys to their car... And then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

(P.S. For me, Baghlan province is also of interest (as there is the Hungarian PRT). Baghlani Jadid is an area just as problematic as Char Dara. And, apparently, at one point the insurgents guarding their captives considered moving either over there, or to Baghlan town itself, or to somewhere else in the province.)

For the attention of strategists

I feel a little vindicated as far as my views regarding the counterterrorism part of "teh strategy" are concerned. Even though this article will be well-known to those who regularly do their reading on these affairs, I have to excerpt it briefly here. This is an assessment of al-Qaida's current state:

"Its activity is increasingly dispersed to "affiliates" or "franchises" in Yemen and North Africa, but the links of local or regional jihadi groups to the centre are tenuous; they enjoy little popular support and successes have been limited.
Lethal strikes by CIA drones – including two this week alone – have combined with the monitoring and disruption of electronic communications, suspicion and low morale to take their toll on al-Qaida's Pakistani "core", in the jargon of western intelligence agencies.
Interrogation documents seen by the Guardian show that European Muslim volunteers faced a chaotic reception, a low level of training, poor conditions and eventual disillusionment after arriving in Waziristan last year.
"Core" al-Qaida is now reduced to a senior leadership of six to eight men, including Bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to most informed estimates. Several other Egyptians, a Libyan and a Mauritanian occupy the other top positions. In all, there are perhaps 200 operatives who count."

And the people who were asked, like Brynjar Lia and Thomas Hegghammer, rank high on my list of sources whom I'm ready to trust.

As to the chaotic reception received in Waziristan by wannabe recruits, I would suggest this source (pp. 4-8., as I should have made clear in the first version of this post) for you to check out if you fancy some afternoon reading today, and haven't yet come across it.

Back to the Guardian article quoted above, it eventually turns its attention to possible future safe-havens of the global jihadist movement. The usual warning about Somalia is mentioned. Another about Nigeria. And north Africa and the the Sahel are highlighted in general. They sure matter. Yemen might receive a bit more mention than it does in the article, perhaps, with the recent attack against the Saudi interior minister (likely prepared at least partly there). But all in all, a crucial fight is still taking place in the Pakistani borderland.

Armed conflict and the media

I swear I posted this a couple of days ago not knowing about the kidnapping going on in Kunduz at the time. But this is what followed, as we now know. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

Pointing out structural deficiencies of the Afghan presidency: Advocacy for the devil?

I read a piece about the current post-election, and possibly pre-election situation over at the Centre for European Reform's blog, and I put together a comment which I then decided to post here. The essence is that one should be able to tell when it is the Afghan presidency, and not the Afghan president, that one is criticising, but even if this would be possible, it seems to me that not many are trying.

"The last parliamentary elections in 2005 were no democratic dream, either, with around 40 million ballots printed for around 10 million registered voters.

I must say I find it somewhat (but only somewhat) puzzling that there is so much talk of Karzai's faults in the West being the key challenge in Afghanistan. Anybody vaguely familiar with the circumstances can suspect that one can't do too much better as the current president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. For that one doesn't need to become the devil's advocate, right?

What do I mean? Most development aid is spent going around the Afghan government, not through it, and some of it doesn't really stay in the country even. The salaries of people, such as policemen, who can do the most harm to the government's reputation on the local level, are extremely low, which wouldn't help a corruption-free organisational culture anywhere, not just in a country submerged in violent internal conflicts since the second half of the 1970s as Afghanistan happens to be. Citizens of the state are killed in military operations accidentally here and there, and the government looks powerless in the face of that as well. An insurgency is raging in the countryside that receives its funding from extensive trans-national networks that have penetrated state security sectors in a number of countries in the region, against which the international community never committed the necessary resources - and now, years late, when the international community finally is contemplating doing so, it already feels the fatigue and is questioning whether it is worth even trying. There is also a booming drug trade that you could best conceptualise as a powerful river - one just can't swim against the stream all the time (provided one is really trying). Also, throughout much of his (first?) presidency, Karzai was pushed to act "against the warlords," i.e. important power-brokers who were never DDR'd really, post-2001, and whose support is necessary if one wants to win the next elections.

While the West (or the ECC, the Electoral Complaints Commission, for that matter) cannot afford to endorse ballot-stuffing and fraud in favour of anyone, it is worth constructively considering what one should realistically expect and publicly or privately demand from any Afghan president at any stage. Also taking into account that there are others, not just Western decision-makers, asking all sorts of things in public as well as in private, from him. It's a one-man-show of a polity by the looks of it only.

I'm really not speaking here personally in favour of Hamed Karzai. I have nothing against the other main candidates. Would op-eds speak more sympathetically about them in a year or so, in the West, without major results in weakening the insurgency? Which is something any Afghan president could only partly be responsible for. I'm not sure.

If we accept that some of the weaknesses of the current Afghan government were inherent at creation, this has to have some policy implications. I just can't say what those should be at this point, directly in the wake of these elections. But one would have to return to this topic later, once the dust settles. Which may very well be months away."

I would also add: with a second round of presidential elections, which would cost much treasure and perhaps even blood (of course this may not be a good enough argument against them), would we be aiming at some creative destruction? Engineering a bigger crisis? Is there somebody who thought this through really carefully all the way, with contingency plans for all sorts of possibilities? Besides plans for more big international conferences outside Afghanistan? Because the second round may not be too different from the first round as far as the elections are concerned, and the media would now (rightly) be more critical of all the details. Would a second-round comeback by Abdullah Abdullah and disgrace for Karzai, in relatively fairer competition, be the preferred outcome? But these are free elections, with no outcome set, that would be the point after all.

Update (September 12): MK Bhadrakumar is worth reading for his evaluation of how the U.S. approaches Karzai.

The northern front

I like it when some of the intel work's findings gradually leak out to the press after a while. McClatchy has a recent article about the re-emergence of the Taliban brand in the north. It claims:

"The Taliban infiltration into Kunduz and Baghlan began 18 months ago with the return from Pakistan of insurgent leaders who ran the provinces during the Taliban rule of Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan officials said. The establishment of the new NATO supply route may be a factor that drew Taliban from the south."

But this is wrong. 18 months ago was around March last year. The deterioration of the situation gradually started back in 2007. Insurgent cells began organising at least already then (but most likely before that). October 2007 saw three IED attacks against the Hungarian PRT in Baghlan province alone. And on October 29 a rocket attack on Pul-i-Khumri came shortly after two ministers left the Hungarian base there. So the next time someone has to write a briefer to someone, these details could be included as well.

In fact, this makes perfect sense. Everybody knew the Salaang Pass had to become an important logistical artery sooner or later, already back then, as the Pakistani bottleneck was problematic already then. And the brains behind the insurgency made careful preparations for this in advance. And by now there is enough of an infastructure established to have a lot of Uzbek fighters sent up there, to these areas.

A law against "idiots" interfering in world affairs by visiting failed states or their vicinity?

The French foreign ministry is proposing a new law (at this stage it is a projet de loi) part of which is about giving the French state the opportunity to make people who get into trouble in danger zones around the world liable for their actions - should this become law, they may have to pay back all or a part of the costs of their rescue, should the French state demand that (in the Bloomberg article they call this a "stupidity tax"). Rescuing citizens in trouble after travelling into dangerous areas despite proper warning against this is something the French had to do on three occasions off the coast of Somalia in the past two years. (H/t Axe; if you open the .pdf file above, go to the last page: that is the relevant section of the proposed legislation.)

It is an interesting idea, but I am not sure if it is actually workable, or if it is something that should really be put into effect.

A key part of the law's text is the part about there not being a legitimate or a professional reason for those concerned to have been there where they got into trouble.

Something that immediately jumps to one's mind is if journalists are covered here? Would people like Eric de Lavarène and Véronique de Viguerie, who interviewed insurgents from the Uzbeen valley posing in French military gear after a deadly ambush against French paratroopers in the area, causing much controversy with this, have been made liable for going there in case they would have needed to be rescued? To give a relevant example from France/Afghanistan... Looking at this from a more universal perspective, would people like David Rohde be liable for getting into trouble and incurring costs on the state that they are citizens of? For now, it seems to be clear enough that that is not the intention of the proposed legislation. However, it is exactly the case of Lavarène and Véronique de Viguerie which shows that public judgement of the necessity of what journalists are doing may vary. Bloomberg's Celestine Bohlen jumps into this debate by placing the two L.A.-based journalists, who were detained by Korean border guards on the North Korean-Chinese border earlier this year, in the category of reckless amateurs.

And then there are some conceptual issues. Why is it only the costs of the rescue that matter? If no ransom has to be paid as a result of the rescue operation, then perhaps that ought to be counted in as well. And the reason for the rescue operations is not only to save the given citizens who are in trouble, but for the state to avoid being blackmailed by kidnappers and send a deterring message for the future. So could one resign of the right to be rescued, in advance?

A brief comment about the Kunduz air strike

I am less interested in seeing whether McChrystal's rules were breached with the air strike in Omar Khel (the answer is: of course). I am more interested in discussing how much this air strike was a breach of common sense and at the same time not necessarily a breach of "humanity" (but before you could misinterpret me, let me remind you that the word humanity can be used without a positive normative content, and humans can be described the way they actually are, not just according to what they should be like).

- So German KSK SFs cannot shoot a known Taliban commander, responsible for a veritable carnage in New Baghlan back in 2007, when they have a clear shot at him, but it is alright for German troops to call in an F-15 to bomb stolen fuel tankers with lots of people around? This doesn't make sense.

- As to whether this was a breach of humanity... again, let me reiterate, not in the normative sense... For some reason I felt compelled to reread the Wikipedia article about Milgram's experiment. Making life and death decisions watching little grey ants running over a rather low-quality image beamed from a moving UAV, while intentionally looking for insurgents... all things moving may end up looking like insurgents then. So one might push the button, or give an order to push the button, too easily, is what occurred to me. Tell me this isn't so. But in fact partly this is exactly why McChrystal's orders are out. This is something McChrystal will know very well.

In other news, I am now officially one of the "smart Afghanistan watchers."

Update (September 6): it turns out there wasn't even a UAV in the air in preparation for the air strike. They called in the F-15, and it was the Eagle that transmitted some real-time images to a German commander, at the German TOC (I guess you can imagine how much faster that bird flies compared to a UAV). They made the decision to strike on the basis of this sort of intelligence. And on the basis of an informer calling on the phone.

Interesting details of a recent operation in Helmand

This report, titled Afghanistan's Narco War: Breaking the link between drug traffickers and insurgents is not altogether a brilliant read, but there is one section in it that I would specifically highlight here.

Between pages 18 and 21 you find "A metaphor for war: The battle of Marjah." It details cross-border logistical preparations of a strategically timed "spectacular" in Helmand, which was then thwarted by a preventive attack by U.S. and Afghan troops, and consequently turned into a (partially successful) defense of drug stashes by the insurgents.

I will include a brief excerpt here, for an appetiser, from page 19.

"Marjah was designated by the Taliban leadership as the staging ground for the attack, and fighters from across Afghanistan and as far away as Waziristan in Pakistan began filtering into the village. Along with the usual arsenal of AK-47s, grenade launchers and explosives, they towed in four Soviet-era anti-aircraft guns, a sign the operation was going to be big."

This is from a report prepared for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

More on teh strategy

In fact, this will be short. But basic.

If one is looking for the right Afghanistan strategy... one has to realise there is NO SUCH THING in reality. I mean, there couldn't be. I mean: a strategy only for Afghanistan.

Because Afghanistan doesn't exist in a vacuum. Because there are all these other countries around it. Like, Pakistan for example. Which is why Obama et al. tried to come up with an AfPak strategy, as everybody remembers. That was a conceptually good start (which is not to say anything about the end result).

The way the discourse is usually formulated, as I see it, is like this:

- the bad guys would take Afghanistan if we left (partly true, depending on external assistance and its extent);

- to keep their friends out of there, we would need more troops (true - just as one would need other things as well);

- wow, man, but that costs a lot (true).

And the conclusion for now seems to be: let's send there some more troops (not as many as would really be needed) - and hope that there be a magic turn of events in 18 to 24 months.

But of course there are other considerations as well. The most basic thing, still confined to within the limitations of the discourse outlined above, is that the bad guys may be happy if their performance is perversely judged good enough to therefore let them take Afghanistan. In return, they might just keep on attacking, stay on the offensive.

Another basic consideration is that Russia and the Central Asian countries are needed to logistically support the presence and the operations of more troops in Afghanistan, to make it all sustainable there. Because Pakistan alone will not allow much more room for manoeuvre. In fact, there is more to this: the reason that many things that could be done for Afghanistan cannot be done in Pakistan, is that Pakistani cooperation is necessary indirectly for anything one wants to do in Afghanistan, and that cooperation may be endangered by any short-term-oriented measure taken for the sake of handling the insurgency in Afghanistan proper. So you could have the best Afghanistan strategy, it won't help you much if certain elements of it cannot be executed, lacking permission, lacking cooperation, or facing even sabotage. But let's focus not only on Pakistan. In dealing with Russia, a whole range of interests come up in any horse-trading. And trade-offs there may not be any more comfortable than with Pakistan (some of these feel so inappropriate or inconceivable they don't even come up). The only reason that thing is working now with Russia to an extent is that the Russians are not uninterested in the fight against the Taliban.

So for all those looking to discuss strategy, bringing in the issue of resources/objectives preferences is fine. But make the leap to discussing the wider regional context as well. You are not the centre of the world, we are not the centre of the world, they are not the centre of the world. Jackie Chan(s) v. Jackie Chan(s), as I pointed out in an earlier post.

When "Othering" becomes a strategic factor...

...is always. It just tends to go unnoticed.
A former U.S. NSC official, Hillary Mann Leverett is weighing in on the debate about Afghan politics in this way:
"When I joined the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) staff in late 2001, senior Bush administration officials were already developing an opinion of the Northern Alliance as a cohesive group of heroic and relatively moderate regional commanders who united to combat the rigidly Islamist Taliban. This assessment continues to influence much Western discussion of Afghanistan. It is also, to be blunt, a myth."

This single paragraph is very distorting, in a subliminal sort of way. In fact, the surprising thing is that this sort of view of the Northern Alliance, as a united force for good-as-Americans-define-it, which could have been - wrongly - very popular, was gone real fast. The U.S. military cooperated with former NA leaders post-2001 not so much out of a belief in this myth, but out of pure cynicism, so it would seem to me. They were given the task of counterterrorism as opposed to state-building, and so they were just doing what they could. And the Bush administration was deeming former NA leaders, the none-too-appreciatingly labelled "warlords," acceptable in its practice, strategically (by intention at least, in a negligent way). If it seemed like truly positive admiration for them, I bet it wasn't perfectly honest, or it rested on the assumption that these people were as good as Afghanistan deserved. Truth be told, what they offered, was certainly better in many parts of the country than what the Taliban had offered.

Meanwhile, although I don't have illusions about what it takes to become a commander in the sort of times Afghanistan has been through, I don't think it's truly a plausible option to just bash everyone there. There will be no Afghans left for the sort of Afghanistan that the West is ready to accept with its perfect armschair standards.

The buck doesn't seem to stop anywhere. The better-off or influential figures in the region in general, be they former NA commanders, or Taliban, or businessmen, or Afghan government officials, they are all declared bad, or at least not good enough. The Pakistani Taliban are bad as well (well, since June 23, 2009, in practice*). Anybody (that is basically everybody) involved in the illicit economy in Afghanistan and the region is bad. Corrupt, criminal, or terrorist. Apparently, even the wives of all these people are bad. Remember? Baitullah Mehsud was blown up while his wife was massaging his leg. An unnamed US official reportedly even had the taste to say "no one is expecting him home for dinner tonight" (and this is NOT an Onion TV quote, to be clear).

I mean, it's obvious the whole region is one huge challenge for us all to handle, and everything there is at least structurally, indirectly, interlinked and interrelated with everything. But come on, one shouldn't just drop a huge normative atomic bomb on the discourse of who one should strategically work together with. This is important if one wants to get to an end-state that is different from the world that gave birth to, and was then defined by, these current partners. But it would take resources and trade-offs to achieve a lasting and positive transformation of that kind. Which brings us back to the wider issue of the right strategy - and I promised to post about that soon.

* I mean, look at major air strikes against the TTP leadership in the LWJ's aggregation, starting on June 23.