The costliness of the Afghan vs. the Iraqi campaign: Some data!!!

Yes, actually, it IS a possibility to look at data. Even while all those amateur strategists will give enlightening talks with sophisticated wording about how "although we cannot make a definitive case regarding the counterfactual issue of what strategic implications the absence of a sustained, intensive commitment would entail for U.S. interests on the regional and global levels, we cannot approach Afghanistan with the erroneous assumption of infinite resources. Devising a workable strategy requires taking into account the costs," by which they usually mean that spending anything on Afghanistan is inevitably too much. Sorry for launching a strawman drone at you, but this does no injustice to anyone. There are loads of examples of people saying just all of the above, and as I said, they do this in various übercomplicated forms.

Of course, the gist of this is important. A cheeseburger you cannot pay for is one cheeseburger you are not going to eat.

The interesting question is, where was all this smartness in the debate about Iraq? Ok, to a degree, similar voices could be heard. But not this loudly. Not with this influence. So did the numbers tell a different story there? Were the numbers more favourable there? Or are the above critics so weirdly inconsistent they can hardly call themselves brilliant strategists? I'm afraid the answer to the latter question is yes.

Let us hear the typical narrative first:

"Going on eight years, the Afghanistan war already rivals the Revolutionary War as the second-longest US armed conflict (after Vietnam). If it drags on another four years, it will become America’s longest war."

This is laughable, of course. The Afghanistan war is already America's longest war. It started on July 3, 1979, with President Carter signing a presidential finding authorising aid to insurgents in Afghanistan ("only" medical aid, communications gear, and some funding for psy-ops and propaganda, for a modest start, worth $500,000).

Still it does matter that...

"For the first time, the war in Afghanistan in the next budget year will cost Americans more than the war in Iraq. By the end of the next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, the total military budget costs for both wars will have exceeded $1 trillion. That’s more than the cost of the Vietnam War, adjusting for inflation, or any other US war except World War II ($3.2 trillion in 2007 dollars)."

So we are talking two wars here. One for which costs are sunken costs. Even the non-sunken ones. The other is the one where one has to be economical. So the Afghanistan strategy is about winning (sort of) in Iraq and then doing something feasible in Afghanistan. Isn't that an anti-strategy?

Here is now a chart from this quite useful report from the Congressional Research Service, about the costs of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, compared (sorry for the bad visibility, but that's what I can offer right now, along with the link to the original document in which you could take a look at page 9):

The story that needs to be told is that funding for Afghanistan fell back already twice. First because of the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, then because, well, the sh*t hit the fans in Iraq, in 2006.

Another thing to note is that even though CRS goes on to talk about OEF costs simply as though they would be identical to the costs of the Afghanistan campaign, you should remember that in fact OEF costs include the price of involvement in a number of other theatres as well, e.g. in the Horn of Africa... There is only one way someone could claim the costs are over 300 billion: taking into account NATO and other allies' costs, which are not insignificant at all, of course.

With requested 2010 spending counted in, Iraq is over 748 billion for the U.S., while Operation Enduring Freedom's costs are on the way towards reaching 300 billion. That is also very costly, but... see the arguments outlined above.

Now, one cannot slug it out, it is stated, so Afghans will have to fight it out for themselves/us (both of us). The Afghan police included. Their corrupt conduct is a problem, however, as you will hear all the time. So look at the ANP's resources. Well... Welcome to a sightseeing tour of the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, financing much of what the ANP needs. An overview of its various "phases," and the resources pledged, committed and spent. Thanks to UNDP, the data is out there for all wannabe strategists.

"Phases I (1 November 2003 – 31 March 2004) and II (1 April 2004-31 March 2005) The estimated budget was US$ 275,846,292. The received and delivered amount is USS 119,995,564 with a US$ 136,746,820 shortfall. Some planned components were not implemented due to the shortage of funds.
Phase III (1 April 2005 – 31 March 2006)
The total target budget for phase III was US$ 159,340,000, including PPSS. During the mid-year revision of the budget the total budget was revised to US $ 164,550,000. The Trust Fund has received Euro 30,000,000 from EC for LOTFA Stage III. USA had also committed US $ 40,000,000 for the police remuneration and the amount was received by the Trust Fund. In addition, US$1,652,893 came from CIDA/Canada.
Phase IV (1 April 2006 – 31 August 2008)
An amount of US$ 297 million were contributed to LOTFA during phase IV of the project. The contributions helped the project meet its expenditures over the life time of the phase.
Phase V (1 September 2008-31 August 2010)
The total estimated budget of LOTFA for two year period is 454,500,158 as per project documents, committed 344,983,114 with the shortfall of 109,511,044 for this phase.
Donors: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, European Commission, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, UNDP, United Kingdom, Australia, United States, Latvia, Iceland, Italy and UK Department for International Development (DFID)."

Let's look at the last phase... After all by this time it is the clearest priority to get the ANP right. Over 344 million have been committed. That can buy you about 5000 Hellfire missiles, counting with an irresponsible guessing methodology.

Conclusion? Thought of bribing the Taliban out of play? Try and bribe Afghanistan into play. Bribe the Afghan police. At the very least, try these things at the same time.

The September 4 Kunduz air strike, no show of force

On September 4 this year, two hijacked fuel tankers were bombed in Kunduz province at German request, with a significant number of civilian casualties. Since then, the ramifications reached quite far. I am not detailing those. I am merely noting that what eventually, by now, transpired about this case was my instinct as well, as I wrote about it for Atlantic-Community.org back in September.

"A stated purpose of bombing the stolen fuel tankers was to deny insurgents the opportunity to use them in an attack on the German base in Kunduz. For this, damaging the vehicles was required. But, for example, why not have rather a show-of-force flown over the target first, to clear the area of people? How is word from an informer, who reportedly needed to give a matching description of the scene to let the tactical operations center ascertain his presence near the site, reliable enough to prefer straight-off dropping a bomb in the middle of a very large group of people?"

Now it is clear, from the video of the air strike obtained by Bild, that there was a question addressed to the TOC (the officer there, "Red Baron 20") about the need for a show-of-force to scare people off the target. Because the targets were the tankers, not the people, as we are not enemy-centric, right? Unfortunately, the answer on this occasion was negative. It was presumed that all the people at the scene, around the tankers, were almost certainly insurgents.

There really is no vindication in this development for me. What I said was just the obvious - it was obvious to me on the basis of attentive monitoring of the situation in Afghanistan. And all other attentive observers could have offered the same sort of insight: the Taliban are generally not so stupid as to offer a mass congregation of theirs to be easily bombed, not even at night. If they would be, the neo-Taliban insurgency would have been a more simple story. It could very well be over by now. In fact, that must have played into why the F-15 pilot felt it was necessary to ask about the need to fly a show of force.

Anyway, here is the video, embedded:

Structure as a pyramid, Afghanistan at the bottom?

Before Monday, here is one more academic sort of post I wanted to put out. Academic, so not irrelevant, but relevant in a less direct way. (Tomorrow I shall post something that, you will see, is very directly relevant for the Afghanistan campaign.)

Anyway. Have you heard of the "Pyramid of the capitalist system" yet? It was a poster mobilising workers to take action, in 1911, in the UK, showing them right where they had to feel they were (at the bottom!) in order to take centre-stage. Here it is:

It is easily available at a great number of websites with a Google search taking "0.12 seconds," showing much that could be difficult to grasp about the importance of "structure" and "structural variables" in an extraordinarily easily digestible way.

Of course, its scheme was by no means perfect, however. Western factory workers felt badly exploited and it did not really occur to them that others were living in even worse circumstances at the time. So when they wrote "We work for all/We feed all" there, they not-so-kindly belittled farmers' role for example (having there just one dude with a shovel to represent farmers). For now, let this be enough for an illustration of why this scheme could be regarded as rather imperfect.

What would a similar scheme look like in 2009? Perhaps that could be a logical question to leap to. And it turns out some people have already put their heads down to it. Here is the pyramid's new version:

And look, it says evil politicians (vaguely reminiscent of Dick Cheney I'd risk saying) are defended by aggressive-looking riot policemen and (re-)elected by TV-watching people high on the happy stuff shown on their TV screens. And they are altogether defended by soldiers behind tanks that trample on the rights of the not-really-voiceless but rarely heard peoples, in peripheric locations on earth. That right there is a theory of what is happening in the world, reducing complexity to what it regards as essential... Why am I addressing this? Because there is a guy down there, at the bottom, who could as well be wearing a turban and a shalwar kameez, so it seems... He is definitely there to represent some kind of resistance against the liberal globalisation project, coming from the Islamic world, and perhaps he was even meant to represent the Taliban there. So is there anything that is wrong with this scheme, specifically with Afghanistan in mind?

Thinking back to how farmers were forgotten in the case of the previous scheme, one could start with the obvious, going from the rather superficial to the quite substantial:

- TV is less an exclusive medium, even if not necessarily less important, nowadays, than it used to be...

- Tanks are not used so much nowadays. Yes, there are some in Afghanistan, and they are of use, but they are not deployed in such a great number. As to soldiers' force protection, a lot of that is provided from the air...

- The current U.S. and other efforts in Afghanistan aim at creating better, not worse, conditions in Afghanistan. Even if they were to fail in the end, being partly misconceived or lacking sufficient commitment behind them.

- There are many that are on top of the "food chain" and yet hard to place in this rather constraining scheme above. A number of countries making good use of the American interest in the global counter-terrorist campaign. Many individuals and companies making profits from it. People feeding on the democracies concerned in all sorts of ways. People feeding on people and state institutions everywhere, across state boundaries, in all sorts of complex ways.

The way Marxists would address the latter argument would be to say that it is the structure that matters, parasytes coming in great numbers notwithstanding. There are nice expressions in use, such as "secondary" and "tertiary parasytes" and so on. But it is a little more complex than that, of course. China is an important source of financing for the U.S., and financing something is hardly about parasytism... this tends to disturb the clear-cut centre-periphery dichotomy a little. Of course there are dependencies in this world, but there are interdependencies as well, in other words. Structure cannot be portrayed as a neatly shaped pyramid, in fact.

This brings one to the most important point. What the above scheme really suggests is that a structure of dependency and dominance being a factor in the way the world is ordered is just inevitably bad. But one is at pain to tell, outside the imaginary world of a utopia, how there could be a world without any such structure.

The alternative costs of the current structure are always interesting to ponder (from the issue of agricultural subsidies to the conduct of transnational corporations and issues of world trade), if one is given concrete ideas to contemplate. But just hating the currently given structure and equating those identified as "at its bottom" (whatever they do) with the potential and actual good-doers is intellectually a rather empty approach. It is built on the notion of the opposite of the "West-East slope" that I wrote of on Friday here, in fact. It is just a reversal of that imaginary slope.

Moreover, the wrongs of any given structure ought not to be necessarily identified to a full extent with the wrongs of its parasytes (from a more predatory CEO in investment banking to the despotic strongman in some remote Afghan valley).

Alright, I hope I managed to retain your interest up to this point. Next time, as promised, some much more policy-oriented input to be provided here.

Where is Afghanistan on the West-East slope?

On Wednesday I went to a debate that seemed to offer something unrelated to Afghanistan, and still ended up reflecting on Afghanistan. Of course.

The debate was about whether in "our region" (the region which I hail from; a region that "we" cannot really name; the borders of which we cannot clearly define), namely in the region varyingly called "Eastern Europe," "East-Central Europe" or "Central-Eastern Europe," we belong to the "West" or to the "East" rather? This could be a boring exercise normally, whereby you could often hear pseudo-intellectuals recite boring, well-known arguments and even some of the craziest, most stereotypical bullsh*t you can imagine, albeit in sophisticated or at least pseudo-sophisticated form.

But on this occasion there were good panellists to listen to, including Attila Melegh, author of this quite excellent book. It was Attila Melegh's idea of the "East-West slope" (which I would rather call a "West-East slope" perhaps, since that more clearly indicates the direction in which one looks down on this slope) that started a string of thoughts in me.

As I will outline it here in a nutshell, the gist of the slope's idea is going to be immediately familiar to those who are knowledgable about postcolonialism. What Attila Melegh does is that he identifies the latent impact of an omnipresent concept in the discourse about "the former Eastern-bloc" or "post-communist" part of Europe: that of the "slope," i.e. the "West-East slope." It is a multidimensional scale on which countries or even certain social behavioural patterns can be placed in terms of how appropriate they are, with the ultimate measuring rod of the "liberal humanitarian utopia" in mind - the latter is ultimately converging with the idea of the "West." Thus countries that "need to catch up," have "unfinished business in terms of their transition processes," show "deficiencies in terms of the rule of law, the functioning of their market economies and the vibrancy of their civil societies" or otherwise, are not in fact perfect members of the West, and thus inevitably not Western enough in nature. Social behavioural patterns that are, or seem to be, a hindrance to achieving a better position along the West-East slope are identified as non-Western. This is used in a self-disciplining way in the discourses of the countries concerned. Concerned politicians and intellectuals in general warn society of how certain phenomena are "non-European" or, say, "Balkanic" or "Asian" or whatever that one shouldn't be.

The end result is a mental hierarchy offensively referred to by Western critics to exert transforming pressure and defensively addressed or self-disciplinarily utilised by some within the target populations. A search for excuses or self-regulation is not the only reaction that emerges, however. Nationalist answers offer what seems to be an escape route, out from the mental hierarchy: something like "we are perfect, no need to measure us, we know this;" or "of course we are European (whatever we do)." An especially negative aspect of this is the enhanced "Othering" of those identified as being further down the slope, to justify how good one is.

Post-colonialism is essentially a similar critique of the mental hierarchy that tends to latently inform much West-centric thinking (not only by Westerners of course). But it is more general in space and time. It is global and not specific to the experience of the so-called "transition period" of "post-communist" countries.

The interesting thing to ask, combining the two, is whether the slope (or scale) of Westernisation, or, alternatively, and more problematically, of "modernisation" or "civilisation," is truly "an imaginary ruler" (as Attila Melegh puts it) along which all countries could theoretically move, or be moved, in the West-centric mind. All sorts of resistance emerge in reaction to the post-structural hegemony of the West, however benign or "benevolent" this hegemony may seem to be, or be intended to be, by many in the West. And meanwhile some ideologies just plainly ignore the Western measuring rod and go for something defined not in reaction only, but at least partly internally driven as well (think of Salafism for an example). Western thinking has to accomodate the idea that not every country can be moved (upwards) along the imaginary ruler or scale, be it because of active resistance to this or because of just a general endeavour to get along in a totally different direction. Momentarily, temporarily, or possibly even in the long run, there may be too many obstacles. And this is where "the idea of Afghanistan" comes in. The country that many believe cannot really be changed, a country where culture is supposedly static and the people irreconcilable with Western ways. A country that is not really on the slope but off it in the minds of many, just like that continent, Africa (another hopeless "country" in the minds of many). A country "doomed to self-destruct;" a country "that should sort problems out on its own;" a country "corrupt beyond repair." Etc. Many of such assertions will most likely sound familiar to you if you are cursorily interested in the discourse about Afghanistan.

That is just why I ended up thinking about Afghanistan again and in general about the West-centric discourse of state-building, towards the end of the debate.

Washington, South Asia and the "Kashmiri groups"

Interesting analysis by Christine Fair in The Hindu. It looks at relations in the triangle between Washington, New Delhi and Islamabad from the specific point of view of the "Kashmiri groups," most notably the Lashkar-e-Tayba, and the U.S. and Indian approaches to their challenge. The article comes on the first anniversary of the 2008 Mumbai attacks which started one year and a day ago and lasted for four days.

Update (November 27): Here are some of the latest results of the investigation looking at the far-reaching support networks of the LeT attack.

What is this?

This is something that gets reported not the first time this time:
"As part of its new plan, the administration, which remains skeptical of Karzai, will "work around him" by working directly with provincial and district leaders, a senior U.S. defense official told McClatchy."

So what does this mean exactly? Who are the "provincial and district leaders"? Governors appointed by Karzai, I mean, "removable types"?

Or is this to say that provincial shuras will be effectively empowered beyond a consultative role, with American support?

Or selected strongmen within those shuras, maybe? Like, let's see, Ahmed Wali Karzai in Kandahar?

Or there should be competing centres of power in provinces and districts, with rivalry between centrally appointed and locally elected forces drawing on different resources?

Or will alternative strongmen be sought, who shall be supported to the detriment of both of the above and for the great victory of whateverocracy?

Single-issue approaches to postcolonial problems

Back in the spring this year, when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, one could fear several bad consequences. One obvious possibility was that the Sudanese government might kick out all humanitarian organisations from Sudanese territory, leaving a huge number of displaced people, in camps and elsewhere, in dire conditions, without the provision of basic humanitarian aid - so you had a conflict between the humanitarian and the human-rights community, if you (probably didn't) like. At the same time, it was also a concern that Sudan might turn back to giving support to the most radical organisations in the Islamic world, if its leadership ends up fully isolated, as pariahs, on the international scene. In the end, this of course didn't happen. The Arab League and the African Union did not support the ICC decision, Omar al-Bashir could make some demonstrative trips outside the country, the U.S., most likely relieved that the ICC was taking fire from all sorts of directions now from which it used to receive some hypocritical backing, was ready for a modest détente with the Sudan, and with Sudanese permission some of the aid organisations that had been forced to close down could return to the country. Now a probing round of mediation for a Darfur peace agreement is taking place in Qatar, albeit with no open presence of representatives from the government or the rebel side. So the moment may not really seem ripe for this. Amnesty International "learned that the Danish government has invited Sudanese President al Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, to attend a meeting in Copenhagen on climate change in December." They say: “Denmark needs to make it clear that it will arrest President al Bashir if he travels to Copenhagen” (so said Christopher Keith Hall, Senior Legal Adviser at Amnesty International).

I am observing this from the ivory tower, not really with the same deep interest that I show towards what is going on in Afghanistan. I am merely dispassionately noting here the interesting phenomenon of a conflict between the human-rights and the environmentalist community that has just appeared on the horizon in this case, although it may be regarded as being of infinitesimal significance.

Unusual reading of the day

From The American Conservative, here is an interview with Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who was fired by her former employer under interesting circumstances. I cannot vouch for the credibility of what she says about things she came across while working for the FBI, but in general there is (not just in the U.S. of course) a trade in classified information. In this case, its networks are said to reach from the U.S., through Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to Pakistan (and elsewhere).

This is interesting addition to another recent article, by Greg Miller for the Los Angeles Times, about the GWoT-related links between the CIA and Pakistan's ISI. I earlier cited Azeed Ibrahim's study where reference is made to potentially over $10 billion paid in covert transfers to Pakistan for financing its participation in GWoT-related operations up to 2007. It seemed like a wilder estimate (or one that was possibly valid for covert payments during the entire long-time relationship between the CIA and ISI), and in Miller's article this much is said about this:

"The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget, current and former U.S. officials say."

Another interesting figure provided is useful for an assessment of al-Qaida's losses in Pakistan - a former senior CIA official is quoted as saying:

"They gave us 600 to 700 people captured or dead."

To this come added those killed in U.S. drone strikes. Miller's article hints that the above mentioned CIA-ISI liaison was deflated somewhat by AQ operatives leaving cities which were more comfortable hunting ground for the ISI. One wonders now that Karachi is an increasingly important hub for these operatives if this might be changing (again). In any case, the U.S. allegedly isn't paying for information which it uses for its drone strikes.

Meanwhile, that is not all there is to the relationship between the CIA and, as some put it, the ISIs (in plural). This recent article by Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker started much debate also. Assessment is up to you. Interesting ideas raised regarding "bad apples," regarding whether U.S. assistance could or should or has to do anything about those, whether India or the U.S. is liked more in Pakistan etc. A former Pakistan Army officer is quoted as saying "The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so" - trust is certainly in short supply on both sides.

Corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption

If you find the title weird, it is because it is in reference to something that I find really weird, and not only me, but many of the observers actually paying attention to what they see in Afghanistan and its region, in fact.

The NY Times reports:

"Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Friday that the United States could start holding Afghanistan’s government accountable for corruption by withholding money for projects “where we control the flow of dollars.” "

Well, in Pakistan, the US is certainly not in control throwing out the window all those billions, so why bother trying the same thing there? Beyond the sick sort of coherence of the above message, it is in reality a puzzle how corruption is fought in one place and not fought in another. Or how differently the solution is seen and how this is presented as though it would be the most natural thing: more money to Pakistan to build capacity, less money to Afghanistan to build capacity...

In an article in the latest issue of the Economist, they start out in their usual way, telling the world what the world thinks (which is always just purely awesome journalism by the way): "IT WAS no secret what the world wanted to hear from Hamid Karzai when Afghanistan’s president was sworn in for a second term on November 19th: a commitment to get tough on corruption."

While I certainly recognize that instances of amazingly corrupt conduct can be found with ease in Afghanistan, I inevitably wondered, reading this, what sort of corruption they are thinking of.

- Corrupt handling of the over two-thirds of resources provided by the West that are NOT handled by the Afghan government?

- Corruption in the underpaid Afghan police, financed from the Law and Order Trust Fund? (As this is what has most of an impact on the ground, away from Kabul..)

- Corruption in how a certain percent of aid ends up with the Taliban, often through their "contracts officer" in Kabul?

- Corruption in how armed groups across the country, among them the Taliban, profit from logistical contracts of the US military, ripping off contractors?

Etc. You get the point.

A radical critique of Western state-building was provided early on by Frantz Fanon (1961). In the conclusion of his Wretched of the Earth he said "let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us."

Fanon was not very strong in offering an alternative, however, and since the end of old colonialism there are historical examples of how what he rejected could actually work quite well in a number of places (and is consequently hardly an exclusively European thing in fact). But we should certainly beware of trying to run Afghanistan while contributing in a major way to making it an obscene caricature. Or: we should rethink our ways.

Pakistan, the state of play

As the Pakistani Army is roughing up South Waziristan:

- While the Obama administration is hedging its bet searching for the right strategy, the purpose of which is to exit Afghanistan stabilise Afghanistan, Pakistan is not taking on Hafiz Gul Bahadur's, Maulvi Nazir's and the Haqqanis' forces, according to Time Magazine. North Waziristan is still a safe haven, for example.

- Regarding whether the Taliban will be able to sustain their tempo of operations in the future, an interesting question is what the impact of this development could be, should we believe it actually occurred. Mullah Omar and some of the Quetta shura have relocated to mega-city Karachi, according to the Washington Times, which references Bruce Riedel, for example, who says Omar was spotted in Karachi recently. This could reduce (or make more cumbersome) the shura's control over the insurgency's local commanders on the Afghan battlefield. But credibility is an issue simply on the basis that a threat of drone strikes seems to be questionable explanation regarding why Quetta would have suddenly become inhospitable to the very rarely spotted all-time leader of the Taliban.

Nuclear South Asia, useful links

I am breaking my promise to post here about Afghanistan again, after the previous post on Somalia. Just a couple of useful links. Very useful ones to consider the stakes in South Asia.

1. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' recent briefer on Pakistan's expanding nuclear arsenal. And a regional outlook provided to it, also useful, to put it into context.

2. Two scenarios from NRDC (this is older stuff) regarding what nuclear war between India and Pakistan could be like, depending on the number of warheads used and whether the explosions take place above ground or if ground bursts are employed.

I really don't intend to be alarmist here. The funny thing about nuclear weapons is that you can spend a lot on them, talk about them all the time, fear them all the time, and in the end live your life without ever seeing them used. I want to finish on that note.

Failed states and the negative spill-over effects they suffer

This ill-informed post at Foreign Policy Magazine's Passport blog where the author is voicing a big muhaha for the supposedly funny reasoning of Somali pirates about illegal fishing and the dumping of toxic waste off their coast reminded me of the very real phenomenon of how weak states are exploited in all sorts of ways. That is a pretty important critical argument in light of the prominent idea that weak states are mostly a threat to the outside world and not vice versa. When in fact their territory is treated by some as a sort of global commons to make private profits from. No wonder locals get upset about this. Of course this is not the only or even necessarily the most important cause or sustaining factor of piracy. But it is of fundamental importance, no doubt, and it is a shame that many are blind to it. Even those who should be better aware of what they are writing about, than the average.

End of detour, next post coming up will be again about Afghanistan.

To the aid of aid in Pakistan and Afghanistan

If the quantity of aid and the ways it is delivered are the super-neglected subject when it comes to discussing Afghanistan strategy, aid to Pakistan is the ++neglected subject.

I have just run into Calin Trenkov-Wermuth' brief overview of EU aid to Pakistan and his recommendation of more non-military assistance to the country. At first, it is easy to sympathise with Trenkov-Wermuth' statements. It is tempting to be critical of the EU for not doing enough on something that is nominally important to it. Quote:

"EU officials have allocated € 52 million in non-military aid for Pakistan for 2009, approximately the same amount as for Paraguay. For the period of 2009-2013, the figure stands at € 435 million, which is in stark contrast to the US’s recent tripling of its non-military aid to US$ 1.5 billion per year over the next five years."

However, what Pakistan really needs is, in fact, not so easy to determine. In this sense it does not matter why the EU is not giving more. Freely given aid as unconditioned wealth could be as uncertain a benefit as an abundance of natural resources can be in you-name-which-country. The latter effect is mentioned in the literature as the "resource curse" sometimes - unconditioned aid can also be a curse, as it is (logically) claimed, for instance in this article.

Currently, aid is given to Pakistan in even more peculiar circumstances than in other contexts - a good overview of these circumstances you may read here. Costs of the war on terrorism are "reimbursed" (not in a direct sense), even in times when peace agreements with the Taliban are in force. Security assistance, supposedly with concerns about instability in Pakistan, is given so Pakistan can buy weapons systems of use against India, and not against the TTP. Budget support is given generously. At the same time, even a discussion of attaching conditions to aid is harshly criticised in Pakistani politics, so one needs to beware of seeming to be imposing anything on Pakistani leaders. Meanwhile, corruption may divert a significant amount of money given as development assistance even, which recently prompted much official Washington head-scratching.

Perhaps the most amazing feature of assistance to Pakistan is all the money covertly transferred to the country for various purposes. On page 12 of Azeem Ibrahim's study, to which I have already linked above, you find a remarkable figure: "Some analysts have suggested that these covert payments may have exceeded $10 billion until 2007." If the anonymously mentioned sources are reliable, and the $10 billion figure is at least near the actual amount of "covert funds" disbursed, it can compete for a decent ranking with the other most-amazing sort of figures I have run into so far, covering the region.

Thus increasing EU assistance, while others, including for example Australia (over 2009-2010 they are putting in $120 million), are also increasing theirs, can certainly act as a perverse incentive in all sorts of ways (brinksmanship and corruption included, obviously) - while one also contributes to decreasing accountability through creating a "multiple-principals-over-agents" sort of situation (the perils of which are touched upon in this study, for example).

At the same time, one should not forget that quite a lot goes wrong with aid in Afghanistan, too. I was saddened to hear this understandably downbeat assessment of Canada's efforts in Kandahar by experienced correspondent Graeme Smith. He observes: "But how many roads are built in rural Afghanistan these days without paying bribes to local insurgents? How many villagers in Kandahar would get polio vaccinations without permission from the Taliban? Making the country better doesn't necessarily require fighting the insurgents – in many cases, it requires working with them."

These are clever remarks and they do make one wonder. According to the ink blot theory of counterinsurgency of which I have written a lot here since 2007 (already in 2007), one would spend money in well-secured areas (the ink blots), try to aggressively promote an expansion of the "ink blots" with both carrots and sticks to the populace concerned in adjacent areas, and at the same time harass insurgents in outlying areas lest the insurgents should have their own ink blots. This is a simple theory, yet a clever one. Even though not all of it can be operationalised in the Afghanistan context. But much that could be, isn't, either.

Precious time is spent arguing about weak governance and its lacking legitimacy in Afghanistan. Paradoxically, at the same time, however, insurgency-affected areas are being paid an insurgency premium of sorts, much of which lands in the Taliban's coffers. This undermines the legitimacy of the government where it would be in a position to do more for locals, while it reinforces the Taliban's legitimacy in areas where they are strong or on the rise (at the same time as it is part of what finances their fight). Avoiding this perverse interaction is not altogether possible - it is a necessary trade-off for sustaining operations in many areas in the country. But sometimes it is done just by default.

Direct-fire attacks on the rise, still

I have blogged before about the war in Afghanistan not turning more asymmetrical in the sense of there being less firefights. It is true that coalition troops suffer most of their casualties because of IEDs. But direct fire attacks are on the increase, too. Whether this will change if the imperfect Afghanistan-Pakistan hammer-and-anvil once (ever) starts to squeeze out life from the various insurgencies in the region is for the future to tell. It is also interesting to ponder if locally one may see some improvements, in a few places. But overall, the trend is not a pleasant one, and I have some data now, running up to this summer, which I am ready to show here. Grey is the colour for direct-fire attacks, and you can watch them become more frequent from January 2007 to May 2009, in the ISAF Regional Command-South' area of operations. Caveat: the people who assembled this graph made a mistake in that it is monthly attacks for which you get figures here, and not "daily attacks." (And so of course you didn't have 400+ IEDs a day in RC-S in May this year.) Nevertheless the fact remains that the trend of frequency is going up, across the yearly cyclicity of the data.

(I found this in a study about Australia's role in building the ANA, btw, which can be downloaded from this page.)

From page 5, then:

Thomas Hegghammer on the big impact of small footprints

For its excellence I need to recommend this article by Thomas Hegghammer with wholehearted support of its analysis and a longish excerpt that I want to include here. It also nicely adds to what I was discussing a couple of days ago, in reaction to an article by Leah Farrall. Here is what follows when U.S. departure supposedly (according to Farrall) weakens the cause of jihad in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"The killing of al Qaeda operative Abu Ali al-Harithi by a CIA drone in Yemen in 2002 was certainly controversial, but it did not become a major symbol of Muslim suffering, because there was no civilian collateral damage and no images of the incident. Likewise, drone strikes in Pakistan have been unpopular, but Islamabad's complicity gives Pakistani officials an incentive to keep photographers away from the aftermath.
By contrast, a future Taliban-dominated government would do everything in its power to amplify the visual impact and exaggerate the collateral damage of American operations. It would use diplomatic and other channels to build international political pressure on the U.S. to stop its attacks. There would be calls on Washington to offer concrete evidence and justification for each major attack, which would be hard to do without sharing sensitive intelligence. Meanwhile, al Qaeda would hide among civilians. For the Taliban, plausible deniability would be easy to establish: after all, Kabul cannot prevent Arab tourists, charity workers and preachers from entering the country. With the small footprint approach, al Qaeda will have a safe haven in Afghanistan, albeit a somewhat less open one than in the late 1990s.
So what if al Qaeda has a few more safe houses? Hasn't the Internet rendered physical safe havens less important? Actually, no. This is a misconception based on inverse technological optimism and a superficial understanding of online jihadism today. Cyberspace can admittedly be a place to meet, indoctrinate, and teach weapons techniques. But websites do not allow organizations to desensitize recruits and break down their natural human barriers to the use of violence. It is one thing to rant online about killing infidels, it is something else to slit their throats (which is why the 9/11 operatives practiced on sheep and camels in the camps).
Moreover, websites cannot build deep personal trust between recruits in the same way camp life does. A strong esprit de corps dramatically increases a group's fighting capability (which is why our own militaries spend so much time cultivating it). Moreover, the Internet has recently become much less hospitable to individuals wishing to do more than access jihadi propaganda. Advances in intelligence gathering have increased the risk of detection for inexperienced internet users. Around the world, hundreds of people have been arrested for terrorism-related online activities. During the eight years that I have followed the jihadi Internet, forum participants have become much more paranoid and considerably less likely to volunteer personal information. The Internet is a formidable propaganda tool, but no safe haven."

By the way, as to the importance of safe havens, and to have some conflicting views (with mine, for example), also recommended is this post from the past by Patrick Porter, at KoW.

Bad news, good news, all sorts of news

A Swedish officer on what one should expect to come in northern Afghanistan next spring and summer (and autumn and so on).

"In the first 10 months of this year, there have been 82 significant combat incidents in Balkh, more than triple the number in 2008, and the insurgency may be even more potent next year.
"In areas where they are hiding right now, we won't have any control during the winter," said Col. Olof Granander, a commander of Swedish forces in Balkh. "And there is a risk they will try to build up their capacity, and they will be tougher to fight during the upcoming spring and summer." "

Christian at GoA sums up developments in Nuristan at the same time. It might bring home how odd it can seem to people and powers in the region what the U.S. is actually up to in Afghanistan. I mean, the West is normally very critical of Pakistani troops leaving an area behind for any reason, be it a Kashmir earthquake or one of their foolproof peace agreements. So what good is there in ceding an area like Nuristan to the militants? Of course there is an answer to this, in that this is a fight that cannot be won from one day to the other (understatement), and a step back might be required to eventually get two steps ahead (optimism). But this all may still seem odd to many.

Elsewhere, in Uruzgan, the situation is changing in other ways, however. Hans de Vreij recently wrote an entire series of dispatches from the province, and he has gone to many of its corners where it was possible. In this article (in Dutch), he accounts of the taking of the Mirabad Valley, an operation that ended seven years of Taliban rule in an area which used to be important to the Taliban for logistical reasons. There is some progress notable in the Chora valley, to the northeast from Tarin Kowt, and at the remote Firebase Cobra, manned by U.S. special forces, in Charchino district, a Green Beret notes that "last time I was here, they opened fired as soon as we left the gate. Now, this doesn’t happen until we venture out a couple of clicks" (the previous link goes to another article by Hans de Vreij). This all is not cause for feeling an overwhelming wave of hope that things might change for the good now (especially given that in some of the areas concerned the underpaid Afghan National Police is taking over "security" for the locals), but it does say something about Taliban strength in these areas. Without much data this is bound to be wild speculation, but it would be interesting to see (take this clearly as a question), whether the stronger push in Helmand against the insurgents hampered their operations in other areas, like Uruzgan.

In other news, if you thought Obama's spectacular hesitation about adding more U.S. troops to man the mission in Afghanistan was all about Hamed Karzai's lacking or weakened legitimacy, reconsider, in light of this article in the New York Times. Quote:

"Seven months after the idea was raised and four months after the agreement was signed, the number of American flights that have actually traversed Russian airspace?
One. And that was for show."

Peter Baker rightly points out that this show was already important in and of itself, to communicate that the U.S. has some cards to play, to thus diminish blackmailing potential on the part of others - while it is equally rightly said that signing off on a major troop increase is not possible with this much haggling potential on the Russian side.

Helping al-Qaida would weaken al-Qaida?

Leah Farrall in The Australian, about counterterrorism in Afghanistan. I stopped, looking up in amazement, at this point:

"Afghanistan's value to al-Qa'ida is as a location for jihad, not a sanctuary.

(...)

A withdrawal of coalition forces from Afghanistan would undoubtedly hand al-Qa'ida and the Taliban a propaganda victory. However, a victory would deny al-Qa'ida its most potent source of power, influence, funding and recruits -- the armed jihad.

Without a jihad to fight, al-Qa'ida would be left with only its franchises..."

Would al-Qaida be left without a jihad to fight, should the U.S. pull out from Afghanistan? So it would be a Taliban victory in Afghanistan over everyone else, by default, should the U.S. pull out? And thus there would remain no fighting to be done?

Wouldn't the Taliban need some allies in any remaining fighting? Some support - financial and material? If yes, wouldn't they get part of that through Islamist networks reaching to the Gulf states? And if those networks would be important to draw on, wouldn't that leave some room for al-Qaida? Wouldn't it be in the Taliban's interest to have us think they are now moving "away" from al-Qaida (while never actually really getting away from them)? And what's that statement saying al-Qaida wouldn't be interested in a sanctuary in Afghanistan? They wouldn't be interested in a landlocked sanctuary where it would be a lot more difficult to strike them? And recruits wouldn't find the prospect of going to Afghanistan for training better than the prospect of going to the currently rather murky world of the Pakistani borderland? (By the way, that borderland could be calmer as well, should there remain no U.S. presence on the other side of the border...)

Anyway, let's imagine a scenario in which the US supports the Taliban, so Pakistan's leadership captures or kills some more (say, a quite decent percentage) of the core foreign jihadists in the borderland through effective cooperation with the U.S. military and U.S. intelligence, devoting its HUMINT and other assets to the task... But would the U.S. really be ready to support the Taliban all of a sudden, to make other sources of support unnecessary to them? If not, would Pakistan be comfortable with hunting down those potentially to the aid of the Taliban, in the latter's struggle with potentially Russian/Indian/Iranian-financed strongmen of the non-Pashtun areas? I am asking this especially since right now I couldn't imagine Pakistan's leadership comfortably justifying support to the Taliban even to their public... which means covert sources of funding would remain important if anyone in Pakistan wanted to support them.

Finally, in establishing whether "the Taliban is moving away from al-Qaida," aren't scholars showing signs of a scholarly bias of focusing a lot on texts (of radical Islamist publications and internet chatter)? Such a bias would be a bit ill-advised in assessing people who believe in deeds much more than in rhetoric (while many of those people are illiterate of course). And I am yet to see an analysis of whether the Haqqanis are "moving away" from the transnational jihadist networks.

Put simply, would helping al-Qaida really weaken it?

Just asking...

You know, this blog is about Afghanistan most of the time. But I am asking this in general, and interpret this in the Afghanistan context at your own peril.

If there is an illicit revenue source that will not cease to exist for the foreseeable future, and it can be controlled:

A) by your enemies;

B) neutrals ready to pay off both enemies and friendlies;

C) a mixture of your enemies and neutrals who are ready to pay off both enemies and friendlies;

D) a mixture of your enemies and friendlies and neutrals who are ready to pay off both enemies and friendlies;

E) a mixture of neutrals who are ready to pay off both enemies and friendlies;

F) by friendlies;

which option would you prefer?

And under what actual conditions would your a priori choice be the preferred option?

And so would you actively want to work with friendlies to gain control of this revenue source?

About the Taliban's open letter to the SCO

The team at Jihadica has recently made available an open letter by the Afghan Taliban to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

Vahid Brown uses this text as part of an analysis of the relationship between the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida. But it does appear to me to be the work of more than just the Afghan Taliban. Somebody else might also have had a say in formulating the text, and I think so on the basis of this reference:

"...the invaders have frequently shelled seminaries and schools under the excuse of being training centers of terrorists."

This seems rather like it would be coming from the Pakistani context, as reference to strikes on radical madrasas in Pakistan, for example on the one in Bajaur Agency, on a madrasa of the TNSM (Tehrik-e Nifaz-e Shariat Mohammadi), in 2006.

This is not the first time I wonder if something, handled as "a publication of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," really came purely from them. One often wonders how much help a group with many illiterate and not very computer-savvy leaders is getting, while depending on support from Pakistani sources, to write letters of the above kind to the SCO, i.e. "the People's Republic of China + some other countries in China's border regions," as some view it.

The R2P moral hazard... in Afghanistan?

Having accidentally seen the Amanpour show featuring, among others, Alan J. Kuperman, scholar, and currently a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a couple of days ago, I was interested enough by his comments to look up something to read from him. I came across his article on the moral hazard of the readiness to intervene in the murky world of mass violations of human rights, destructive intra-state conflict and genocide, especially with the seemingly growing prominence (or whatever) of the principle known as the Responsibility to Protect.

Full reference to the article:

Alan J. Kuperman: Mitigating the Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from Economics. Global Governance 14 (2008), 219–240.

It was predictably the sort of highly stimulating intellectual fun of litte current practical consequence that I expected (which is not to say that it is not well-written, or that it is not clever, or that it is something that can in no way take on greater significance in the future).

The essence of its argument is simple: by offering a helping hand to potential rebels we might make potential rebels out of people who would otherwise just play silence-of-the-lambs or whatever. And this could, in fact, be problematic, as potential rebels tend to be destructive themselves and also to bring about a lot of destruction from the regime against which they rebel. Which could all be for a noble cause in the eye of the beholder, but may demand unwilling victims for its success. And so on.

Why am I writing of this here? How would this be relevant regarding Afghanistan? Well, the Taliban are certainly not rebelling for intervention, so if there is a link it has to be somewhere else.

Let me think.

Aha. I see. It can be found in the absence of something. In all those debates about the U.S. national interest that should (irony) drive the activities of the 38 ISAF contributing countries and the others that participate in Operation Enduring Freedom, one implicitly finds the constant rejection of the principle of the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P... and the rather mistaken idealisation of the 1990s when the UN and others were expressing concern about things like the war blockade of the Hazarajat where the Taliban were facing local resistance and persistent guerrilla warfare, but of course no intervention was meaningfully contemplated.

The interesting thing is, Kuperman himself identifies a "randomisation" of the response to possible humanitarian-intervention situations as a way of mitigating the moral hazard of the R2P "insurance" dilemma. That randomisation is being practiced, and when interventions are carried out, staying the course is not regarded as that what needs to be done by default.

I am not, actually, taking a normative view on this, saying that this is universally wrong, and that national interests should be forgotten and humanitarian interests necessarily prioritised all the time. I am merely intrigued, intellectually, by the total disconnect between the discourse about Afghanistan and the discourse of R2P...