A Different Place

I’m very privileged to be able to add my name to this letter — signed by some very smart people who’ve been working in and around Afghanistan for many years.

We have been engaged and working inside Afghanistan, some of us for decades, as academics, experts and members of non-governmental organizations. Today we are deeply worried about the current course of the war and the lack of credible scenarios for the future. The cost of the war is now over $120 billion per year for the United States alone. This is unsustainable in the long run. In addition, human losses are increasing. Over 680 soldiers from the international coalition – along with hundreds of Afghans – have died this year in Afghanistan, and the year is not yet over. We appeal to you to use the unparalleled resources and influence which the United States now brings to bear in Afghanistan to achieve that longed-for peace.

Read the rest up at the website www.afghanistancalltoreason.com and note that the list of signatures is growing and being updated as more people learn about the letter. Please support this initiative by forwarding the text of the letter onwards.

One of the most difficult issues to navigate when discussing recent history with Taliban interviewees (especially those of a political bent) has always been the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Traditionally any attempt to suggest that Osama bin Laden was involved in the planning and funding of these attacks was met with skepticism as well as a statement along the lines of, “we don’t know, nor have we seen any convincing evidence and it could have been anyone who carried out and planned this attack.”

Now, though, in the first semi-official acknowledgement from a Talib — in this case the former Ambassador to Pakistan, Mawlawi Abdul Salam Zaeef — we have the following statement in an interview:

When asked for his opinion of Osama bin Laden and his relation with Mullah Omar following the events of 11 September, Zaeef said, “Following the September events, the Commander of the Faithful Mullah Omar met with Bin Laden in the presence of a large number of Taliban leaders and Al-Qaeda members, and asked him if they were behind the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon.

“Osama denied the allegations but I now believe that Bin Laden planned the attacks without informing the Commander of the Faithful and then lied to him by denying his involvement in the attacks after they took place,” he said.

This is maybe all we’re going to get for the moment, but this admission is a crucial first step in tackling the issue of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Let’s hope it’s part of a larger political development.

Not so much. Last weekend’s Sunday Times carried an article by Miles Amoore headlined, “Love drives repentant Taliban chief to defect.” It also includes the following:

Many fighters are thought to have mixed feelings about leaving [the Taliban]. “If I stop fighting, maybe the government will still persecute me as a Talib while the Taliban try to kill me,” said Rahman. “I am stuck in the middle.” The greater number of foreign fighters in the south and southeast — mainly from Pakistan and the Middle East — will make it even harder for foot soldiers there to defect.

I’d like to see some numbers on how many ‘foreign fighters’ — “greater” in number — there supposedly are down in southeastern Afghanistan, let alone in the south. Needless to say this is an exaggerated claim. Watch this space for more detail.

Analysis and commentary on Afghanistan is pretty frustrating at the moment, mostly since I’m out of the country, but all the fuss over Petraeus, the Lisbon meeting this weekend and the upcoming December Strategic Review in the US. Finally put some thoughts to paper on how I see it:

The problem with milestones is that there’s always another one a little further down the road. Last week we had the NATO meeting in Lisbon, to be followed soon after by the long-anticipated December Strategic Review. I can recall back in February this year when think-tank “lifers” in Washington told me to sit tight in anticipation of the “big review” coming up in December which would deliver some much-needed policy changes. Now that we’re here the view seems much less rosy:

Last week a team led by Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the president’s Afghanistan adviser at the White House, returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan with data that will serve as a basis for Mr. Obama’s review of the war next month. General Petraeus is also assembling masses of data.

Those final five syllables should be enough to make even the most die-hard optimist take pause. Petraeus wants to present an empirically valid case for continuing along the current course — the so-called “default position” turbo-charged with all the money and weapons the heart could ever want. Petraeus wants to use all these “masses of data” to make you believe five things, all of which are also more problematic than he’d have you believe.

Read the rest over at Current Intelligence.

I’m going through our selection of poems written by young and old Talibs and remembered a different set of poems that I translated from the Dari a few years ago, those of Nadia Anjuman. I’ll be republishing these poems online soon — since the old website has lapsed and doesn’t work any more — but you can order the full printed version on the HAWCA website. It includes an essay written by Christina Lamb, the complete side-by-side English-Dari translation of Nadia Anjuman’s book of poems as well as four stories written by victims of violence against women. This is one of my favourites among the collection:

Fly Freely (2001)

On a day when my thoughts bring me firewood

as a gift instead of cold feelings

On a day when my eyes are wide open

As if

By seeing a withered leaf, oceans would flow

On a day when my hands are inspired

to weave clothes full of wheat and roses

for the body of this creation

On a day when my lullaby can

grant sleep to the eyes of the sick and street-bound children

On a day when with soaring melodies

pray

to the fire spirits

On that day,

I will write a poem, a great romance

sweet as a palm tree and as enchanting as the moon.

There’s an interesting piece in today’s Sunday Times by Marie Colvin on Kandahar. It’s stuck behind a paywall, I’m afraid, so you’ll have to get it via LexisNexis or do a google search in a couple of days to see if someone copies it out elsewhere.

It’s an interesting story for the detail it brings out from Kandahar city. Colvin presents a picture of an increased Taliban focus on the city as a result of pressure from the outer districts where American/ISAF forces have been carrying out operations in recent weeks. One of the problems with this article, though, is that she gets the timing the wrong way round. A photo caption, for example, states that “the Taliban have begun assassinating government officials after infiltrating the city.” The Taliban’s assassination campaign has been up and running for several years now. There is nothing new, either, in the claim that the Taliban have decided to focus on the city as a special priority.

Already back in November/December 2009 a decision was taken to flood the city with Taliban supporters or sympathisers (and to reach out to those already living there). Much has been written on the areas that the Taliban gravitated to — for a mixture of tribal/qawmi and geographical-kinship reasons — but this piece suggests what’s going on is a new development. One interesting data point, though, is the extent of the violence. She visits Mirwais hospital to get a sense of the numbers:

“The hospital’s reception desk keeps three separate books to record the bloodshed. One is for Taliban shotings, the second for IEDs and vehicle bombs and the third for “innocent deaths” — from road accidents and natural causes. The receptionist said that 14 or 15 injured victims of Taliban attacks, mostly men, were being brought in every day.”

Not all of these are assassination attempts, of course. But certainly the numbers being targeted nowadays is high. Even back in late summer this year there it wasn’t unusual for 4 or 5 people to be killed in a single day.

A key point left out of this article is the fact that assassinations are not exclusively carried out by the Taliban. A long-standing rumour in the city even holds that the early assassination campaign reinvigorated around 2006-7 was spearheaded by old Kandahari Hezb-e Islami affiliates/supporters from the older mujahedeen generation. A larger number still are completely unrelated and carried out independently of the Taliban’s assassination commission (yes, there’s an official ruling body to assess who gets targeted and who doesn’t), the result of an environment where anything goes, where the rule of law is absent and where there is simply too much violence happening to make everything a priority.

***

Apologies for the absence. Have been taking some time together with Felix Kuehn to finish off a book-length study of the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda (and their affiliates) 1970-2010, commissioned and part-funded by New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and the Norwegian government. More on that to follow.

I was browsing through my father’s pile of books a while back and I came across a hardback with a great title: ‘Hope Is Not A Strategy’. (It’s not about politics, or Afghanistan, so don’t bother looking it up).

And they’re right. It’s not.

Which brings me to an article I’m reading at the moment: Alex Thier’s “Afghanistan’s Rocky Path to Peace”. You can see in this photo I took of my notes that I enjoyed the near-fairy-tale like quality of the article’s assumptions:

The words that occur with great frequency in this article are conditional: ‘could’ appears 8 times, ‘might’ appears 12 times and ‘would’ occurs 29 times (and also the word ‘will’ 29 times, as if force of suggestion will make something happen).

It’s probably just me, but I came away from this article with the sense — if this was as far as we might allow ourselves to think in terms of a possible negotiated settlement — that there is no way this can ever happen. For all that is presented is hope. Hope that this might change. He even says that the possibility would require “the stars to align”.

That’s not enough. There are enough alternative possibilities to the outline presented in this article that mean the concluding paragraph falls flat on its face.

“Do the Afghan people get a say? After 30 years of war they are among the poorest and most traumatized people on earth. But they are possessed of endurance and an indomitable spirit. If the indigenous, neutral leadership that supports a just peace could find its voice, that might spur a movement that presses the parties to reconcile.”

I say it again. Hope. Is. Not. A. Strategy.

Many of you have already downloaded and visited my previous post which contained a PDF version of a chronology of events in Kandahar from September 2001 up to the present day. For various other projects in the past (most of all, for work in connection with Mullah Zaeef’s My Life With the Taliban) I have found it useful to put together event data of varying levels of granularity.

Various projects made it difficult for me to work on compiling these various chronologies and event lists, but I finally found time to finish it off this week. Accordingly, please visit http://www.alexstrick.com/timeline/ for a more or less complete listing of events that took place in or relating to Kandahar from 1979-2010. Some years are less thoroughly presented than others, but this will change as I incrementally update the timeline over the next few months as I simultaneously go through the final stages of editing (together with Felix Kuehn) Mullah Zaeef’s second and forthcoming book.

I hope, also, to be able to find time to explain how I put the raw data together and was able to present it in this format. In short, I used an extremely nifty piece of software called Tinderbox (Mac only, apologies…) and was given a lot of help by some people who understand its ins and outs far better than I currently do. So special thanks to Mark Anderson for that, and to Mark Bernstein for writing the software in the first place. I use Tinderbox for almost all of my work these days (data gathering, data sorting, data organisation… the list goes on) and strongly recommend others with high-volume complex data projects to give it a try.

Anyway, find the timeline here and please don’t hesitate to get in touch with comments/corrections.

I’d been talking about this piece so much over the past 5 months that I almost believed I’d never finish writing it, but anyway, it finally got printed in ‘The National’ newspaper’s weekend supplement.

READ IT HERE