A Different Place

Irish Parallels

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:33:09 +0000

I’m finally getting round to finishing a book I blogged about a while back, Talking to Terrorists. In the conclusion, I keep getting struck with a sense of deja vu. No, Afghanistan is not Northern Ireland, nor are the Taliban the IRA. But there’s definitely something to be learned here:

“It was this absence of a long-term strategy which was to be one of the key contributory factors to the sharp increase in violence from 1969 to 1975-6. The rapid oscillation of policy in these years proved particularly damaging: from an ‘ostrich-like’ policy of neglect as the province spiralled towards collapse, to full-blown intervention and ‘Direct Rule’, to negotiations with the IRA in 1972, to an abortive attempt at power-sharing with moderate parties in 1973-4, only to return to more exploratory talks with terrorists in 1975. What characterised this era was the inability of the state to recognise how its own behaviour could exacerbate the situation. The lack of a consistent approach or over-arching vision — not to mention periodic flirtations with the possibility of a complete withdrawal from Northern Ireland — heightened suspicion of British intentions and undermined those moderate voices who were the most likely partners for peace (including the Irish government). […]

“From the mid-1970s, as violence spiralled out of control, the British government — with some reluctance — came to the decision that it needed to establish a ‘long haul’ commitment to Northern Ireland, in order to end the instability upon which the terrorist campaigns (both loyalist and republican), had thrived. By focusing their energies on ‘normalising’ the security situation and prioritising economic regeneration over constitutional experiments, the British effectively abandoned the hope that they might reach a peaceful settlement in the near future. Yet in taking this new path, they also wrested the initiative away from those violent groups that were prepared to use spectacular attacks to influence political events at important junctures. It was this change of tactics that forced the IRA to adopt its own ‘long war’ strategy — effectively an admission of weakness on the part of the republicans and a marked departure from the ‘one last push’ philosophy which had prevailed in their ranks until that point.” (p.243)

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Hope Is Not A Strategy

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 17:25:40 +0000

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.

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Kandahar Timeline 1979-2010

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:09:21 +0000

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.

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On Experts

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Sat, 22 May 2010 11:11:47 +0000

I found this nice little story about John Cooley:

In his typical self-effacing manner, [John] Cooley prefaced Payback by recounting how Joe Alex Morris, a friend killed during the first stages of the Iranian revolution while reporting for the Los Angeles Times, cautioned him about taking his expertise too seriously.

“Never consider yourself an expert on the Middle East. If you do, you’re already in deep trouble,” Morris told Cooley.

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Kandahar Portraits

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Fri, 14 May 2010 05:04:11 +0000

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 Related posts:Kandahar Timeline 1979-2010 Many of you have already downloaded and visited my previous... Kandahar’s Electricity Problems I’m with the short-termers [...] Related posts:

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From ‘Ghazal’ by Shin Gul Aajiz

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Sat, 01 May 2010 06:05:16 +0000

These lines from a poem written by Shin Gul Aajiz and published on the Taliban’s website sometime in late 2007:

The river of your love took me, I am going

If I am a drop, you are the sun of beauty

I am a garden of flowers because of your love’s spring

It’s one of the poems that Felix and I are editing together for a collection to be published by Hurst Books in early 2011. Lots of different styles, forms and subject matter. The one above is about yearning for his ‘beloved’. Many are political (motivational anthems angry with the ‘kuffar’) but these by no means dominate the collection we’ve kept since 2006.

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Kandahar Chronology (September 2001-October 2009)

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:51:17 +0000

I compiled this chronology of significant events relating to Kandahar province last year. The primary source for these dates/events was the New York Times’ archive, but then (almost) everything has been double-sourced. Everything from about 2008 onwards was while I was here in Kandahar so that then is my own observations and event listings. Perhaps someone will find it useful and it will save someone somewhere some time.

Here is the file:

LINK

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Ask the Scholars: when and where was Mullah Mohammad Omar born?

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:38:39 +0000

As part of the NYU study, I’ve been doing some delving into the ages of various key members of the Taliban and those affiliated with ‘Al Qaeda’ and the various associated groups. While doing this, I came across a whole host of differing accounts of Mullah Mohammad Omar’s age and birthplace. I thought I’d list some that I came across as a way of showing how the ’scholarly community’ is often deeply divided on really basic issues.

Sana Haroon (in Frontier of Faith) says that his ‘hometown’ was Uruzgan
John Cooley (in Unholy Wars) says that he was born in Maiwand district, Kandahar province
Bruce Riedel (in the execrable The Search for Al Qaeda) says that he comes from Uruzgan province
Kamal Matinuddin (in The Taliban Phenomenon) states that he was born in 1961 in “Nauda village of Panjwayi district”, Kandahar province; that he later moved with his family to Deh Rawud district of Uruzgan province, and then later migrated back to Sangisar in Kandahar province. Matinuddin’s account is frequently cited.
Rohan Gunaratna (in Inside Al Qaeda) states that he was born in 1962 in Uruzgan
Steve Coll (in Ghost Wars) states that he was born in 1950 in Nodeh village in Kandahar province
Dexter Filkins (in The Forever War) dances around the issue and states merely that he was based in Sangisar
Ahmed Rashid (in Taliban) says that he was born in 1959 in Nodeh village near Kandahar and that he moved with his family during the 1980s jihad to Tirin Kot in Uruzgan province
Michael Griffin (in Reaping the Whirlwind) states that he was “from Maiwand” in Kandahar province
A hagiographical Arab jihadi account of Mullah Mohammad Omar’s life (“The Giant Man”, published by Al-Tibyan Publications) states that he was born in 1962 in Uruzgan
Another Arab jihadist profile on Azzam.com states that he was born in 1960 in Noori village in Kandahar province
Mullah Zaeef (in My Life With the Taliban ) says that he was born in Uruzgan around 1962
The French review Politique Internationale says — in the introduction to one of the few interviews made by a western news outlet with Mullah Mohammad Omar — that he was born in 1965 in a village near Kandahar.

That’s a variance of 15 years in the different estimates, and I haven’t even included the various speculations in newspaper and magazine print — of which there are volumes.

It all goes back to issues of information and openness among the Taliban. I’m reading Philip Short’s excellent biography of Pol Pot in the evenings here in Kandahar, and I came across this passage:

Even then, he did so reluctantly. For two decades he had operated under multiple aliases: Pouk, Hay, Pol, ‘87′, Grand-Uncle, Elder Brother, First Brother – to be followed in later years by ‘99′ and Phem. “It is good to change your name,” he once told one of his secretaries. “The more often you change your name the better. It confuses the enemy.” Then he added, in a phrase which would become a Khmer Rouge mantra: “If you preserve secrecy, half the battle is already won.” The architect of the Cambodian nightmare was not a man who liked working in the open.

I’m wary of drawing comparisons between the Khymer Rouge and the Taliban, if only because it seems easy to do so on the surface, but secrecy over basic points is certainly something that they shared.

Please let me know if you come across any ‘interesting’ citations of where Mullah Mohammad Omar was born; I even vaguely recall reading somewhere that he was born in Kunar province, but can’t remember where I read it.

UPDATE: Someone very helpfully suggested I read this Dutch report from 1999 as to the childhood and early years of Mullah Mohammad Omar. Go to Google Translate if you don’t understand Dutch.

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New(ish) Kandahar Blogs

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:54:25 +0000

Just a short shout-out to three blogs also posting from Kandahar for those who don’t already follow them. Not everything is always interesting, but given the dearth of information they’re worth keeping up with.

Kandahar Diary – PSC Contractor based down in Kandahar, managing operations all over the south it seems.

Knights of Afghanistan – Observations from an Expat Country Manager for an Afghan PSC, based down in Kandahar

Free Range International – Most of you will already read these guys, but now they’re increasingly posting from Kandahar rather than just from Nangarhar.

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Jere van Dyk’s ‘Captive’

Alex Strick van Linschoten — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 16:55:02 +0000

I’m looking forward to this book, just reviewed (below) by Publisher’s Weekly. Quite apart from the whole survival-memoir thing, Jere knows a lot about the Haqqanis (having spent time with them during the 1980s).

“Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban” (Jere Van Dyk)

Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban Jere Van Dyk. Times, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8827-4

An American journalist exploring the war zone on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reports unwanted lessons in its perils in this harrowing memoir. Having traveled with the “freedom fighters” in the ’80s, Van Dyk thought he had the connections and knowledge to navigate the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but he was captured by a fractious band of Taliban fighters in 2008. Van Dyk (In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey) and his Afghan guides spent 44 days in a dark cell. Well-fed but terrified, he felt a nightmare of helplessness and disorientation. Dependent on a jailer who mixed solicitude with jocular death threats and a ruthless Taliban commander who could free or kill him on a whim, the author performed Muslim prayers in an attempt to appease his captors; wary of murky conspiracies involving his cellmates, he “was afraid of everybody, including the children.” Van Dyk’s claustrophobic narrative jettisons journalistic detachment and views his ordeal through the distorting emotions of fear, shame, and self-pity. But in telling his story this way, he brings us viscerally into the mental universe of the Taliban, where paranoia and fanaticism reign, and survival requires currying favor with powerful men. The result is a gripping tale of endurance and a vivid evocation of Afghanistan’s grim realities. 1 map. (June 22)

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