A Different Place

I’m with the short-termers on this one:

Convinced that expanding the electricity supply will build popular support for the Afghan government and sap the Taliban’s influence, some officers want to spend $200 million over the next few months to buy more generators and millions of gallons of diesel fuel. Although they acknowledge that the project will be costly and inefficient, they say President Obama’s pledge to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011 has increased pressure to demonstrate rapid results in their counterinsurgency efforts, even if it means embracing less-than-ideal solutions to provide basic public services.

…

U.S. diplomats and reconstruction specialists, who do not face the same looming drawdown, have opposed the military’s plan because of concerns that the Afghan government will not be able to afford the fuel to sustain the generators. Mindful of several troubled development programs over the past eight years, they want the United States to focus on initiatives that Afghans can maintain over the long term. (excerpted from The Washington Post)

I wrote about this a few weeks back, suggesting that it would probably be better just to pay for fuel and generators so as to deliver something tangible and real for people in Kandahar City. Martine van Bijlert (one of the co-founders of AAN) just posted a must-read commentary from her recent trip down to Kandahar in which she notes that:

I have returned from Kandahar shaken. Not because of the blasts and the warnings and the feelings of apprehension, but because of how dark the future looks when I listen to what people have to say. I fear that all the shiny plans will do very little to change that.

Electricity would, at the very least, be something that the government and foreigners could point to as having improved — only, that is, if it can be maintained past just a few months. The last two times we had regular and reliable electricity — just after Governor Torialai Weesa was appointed to the post for a month or so, and in the run-up to the Presidential and Provincial Council Elections — nobody benefited from the provision of the service because (a) there was very little follow-up in terms of publicising and trying to advertise and remind people it was there and (b) because it soon stopped and people went back to moaning about how useless the government and foreigners are.

Today I heard for the third time that Mullah Mohammad Omar (i.e. Taliban leader) was captured by Pakistanis three weeks ago in Karachi. I don’t really believe it, but since everyone’s talking about it I thought I’d post something here. You know. Just in case…

This is a pretty useful survey to read through. I have my usual concerns about how it was conducted, who they spoke to, who did the interviews, where people were interviewed, how they managed to get through all these long lists of questions etc etc, but there are some general trends here which reflect things said by people I speak to.

The conclusion presents a bleak picture:

This survey’s findings indicate endemic corruption, along with a lack of security and basic services, in Kandahar Province. Collectively, this sets conditions for a disenfranchised population to respond either by not supporting the government due to its inability to deliver improvements in the quality of life or, worse yet, by supporting the Taliban.

We should keep in mind, though, that this survey was carried out between December 23-29, 2009, a period that — compared to now — was and felt much safer. The exponential increase of insecurity, particularly in Kandahar City, since then would surely give more pause for thought. Next time they’re doing these surveys I’d be interested to see some data collected on whether people are sending family members outside the province in anticipation of the coming summer; I’ve heard mountains of anecdotal evidence that this is the case, but something concrete would be useful to confirm this.

[h/t to Nathan Hodge at Wired's Danger Room Blog for distributing this survey online]

I’m running out of ways to describe how difficult Kandahar is becoming, and more so each day. A good friend was just a little over 100 metres away yesterday evening when the foreign offices were attacked. Lucky guy. With him was someone else I interviewed a few months ago for an article I’m writing for The National. The commander of a group of men in a private security company, he had told me how dozens of his friends had died over the course of his work. Last night while he was out with friends, the group that he works with now were all killed in the blast.

We’re only at the beginning of the summer. Four or five months to go before we realise that the surge didn’t really work. If only we could fast-forward to that point and avoid all the deaths to come.

Heard this morning about a bus travelling on the Herat-Kandahar road which was shot up by NATO troops. Above you can hear one of the victims explaining what happened. He seems to be the only one in the Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar City; the rest were taken to the main base at Kandahar Airfield (KAF).
A couple of pictures follow:

I type to you now without the sound of a generator in the background. Yes, it’s that time of the week – we have city power. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of working with a generator in the next room, let me just tell you that it makes it difficult to think; by the end of the day you often feel like someone has been bashing your head all day. Turning the generator off is one of the most pleasant moments in my day.

…which is why it baffles me that restoring Kandahar’s city-power isn’t more of a priority for the guys who are ‘winning hearts and minds’ (supposedly) this summer in the city. I get that without sorting out Kajaki and Dahla dams paying for fuel for massive generators to supply the city with power is a little like burning money, but we seem to be doing that anyway so why not go for the short-term fix on this one when it could make SUCH a difference.

Anyway, rant over. Another interesting thing I heard yesterday is that shopkeepers are tearing up and throwing out their stocks of Seven Star cigarettes on account of a rumour that the company have written the word “Allah” inside the filter so that by smoking Seven Star somehow you are burning or desecrating the name of God. People really seem to be taking this one to heart.

UPDATE: (25 minutes later) The power went again. We’re back on generator. Yuk.

AGAIN UPDATE: Things like this don’t help either…

“The storm is coming. Believe you me. The storm is coming. I try telling people, but it seems they’re all just making themselves busy with fixing the leaky roof or the squeaky door. The storm will destroy their entire house and city, though. The storm is coming. You have two options: get out now, or climb down into your bunker and hope that the storm will pass and that you’re still alive six months from now. The storm is coming.” (Businessman in Kandahar City).

Kandahar, it seems, has changed. Felix and I were away for a little over two months, and during that time security conditions in the city have worsened considerably. The threat comes not just from the Taliban — who are able to carry out occasional prominent operations and move around the city — but also criminal groups. Kidnappings, robberies, intimidation — these seem to be par for the course for residents inside the city.

‘The surge’ is coming, too, and everyone knows it. Some families are sending women and children away, either to Quetta or to Kabul; those who could afford to do so had mostly done this already. Young people who manage to find work or study opportunities outside Kandahar are staying away. “Come back to Kandahar?” said one Kandahari friend of mine now working in Kabul. “You’ve got to be kidding, right?”

I haven’t really had a chance to catch up on what’s going on outside the city, let alone what’s going on in the districts, but I hope reporting this summer is going to be better than this recent article (“Barrel-chested governor Canada’s 250-lb political weapon in Kandahar” by Murray Brewster). Steve Coll’s blog post on everyone’s favourite brother is a must-read.

I’m knee-deep in research work and reading of my own. On my bed-side table for the coming couple of weeks (ok, I don’t have a bed-side table…) are:

– Brynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad

– David Cloud and Greg Jaffe’s The Fourth Star

– David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers

– Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

– Vasily Grossman’s A Writer At War: V.G. with the Red Army, 1941-1945

Another book I’ve been dipping into recently is Patrick Porter’s Military Orientalism (Hurst, 2009), an excellent take on the way militaries see each other and adapt to their ‘enemy’. I haven’t yet read the chapter which deals with the Taliban, but I’ll be sure to comment here when I do.

The things we’re working on have completely filled our plates for the next half year or so: a collection of Taliban ‘poems’ or songs that we’re putting out a translation of next year; a second volume together with Mullah Zaeef on the history of the Taliban movement 1980s-present day that we hope will address all the things everyone said he neglected to mention in the first book; and a large research project for New York University on the extent of links between the Taliban and al Qaeda (and all the various affiliates of both) which tackles everything from the 1970s onwards.

I just got back from an incredibly depressing lecture by John Nagl at King’s College London entitled “Afghanistan and its lessons for the future of conflict.” Unashamedly addressing the problem from the perspective of the US army, Nagl took us through his conception of counterinsurgency warfare, how the US — in his analysis — have responded and learnt from mistakes made in the past, and what this might mean for Afghanistan at the moment and the wars of the future.

There were quite a few points and broad themes where we were in complete agreement: the absolute importance of the information or ‘strategic communications’ element in Afghanistan to any success that might manifest itself, or in terms of any buy-in from Afghans; we agree on the importance of history (“history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes”) and on the need for careful, diligent study in order to prevent repeating the mistakes of the past.

We differ, though, primarily on the different basis of our professional and personal experience. John Nagl served many years in the US Army, taking part in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as well as Operation Enduring Freedom post-2001. He is concerned with the institution that he knows best (the US military), the people who form its staff and worried about its ability to adapt to change from within. These are all valuable pursuits, but it’s a very different world to the one that I inhabit, sharing in the ordinary problems and insecurity that Afghan friends face on a daily basis — with the caveat, of course, that I have a foreign passport and can leave at any point that I choose.

Almost entirely absent from tonight’s presentation was the Afghan narrative — the ordinary experiences of people who have to exist at the sharp end of the spear. I’m not even talking about the ‘counter-narrative’ which we’re starting to see more of from the policy community — specifically the kind of thing that Mullah Zaeef’s book seeks to encourage, and that recent talk of negotiations will only promote further (at least in name).

To that end, I am incredibly worried about his seemingly wholehearted endorsement of ‘community defence initiatives’. I don’t think I need to go into the reasons why creating and funding tribal militias in southern Afghanistan is to open Pandora’s Box — others have written about it — but the US military’s continued involvement with this idea (with what amounts, by now, to wilful ignorance of the very loud counter-discourse) indicates, to my mind and from where I’m sitting, an emphasis on short-term fixes over long-term strategy and consistent communication of those goals.

There’s a whole literature now from scholars, military practitioners, and also from within the US establishment, on how and why the fostering of these tribal or local defence groups is a bad idea, and the only thing to explain it is a reliance on something I like to call ‘hope tactics’. About half a year ago, I received an email from a American soldier about to deploy to Nuristan. He’d read a post I’d written together with Felix on tribal militias and wanted to know more about why I thought it wouldn’t work. In the end we had to agree to disagree, but he had these words in final response:

It’s not that militias are good or bad for Afghans – rather which militias, in which geographical/political setting, with what mission, under whose supervision/ownership, for what purpose, and with what training. In my view – seconded by quite a few Afghans I have interviewed – a locally sourced, tribally/communally managed, non-militarized, properly trained over the long-run, arbakai force may be the preferable solution in some areas of Afghanistan.

…which is all fine and well, except just to go ahead anyway in the hope that you’ll be the one who can make it work (even if we forget that people are never deployed long enough to see this kind of thing through to the conclusion and in the kind of detail and perspective that an incredibly important decision like this should entail) is just wishful thinking.

There was also a lot of talk of ‘enemies’ tonight. Obviously there is a dialectic at the core of counterinsurgency studies — the insurgent vs the counterinsurgent — but to my mind this needs to be complicated by the on-the-ground reality that there are no such clear lines dividing government, people, Taliban and all the myriad of other ‘groups’, particularly in somewhere like southern Afghanistan. While the Q&A session afterwards had him admit more of this detail and ‘messiness’, this didn’t come across in the quite confident presentation that preceded.

Finally, the most worrying of all was his suggestion that, for the future, maybe “the military needs to become more like the State Department, and the State Department need to become more like the military.” One of the biggest problems — in my analysis — that we suffer from in southern Afghanistan is western political establishments’ almost complete reliance on the military to form policy in the absence of their own more creative and useful alternatives. We see this with the United States in particular, but also in the United Kingdom. What we most certainly DON’T need, is a further creep of political power into the hands of the military who, we must remember, only come with a limited toolbox and set of resources to respond to different kinds of problems, notwithstanding Professor Nagl’s hopes to the contrary.

“The reality was that [Afghanistan] was viewed as an unwanted headache and one which seemed increasingly impossible to solve. This much is made clear from official government documents from the period, which reflect the sense of defeatism and intellectual exhaustion that permeated the highest echelons of the British state. [...] Governments had cast around for a ‘silver bullet’ to solve the crisis, oscillating between markedly divergent positions. [...] thinking on [Afghanistan] now appeared more rudderless than ever.

[...] a policy vacuum allowed the notion of ‘talking to terrorists’ to once more re-enter British calculations.”

I’ve doctored the above passage a little, but it’s certainly an interesting parallel for the present day discussion. The passage is, in fact, discussing post-1975 Northern Ireland and the British government’s return to a policy of clandestine discussions through intermediaries with figures from within the Provisional IRA.

The book does caution against drawing parallels between different circumstances — everything is local, after all — but the fact that even a brief read in the book will remind you of what is happening with international policy towards the Taliban at the moment is an indicator that there are at least lessons to be learnt here: ending political stalemate in the greater Kandahar area at the moment should be the single priority of any efforts to find ‘a solution’, but doing so from a point of strategic bankruptcy will inevitably be to the detriment of everyone’s long-term future.

As such, the book “Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country (Crises in World Politics)” (John Bew, Martyn Frampton, Inigo Gurruchaga) is an absolute must-read for policy-makers who see a future (or an end-game) in the possibility of some sort of negotiated settlement with the Taliban.