UPDATED: An Appeal

It’s easy to talk in the abstract about war. The dead become numbers, the displaced are statistics, and slowly we begin to forget about the people who live through it all. Afghanistan is a case in point. Tens of thousands of words of commentary are written every day, but very few of these seem to accurately bring these day-to-day particulars across. Earlier this month, I read an article by Josh Partlow in the Washington Post on the situation for those who have fled the conflict in Helmand -- U.N.-speak = IDPs -- for an area near Kabul City. It was a detailed, movingly-described account of some of these ‘particulars’ of their lives:

“For those who have escaped Afghanistan’s worst violence, some things are hard to forget: the sight of a woman’s hair entangled in the mulberry branches, her legs strewn far away in the dirt. Or the sounds they heard as they hid in an underground hole, counting the bombs to pass the time, praying the American troops would leave. Some of those Afghans have tiptoed in the footsteps of neighbors to avoid the mines. They’ve been hit with shrapnel and tied with flex cuffs, threatened by the Taliban and frightened by the coalition, seen relatives shot and homes destroyed. And so they left Helmand province and made their way to this dirt lot on the outskirts of Kabul, where month by month the settlement expands with those who have come to wait out the war. “In a situation like this,” said Sayid Mohammad, a Helmand native who has spent the past year at the refugee camp, “how could I ever go home?”” [Read the full article here]

There’s nothing new or particularly special about this group of refugees from Helmand, but for some reason this piece said something to me. It’s easy to become passive consumers of the news coming out of Afghanistan, particularly when it’s often so frustrating to read. I first read the article in London, a place where everything is taken for granted: warmth, walking on the snow, heating in the house, electricity, water, you name it. But if you allow your imagination to drift, imagine living away from home, in a place far colder than what you’re used to, in tents and makeshift huts on account of a war taking place in the villages, one that you have seen sweep through with random but seeming deathly certainty and claim your friends and family. For another account of life in the camp, watch the documentary account made by Alberto Arce here.

So I decided together with a long-standing Afghan friend and respected NGO-practitioner -- she used to run HAWCA -- to try to find some way to contribute to bettering the lives of these refugees at the camp. Orzala explains more:

“We contacted the UNHCR office to find out about the numbers of refugees and how we can make sure that our possible help is going to reach the neediest. Their formal response was, it can happen through government or NGOs working with refugees. A good friend who also is part of an international organisation involved in the field advised small scale donations and funds to go through private initiatives rather than the formal ones. Additionally with my experience in the past, I believe the winter will be over if we follow the lengthy procedures. I visited the site itself a couple of days ago to talk with those living there and also to get a realistic sense of how many people were living there. A representative stated that there were 870 families living there at the moment, and we got an idea of what other organisations were working there as well (Aschiana, the World Health Organization, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health along with Welt Hunger Hilfe). It seems, however, that there is a shortfall in terms of the amount of assistance being provided, as well as the speed that this is happening.”

So in the short-term what we want to do is -- at the suggestion of those from the camp, but also an idea Orzala had had beforehand -- to raise some money to provide charcoal. People are accustomed to using this in the winter; and it’s neither heavy nor particularly expensive. 50 kilograms of charcoal costs about $20 and so to be able to provide around 20 kg of charcoal to everyone will cost just under $7000. I know it’s easy to just close this page and move on to something different, but I hope you’ll be able to donate something -- perhaps $10 or $15 -- via the paypal button below so that we can try to ensure that this group of people have at least some warmth to rely on when the snows come in Kabul.

[THE APPEAL HAS NOW CLOSED]

Since the donate button doesn't display a running total, I'll do that myself here on the blog, and will of course keep you all updated with how things go once we have raised our target amount.

Final total raised: $9,118 from 124 people.

Real People as Agents

I was reading in the first volume of Taruskin's history of music -- all right, procrastinating from overdue PhD chapters -- and came across this useful and timely reminder:

"Statements and actions in response to real or perceived conditions: these are the essential facts of human history. The discourse, so often slighted in the past, is in fact the story. It creates new social and intellectual conditions to which more statements and actions will respond, in an endless chain of agency. The historian needs to be on guard against the tendency, or the temptation, to simplify the story by neglecting this most basic fact of all. No historical event or change can be meaningfully asserted unless its agents can be specified; and agents can only be people. Attributions of agency unmediated by human action are, in effect, lies -- or at the very least, evasions. They occur inadvertently in careless historiography (or historiography that has submitted unawares to a master narrative), and are invoked deliberately in propaganda (i.e., historiography that consciously colludes with a master narrative)." (Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol 1, p.xviii)

It's good to be reminded of this when thinking about most things, but especially when discussing ideology and influence with regard to the war in Afghanistan and the identity of the various groups fighting. People have thoughts; ideas do more than just 'emerge'. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else, but I think writing on the nature of the Taliban, for example, could become a lot clearer if we stuck to the agency of real people rather than abstractions.

Deedee Derksen picks her 2010 books

This is a guest-post by Deedee Derksen, a Dutch journalist just out with a good book on Afghanistan that helps deflate many stereotypes commonly believed.  It's only out in Dutch at the moment, but I'll bet an English version will come out before not too long...

I love reading autobiographies and biographies.  A few I’ve read this year convey profound belief, be it in:

a.    creating the best rock band in the world (Keith Richards) b.    establishing the best Islamic Emirate in the world (Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef) c.    writing the best books in the world (Somerset Maugham, Patricia Highsmith) d.    great reporting (Martha Gellhorn, Hugh Pope) e.    himself (Tony Blair)

Keith Richards and Mullah Zaeef share more than their belief. They’re both icons of their time, or at least wingmen to icons. They were both part of a band that made headlines the world over. They both know a thing or two about the dangers of drugs and loose women. And they were both once wanted men – though the hordes of semi-naked girls and English bobbies after Richards probably weren’t quite as menacing as the war on terror justice unleashed on Mullah Zaeef.

Both excellent autobiographies offer rare insights to lives otherwise closed off, and often misrepresented.  Anyone doing anything Afghanistan related should read Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef’s memoir (My Life With The Taliban, ed. Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn), which provides a unique insider’s view on the Taliban movement. Keith Richard’s book (Life, co-author: James Fox) may not be as vital to world peace as Mullah Zaeef’s, but it’s nonetheless a lot of fun to read. For all the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll stories (and there are many), what struck me most was that Richards is, above all, an ambitious, hardworking guy.

Two biographies of writers that appeared in 2009, which I read in 2010 and which are unlikely to be bettered, are The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, and Beautiful Shadow – A life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson.  Somerset Maugham’s short stories are among my favourites (as are those of Alice Munro, mentioned elsewhere on this blog), and this biography gives an account of the tortured, and often quite unpleasant, genius behind them. Like Maugham, Patricia Highsmith was a loner, according to the beautiful biography by Andrew Wilson.  I read her series of Tom Ripley thrillers again after reading about the author. They’re amoral, and gripping from the first page. Terrific.

Martha Gellhorn’s reporting on the Second World War is some of the most interesting. As a woman, she wasn’t permitted to embed with the American troops. So while reporters like Ernie Pyle and Gellhorn’s husband Ernest Hemingway were embedded, and thus subject to official censorship, Gellhorn wrote freely about the horrors in Europe (Gellhorn: a Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorehead).  Now women reporters can go embedded, many consciously choose to work independently, like Minka Nijhuis from the Netherlands in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her beautifully written and very moving book on Burma -- Birma. Land van Geheimen (2009) -- won a well-deserved, and prestigious, Dutch award in 2010.

Many foreign correspondents find it difficult to convey to their editors images or impressions that contradict stereotypes at home. This is especially so in the Muslim world, as Hugh Pope explains in Dining with al-Qaeda.  Pope, after thirty (!) years reporting across the Middle East, has some tremendous stories to tell – and he does so with much empathy and wit.  A great read. I also liked People Like Us by the Dutch former-correspondent Joris Luyendijk, a Dutch book on Middle East reporting which was published in 2006 but translated into English in 2009. Luyendijk rightly shatters any lingering belief in objective coverage of the Middle East.

I haven’t yet started Tony Blair’s eulogy to himself. Judging from the bits I’ve read here and there, I don’t have high expectations. Not only does it beg for a good edit (I assume he made the fatal mistake of writing it himself as it reads like a column in Good Housekeeping). But Blair’s take on civil liberties would make Dostum blush (read Dave Eggers's wonderful Zeitoun, also out this year, for the sharpest antidote to Blair’s call for the suspension of Habeas Corpus). Perhaps just as offensively, Blair expresses no remorse over Iraq, and lumps all Islamists together, conflating Hamas and Hizbollah with al-Qaeda, and portraying them as an existential threat, the gravest ever faced by mankind, perhaps with the exception of Gordon Brown. And all this from one of most successful politicians of our times and the man currently entrusted to bringing peace to the Middle East. Now that’s a great piece of fiction.

The Best Books of 2010 (UPDATED)

It's the end of the year again -- so fast! -- and I thought it'd be worth taking a moment to reflect on what I'd read over the past year. I also managed to rope in a few friends in to provide their own roundups for the sake of variety. I allowed myself to include long-form journalism as well as books, since this year saw two really fantastic examples of that; of course there were many, many more, but the two below really stood out.

For non-fiction, I came to Noah Feldman's Fall and Rise of the Islamic State a few years after it was published, but found it both interesting and lucidly written, as fine an example for how to explore these issues of ideology and political aspiration in Islam as I know. Students and scholars of political Islam take note.

Matt Aikins notes how a new round of Iraq memoirs are being released, and at the top of these (although it's only half-memoir) must be Wendell Steavenson's The Weight of a Mustard Seed. She tells Iraq's story through the voice and life of a relatively senior figure from within Saddam's armed forces, interspersing it with her own efforts to to research that same story. It's beautifully written -- like her previous book on Georgia -- and, along with Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near, is always something I recommend to people on Iraq. David Finkel's The Good Soldiers tells the story of the American military's struggles post-2003, again powerfully written.

From Afghanistan, Elizabeth Rubin's New York Times Magazine profile of President Karzai was simply one of the most compelling and interesting pieces of writing that I've read from the post-2001 period. You must read this if you haven't already. Looking across the border, Jane Mayer wrote an absolutely devastating New Yorker piece on the drone strike campaign in Pakistan. I'm surprised it hasn't received more attention. If you haven't read it, stop what you're doing; print it out and make time.

Reconciliation has been one of the most misused buzzwords of 2010. For a different perspective, look no further than Ed Moloney's Voices from the Grave. This is an edited/commentary-rich oral history of two figures from Northern Ireland, published earlier this year now that both voices have died. It shows the inner machinations going on behind the scenes -- including some amazing accounts of prison dynamics and the hunger strikes -- and every pundit and politician seeking to involve themselves somehow in the debate must read this book as a historical and contextual corrective.

I didn't get the chance to read much fiction this year on account of work, but Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring an Iranian Love Story (reviewed in the New Yorker here) was definitely the most memorable. Time will tell whether it will last, but my sense is that this was something special.

There were countless numbers of books that I wanted to read but didn't find the time. They will be priorities in 2011:

-- Alice Munro's short-story collection, Too Much Happiness

-- Priya Satia's Spies in Arabia (described to me by Matt Aikins as follows: "It's about the cultural environment of Edwardian-era British secret agents in Arabia – their dissatisfaction with Western modernity, their search for some pre-modern, inscrutable purity in the ‘vast desert’ with its ‘timeless inhabitants’, the intuitionist methodologies they developed in response to a ‘mysterious Orient’ that scientific empiricism could not fathom, their cultivated literary mystique and ambitions, their habits of dressing in Arab garb and living so as to ‘become one with them’ – and the complex relationship this had to the military and political imperatives of empire and war.") Who wouldn't want to read that?

-- Nir Rosen's Aftermath (although I'll have to read his earlier Iraq book first…)

-- Two books on Kashmir: Arif Jamal's Shadow War and Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night.

-- Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, an account of the killings and deaths in central and eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

-- Mary Kaldor's The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon

-- Michael Lewis's The Big Short, on the financial crisis and how it happened

-- and (although I reckon this'll keep me going into 2012) Richard Taruskin's magisterial Oxford History of Western Music. It's five volumes, but Taruskin is one of the truly great living musicologists and cultural scholars of our day. It's been out for a while but Oxford University Press have recently issued a paperback version selling at just under £60 on Amazon. That's a bargain if ever there was one.

Here are some selections from Matt Aikins, intrepid journalist and the talent behind Harper's profile of General Razziq, The Master of Spin Boldak:

Every year it seems as if there are more good books being published and less time to read any of them. 2010 was no exception. There is a sort of 'second wave' of in-depth reporting coming out of the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts. Joshua E. S. Phillips' chronicle of torture by US soldiers in Iraq, None of Us Were Like This Before, is among the best. It's unflinching in every sense of the word: neither from incendiary portrayals of the depravities US military might inflicted on innocent Iraqis, nor from a nuanced and empathetic understanding of the torturers themselves, in many cases ordinary Americans who found themselves swept up, beyond morality, by forces within and without that they could hardly comprehend.

Finally, two of my favorite reads from 2010 were not actually published in 2010. Jane Mayer's The Dark Side is astonishing not only for its comprehensive indictment of the expansion of executive power under Bush, but for how well-written and engrossing it is. And Out of Afghanistan, Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison's out-of-print account of almost a decade of negotiations leading to the Geneva Accords, (which paved the way from Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan) should truly be a must-read for every Afghanistan expert. It's extremely relevant right now.

And these from Anand Gopal, by far and away the best-connected and most interesting writer on the insurgency in Afghanistan (just see his paper on Kandahar if you need convincing):

In 2010 we finally saw some quality Af-Pak books hit the shelves, three of which are indispensable. Antonio Giustozzi's Decoding the Taliban: Insights From the Field contains selections from some of the most careful and learned observers of the Afghan insurgency; if you don't have time for the whole book, read Tom Coghlan's take on Helmand. Giustozzi's other release this year, Empires of Mud, is a fascinating study of warlordism in Afghanistan, a much-abused term that warranted the close attention. My Life in the Taliban by Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef provides a rare glimpse into the mind of a senior Taliban figure. In particular, the descriptions of life during the anti-Soviet insurgency in Kandahar are an important contribution to our understanding of the country's history.

Outside of the South Asia field, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks gives a compelling look at the intersection between genetics, medical research, race and class. It traces the story of a poor, cancer-ridden African American woman and her unlikely (and unknowing) contribution to medical science: a cell sample that has been used to study cancer for decades. Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom looks at Bush-era American suburbia. I don't think it quite lived up to its hype, but it is an important and enjoyable read nonetheless. Finally, for the mathematically inclined, I recommend Oded Goldreich's P, NP and NP-completeness: The Basis of Complexity Theory, which gives of a good overview of the P-NP problem in computer science, which made the news this year for almost getting solved.

And these from Naheed Mustafa, a friend and journalist who is hopefully soon starting work on a great project she has up her sleeve:

I always feel like I’m six months to a year behind in my reading. I end up doing so much reading for work that I can’t get around to reading the things I want. But certainly there are worse problems one can have. I do read a lot of long form journalism and some of the pieces I especially enjoyed have already been mentioned above (Elizabeth Rubin’s profile of Hamid Karzai) and Jane Mayer’s drone piece.

Daniyal Moinuddin’s collection of short stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was compelling and on the whole I thought it was an eloquent presentation of the fading of the traditional landowning class in Pakistan’s Punjab. The other two books I finally got around to reading and am happy that I did: Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill – both Canadian writers. Neither was published in 2010 but, like I said, I’m always behind.

There are several long form pieces I’d suggest as well. Two from Basharat Peer who I think is one of the most phenomenal journalists of our time and has an eloquent, literary style of writing: Kashmir’s Forever War in Granta 112: Pakistan and The Road Back from Ayodhya in The Caravan. The third is an astonishing portrait of Roger Ebert written by Chris Jones for Esquire entitled The Essential Man. Jones’ attention to detail and the tiny cues he picks up are brilliant. Roger Ebert wrote a response to Jones’ profile (on the whole positive) that you may want to read to get some sense of the process (I’m obsessed with “process”). Also, another Esquire piece called Eleven Lives by Tom Junod about the oil workers who were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion back in April of this year.

My last recommendation is actually a short excerpt from a memoir my dear and lovely friend Rahat Kurd is writing. It’s about growing up Muslim in Canada. The essay was printed in Maisonneuve magazine: Things That Make Us Muslim.

Your suggestions and recommendations are welcome in the comments below.

Open Letter: The Response (UPDATED)

After a slow beginning, the open letter to President Obama that I co-signed has finally started to get some media coverage and blogger/commentator reaction. I'm listing here all the different places it's shown up so far, and I'll try to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

Note, too, that the list of those who have signed continues to grow as word about the letter spreads. We are now over 50 names.

Reprints of the Letter

Main/Official Site

War is a Crime.org

The Guardian @ Comment is Free

The Daily Telegraph

Jean Guisnel translates the letter into French

'War in Context' blog republishes part of the letter

The official Afghanistan Operation blog of the British Ministry of Defence reprints part of the letter and links to the Daily Telegraph reprint

The UK's Stop the War Coalition reprints the full letter

Anthony Loewenstein reprints the full letter

E-Ariana (a news wire service) reprints the full letter

Comment and Explanation from those who signed

Gerard Russell explains why he signed over on his personal blog

Four of those who signed answer some questions posed to us by a blogger/journalist

Gilles Dorronsoro was on BBC World Service Radio (no link available)

Daniel Korski explains why he signed (on his blog at The Spectator)

Joshua Foust explains why he signed (and why he's changed his mind on negotiations) over at registan.net

I explain on BBC World Service a bit about the context of the open letter (44:23mins in)

News/Wires

"No decisive victory one year into Afghan surge" - Associated Press (republished elsewhere, including at NPR.org)

"US surge in Afghanistan 'not working'" - The Daily Telegraph (UK)

"Afghan insurgents kill six foreign soldiers" - AFP posted on Khaleej Times

"Obama "Must Talk to Afghan Taliban"" - Asharq al-Awsat (reposting AFP)

"Des experts internationaux appellent Obama à négocier avec les talibans" - AFP posted on Le Monde website (in French)

"Obama must talk to Afghan Taliban, experts say" - AFP published on Emirates 24/7

"Academics, experts appeal to Obama to back Taliban talks" - Myra MacDonald writes a piece for Reuters about the letter, quoting extensively.

"6 Nato soldiers killed" - The Morning Star Online

"Letter to Obama calls for change in Afghan strategy" - Daily Times (Pakistan)

"Pak intelligentsia urges Obama to change Afghan strategy" - AfghanistanNews.net (needless to say, we are not the 'Pak intelligentsia')

Allvoices runs a news piece on the letter

Pakistan Today, a newspaper, outlines the main points of the letter

The Century Foundation feature Praveen's critique of the letter on their Afghanistan page

Dawn newspaper (Pakistan) features the letter

France 24 cover the letter on their website news wire

Blogging and Analysis

Malou Innocent mentions the letter and part-quotes it in a piece entitled "Spinning Us to Death" - The National Interest

Tim Mathews disagrees (reposted here), but finds some common ground here and there

Max Boot strongly disagrees

"Top Analysts Blame American Intransigence In Not Talking To Taliban" - Steve Hynd agrees over at NewsHoggers.com (reposted at Rethink Afghanistan

"Commentary: Vietnam syndrome?" - Arnaud de Borchgrave comments (mostly sympathetically) for UPI.com

Christian Bleuer mentions the letter, but declines to comment

Ann Marlowe sees an opportunity for satire in the open letter

Paul Pillar cites the open letter in the context of the strategic review and wonders why there hasn't been more criticism

Tea and Politics cites the letter and equates talks in Afghanistan to 'negotiation with the Nazis'

Robert Naiman suggests the 'progress' cited in the strategic review may not be all it seems, citing the open letter (@ the Huffington Post)

The 'Obama Blog' suggests the US president is ignoring the 'Afghanistan-Pakistan reality'

'The Lift' blog on 'legal issues in the fight against terrorism' cites the letter in a post

Jason Ditz of antiwar.com cites the letter in a post about 'bleak metrics'

Hugh Pope updates a post about Deedee Derksen's new book 'Tea with the Taliban' and cites the letter

The Council on Foreign Relations cite the letter in an analysis brief looking at the post-Holbrooke strategy

Compatible Creatures blog cites the letter in a discussion of Holbrooke's alleged last words

Jayshree Bajoria (Council on Foreign Relations) cites the letter in a post on her Huffington Post blog

Small Wars Journal's forum (Small Wars Council) mentions the letter and kicks off a very frank discussion

Praveen Swami (The Daily Telegraph) disagrees with the suggestions contained the letter

Columbia University Press' blog cites the letter

'American Everyman' cites the letter

Dr Mohammad Taqi (Daily Times, Pakistan) cites the letter and suggests both it and the strategic review misconceive the environment

'Rehmat's World' cites and quotes part of the letter

Afghan Reactions

KabulPress.org disagrees with the letter (in Dari, and interesting as one of the few Afghan reactions so far -- aside from those Afghans who have already signed the letter)

8am or Hasht-e Sobh daily newspaper also disagrees with the premise of the article (also in Dari)

An Open Letter to President Obama

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.

No Comment: McChrystal and Petraeus

Taliban Realism over the September 11 Attacks

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.

Foreign fighters down south?

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.

Petraeus, Lisbon and the Great PR Push

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.

'Fly Freely' - Afghan Women's Poetry

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.

Marie Colvin in Kandahar for the Sunday Times

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.

Hope Is Not A Strategy

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:

thier.jpg

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.