Registan

The UN News Service carries this missive from officials in country warning that the situation in Kyrgyzstan is only getting worse.  It may yet be a recipe for political mayhem, but it’s certainly setting the stage for an unpredictable amount of [largely preventable] human suffering.

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people in Kyrgyzstan include 580,000 people classed as food insecure and 250,000 people at risk because of electricity and water shortages.

Central Asian winters can be extremely harsh, particularly in the mountainous regions of southern Kyrgyzstan, which were also hit early last month by a deadly earthquake.

 Eurasianet covers the story of Kyrgyz courts ordering the Canadian mining entity currently at work in the Kumtor mine to back $2.5 million in back taxes. Kumtor is the largest mine currently operating in Kyrgyzstan, and was sold to foreign investors under then-President Askar Akaev in 2004.  It was seen as just another move by a corrupt and elitist regime, yet even today there are opposition members and everyday Kyrgyzstani people looking back at 2004 as the ‘good old days.’  Whether or not Centerra, the Candiana mining company, pays the money they owe, I doubt anyone plans on seeing that money coming out to help stave off the coming energy crisis this winter.

But will the coming storm unite the opposition?  Despite the press given to the demonstrations in Talas,  Gulnara Mambetalieva of the IWPR posits that the opposition has not yet achieved solidarity.  Personally, I think a revolution in Kyrgyzstan would be better served by a grass-root movement instead of a top-down change orchestrated by the established opposition.  It was the established opposition that got them into the mess they are in now, replacing Akaev with possibly the only man in Kyrgyzstan more shameless in his corruption and nepostism.  However, the charismatic personality capable of unifying and leading such a grass-roots movement has yet to emerge.  A free press is usually necessary — and Central Asian authoritarianism seems to understand that an unfettered press is a dangerous thing to have around.

It is telling that the Army’s Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual, FM 3-24, was written by people with no knowledge or understanding of Afghanistan. It is similarly telling that guys with a lot of Iraq experience, like John Nagl and General Petraeus, use their Iraq experience to assume that they can take the lessons they learned there and apply them in Afghanistan because COIN is universal. In fact, in an interview for NPR today, Nagl does precisely that:

After spending a week in Afghanistan on invitation from top U.S. military commander Gen. David McKiernan, retired Army Lt. Col. John Nagl says he saw “a new spirit” of determination from the U.S. to stamp out the insurgency…

“If he gets all of those things that he requested, with the understanding of counterinsurgency that he and his command have, this is a war that we can turn around,” Nagl says. “I don’t think we’re winning right now, but I think that we can win this war. … The question is whether we can give them what they need to accomplish this job.”

Nagl says he believes the U.S. needs to double its American troops from 30,000 to 60,000 in Afghanistan. He also says the Afghan National Army needs to grow from 70,000 to 250,000. That may mean getting more help from the international community.

The question is whether the U.S. has the troops to fight the war, and Nagl says he is not sure…

This is the epitome of the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, expressed so ably by Matthew Yglesias. It states that the U.S. can do literally anything in the universe, so long as it has the will to do it. By Nagl’s count, this means 30,000 American troops to the country when the Pentagon struggles to find 2,500; and tripling the number of Afghan troops to a number whose monetary cost will exceed the country’s total GDP. Just like that.

And then Nagl wants to use “economic incentives” on the natives—just like what worked in Iraq (the “Sons of Afghanistan,” he wryly called them). This, apparently, is all we need to do—as if we haven’t been trying that for years—so long as the new President can mobilize the U.S. for war and no one starts to question the costs of tossing in money and troops without the first idea of how to use either. Tactics matter.

That’s the trick—Nagl still demonstrates zero understanding of the country he’s discussing, and has developed a knack for using his military-funded tours of the capital to issue generic COIN platitudes… and reporters eat it up because he’s a COIN expert who works at a think tank that feeds experts into the Obama administration.

Be Patient, he reminds us. Luckily, Nagl has a great and respectable comrade-in-arms: Ann Marlowe.

“The security situation is better than it was when the 82nd Airborne left in April. I am satisfied.” So says Haji Doulat, the 63-year-old subgovernor of Mandozai, one of the 12 districts of Khost Province. He has worked hard with American troops to develop this rural farming community of 120,000…

Good governance is an essential part of progress. Mr. Doulat is considered the best of Khost’s subgovernors by U.S. commanders. On a national level, much that’s gone wrong is the fault of Mr. Karzai’s wavering and often incompetent government… Victory in Afghanistan — defined as the time when we can pack up and leave Afghans to govern and defend their own country — will come. It will take patience, however.

Just like that: patience! Nevermind the bombings and assassinations—we’ve built a lot of schools in Khost over the past 75 months, so we’re winning! Of course, those schools get bombed, but that’s just liberal propaganda because the troops are in the districts. That Haji Doulat fellow is a regular in Marlowe columns—last time we saw him, during Ms. Marlowe’s previous attempt to declare victory even as the major U.S. FOB in Khost suffered hours of coordinated attacks, Ms. Marlowe was bragging about how Doulat’s family runs a “successful contracting business” that doesn’t take any bribes from bad people, and how much the troops have to “massage Doulat’s not inconsiderable ego” and “reward him for his competence and honesty,” in a way that isn’t at all like taking bribes from the good guys.

Then again, Ms. Marlowe is diametrically opposed to Mr. Nagl on the topic of negotiating with the Taliban margins—she thinks it would betray “it’s Meenas” and isn’t needed anyway because we’re really secretly winning in Khost and people who don’t think so might as well just be British.

Sigh. Does anyone else feel better about our prospects of winning the war?

Update: Where the hell does Marlowe get her data? Leaving her continued insistence on Khost having “a million people” (the 2003 census put it at less than 500,000), she claims the subgovernor of Mandozai (sometimes called Islmailkhan, after the town that houses the district center) is Haji Doulat. Problem: Xinhua reports from November 15, 2008, that the subgovernor is Daulat Khan Qayumi (another BBC Monitoring Service translated report identifies Qayumi as the district subgovernor in mid-July). Reuters identified the sub-governor as Qayumi in March. Twice.

What could explain this? “Haji” (spelled “Hajji” by people who, you know, know better) is a term of respect for some men who have made the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. It is also a quite racist term used by some U.S. military personnel to describe Islamist extremists. Daulat (Doulat) Khan Qayumi (or Qayoumi) is his actual name; considering Marlowe’s obsessive refusal to consider anything someone not wearing a uniform has ever said, I really don’t know if I can trust she learned the good sub governor’s name from one who respected him. And why not ever say his real name?

I just don’t get it.

Though it surprises view regular readers, the crisis in Kyrgyzstan is ramping up.  EurasiaNet has two excellent stories, and I would argue the connection between them is strong enough to argue for them being one long article.  The first article I’m linking covers the Energy Crisis, and the second article illustrates the most recent anti-government rally and the authority’s tacit approval of violence to stop the rally supporters.

Corruption seems to have reached a critical mass.  Perhaps the next Tulip Revolution will be an actual revolution — but to what?
I’m hoping there will be more in the press soon, and I’ll cover it here.

Johnny-come-lately turns Johnny-leave-early?

Uzbekistan has decided to withdraw from the Eurasian Economic Community.  The EEC is an outgrowth of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] that was founded in 2001 by those countries seemingly closest to Russia, though not necessarily with those aims.  The Kremlin’s ‘circle of trust’ at that time included Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.  Kazakhstan and Belarus both have strong historical ties, not to mention large Russian minorities, while Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan both have close Russian military and trade connections.  Uzbekistan at the time was playing to the West, and Karimov chose not to join the EEC.

That all changed in 2005 with Andijan and the icy shoulder the US and the West turned to Karimov.  I’m willing to assume that other political changes behind closed doors in Tashkent also influenced the change.  Either way, a rapprochment with Russia became feasible, and the EEC welcomed Uzbekistan in 2006.  Even with Uzbekistan, the EEC wasn’t able to accomplish too many economic policy changes.

That doesn’t stop them from having lofty goals, including:

• Standardization of customs and security guidelines at borders
• Currency exchange regulation and standardization
• Creation of programs for social/economic development
• Common market for transportation
  And the Big One
• The formation of general energy market

However, the Uzbek government is stressing that this is only a suspension of their membership.  Karimov’s complaints, however, cast doubts on how temporary this may be.

According to Uzbek President, the EurAsEC duplicates other organizations such as Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

If I may be allowed some sarcasm:  If there’s one thing Central Asian governments abhor, it’s redundant and inefficient government bureaucracies!

Experts also point out the problem may stem from rivalries in the region.  Uzbekistan’s leadership has yet come to see Kazakhstan as a serious contender for the role of ‘regional power.’  Unfortunately, if Karimov waits too long, Kazakhstan will stop waiting around for Uzbekistan’s open support.  And yet, the Uzbeks are voting with their feet, sending record numbers of migrant laborers to build Kazakhstan’s petro-fueled economy.  Kazakhstan’s economy may have diversified enough to help it weather the coming crisis better than Russia, in my opinion.

Almost a week ago the BBC carried this story concerning the latest outbreak of maternal/infant HIV, this time in Namangan, in the Ferghana Valley of eastern Uzbekistan.

The Uzbek cases were discovered in October, and have reportedly been referred to prosecutors.

But they have not been reported in the local media, which is tightly controlled by the government.

The officials who spoke to the BBC’s Uzbek service were only prepared to comment on condition of anonymity.

Not So Fast, says the Uzbek government.

“Everything is fine in this hospital. There are not 43 HIV positive children and the source of this information in the press is unclear to us,” the official added.

Previous cases include last March’s outbreak in Osh, Kyrgyzstan and the outbreak in Shymkent, Kazakhstan.  I can speak from some experience in that case, as I was living in Sayram at the time, a small city 8 km from Shymkent, and many of the infected women and babies in Kazakhstan were one-time residents of Sayram.  I say “one-time residents” because after the disclosure of their illness by local authorities, they were shunned and cut off from their families.  Some women learned their children were HIV positive only after being arrested by local police for being prostitutes and drug-users, the only evidence brought against them being their sick children.

I’m not ready to suggest a correlation, but it is odd that Uzbeks seem to be suffering from these outbreaks disproportionately.  Many of the victims in the South Kazakhstan outbreak were ethnic Uzbeks, as I assume were those in Namangan, and as Uzbeks make up a large percentage of the inhabitants of the city of Osh, I assume the afflicted women and children there were likewise Uzbeks.
Even as the trial against the doctors and nurses ‘at fault’ was unraveling, I remember hearing rumors that the whole tragedy was a political setup.

It’s no secret that the health catastrophe fomented change at the highest level of the region.  Conspiracy Theories are the most dangerous lies because they feed the fatalism and defeatism already too common in the region, but I’m inclined to lend some credence to those surrounding the HIV scandals.  Particular the idea that the scandal wasn’t out of the ordinary, just distinctive in scale and useful as a tool to oust the incumbent ‘rulers’ of South Kazakhstan.  With the increased rate of these outbreaks, it becomes more and more clear that the lack of sanitary conditions, the horrible financial state of the state-run health system, combined with the relatively low level of health education among the populace and those doctors not employed in modern, private facilities all work in concert to make these health travesties possible.

And what of the explanation that medical corruption plays into this?  The idea that blood is bought and sold goes a long way to explaining this, but what isn’t clear is where all the HIV-infected blood is coming from.  The governments of the Central Asian republics are not treating HIV as the epidemic it is quickly becoming there, claiming low numbers of infected.  However, the drug trade and increasing prostitution can’t be helping matters, especially considering the high percentage of Central Asian men that lose their virginity having unprotected sex with prostitutes.  I heard from many men there, not to mention circumspect wives, that this practice is common, and quietly accepted.

Spencer is still issuing platitudes about Taliban negotiations, though now he’s tempering it with sage wisdom from Mister Kilcullen and the zeitgeist-y SWJ. The latest movement involves Hamid Karzai’s latest blanket offer of safety to Mullah Mohammed Omar—an offer that was quickly rebuffed.

Now, Ackerman plays this like a reasoned first step in testing a hypothesis about the behavior of the Taliban. As I noted last time, only those unfamiliar with the Taliban’s history will see this as a new data point: Karzai has been extending the exact same offer since about early 2002 or so (see here, for example). Rather, this is the desperate gamble of a man scrambling for political capital right before a major election—and, given the swiftness of Omar’s reply, a rather convincing admission of weakness.

This is not a promising step—it is a deeply discouraging one. The SWJ guy linked above is right—until movement inside Afghanistan favors the U.S.—at the moment is most certainly does not—offering negotiations only makes us look bad. Let us hope the exigencies of democratic politics don’t undermine us too terrible.

According to this video by Outside Magazine, Greg Mortenson is expanding his build-a-school program to Kunar, Nuristan, and Panjshir. Outside features an extended look at his post-Three Cups of Tea activities in the December, 2008 issue. It’s worth a read.

As I’m sure he is to many of you, he is a hero to me. The Central Asia Institute is always worthy of giving—among the charities with which I am familiar, it offers exceptional bang for the buck. My gushing review of his book is here.

In an email interview, David Kilcullen thinks the current strategy in Afghanistan doesn’t focus enough on security or governance:

Well, we need to be more effective in what we are doing, but we also need to do some different things, as well, with the focus on security and governance. The classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall wrote, in 1965, that a government which is losing to an insurgency isn’t being out-fought, it’s being out-governed. In our case, we are being both out-fought and out-governed…

His reasons are fourfold: security (which he defines to include the nebulous concept of human security) has failed, Pakistan’s safe havens, Kabul’s failure to govern, and inattention caused by under-resourcing. Given his inclusion of human security—which includes, according to him, “economic and social wellbeing, law and order, trust in institutions and hope for the future”—this is another way of calling the war an astounding failure.

Of course, he also says that 80% of Afghanistan’s population lives in Lashkar Gah and Kandahar. Or 80% of the population in the south lives there. Or something. In other words, while Kilcullen is a brilliant and clever man, I’m still not sold that he “gets” what needs to be done, though his discussion is almost completely devoid of the shallow platitudes that consists of most writing about the war (and for this, we are truly thankful).

Here’s something to think about as we ponder his desire for a renewed focus on governance and “community engagement”—a) what about local governance has the local PRT and CA initiative not covered? b) is focusing on governance, at least as we conceive it and have codified it in the Constitution, even appropriate? and c) Is talk of security and governance missing the point entirely, considering the role of local fraternal grievances in Taliban recruitment?

These I cannot answer now—my information reach is too small to answer (I am not in discussion with any PRTs or CA commanders, nor do I know how governance initiatives at the local level have performed). But I am convinced point c) is the real crux of the matter, and it’s one even Kilcullen’s plan—which is well defined and scoped—doesn’t seem to account for. And don’t get me started on just magically wishing the Pakistani government to “govern” the FATA.

Strategy of a different sort can be found in this CFR report.

Framing these regional power struggles-and any new ground-up strategy-are a complex and baffling array of tribal actors. Pashtuns are represented by dozens of major tribal groups (though two “super tribes,” the Durrani and Ghilzai, have historically been among the most influential) with hundreds of subtribes. The most sought-after partnership discussed in any potential U.S.-NATO-Afghan tribal cooperation would involve the arbakai.

Oh God. Utilizing arbakai in anything other than small-scale community projects in any area other than the Loya Paktia area would be total disaster—and that’s according to the Tribal Liasion Office, whose sole purpose is to advocate precisely that.

The CFR report continues, relying on the unreliable NPS tribal maps, created by Tom Johnson’s shop—the same Tom Johnson who compared the Ghilzai to the Navajo and thought Gardez was a province—and shallow and ahistorical assumptions, like how the tribes have always resisted outsiders.

It’s not bad per se, but it really says nothing about an actual strategy. While Kilcullen produces something we can argue with and discuss, CFR just gives us… a muddled picture of a bunch of experts offering quips. Which isn’t necessarily incorrect—there is a range of expert opinion on Afghanistan, to be sure—but it also isn’t very strategic, and it definitely isn’t very insightful.

While my own self/crowd-funded trip to Afghanistan fell apart for reasons I hope to explain one day, there are other independent writers whose work is worth funding. David Axe is a defense correspondent who gave up a career with Defense Technology International to pursue stories in the Horn of Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He does really good work. He is on his way back to the Horn of Africa to report on the growing piracy issue there. He doesn’t have the money to do it, and there is apparently little editorial desire for freelance work in the area.

It is a dangerous prospect—journalists get abducted from Somalia, and the pirates aren’t exactly known for being cuddly Johnny Depp-type figures. This is important work. So, if you feel so led, I quite humbly ask that you click on the link above to David’s weblog and donate $20 to the cause.

Michael O’Hanlon—who last year had a habit of making sh*t up when reality didn’t suit him (see here, here, and here, for example)—now thinks the one thing missing from Afghanistan is… another Surge:

The war in Afghanistan is not going well, and the critical problem is the same one that dogged our efforts in Iraq for years: grossly inadequate troop levels. Western troop totals there have just inched over 60,000, while Afghan security forces total some 140,000. Let’s put this into perspective: We are trying to do with 200,000 personnel what it took 700,000 soldiers and police (plus 100,000 “volunteers”) to accomplish in Iraq. But Afghanistan is even larger than Iraq, and more populous.

President-elect Barack Obama has wisely promised an increase in U.S. forces for Afghanistan. But his proposed minisurge of perhaps 15,000 more troops, on top of the 30,000 Americans and 30,000 NATO personnel now there, will not suffice as a strategy. More is needed.

But it is not about numbers, he reminds us. But instead of noting the surge that already happened in 2006—when NATO took over, an additional 30,000 troops entered the country, with quite the opposite effect of a similarly-sized Surge in Iraq—O’Hanlon instead mouths the same old boring platitudes that Iraq and Afghanistan are, in fact, different countries, and oh yeah Pakistan is mean and really hard too.

Missing is an understanding of why 30,000 extra troops didn’t help things before, or why anything would be different this time around. You can talk doctrine, training, and so on, all you want. But unless it is connected to a concrete doctrine, some method of making it all work plausibly, then you are spouting platitudes.

The best part? Because Afghanistan is not as bloody as Iraq was in 2006, we can take our time. But we shouldn’t waste time in flooding the country with troops and money to train them. Or something. By the end, I’m not really sure if he’s arguing that the U.S. and NATO should send more troops, or if we should instead train up more locals. Or take our time while also acting urgently.

Like much of his other work, O’Hanlon’s argument is a mess, demonstrating his deep familiarity with buzzwords and deep ignorance of the places he advocates flooding with troops. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong—there is a pressing need for better security across the country, as regular readers here can attest—but I really wish he’d stay off our side. And maybe not invent a new set of benchmarks to prove himself right again.

The Captain’s Journal kindly linked to a post of mine, discussing the problems involving the new Kajakai dam turbine. While that issue is important—I remain concerned that we’re spending a lot of resources and people protecting an easily-destroyed symbol rather than doing something more tangible to improve the local environment like keeping the Taliban out—it is also important to harp, again, on how puzzling it is that the South gets all the attention. While things are bad there, the East is just as bad—and has been this bad for far longer.

A case in point is the latest convoy attack. Attacking the convoys ferrying supplies from Karachi to Coalition bases has been a common occurrence, whether fuel trucks at Torkham or food trucks at Spin Boldak. But this latest attack is remarkably not only for its violence and high body count, but for where it took place.

The strike was in the Bati Kot district of eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province.

An Associated Press photographer said that an American military vehicle, two civilian vehicles and two rickshaws were destroyed.

Cmdr. Jeff Bender of the Navy, an American military spokesman in Kabul, said the civilian death count, initially put at 10, had risen to 18.

This isn’t a total surprise—there are routinely attacks on U.S. convoys in the district—but this has received scant attention.

The East matters—it not only contains a big chunk of our significant resupply routes (remember the adage about who studies logistics), it also contains a big chunk of Taliban infiltration points. It is relatively easy to sneak across the Hindu Kush, thanks to the innumerable passes and valleys we cannot possibly hope to secure with current manpower. It is relatively hard to sneak in across the open desert, where movements of people can be spotted from the air with ease. Yet, despite the East mattering so much that it forms the centerpiece of reporting on how bad Afghanistan has become (unfortunately limited to a unique situation in the Korengal Valley), the vast majority of media focus is Kabul and the South.

Bonus Funsies: Video of the Taliban hijacking a convoy in the Khyber Pass.

An interesting pair of stories in the NYT illustrate brilliant just how complex the problems facing the U.S. in Afghanistan and Pakistan really are. The first is CJ Chivers’ look at an embattled outpost in Nuristan:

The Americans’ mission is to disrupt the Taliban and foreign fighters on supply paths from Pakistan’s tribal areas. Col. John Spiszer, the commanding officer for the larger task force in the region, distilled how the mission often worked. The American presence, he said, is a Taliban magnet, drawing insurgents from more populated areas and enhancing security elsewhere.

First Lt. Daniel Wright, the executive officer of the American cavalry unit — Apache Troop of the Sixth Battalion, Fourth Cavalry — put things in foxhole terms.

“Basically,” he said, “we’re the bullet sponge.” …

The unvarnished consensus among soldiers here, many of them veterans of the war in Iraq, is that the Pentagon’s efforts in Iraq undermined its efforts in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda plotted attacks on the United States. The military has been reviewing its Afghan strategy. …

For now, the soldiers of Apache Troop absorb and repel attack after attack. Sgt. Michael S. Ayres, a squad leader, summarized the practical mentality: standing watch behind heavy machine guns, the soldiers are waiting for reinforcements so they can change the nature of their fight.

“We need all the help we can get out here, so we can push out patrols and get out of the defensive,” he said.

Photojournalist-blogger John McHugh, being treated for a gunshot wound at the Outpost formerly known as Kamu in 2007. 17 ANA and 7 U.S. troops died in that battle. McHugh’s embed diary for the Guardian offers a great deal of insight into the challenges the U.S. faces along the Pakistani border.

They’re stationed at King Zahir Shah’s old hunting lodge/castle along the Landai Sin River. Combat Outpost Lowell used to be called Combat Outpost Kamu, which means it is in the far east of Nuristan, right along the border with Chitral. As one might guess from these place names, there are a lot of violent men roaming the hills, and their constant potshots have started to annoy (to say the least) the troops standing in their way. Chivers’ article is riveting reading, though like some other stories coming out of the Korengal or Nuristan it isn’t exactly representative of the rest of the country. (Earlier this month, Chivers also wrote of this outpost, chronicling the desperate fight to save one of the Afghans working for them on the base; a disquieting slide show is here.)

Further south, just across the border from Kunar, Jane Perlez writes of Pakistan’s brutal fight against its own insurgency:

Behind mud-walled family compounds in the Bajaur area, a vital corridor to Afghanistan through Pakistan’s tribal belt, Taliban insurgents created a network of tunnels to store arms and move about undetected…

After three months of sometimes fierce fighting, the Pakistani Army controls a small slice of Bajaur. But what was initially portrayed as a paramilitary action to restore order in the area has become the most sustained military campaign by the Pakistani Army against the Taliban and its backers in Al Qaeda since Pakistan allied itself with the United States in 2001.

Ms. Perlez kindly tells us that the trip to Loe Sam, in Bajaur, was arranged by the Pakistani military. So what she reports and sees is not the result of independent investigation. It is, nevertheless, really interesting to see how the militants there have adapted to, say, the use of UAVs and the occasional helicopter attack. The Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps, two independent forces (the FC works for the Ministry of the Interior), have lost 83 men during three months of fighting. They’ve lost well over 700 since 2004—more than doubling American losses in Afghanistan.

Indirectly, this helps to show why it is so inappropriate to write off Pakistan as not caring, or doing nothing, about the militants in the NWFP and FATA. It’s not that it’s doing nothing, it’s that the Pakistani government can’t do much—especially if it wants to maintain a popular mandate and not throw it away by killing off hundreds more troops on a somewhat unpopular campaign.

In either case, both pieces are worth reading in full, on the off chance anyone thought things will improve dramatically now that the U.S. has a new President.

The Small Wars Journal posted two really fantastic essays this week, both of which are fully worth reading.

The first is, “The Role of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Counterinsurgency Operations in Khost Province, Afghanistan,” which explores exactly what the title implies. An excerpt:

Perhaps the hardest lesson of the PRT experience in Khost has been that no amount of development will improve security conditions. In fact, security in Khost province has largely deteriorated to almost alarming levels despite the substantial increase in funding of projects and development. From January 1 through July 13th, 2008, attacks by the Taliban and their allies (HQN) have increased by 20 percent over 2007 levels for that same period to a total of 301. (Radin and Roggio 2008) In 2007, there were 107 “clashes” – actual engagements between the Taliban and NATO/Afghan security forces. As of August 31, 2008, there were already 115. (McCreary 2008) Some spectacular Taliban attacks on the major U.S. installation in Khost province – FOB Salerno, located just outside Khost City – give pause to any previous speculation that U.S./NATO efforts in Khost represented a “model counterinsurgency” as some suggested. (See [Ann] Marlowe for example.)

Aside from the repeated digs at Ms. Marlowe, there is some good analytical work there about the specific roles PRTs can play in area.

The other paper, “Getting the Basics Right: A Discussion on Tactical Actions for Strategic Impact in Afghanistan,” is also exactly about what it says. This was prepared by the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul. What relationship this has to the Counterinsurgency Academy I don’t know. Its point?

Although there is much to do at the strategic level in Afghanistan, such as developing a comprehensive border strategy, eliminating corruption, developing an effective and functioning government, defining the role of the Afghan National Police (ANP) – the list goes on – it is at the tactical level, at Regional Commands (RC), Task Forces (TF), Battlegroups, Companies and Coalition mentoring teams that the most immediate and tangible change for good can be made.

I titled this post “fascinating” because both of these papers do a good job of tying together many of the threads I’ve been pulling here. Leaving aside the hilarious mentions of Ann Marlowe’s lazy representations of Khost as how some people just don’t get it (see here), the piece on PRTs tracks closely with my own informal explorations of them as a phenomenon (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). The other piece on tactical level changes to effect change at the strategic level is a much broader exploration of the examinations I’ve made of the impact of civilian casualty rates on local perceptions, and how it has begun undermining the counterinsurgency (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). So it’s neat to see that I’m not off the deep end with regard to my analysis of what’s going on in Afghanistan. I’m just not in the right good ol’ boys’ club to get my analyses heard. Which I’m fine with, to a degree.

Plus, it’s funny to read this on a site administered by a guy who once accused me of not knowing anything about ISAF, OEF, or Afghanistan because I was too hopelessly wedded to my biases and cynically used MSM reporting to support them. I almost lolled when I realized it.

Parun, the “capital” of Nuristan province, courtesy flickr user Saleem Nuristani.

Not your typical embed: Andrew Klavan spent a few days with FOB Kalagush. It’s quite well-written: despite the requisite Kipling shout outs (though they make much more sense here, this being the literal setting of a famous Kipling novel and actual biography), he explains well the challenges we face:

This so-called provincial capital was largely a figment of the Afghan government’s imagination. As we carried our packs along the lone mud road, we came upon the “town”: a collection of half-finished ramshackle buildings and wooden huts with idling native workers staring balefully from the porches. Rory, who had a habit of echoing my unspoken showbiz thoughts aloud, muttered to me, “Deadwood,” just as I was thinking, “Tombstone.” …

The main mission was to break ground on a new FOB site. Moving the PRT close to the provincial government would make overseeing new projects much easier. The trouble was, the chosen site was owned by a little nearby village called Pashki. Four months ago, the Pashki elders had agreed to sell the land to the Afghan Ministry of Defense. Now, though, they were worried that the U.S. presence would attract attacks from the Taliban.

It’s worth reading in full, even if you have to skip past all the references to how he wants to make it into a screenplay just to give it to those America-hating Hollywood liberals. The point about moving the PRT makes sense in one way: PRT Kalagush is practically in Laghman (see, for example, this BABEAA post), and many of the locals there view themselves as in Laghman. The PRT itself has to airlift itself to Parun to do business with the provincial government, or else suffer through an agonizingly slow two-day trip hundreds of miles out of the way thanks to the steep valleys.

But in another way, moving the PRT doesn’t make a jot of sense.

FOB Kalagush, courtesy flickr user Hayat Nooristani.

As Klavan so ably put it, calling Parun the capital of anything is more of a wish than a statement of fact. It’s not just true of soldiers, either: in his lecture at Boston University, David Katz, a senior foreign service office attached to FOB Kalagush, mentioned that Parun is not only basically inaccessible from Kalagush it is for all intents and purposes inaccessible to the rest of Nuristan as well. Moving FOB Kalagush from an accessible, if possibly disputed, area to one that is basically inaccessible doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Regardless, Klavan’s article is a wonderful snapshot of the sorts of challenged we face as we push into isolated communities in Afghanistan. And of the many policy challenges facing the government—well, both governments—as they try to build lasting institutions that can eventually contribute to peace.

Remember that time Michael Yon bravely reported the “top secret” mission to refurbish the Kajaki hydro plant? The same top secret mission ISAF bragged about in a press release on the very same day? It seemed like a wonderful thing, a stunning blow both to the Taliban in Helmand (who couldn’t stop its transportation and installation), and to the naysayers who are convinced there is no hope for the country.

Last year, when Rory Stewart was preaching about his “grand infrastructure” idea (later transmogrified, sans explanation, into a muted call for a neo-light footprint strategy), this seemed like the best idea ever: a huge, undeniable, expensive symbol of the West’s commitment to Afghanistan. While praising his intentions, Carl Robichaud tossed water on the idea given its impracticalities, especially since the combat in nearby Sangin Valley was so brutal.

It is the sort of context missing from most accounts of the operation, and so the operation was exuberantly declared by all a success upon delivery. The context of the last few years—including the salient information that not just Taliban commanders but opium kingpins do not want a big expensive dam providing electricity to farmers disinclined to support them—helps to inform why Carlotta Gall would write such a pessimistic take on where the delivered turbine and power stations are nearly two months later:

It has been a rare instance of a fulfilled promise in the effort to build up Afghanistan’s infrastructure. But even with the step forward, the improvements to the dam, in an inaccessible area of northern Helmand Province, are still being held hostage by the Taliban’s growing ability to mount offensives in recent years. The overall power project has been repeatedly delayed because of the difficulty of security and logistics. And the rest of the original $500 million proposal to augment the capacity of the dam itself has not been approved, cast in doubt by the Taliban’s gains.

“In the case of the Kajaki Dam or others, the security situation impedes the delivery of the service,” the American ambassador to Afghanistan, William B. Wood, told reporters in Washington in June. “The reason that there isn’t more light at night and more warmth in winter for south Afghanistan is because the Taliban has not let us do everything, work as effectively as we’d like to on the Kajaki Dam.” …

The huge operation was criticized in the British news media, which questioned the exposure of British soldiers to such high risk to save an American government assistance project.

Yet for the Afghans employed here, and the frustrated residents of cities like Kandahar, who have lived with barely a few hours of electricity a day for the past seven years, NATO was belatedly meeting its commitment to bring development to southern Afghanistan…

Mr. Rasoul is now in charge of the next stage, with an American engineer, George H. Wilder, 62, who works for the American contractors in charge of the project, the Louis Berger Group. They work and live in a small construction camp next to the dam, protected by a battalion of British and Afghan soldiers who keep the Taliban, who hold the surrounding villages, at bay. Everything the workers and soldiers need comes by helicopters that fly high over the brown, barren mountains and then spiral down over the green-blue reservoir into the camp to avoid enemy fire.

This remains remarkable: a Berlin Airlift for southern Afghanistan, if you will. But the fundamental objection to it remains: is it smart to build an expensive, borderline indefensible power station when you cannot provide basic security and services to the nearby villagers? This turbine camp represents, along with all the hope and sunshine, an enormous, juicy target for militants or drug lords seeking a way to poison the entire southern effort. While it’s nice that the camp “rarely comes under [direct] fire anymore” thanks to some impressive soldiering by the British, how long will those gains stay in play once the turbine is installed and the power substations set up? Will an entire battalion be required to defend each?

The south faces enormous challenges, among them basic security and economics. Kajaki has been considered too dangerous for development work for many years at this point. Other places in Helmand—Lashkar Gah, for example—have far bigger needs than a few more hours of electricity per day. Yet an enormous amount of money, troops, and equipment is being expended to complete a construction project that will inspire prayer for every day it isn’t fatally undermined.

I don’t get it. Am I alone in thinking we could be spending our time, money, resources, and (most importantly) manpower in a much better way?

Clare Lockhart, one of the architects of the Bonn Agreement, and a close colleague of Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s former Minister of Finance and a potential candidate for President in 2009, has her idea of how to “fix” Afghanistan:

After 9/11, stability was created through a partnership between the Afghan people and the international community. In December 2001, the Bonn Agreement laid out a political framework to allow increasing numbers of Afghans to become participants and stakeholders in their country’s future, with a sequence of events set out in a clear timetable using mechanisms like the loya jirga—a national convention of Afghan representatives—that would be culturally familiar to Afghan citizens.

A group of Afghan leaders and managers was empowered to implement an economic reform agenda to complement the political process. It started with simple mechanisms such as putting in place a national currency. In 2001, there were at least three different currencies in circulation and millions of afghanis were required to buy a simple meal. The hawala dealers—the Afghan money changers—agreed with the government on a plan to change the currency, and before long a new currency was in use across the country. Afghanistan’s new Cabinet designed its first post-Taliban budget, working out how many policemen, doctors, teachers, and soldiers would be required to keep the peace and restore essential services, and it set out a vision for the future of the country in the “National Development Framework.” These leaders designed a transparent process to create a cell phone system where companies bid for licenses in return for a fair price to citizens and revenue to the government. The U.S. government made a risk guarantee available to investors. As a result, rather than the small numbers of satellite telephones that existed in 2001, there are now more than 5 million cell phones in the country, which have sent more than $1 billion in revenue to the government. They also designed a national health system that set standards for health care and contracted out basic services in partnership with nongovernmental organizations.

She’s right that this saw a great deal of success. I would argue, however, that there was no way the international community could not see success, at least of a sort, because building a country up from zero means any progress is good progress. That being said, Ms. Lockhart is very apt at describing just how the International Community has failed Afghanistan in a stunning way—and for that, her essay is absolutely worth reading.

However…

Ms. Lockhart doesn’t seem to get that her own reforms played a huge role in creating an unstable picture. While she is right to excoriate the International Community for creating a shadow economy no Afghans could participate in, and a shadow government no Afghans had a stake in, she doesn’t seem to get that it was the Bonn Agreement that did this, as it governed both Afghanistan’s initial political institutions and the relationship of the international community to those institutions. There is very little allowance for her own role in building a house on sand.

I’m also finished the book she coauthored with Ashraf Ghani a few months ago. I didn’t write a review of it, because it didn’t say anything. The book argues that national and local initiative, and a rejection of the project-based aid community, are vital for breaking debt cycles and creating home-grown economic stability. Great, that’s not exactly new thinking. But her big idea now is to change the nature of Afghanistan’s relationship with the International Community, into more of a mentor-protégé relationship.

Mixed in which this is precious little about how one would go about doing that in Afghanistan. For starters, to turn Afghanistan into a standard issue state will require fundamentally reordering the normal institutional makeup of most communities. The idea of a benevolent-but-distant government, for example, which has actually worked quite well for most of Afghanistan’s modern history, is absent.

The countries that transformed successfully all partnered with the aid system but with a clear vision for how best to use the money, with rights and responsibilities on both sides and clear recognition that domestic leadership was the critical factor. In the short term, resources and military commitments will be required for Afghanistan, but if good governance were restored, Afghanistan could be steadily raising its own revenue and meeting its own bills. A series of reinvigorated national programs managed and staffed by Afghans in partnership with development banks and experts would be far cheaper than the thousands of foreign-run projects. By supporting national programs in partnership with civil society, donors could shift their emphasis to creating a good governance system from the bottom up.

There is a whole range of organizations in the United States and across the world—from volunteer associations to land-grant colleges—that could partner with the effort at reasonable cost. New technologies, such as soil analysis of satellite imagery and using long-distance engineering and architecture support, could drastically reduce the costs of travel and security that are necessary when outsiders are on the ground; they could instead partner with Afghan engineers, architects, and agronomists at Afghanistan’s universities. Rather than sending in thousands of civilians, the shift in emphasis could be to training Afghans to do the jobs themselves.

I don’t want to be a naysayer, since this seems like a really good idea, but Ms. Lockhart’s head is in the clouds. The basic problem facing Afghanistan isn’t governance, it is security. And even when Afghans talk about governance, they really are talking about corruption. Her plan doesn’t have in it provisions to curb corruption, which will permanently sink any initiative into governance. Security must come first, of course, and especially since security is actively undoing what little progress there was. But the governance issue MUST be placed in an anti-corruption context, or all of our newer good intentions will wind up in exactly the same place as all our old good intentions: in the blood-soaked dirt.

Eric Schmitt obviously had other sources. A friend forwarded on the unclassified “Wanat” incident report, which I posted (pdf) here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Overall, it’s not very insightful. It seems to misunderstand the structure of the government of Afghanistan, as it treats the different levels of government as if it was a federal, rather than unitary, system. My friend wondered this, too:

If the dispersed presence leads to incidents where civilians get caught in the cross-fire, their shops, residences and mosques are used by insurgents to attack Coalition forces and destroyed as a result, and civilians security is reduced rather than improved then what’s the way forward?

Does a VPB have to be adjacent to a built-up area like a bazaar to accomplish its purpose?

It is an interesting question to ponder: is our standard, cookie-cutter COIN strategy going to work in Afghanistan? It’s is an idea I’ve attacked repeatedly, though obviously the question is a complex one. So what is the purpose of a VPB? Is it to provide “presence,” security, offensive capability, some combination of the above, or none of the above? Is community dispersion really the best and only way to achieve our goals?

I see our fundamental problem, again being manpower: we do not have the people to properly disperse, so the fewer bases we have are more cut off and more reliant on air power. In general, air power has been counterproductive in Afghanistan if nothing else than as an IO problem headquarters has yet to solve.

Last note: the report sheds light into why the military continues to insist on Want (they still call it “Wanat”) being a part of Kunar: their primary sources of local knowledge seem to be Pashtuns near Manugai and Nangalam, near Camp Blessing. The Pashtuns have been pushing into Nuristan’s valleys for decades—Schuyler Jones (for example) wrote about this extensively in the 1970s. It would make sense that Pashtuns would claim Kalasha land for their own.

Update: For an example of how complex this is, but also for how the military is gaining a better understanding of the governance issues facing the area, see footnote 5 on page 2 of part 1:

Effective governance is complicated by the fact that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan considers Wanat [sic] to be part of Kunar Province while the people of Wanat [sic], the shuras and even the provincial government consider Wanat [sic] to be the District Capital of Waygal District and a part of Nuristan. The population in Wanat [sic] is primarily Nuristani as opposed to Pashtuo as well. See Exhibit 61, Statement of LTC (b)(3) (b)(8) dated 16 Jul 08 wherein he notes there is “no road access to either [Aranas or Bella] [sic] no government present, or security forces present.” [sic]

This helps to highlight the problems commenter David repeatedly notes about the extreme centrality of the Afghan government.

David Andelman, editor of the World Policy Journal, had his assistant email us to let us know his journal is available for free during November. Ordinarily, I’m annoyed by this stuff and just delete it, but I like WPJ, and there are two articles in this issue I think readers here would enjoy:

The first is by Charles Cogan, and he argues (pdf) that “The Taliban… was created initially as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pakistani ISI in 1992,” so therefore if we cannot dissuade Pakistan from its continuing support of the Taliban, we should scale back our efforts in Afghanistan “with the option to strike Al Qaeda whenever we can.” How Rory Stewart of him.

The second is by David Lewis, who speculates (pdf) about the next 25 years in Central Asia. Like all future predictions, it is both cheesy and extremist, but having worked for a futurist, I can relate to the problems in writing this kind of thing. I’m not sold on the certainty of Russia and China fighting proxy wars in Eastern Uzbekistan, but what do I know anyway.

Regardless, these are both worth reading and pondering. And being able to get an issue of WPJ without a library subscription is nice, too.

Remember when I said Mark Ames was being too hard on CJ Chivers over his coverage of the Georgian conflict? Well.

Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.

Call into question indeed. Chivers is not pushing any agenda here, he is just reporting what information he can get when he can get it—and unlike way too many journalists, not treating the information he has as conclusive and case-settling. Even so, documenting the growing divergence between the Georgian portrayal of the war and what independent observers on the ground have seen is a laborious process—and Chivers deserves thanks for continuing to do the work needed to get it all into the open.

Can Barrack Obama do anything about civilian casualties in Afghanistan? It is actually a pertinent question considering the manpower restraints on the ground; with no real extra troops to draw at least until early 2009, the war there must continue in more or less the same fashion it has for the last several years.

This time the main concern revolves around yet another wedding bombing, this time down in Shah Wali Kot in Kandahar (we discussed this yesterday). Our friend Alex Strick van Linschoten, who’s been reporting from Kandahar for a long while now, posts some pictures from the women’s ward of the nearby hospital and highlights his coverage in The Globe and Mail:

Dozens of Afghan civilians are dead and dozens more are wounded after a series of air strikes aimed at Taliban fighters fell short of their target and exploded in the middle of a wedding party in a mountainous region north of Kandahar city, tribal elders and wedding guests told The Globe and Mail on Tuesday.

Survivors of the attacks, which occurred in the village of Wech Baghtu in the district of Shah Wali Kowt on Monday evening, said the majority of the dead and injured were women – the bombs struck while male and female wedding guests were segregated, as is customary in Kandahar province.

I don’t see how Obama has anything to do with this, reality check or no. It is pushing a good eighteen months now that he’s been relentlessly pilloried by the Right for expressing a concern over both Afghan civilian casualties and the problems posed by the “light footprint strategy” and consequent over-reliance on air strikes.

So it’s not like this was all unknown information and analysis Obama will now only see with intelligence briefings. Why put everything back on him? It’s not his job to rework tactics. I’d be more concerned about him understanding the military, the details of his domestic responsibilities, and broader macro-level issues the U.S. faces in the entire region, than his ability to micromanage a conflict like a black Bill Clinton. It is the strategery I want to see from him—a proper strategy will yield the ultimate effect of a decreased reliance on air strikes, and maybe, maybe fewer innocent people bombed on their wedding day.