Registan

Ali Saleem is easily everyone’s favorite Pakistani. “My existence on TV discredits the misconception that Pakistan is a country of bearded extremists,” he once said. “I want to show the world that we are just cool, normal people.”

For years, Saleem ran Pakistan’s most popular TV show, in which he dressed up like a woman (Begum Nawazish Ali, a middle-aged widow) and chatted about prominent Pakistanis—celebrities, officials, politicians, everyone. Much like a younger version of Dame Edna Everage, Saleem would adopt this sassy persona and use it to crack jokes and otherwise defuse some of the tension that accompanies Pakistani politics. An open bisexual, Saleem even had fans among Pakistan’s religious elite, who simply made sure to remind him to pray everyday.

Part of the reason I speculate Saleem did not generate much outrage as a TV tranny—his show was eventually canceled for criticizing Pervez Musharraf—is because of Hijras. Kind of thought to be a “third gender,” hijras are most commonly male transvestites: men who portray themselves as women. While many are referred to in English as “eunuchs,” few ever go that far.

In fact, hijras have an ancient tradition in South Asia—even the Kama Sutra mentions them. While is why it is nice to see Pakistan’s Supreme Court stepping in and calling for basic human consideration to the country’s transvestites.

‘They are human beings and nobody has a right to hate them.’ A three-judge bench comprising the chief justice, Justice Chaudhry Ijaz Ahmed and Justice Ghulam Rabbani had taken up a petition seeking the establishment of a commission to emancipate effeminate men ostracised by the society for no fault of their’s.

Islamist jurist Dr Mohammad Aslam Khaki, who researched into the conditions of the ignominious merrymakers and discovered them to be the most oppressed and deprived segment of the society that is subjected to humiliation and molestation, had filed the petition for the welfare of the unfortunate and vulnerable people left by the society to live by begging, dancing and prostitution.

The Court deserves every ounce of applause we can muster for such a ruling. Pakistan is a vastly more complex place than we in the U.S. ever give it credit for being. While it has deep challenges and faces serious risks, we should also not lose sight of the fact that Pakistan itself is worth saving as well.

I post this without comment of my own except a short note on differences in translation. Ferghana.ru is reporting this week in that after pressuring women for several months to stop attending mosque on Fridays, Bukhara authorities have officially told them to stay home.

Muslim women in Bukhara are now prohibited to go to mosques, where they are used to go before Friday prayer. According to Uzbekistani Committee for religious affairs, in 2009 Friday prayer in the Bukhara mosques was attended by over thousand women. Two mosques, Khuzha tabband and Piri dastgir, were especially popular. However, since recently the representatives of law enforcement bodies, clergy and mahallah (district) committees have been actively urging Muslim women stop visiting mosques and reached significant success.

Ferghana.ru is reporting the story in English, Russian, and Uzbek . This is the first time I can remember seeing a story on Ferghana.ru that was basically identitical in all three languages. The only difference of any potential significance that jumps out at me is that the English version ends by saying that Bukharan authorities have decided women’s presence in the mosque for Friday prayers is “intolerable,” while the Russian version (недопустимое) is I think closer to a simple “unacceptable” and the Uzbek is (ножоиз) something like “out of place” or “inappropriate.” Whether this difference in shades of meaning is conscious editorializing for different audiences or just translators’ prerogative, I can’t say… but I’ve noticed before that some multilingual Central Asia sites will often shape the content in a language across languages to meet expectations of different assumed readerships.

Please feel free link to other coverage/versions of the story in the comments. So far I don’t see it reported in other places, but I’m sure it means I’m just not looking hard enough.

I have a new article in the Columbia Journalism Review today, looking at how the media is covering the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian War of last year. A brief snippet:

That doesn’t mean the meta-war over Georgia and Russia has ended. It is to say that Georgia has a big advantage in the English-language press (in Russian, obviously, their fortunes are reversed). We still have right-wingers decrying heartless Russian aggression. There are scattered stories here and there that Russia is not, in fact, the genesis of all evil in the Caucasus, but they get buried by news about America’s wars. There are Russian news agencies trying to get the word out, but would any red-blooded American trust the pages of the Moscow News to give them the truth about the topic? Meanwhile, the op-ed pages are oddly silent about Georgia’s own role to play in the conflict, and the arrogance with which President Saakashvili assumed America would ride to the rescue when Russia inevitably pushed back against his strike into Tskhinvali.

Comments, as always, are much appreciated.

Photo: Tblisi, from flickr user Maykal.

This was originally posted to the World Politics Review blog.

There is tremendous buzz about Afghanistan’s elections. Open up any op-ed page, and you can find countless articles about votes and democracy and Karzai not instantly winning, and whatever else. But what I don’t get is why anyone cares.

Democratic elections usually rest on a few basic principles: a free and fair vote, an uncoerced selection of candidates, and an agreement by all parties to abide by the results. Afghanistan doesn’t quite qualify for any of these.

• Take the idea of a free and fair vote. Pajhwok, an internationally-funded independent Afghan news service, has an entire news page set aside for incidents of voter intimidation—and I don’t mean by the Taliban (more on them later). It runs the gamut from the government arresting supporters of Abdullah Abdullah, to police killing Nuristanis for asking for enough ballot boxes to cast their votes.
• The government is building up “tribal security” forces modeled on the arbakai, a traditional tribal militia. Only, these forces are going to be different from all the other forces that have come before, will be given better weapons, and will not be subject to the disarmament and de-mobilization programs that have stood down other informal militias. In other words, they are flooding the country with guns to try to create security for the election.
• Shortly before the registration deadline passed, Gul Agha Sherzai—the former-warlord governor of Nangarhar Province who had taken to American newspapers to make the case for his impending presidency—abruptly withdrew his own nomination amid rumors of a deal cut with Hamid Karzai.
• Speaking of deals, what’s “free and fair” about Karzai de-exiling a man like Abdul Rashid Dostum—the Uzbek warlord who faces allegations of America-sponsored mass killings in 2001—to deliver the Uzbek vote?

We could go on. The very fact that several parties expect the Uzbeks to essentially vote as a bloc makes me question the entire validity of the vote: this is not like a party member voting a party line, these are subjects doing their ruler’s bidding. In interviews all around the country, you see a similar dynamic—“we’ll vote for whomever our elder tells us to.” What’s worse, many people have been explicit that they plan on voting for whomever they think will win—which means, they are voting for Hamid Karzai.

Lastly, there is the Taliban question. Until Abdullah made a surprisingly strong showing, the Taliban were almost absent from the election—in particular they didn’t interfere with voter registration over the last year. Even though they’re doing what insurgencies do, and attacking some polling stations here and there, it is obvious, especially from the soldiers on the ground, that there is no way they could possibly secure even a majority of the polling stations around the country. Despite that, there won’t be a major Talibn disruption because they know better than we do that even a runoff election will not change a thing in the country.

If Hamid Karzai wins, it’s the failing status quo, and a powerful narrative that democracy doesn’t work. If Abdullah Abdullah somehow wins, then he’ll have to deal with the powerful entrenched interests in Kabul that even Karzai couldn’t meaningfully change—which would mean a continuation of the status quo and a powerful narrative that democracy doesn’t work. If somehow the planets align and Ashraf Ghani wins, then Kabul will get to experience yet another America-friendly egotistical technocrat—precisely what Karzai was in 2002—and very little would likely change. You know the rest.

While this matters on a theoretical level—Afghanistan has never before tried to change a government through election—the chances of it meaning anything in a strategic, pragmatic, or personal level are so remote it’s difficult to understand what all the hubbub is about. Then again, this is also an argument I would be thrilled to lose, because if Afghanistan is consistent about anything, it is surprising its Western observers.

Photo: Afghan women register to vote, 2004, courtesy flickr user The Advocacy Project.

I taped an hour-long BloggingHeads.tv segment with Michael Cohen, of the New America Foundation and Democracy Arsenal. We talk Afghanistan strategery, lessons learned, and the politics of continuing the war. Hope you enjoy.

Andrew Exum has finally posted his own thoughts after running a weeklong essay contest to see if we have a strategy in Afghanistan or not. The result is, let us say, incomplete. To his great credit, he is explicit that his thoughts on the matter are incomplete, a courtesy I wish the other certainty-filled Big Thinkers would show us when they write about how Afghanistan is the most mattering war ever or worthless beyond compare. But even Exum’s incomplete thoughts have a curious contradiction I have yet to work through myself. It seems based on two primary assertions:

1) Afghanistan has “clear interests” to American national security interests (e.g. al Qaeda, opium, the Taliban, transnational terrorism) and those interests are “worth protecting”; and

2) If the war does not improve in 12-18 months, we should scale back our efforts and prepare to withdraw.

I don’t know how he can square those two assertions, aside from saying “it’s politics.” That may be true, but this really is an either/or thing—it is literally life and death. If America has interests in Afghanistan that are worth protecting with our lives and theirs (what are they, Andrew? You never get around to articulating them), then a 12-18 month timeframe should be immaterial.

Either these interests are worth protecting, so we channel all the resources, time, personnel, and attention… or they are not, in which case we have no reason to risk American and Afghan lives for an empty cause. You can’t really say we have these interests worth killing and dying for, but only for the next year or so. I don’t think interests work like that.

Something else also bothers me:

[If change is not evident by Christmas 2010, President Obama, then direct the Department of Defense to shift its strategy in conjuntion with that of the NATO alliance. But until then, allow your new commander -- the guy you put in charge because you fired the other guy and after you promised to properly resource the war on the campaign trail -- to develop a plan for winning and to execute that plan.]

Again, two points need to be raised in response:

1) That’s a lot like Dave Dilegge’s bizarre trust-us-we’re-the-experts post (a sentiment he later walked back later in the day), and speaks to a certain inviolability of the generalship that doesn’t square with the apparently new focus on media friendliness in Afghanistan’s four star generals; and

2) Part of the subtext of today’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran story is that the Obama foreign policy team has rebuked NATO involvement in favor of “the A-Team” (itself a curious reference to a type of SOF unit) taking over the war. By Exum’s logic, we’re in charge until we’re bored or bloodied, then it’s back to being NATO’s war again.

It’s also a bit cheeky to say Obama promised to resource the war properly, then refused to do so for an unfavored general, and now kind of does so for a Petraeus-approved one (and even then, has issued instructions to this new Petraeus-approved general not to request more troops).

I guess what I’m getting at in this conceptual mess of a post is that the war is a terribly muddy place, intellectually and even morally, and it’s really damned tough to figure it all out. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t torn between my earnest belief that we do have vital interests there and my inability, like Exum, to really articulate what they are in a logical and straightforward manner.

Or maybe that’s the point, I don’t know. Any thoughts?

Rajiv Chandrasekaran files another excellent, depressing story today on the military in Afghanistan:

There was no formal agenda. McKiernan, a silver-haired former armor officer, began with a brief battlefield update. Then Gates and Mullen began asking about reconstruction and counternarcotics operations. To Mullen, they were straightforward, relevant queries, but he thought McKiernan fumbled them.

Gates and Mullen had been having doubts about McKiernan since the beginning of the year. They regarded him as too languid, too old-school and too removed from Washington. He lacked the charisma and political savvy that Gen. David H. Petraeus brought to the Iraq war.

McKiernan’s answers that day were the tipping point for Mullen. Soon after, he discussed the matter with Gates, who had come to the same conclusion.

Mullen traveled to Kabul in April to confront McKiernan. The chairman hoped the commander would opt to save face and retire, but he refused. Not only had he not disobeyed orders, he believed he was doing what Gates and Mullen wanted.

You’re going to have to fire me, he told Mullen.

Two weeks later, Gates did. It was the first sacking of a wartime theater commander since President Harry S. Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for opposing his Korean War policy.

In other words, General McKiernan was basically fired for not having enough friends in Washington and being insufficiently media-friendly… and not necessarily because of his command, his capabilities, or his record. It’s good to know the military’s top leadership is defining success like this—at least we know in the future success will be disconnected from performance.

Here’s a bigger question: since General McKiernan is the first theater Commanding General to be fired since MacArthur—a terrible precedent, given how many of the them screwed up before him—and because that firing was basically because he’s not camera-friendly and not a craven politician… what does that mean for the future of military leadership? If Mullen and Gates are sending the message that in order to succeed one must become some sort of John Nagl-type figure—filled with soundbytes and suave at the cocktail parties—that’s not terribly encouraging for the future of the Army (or military as a whole). Being Washington- and media-friendly is not the same as leadership, even if being able to move in those circles is an increasingly important part of the job.

The decision to fire McKiernan stinks more and more as new information comes out. And I learn new reasons to be deeply mistrustful of McChrystal’s initiatives, considering how many of them are just as conventional and unworkable as McKiernan’s supposedly were. This really does not bode well for the war in Afghanistan, or the military as a whole.

And there’s a another subtext to this story as well: the Obama foreign policy team seems uninterested in multilateralism. Back in June, I posted the concerns of someone working at ISAF in Kabul that McKiernan’s firing meant the war was being “Americanized.” It is also the theme of Chandrasekaran’s Afghanistan-focused reporting. This report of his is no exception.

“He was still doing the NATO-speak at a time when Gates and Mullen were over it,” a senior military official at the Pentagon said…

In Washington, doubts about McKiernan were growing among Gates and Mull en and their staffs. McKiernan’s plan to integrate civilian and military resources, which Gates had asked him to draw up, did not impress many who read it in the Pentagon. Once again, they faulted McKiernan’s perceived deference to NATO. What the document needed, they thought, was sharp thinking from the U.S. military, not a casserole of inputs from a dozen allies.

Well how dare a four-star general try to maintain the U.S.’s most important military alliance during a controversial war. McKiernan obviously paid for his insolence, so the problem of multilateral thinking is solved, right?

Previously:
The Consequences of McChrystal’s New Rules
McChrystal’s Confusing New Rules
The Shortcomings of McChrystal’s Review
McChrystal’s Existential Choice
Yet Another Strategic Review
Thoughts on the Change of Command in Afghanistan
Defending McKiernan
Who Is Stanley McChrystal?
A Double-Edged Sword

Earlier this year, I was going out on a patrol through central Afghanistan with some colleagues. We were hitching a ride with the local PRT. As is normal, the night before the patrol, we all gathered near the PRT operations center for a briefing on what to encounter. The colonel running the PRT saw us cultural advisers coming and flattened his lips. While giving the weather report, our interpreter came up.

Now this interpreter was an American, born and raised in Sacramento, to parents originally from an Eastern majority-Pashtun province. She could speak Pashto reasonably well, and was steadily improving. She also had a Secret security clearance, so she could participate in mission briefings without any concerns about operational security. She also wore a scarf around her head, as is generally considered normal for a modest Muslim woman.

To this PRT colonel, however, that meant Terrorist. He wouldn’t let her near the open-air briefing, demanding, despite our protestations, that she basically sit in a corner while we went over such top secret information as which route we’d be traveling along (there is only one road between the two bases we’d be visiting), how sunny it would be, and who would be in which Humvee. She just had to find out where she was riding later.

Unfortunately, this interpreter, whom I consider a friend, just had to deal with it. She is not alone. Old Blue relates a story today about his own interpreters, with whom he trusts his life, being treated as common criminals when they accompanied him on an officially-sanctioned trip to Bagram. After being denied permission to eat because their IDs were not stamped right, they were then prevented from boarding the same C-130 they had arrived in, and forced to ride in a taxi, in uniform, back to Kabul.

I wish Blue’s interpreters were not the only ones to have suffered such humiliation, but it is a routine experience. Another interpreter I met, a very smart young husband and father who lives near the Pakistani border, had been trying for two years to get an interpreter visa to come to the U.S. because his family had begun receiving shabnamah, or night letters, from local militants for his work at the American base. In 2007, the team leader of the cultural advising team I was visiting super pinky swore to submit the paperwork, but never got around to it. The next team leader—both these men were Lieutenant-Colonels who walked home with medals—made the same promise, but then spent his last month stationed there in the MWR watching Minnie Driver movies. It took the third team leader, who was only filling the slot temporarily while his program brought along a replacement, to coordinate the visa papers. They are finally being processed, but the two year delay has complicated the procedure (and the State Department has, for some reason, made it more difficult for the men and women who risk themselves helping us in our wars to find refuge when they’re done).

It gets worse still. Last month, I complained about Mission Essential Personnel, the military contractor that provides interpreters for the Army. In just the bare minimal outlines of how they could run their contract effectively, they are a resounding failure, and have a knack for hiring septuagenarians for combat units while misassigning their language skills.

Now, it seems, they also screw over the interpreters who get injured on the job:

Three days later Ahmed regained consciousness, but was suffering from shrapnel wounds in his scalp and severe burns covering his right hand and leg.

A little more than three months after his accident, Ahmed was fired by his employer, Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) of Columbus, Ohio – the largest supplier of translators to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. In a statement released to this reporter, the company said that Ahmed’s “military point of contact (POC) informed MEP that Basir was frequently late and did not show up on several occasions. A few days later, Basir’s POC called MEP’s manager and told her that they were not able to use him and requested a new linguist.”

Ahmed says he missed only one day of work and arrived late twice.

Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the U.S. military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.

Ahmed is one of dozens of local Afghans who have been abandoned or poorly treated by a complex web of U.S. contractors, their insurance companies, and their military counterparts despite years of service risking life and limb to help the U.S. military in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

Indeed. That whole story is depressing, and should never be tolerated by the military’s leadership. But it is, since way too many of them consider their “terps” to be expendable assets, at least judging by how they’re treated. They’re local hangers-on, so if anything happens to them, meh, we’ll just get a new one.

As for the American interpreter being excluded from the patrol meeting? It turns out this PRT commander, an Air Force Colonel, didn’t think to bring along his own interpreter. And so, when we came to a huge traffic snarl and had to see what was going on, he was lost.

As it turned out, there was a bomb underneath a bridge, and the ANA, ANP, and NDS were all there in numbers to investigate. When we got there, an NDS agents—NDS is Afghanistan’s internal intelligence service—was taking photographs of the bridge and the bomb underneath. One of the soldiers from the PRT grabbed the NDS agent and accused him of taking pictures of the soldier and the convoy, a charge he denied. He indicated we should talk with his boss, whom our team knew well from previous meetings.

Naturally, our interpreter, who the PRT Colonel had disparaged and insulted the night before, was the only person capable of translating for the soldiers who hadn’t thought to bring their own because it was meant to be a quick routine trip.

The icing on the cake? While we spent two hours waiting for EOD to clear the explosives, the District Sub-Governor approached the Colonel and asked him if he’d like to sit down and chat about what was going on. The Colonel refused, and after another hour of sitting in the road, motionless, with machine guns trained on the stopped cars, we turned around and took a three hour detour to get back to base. Mission Unaccomplished.

The treatment of our interpreters in Afghanistan is simply unforgiveable. We could not operate without them, but they are often treated worse than second-class citizens. We owe them, and ourselves, far better.

Photo: some of the onlookers the PRT was “painting” with its machine guns, February 2009.

To us.

Registan.net turns six today. In blog years, that’s something like a babillion.

(Photo: pshutterbug)

Around 11 August the news broke on several forums that Hasan Asadov was shot to death in his apartment on 9 August. According to the initial reports, he was either the “head of the Interior Ministry’s Terrorism and Anti-Corruption department” or “worked in the department” (Ferghana.ru and Uzmetronom, respectively).

Today, though, Eurasianet is running a story in its briefs that claims to have found an alternate source that contradicts the basic facts of the earlier story and causes a very different potential pattern to emerge.

An Interior Ministry Official shot dead in Tashkent on August 9 was tasked with keeping religious organizations in line, sources tell EurasiaNet. “His job was to keep tabs on the various religious factions in Tashkent; his murder was ’pay back,’” the source claimed on August 14. Hasan Asadov was shot five times at point blank range in his apartment. Uzbek media reports described him as a manager at the ministry’s anti-terrorism and corruption unit.

The Eurasianet story goes on to explicitly posit a link between this most recent murder, the 31 July attack on Anvarqori Tursunov (see last week’s post here at Registan.net) and the murder of another Tashkent religious official, Abror Abrorov, two weeks earlier.

There’s no way to judge the level of knowledge of Eurasianet’s anonymous source, so it’s clearly too early to say anything objective about the likelihood of a connection here. I found it unusual that Eurasianet says “Uzbek media” misled on the story about where Hasan Asadov actually worked and what he actually did. Ferghana.ru has its own sources and usually can be depended on to question the Uzbek MSM says, but so far they have reported no controversy about Asadov’s job description. This is a story to watch for the next few days to see if any other outlets find sources who confirm Eurasianet’s claims.

Please feel free to add links to any other stories in the comments and I’ll update this post in a couple of days if more information becomes available.

We’ll see if the U.S. is successful at its $300 million weaning. But at least he got some good comments from people, if it off the record. I think it could be fun to highlight how U.S. officials are trying to spin their counternarcotics efforts. Let’s summarize.

• The government’s response to a small program that didn’t work is to sextuple it and see what happens.
• Well-known agricultural and counternarcotics expert Michelle Flournoy, the founder of Obama’s Shadow Pentagon, thinks that all farmers need to grow food instead of poppy is the right seed.
• USAID it taking credit for Nangarhar’s opium crop swinging all over the place, and even though they’re an aid and economics organization they view the whole problem in moral terms.
• Instead of fueling the rural economy, USAID thinks it’s distorting the economy; lastly, there seems to be no comprehension of the correlation between stepped up anti-drug efforts and increased local support for the insurgency.

Nowhere in there do I see improvements to road security, infrastructure development, credit institutions (”food business” is not the same as the operating loans subsistence farmers actually need), Helmand’s enormous empty cotton gin, or even the slightest realization that focusing so much energy and weaponry on literally the only thing keeping thousands of farmers from starving or being beaten to death by creditors is a very reliable way to ensure deep-seated, popular hatred of the U.S.

We’re on the cusp of victory, I just know it.

In Khost, the Afghan security forces just might be turning into the new heroes of the war. On Wednesday, another man wearing an explosive vest charged a police checkpoint in Sabari District, but was shot dead. This is especially good news for Sabari, since it’s only recently that the U.S. has decided to re-establish a presence in the district bordering Paktya to the north. It is also one of the more complex areas of Khost, socially and politically, with a confusing pastiche of tribes, communities, and economic and personal grievances all complicating the security environment. Good for the ANP, if they can keep suicide bombers at bay.

Meanwhile, in Khost City itself, another suicide bomber managed to attack the police headquarters (again). Unlike the last time, where the police and Afghan Army received high praise for their response to a complex attack, initial witness reports indicate that the police responded with “indiscriminate fire.” An unknown number of residents fled the area.

Lastly, as Afghanistan gears up for its election in six days, it’s been interesting to see how different groups use threats against it as leverage. In Khost, for example, a large Kuchi community has decided to protest the construction of a police checkpoint they feel is too near a mosque by boycotting the election. Given how screwed up it’s looking to be—several Nuistanis protesting the lack of ballot boxes in its capital, Parun, were gunned down today by Afghan security—a mere boycott isn’t really much of a threat. It remains to be seen if and how such threats might be capitalized on post-election, or if the government caves in to their demands.

…but better late than never. This one hails from Tajikistan. The main reason it caught my eye is rather academic. There is a paper that I am finishing for a class last semester, and that paper is on language and alphabet changes in Central Asia. It’s more exact than that, but I don’t want to get into it right now. Suffice to say that this story caught my eye.

No More Russian in official use in Tajikistan?  Its amazing that lawmakers can even suggest this, and it sounds like something you’d expect from Turkmenistan first.

The director of Russian language testing at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Svetlana Melnikova, told VOA she agrees with President Rakhmon about the need to protect all national languages. But she says many of them are being affected by globalization, particularly in the areas of business and science.

Melnikova says technical terminology in CIS countries exists basically in Russian and English, and Tajiks will need to choose one of them. She predicts it will take more than a decade before Tajikistan develops its own scientific vocabulary.

It is interesting to see a date mentioned for the readiness of ’scientific vocabulary.’  This is a problem shared by many of the other non-Russian languages of the former Soviet Union, though not all of them.  However, Russian itself borrows much of its academic, medical, and law vocabulary from other European languages, including German, Polish, and French.  They in turn received many of the words from Latin and Greek.  My point is that it is quite arbitrary, in my opinion, to create a whole new set of vocabulary, especially in Tajik, which could easily use textbooks from Iran as models.  For the Turkic languages, I would suggest keeping the ‘Russian’ vocabulary, and adopting it inside the grammatical forms of the native language.

Perhaps this is a naive suggestion, but it is how I see the problem now.

Gretchen Peters and I obviously disagree quite strongly on the strength of the relationship between opium cultivation and insurgency funding. That doesn’t mean this study she produced for the U.S. Institute of Peace isn’t worth reading, however:

In Afghanistan’s poppy-rich south and southwest, known links exist between Taliban insurgents and the drug traffickers who operate along the Pakistan border. The fact that the Taliban profit from opium is routinely mentioned in media reports, academic studies, and comments by U.S. government officials, yet there is little concrete detail available to the public and policymakers on how the insurgents interact with drug traders and profit from opium. To the extent that NATO forces, civilian officials, and aid organizations operating in the south and southwest lack data on the issue or have failed to analyze it, they function in a relative vacuum. With thousands more U.S. troops deploying to Afghanistan, joined by hundreds of civilian partners as part of Washington’s reshaped strategy toward the region, understanding how the Taliban profit from the opium trade could help build strategies to weaken the insurgents and to extend governance.

So far so good. The report is a lot of rehashing the material in her book, primarily the “survey” she kept mentioning. They interviewed three hundred people, though given the severe constraints on collection, I’d question whether it could be called a survey (i.e. it’s clearly not randomized, and given the literacy, or illiteracy, of the respondents, it’s unclear if they could answer the questions appropriately), but it still has some important things to say… and not say.

The problem is with the corner Ms. Peters has painted herself into. In the exchange we had after I panned her book, she admitted that other factors, such as government corruption, could play a potentially larger role in cultivating opium and in fueling the insurgency than mere drug smuggling, but her book was about the Taliban and al Qaeda, so that’s what she restricted her research to. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s a tacit admission that she’s deliberately covering only the convenient good-versus-evil side of the phenomenon, and not the morally complex political economy of the entire Afghan drug trade.

So we’re stuck with what could only be called an incomplete picture. And it is here where Ms. Peters needs to construct an air-tight case for why we should be concerned with opium as the primary driver of militancy in the country—something she just doesn’t do. For example, in this report, Ms. Peters repeats the UNODC’s estimate that the Taliban receive around half a billion each year from the opium trade—about seven times more money than the Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA just estimated they actually receive.

That being said, the DIA and CIA agree than the relatively paltry $70 million the insurgency does receive is sufficient to fund a lot of militancy. But here is where the other side of the “financial intelligence” coin comes into play: that’s probably less than half their operating budget if you factor in Gulf Region donations and grafting the reconstruction effort.

Which brings us back to the original disagreement I have with Ms. Peters: focusing on opium as the root of all evil only gets you, at the very most, a tiny sliver of the problem. And it certainly doesn’t assist with a solution, considering the role opium plays in driving the rural economy. So while we can hem and haw about how opium profits go right into the hands of Mullah Omar, if we ignore that those profits also go into the hands of Akhundzada, the Karzai family, Sherzai, and many others, then we’re deliberately blinding ourselves to the real magnitude of the problem.

Photo comes from this atrocity, of course.

Central Asia is convenient term, but what does it mean?  For Registan.net, it often stretches south to include Afghanistan, east to include Xinjiang, and north to include Kazakhstan.  Kazakhstan might seem a natural inclusion, but in the Soviet Union it was considered apart, and maps that included it were generally labeled “Kazakhstan and Central Asia.”  [Казахстан и Средная Aзия]

Still, the five former Union Republics of the Soviet Union that make up most of Turkistan [Түркiстан in Kazakh] have a lot in common.  And yet, like siblings close in age they are perennially at odds, and only united by powers from without.

There is an excellent article on this meme as it manifested most recently within the SCO over at RFE/RL.  The SCO and the accompanying CSTO have been on rocky ground for the past several years, though neither was originally a strong organization.

The states of Central Asia have been known to frequently tout their close relations though pledges of eternal friendship. And, aside from Turkmenistan, they take part in regional groupings such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Collection Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

They are both attempts to form unity in a region torn apart by individualistic and opportunistic exploitations run by governments wholly entwined in national business interests.  There is a similar story focusing on the Uzbekistan/USA/CSTO relationship over at the Asia Times.  Here’s an excerpt, but read the whole thing:

Unsurprisingly, Moscow has prioritized its ties with Bishkek and Dushanbe. Although Uzbekistan is a much bigger country, from the perspective of the Afghan problem (and regional security), Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are vital assets. A base in southern Kyrgyzstan enables Moscow to hold the region’s jugular veins, apart from insulating Bishkek and Dushanbe from their Uzbek Big Brother. Kazakhstan has acquiesced with the Russian move.

Reuters via the New York Times chimes in as well, pointing out that the thaw between the USA and Uzbekistan has forced Uzbekistan to drift out of Moscow’s sphere of influence.  This offers the beginning of an explanation for Uzbekistan’s harsh criticism of Russia’s planned military build-up of southern Kyrgyzstan.  Naturally, Kyrgyzstan is hoping to have some protection from their Uzbek Big Brother, and has responded in kind to Uzbekistan’s protests.

Proof that the issue is more complex than it at first appears, Russia has actually stepped in to placate Uzbekistan.  Kyrgyzstan’s President Bakiev even stressed that the new military installation would not be a ‘base,’ but a training center for anti-terrorism, something useful for the region as a whole.  I don’t expect this to convince anyone, and the recent events at Khanabad at the Uzbek/Kyrgyz border are definitely the elephants in the room.

In Dave’s [Bhavna Dave, not my friend Dave] Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, language, and power, there is a quote that pops into my mind when I read news regarding Kazakhstan’s resources hailing from the back half of the periodic table.  It itself is a quote from a Soviet era geo-bureaucrat, saying that the entire periodic table of elements could be found between Kaakhstan’s Central Asian south and Siberian north.  The truth of this statement has been one of the better kept secrets until recently, and Sumitomo recently made a ‘landmark’ deal with Kazakhstan’s government for access to the legion of aging Soviet-era mines of Uranium and rare earth metals.  China is not pleased.

The move is expected to spark tit-for-tat dealmaking by Beijing, which has moved quickly to crush any assault on its 98 per cent worldwide monopoly on rare earth production. It may also create a “gold rush” for Kazakhstan’s crumbling Soviet-era uranium mines.

And, fancy that, Kazakhstan just raised its output target for this  year.  Could be connected, yeah?   The interesting thing is that, similar to the comical re-marketing of oil companies as Green, several of the above stories mention that uranium and rare earth metals are an integral ingredient in the Green Revolution.  Which is not to say that oil companies aren’t making progress towards efficiencies and certain things, but a coal and oil plant can really only be so green before it ceases to be a coal and oil plant, right?  And uranium… well, pick your poison.  Do you prefer black lung, oil-slick’d seals, or thyroid cancer?

Laghman province, nestled between Kabul, Kapisa, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Nuristan, rarely makes it into the news. We’ve briefly mentioned the small FOB in Laghman that spends most of its focus on Western Nuristan, but there’s very little news about Laghman itself.

But there’s actually quite a bit going on. Up the Alisheng River Valley, which is notorious for ambushing the Laghman PRT and other units in the area, JD Johannes visited a shura. It was pretty interesting: a concerted attempt to resolve a militancy problem through mediation rather than a military rampage. It’s fairly standard, right down to the rosy picture all the West-friendly players given him about how these things work. But he ends with a disquieting anecdote:

As we waited for our Blackhawk to take us back to Mehtar Lam, one officer told me that he can feel the clock ticking.

“We only have a year, maybe a little more, to start making serious progress,” he said.

The Taliban knows this too.

In 2007, when the clock was ticking in Iraq, many tribal leaders and Iraqi politicians stepped up to the challenge.

The question I have in my mind is if the Afghans can hear the clock ticking and if they even care.

That’s quite the question, and one we seem to be doing a poor job wrestling with back here. Meanwhile, in Laghman, there is a flurry of construction, of girls’ schools and boys schools. There might even be some meaningful attempts to monitor notoriously corrupt construction contracts and maybe tamp down on some of the graft.

But the real problem is, we have almost no one telling stories from there. I’m glad JD Johannes is in the area, because otherwise it would be a virtual blackhole.

Valley, Laghman Province, courtesy combat.camera.

Can anyone else make sense of this bizarre Dave Dilegge “people should shut up and trust the generals” rant? It’s angry, more than a bit unfounded, and downright counterproductive to be telling people to shut up. Ridicule is one thing, especially in the face of rampant idiocy… telling people to be silent, put their heads down, and allow the military run all things is is dumbfounding.

“Trust me, I’m a doctor” is usually the response of an untrustworthy doctor when questioned by her patients. What gives?

Kapisa province, Afghanistan, can be seen as a microcosm of sorts for how the war can be won. It is a densely-packed, multiethnic enclave in steep valleys surrounded by tall mountains, and near enough to Kabul and Bagram that managing events there shouldn’t be too hard for the tens of thousands of troops in the area. It has unique ethnicities like the Pashai and Parachi, unique Pashtuns like the Safi, and huge areas of Tajik dominance. It also has had to deal with rather severe political fracture, driven in part by ethnic conflicts.

Kapisa has been the site of several failed attempts at counterinsurgency since 2005. There have been at least two special operations sweeps through the area, and at least three major Coalition efforts to clear and hold territory. In stable areas, the PRT has convinced the governor to begin some construction work, but Governor Abubaker is plagued by credible accusations of corruption and ethnic favoritism. Furthermore, there are worrying signs that fighters who wish to reconcile with the government can’t find someone who knows how to do it.

Try to find Alasay.

This year, the big push has been into the Alasay Valley, a mostly-Pashai enclave on the northeast shoulder of the Tagab Valley (our friend Old Blue worked in the Tagab as an ETT some years back). We’ve covered some aspects of the counterinsurgency there (see here, here, and here, for example), but there’s not been a whole lot of news coming out of the area recently.

An NGO friend (who must, sadly, remain anonymous) has been spending a lot of time in northern and western Kapisa—areas generally considered safe and permissive places to travel. At least in March, that was certainly the case—I had a wonderful time exploring some of the bazaars in Nijrab, out of uniform and without any kevlar of body armor. The people there, mostly Tajiks, were great, if a touch nosy. Now, however, things are different.

Hizb-i Islami Gulbuddin is one of the two tanzims active in the area during the jihad and the civil war. The other, Jamiat-i Islami, was in the area for obvious reasons, as Kapisa lies along the approach to the Panjshir River valley. But what’s so interesting about Kapisa is that most of the major Jamiat figures have managed to secure wealth and power in the post-2001 Afghanistan, while most of the HiG figures have not (there are notable exceptions, but these men renounced HiG). As a result, most of the violence in the area is not actually “Taliban” as we’d normally consider it, but HiG fighters (and in a lot of cases petty thugs) calling themselves Taliban.

This NGO friend reports that Kohistan, Mahmud Raqi, and Kohband districts, all of which were Jamiat and almost all Tajik, have become targetted zones of interest for the insurgency. Because they are close enough to Kabul, the militants count attacks there as attacks in Kabul—surely not good for the purposes of propaganda. “Our team sees a lot of movement of weapons and people from Pakistan with only a few intercepted by the security forces,” he says, “and there’s active insurgent surveillance along major roads where previously you’d never have seen them.”

That’s not good. As it stands now, after about 3 PM or so, locals seem to consider these areas—which, to repeat, were permissive and safe just a few months ago—to be out of the government’s control and firmly in the hands of the insurgents. They not just own the night now, but the evening and afternoon as well, even if night is still when they rocket district centers and shoot up police stations. The local security forces are doing what they’re doing most other places: the bare minimum possible to get past the election, with the hope that everything will go away afterward.

Considering a big movement of insurgents into Western Parwan—Shinwari and Ghorband districts mostly, just west and south of Bagram Air Field—this is really bad news for Kabul. The NGO worker said that the price of cars and motorbikes in Kabul is extremely low but food is high, due to people’s fears of post-election violence.

Many of the insurgents making this push, according to this NGO worker, are actually from Pakistan: the HiG networks in the province remain mostly as they were, at least geographically (so mostly limited to places like the Tagab). While last night the police finally arrested one of the insurgent surveillance teams, there is tremendous concern that, much like in early 2008, Haqqani Network and HiG fighters will use Kapisa as a staging ground to launch anti-election attacks on Kabul.

If the police start arresting the afternoon insurgents in northwest Kapisa, there’s a chance these attacks could be forestalled. But it requires the police really going after them, and getting significant French and American support to do so. And it is not at all clear either is willing or able to do that.

Photo: Tagab district center, February 2009, by me.

Last month, I noted a terrible paradox in the new rules coming out of General McChrystal’s command:

There are also concerns from soldiers about whether or not it is prudent to develop a reputation for withdrawing from such firefights. After all, you cannot fight a war — even a counterinsurgency — without fighting or killing the enemy…

Gen. McChrystal’s directive, therefore, is fundamentally contradictory: It requires U.S. troops to protect undefined population centers, unless threatened by the very forces that endanger them.

Even more ironic is the subtext of Gen. McChrystal’s new directive, which speaks not to protecting the people of Afghanistan, but to protecting the Western troops inside of it. Withdrawing from a populated area when fired upon does not “protect” it any more than dropping bombs on it does. Afghans want America’s protection, not necessarily its absence — and confusing the two will make the situation worse.

Tim Lynch writes about a recent RPG ambush in Nangahar Province and notices: since McChrystal got put in charge, the militants have become much more violent:

There is a problem with this whole scenario and that is how the hell do a squad of Taliban move over the Tor Ghar mountains, dig in and ambush a fuel tanker, break contact when the Americans show up and withdraw back over the mountains without being hit by 300 to 400 rounds of 30mm cannon fire by an Apache? I think I found out the answer inadvertently when I was down south with the Marines last week. The Marines are shooting rockets – a lot of them and I was chatting up the 3 who told me he has been meeting with spacemen. Pray tell why? I asked and he told me the new generation of the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) goes so high that you have to de-conflict the missile track with satellites and other stuff hanging out in space. I then asked why shoot rockets and he said because we cannot get clearance to use Tac Air fast enough given the new ROE put in place by Gen McChrystal.

It seems to me that the Taliban understands this ROE change and know that as long as they are operating near civilians we will not whack them. How else do you explain 20 armed guys moving several kilometers in broad daylight through the densely populated, strategically important Kabul river delta? A year ago there would have been so many attack birds stacked over these deadbeats they would have needed an airborne controller to keep them from hitting each other.

This cannot be considered good news and it will make it much easier for the Taliban to actually backup some of the BS they have been spouting lately about cutting the roads during the upcoming presidential elections. Air-power is how we fight when we want to be asymmetrical and we are good at it. However our FOB bound operational mindset has created opportunities for Afghan score settling which is how we have been tricked into bombing wedding parties or warning the only physician in Nuristan to flee his clinic and then killing him and all the nurses and midwife too as they pulled out in their vehicle. Due to our over reliance on technology and local informants we have created a more level playing field for the bad guys who clearly understand they are, for now, safe from our ground attack aviation assets. Just in time for the elections too….unbelievable.

I agree, Tim. That actually is quite unbelievable. And that is a nice way of summarizing precisely why I have become so deeply pessimistic of our ability to actually do the right thing over there. We refuse to learn from our mistakes, and we refuse to repeat our successes. It really is unreal.