Gretchen Peters

I am too busy with other work to post much these days, but I wanted to highlight a good article in December’s Harper’s Magazine that details drug corruption among the Border Police in Kandahar.

You can read it here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/12/0082754

President Obama, if recent leaks from the British government to the BBC are to be believed, has already made up his mind to send more troops to Afghanistan, as his commander there, Lt Gen Stanley McChrystal has requested. Today’s New York Times says European defense ministers have also signed on to the plan.

Perhaps Obama’s just pretending to deliberate while he waits for health care reform to pass. It’s understandable he might be leery of taking on two such enormous issues at once.

But the delays are troubling for US troops in Afghanistan, according to this insightful report in Stars and Stripes.

It’s not just the sense of mission drift that has soldiers and marines worried, the article says. New Rules of Engagement require foreign troops to hand over captured suspects to local authorities within three days. But the suspects often bribe their way out, or simply get released by Afghan police and judicial officials who don’t have the capacity to hold them. I have heard of cases from folks on the ground in which known militants who planted IEDs — and killed US troops — were back on the streets within days of being captured and handed over.

“I joke that we have to fight our own rules more than we fight the Taliban,” said Staff Sgt. William King, 38, a technician with the Washington National Guard’s 319th EOD, who watched his colleague, Staff Sgt. Thomas Rabjohn, disintegrate in a blast in the violent Tangi Valley earlier this month.

The unit then swept the area for evidence and rounded up 22 detainees in a single operation, he said. Of those, three were ultimately held. But the midlevel officers had to argue with the decision-makers in Bagram who, following policy, did not want too much of an American fingerprint on the detention process.

“From a COIN (counterinsurgency) perspective, it makes sense. We have to get Afghans to take care of their own needs. Part of that is holding them responsible for what happens in their area,” said King, a single father of two from Lacey, Wash. “We spent 10 days diving through hoops before we finally found a solution to get these guys into custody, where we had reason to believe they would stay in custody.”

It’s too bad the US government and the American public can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, because the war in Afghanistan needs urgent attention.

Most discussion of Afghanistan’s mammoth opium trade treats the problem as if it were Afghanistan’s alone. Pundits blame corruption in the Karzai government. Aid workers want to help poppy farmers grow alternative crops. The military wants to kill or capture 50 traffickers who collaborate with the Taliban.

But too few take note of the fact that the vast majority of profits are actually earned outside Afghanistan. Addiction, Crime and Insurgency, a new report from the United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), pulls together some eye-popping statistics in an attempt to refocus attention on the broader consequences — and reach — of the trade.

See the full report here.

According to a recent report for the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, American intelligence agencies continue to believe that donations from wealthy sympathisers in the Gulf make up the bulk of funding for the Taliban, al Qaeda and other extremist groups operating along the AfPak (Afghanistan/Pakistan) frontier.

An examination of their day-to-day activities at the ground level suggests otherwise however.

Read the full report here.

I have been traveling and working on a research project in recent weeks, and I have had zero time to blog on the website. But I am taking some time today to post a few recent articles I have written, including this Oped in Britian’s New Statesman:

In Helmand, they protect opium shipments, extort money from poppy growers and operate heroin labs. In Kunar, they smuggle timber and guns. In the Swat valley, they control emerald mines, selling gemstones on the black market. On both sides of the Afghan/Pakistani border, they run a brisk kidnapping racket, snaring wealthy local businessmen, diplomats and journalists from around the globe.

When people in the west imagine the Taliban, most think of bearded fanatics, battling from caves under the flag of radical Islam. Having studied their day-to-day activities for more than five years, when I think of the Taliban I think of Tony Soprano and his gang.

Read the full article here.

In the following far-ranging interview with Failure, Peters discusses the Obama Administration’s approach to Afghanistan, the evolution of the Taliban, the role corruption plays in perpetuating the drug trade, and her own personal experiences reporting from one of the most dangerous regions in the world.

The war in Afghanistan has received increased media attention recently. Why?
In part, because it is going badly. By some estimates the Taliban now controls or dominates as much as sixty percent of Afghan territory, and casualty rates are higher than ever. Also, President Obama said that Afghanistan would be one of his central foreign policy efforts. He said he would refocus attention on the war in Afghanistan and finish it the way it should have been finished from the start.

Read the full interview here.

A new report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gives a concise breakdown of the dramatic change, both in terms of U.S. military strategy and counternarcotics policy, toward Afghanistan since the Obama administration took office.

It’s worth a read, since it zeroes in on the “fruits of neglect” and the culture of impunity that created the problem, and because it pieces together various new intelligence and policy initiatives taking place to fight it. It also argues, correctly, for a new metric for measuring success in the counternarcotics fight and encourages the kind of rigorous debate the United States needs to be having about Afghanistan.

Read the full story here.

I have long been a fan of the brave and determined Afghan reporters at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. They go into areas where few other journalists dare to tread and come back with balanced and insightful reports. If you want to keep up with what is going on in the countryside, read their dispatches.

Two reports out this week are especially good: This story examines the state of voter apathy in Helmand, where thousands of US and British troops are attempting an 11th hour effort to stabilize the province ahead of Aug 20 polls.

Engineer Abdul Hadi, the provincial head of the Independent Election Commission, said that Helmand would have 222 polling centres housing 1,092 polling stations.

But if the security situation does not improve markedly in the next two weeks, dozens of these centres could remain empty.

“You cannot conduct a military operation one day and expect people to come vote the next,” said Shah Nazar, a retired police officer. “People need to feel safe. But under these circumstances, nobody can participate in the elections.” (Read the full story here)

The IWPR reporter, Mohammad Ilyas Dayee, spoke to people in Marja, the scene of recent heavy fighting between the Marines and the Taliban, Musa Qala, a town the Taliban controlled for about four months in late 2006 and early 2007. It’s a sobering assessment of the chances of having a legitimate vote in the country’s largest province.

Meanwhile, another enterprising IWPR reporter actually traveled to a militant-controlled area to attend a rally of sorts where Mullahs were warning people not to vote:

The mullah spoke in generalities for a bit, asking people to maintain their unity. But slowly he came to his main point – exhorting people not to participate in the elections.

“These elections are a trick, a fraud perpetrated by western countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom,” he said. “Whoever participates in these elections will be shamed in front of Allah and his prophet.”

Ehsanullah Ehsan, a member of this group, had a black turban and black clothes. He looked like Taleban, and he told me that they had given speeches like this one in Karokh, Gozara and Oba districts of Herat province. The people in those areas had welcomed them warmly, he added, and the process was continuing.

Ehsan said that he himself had given some of the speeches, and added that participation in the elections was a very great crime.

“The Americans are just picking a puppet for themselves,” he said. “The president of Afghanistan is not going to be elected by the people.”

Ehsan urged participants at the gathering to tell their relatives not to vote.

The purpose of this counter-election propaganda was to motivate people to take up arms against foreign forces rather than vote, said Ehsan.

“Afghanistan has been invaded by these foreigners,” he said.

Ehsan knew how to play on people’s emotions. He talked about subjects designed to make people very angry, such as the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in western newspapers; the alleged abuse of the Koran by Americans; and the “genocide” caused by coalition forces’ bombardment of peaceful communities.

Ehsan told people that the foreigners had come to control our country and our people, and it was the job of each and every Afghan to spread the word that foreigners are the enemies of our culture and our religion.

Ehsan said that the mullahs did not belong to any specific group, but were just trying to serve Allah and rescue Afghanistan from the invasion of the infidels. He did say, however, that the mullahs were being financially supported by the Taleban.

Each of the mullahs had a mobile phone and modern weapons, and they were walking around the area without fear.

Their propaganda seemed to have an extraordinary impact on their audience. (Read the full story here)

It’s a fascinating read, and another indication of how badly NATO, the US military and the international community is losing the public relations war in the rural Pashtun south. It’s another example to me of how the West has deeply underestimated the enemy, and a sign of that old counterinsurgency dictum: “the best weapons don’t shoot.”

As the Obama administration and the Pentagon revamp strategy towards the region, an effective campaign to counter the insurgents’ misinformation campaign will be as critical to any effort to “clear, hold and build.”

In Afghanistan’s poppy-rich south and southwest, a raging insurgency intersects a thriving opium trade. This study examines how the Taliban profit from narcotics, probes how traffickers influence the strategic goals of the insurgency, and considers the extent to which narcotics are changing the nature of the insurgency itself. 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 the nexus between traffickers and the Taliban could help build strategies to weaken the insurgents and to extend governance. This report argues that it is no longer possible to treat the insurgency and the drug trade as separate matters, to be handled by military and law enforcement, respectively.

Read the full report here.

President Obama doesn’t need to send any more American soldiers to Afghanistan. There’s no doubt country needs to be stabilized – and fast. But it would be more effective to send thousands of police officers: beat cops who would know how to walk the streets and round up the criminals who are terrorizing and destabilizing that country.

And I’m not just talking the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Read the full story here.