October 23rd, 2009 §
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.
October 12th, 2009 §
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.
October 10th, 2009 §
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.
August 16th, 2009 §
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.
August 12th, 2009 §
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.
August 11th, 2009 §
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.
August 10th, 2009 §
In June, I met with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke to discuss how the drug trade benefits the Afghan Taliban. I urged him to pay close attention to the two history chapters of my book, Seeds of Terror, warning that Washington has a habit of making the same mistakes over and over in Afghanistan.
He assured me the Obama team had consulted with a raft of experts and historians, adding with a laugh: “We plan to make new mistakes.”
I am not entirely sure, however.
Read the full story here.
July 20th, 2009 §
From Time Magazine’s website:
In her new book, Seeds of Terror, journalist Gretchen Peters makes the compelling argument that the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have evolved (or devolved) from purely religious terrorist groups into narcoterrorism syndicates with religious overtones. The drug trade nets them $500 million a year in profits, resources the militants use in their fight against Western forces. Until that supply of cash is cut off, Peters argues, Western forces cannot defeat the militants.
Read the full interview here.
June 29th, 2009 §
The U.S. government has announced that it will be reshaping counter narcotics strategy in Afghanistan to increase efforts to interdict smugglers and traffickers and take the focus off crop eradication, which has hurt poor farmers.
This is a welcome change. As the Obama administration’s special envoy to the region Richard Holbrooke put it, the policies of the Bush administration — which pushed grandiose development plans and wide-scale crop eradication — largely failed:
“They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban.”
To support this shift in focus, the U.S. military (not to mention troops from other NATO nations operating in Afghanistan) will have to reshape its efforts from the ground up to accommodate this shift in focus. There are two main areas where they will have to change their behavior, one is how they interact with locals, and speak about the Taliban and al Qaeda (in other words, a public relations campaign) and the other is how they collect intelligence. Every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan plays a critical role, right down to the grunt on patrol.
First, public relations. American forces in Afghanistan should stop using words like jihadi, mujahidin and Taliban to refer to the enemy, because these are actually complementary terms for them. I like the suggestion made by counter insurgency expert David Kilcullen in his brilliant book The Accidental Guerilla that they use the term ‘taqfiri,’ or heretic. As I say in my presenations on the book, the Taliban use two bogus arguments among the local populace to rationalize trafficking drugs. One bogus argument is that, even though Islam’s holy book, the Koran, bans the use, cultivation and traffic in all narcotics, it gives you a pass in times of war (it does not). The other bogus argument they use is that the Koran allows you to traffic in drugs as long as you sell them only to non-Muslims (it doesn’t, and they don’t). Almost none of Afghanistan’s drug crop ends up in the United States, while Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran — all Muslim nations — have skyrocketing addiction rates. If coalition forces talk about the Taliban as heretics and criminals, they will have a better chance of winning public support.
Second, collecting intelligence. U.S. soldiers patrolling the mountains, villages and poppy fields of Afghanistan are no different than the cops who walk the beat on U.S. streets. They have a valuable role in collecting ground level information about how the enemy funds himself. If a military patrol intercepts a guy with a drug shipment, find out who he got it from, and more importantly, who he is taking it to. Don’t ask him if he knows where Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar is. Would a New York City beat cop busting a cocaine pusher ask him where to find Pablo Escobar? No, but that low-level smuggler is part of a chain. He will have information about the guy above him on the chain, and that guy will have information about the guy above him. Follow the chain. Follow the money.
June 12th, 2009 §
Three Cups of Tea, the lovely book by mountaineer-turned-humanitarian Greg Mortenson, has captivated American readers and held its position on the New York Times best seller list since January 2007.
Nonetheless, many Americans have no idea about the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Pakistan, where more than 2.4 million people have fled the Taliban in the Swat Valley and countless more have fled the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, better known here as the “tribal belt.”
Ahmed Rashid, author of the Taliban and Descent into Chaos, has written an excellent editorial in today’s Washington Post that spells out clearly why we as a nation must help the people of Pakistan. He writes:
The mass exodus from the battle zone to the southern plains has been the largest and fastest displacement of people since the genocide in Rwanda 15 years ago, U.N. officials say. … U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the United Nations may be forced to cut all its services, including food supplies, by July if its appeal for $543 million in emergency aid goes unmet. After nearly a month, donor countries have pledged only 20 percent of that. The International Committee of the Red Cross — the only aid agency working with civilians wounded from the fighting and with those civilians who have remained in the destroyed towns of Swat — seeks $38 million, which would double its Pakistan budget for this year.
Rashid notes that President Obama has pledged $310 million to help the people of northwest Pakistan, making him “the the only world leader concerned” about them. Arab and European nations have so far not coughed up any major aid packages.
Times are tough, but I encourage the American people to follow Obama’s lead and send what they can to help the people of Pakistan. Many excellent aid groups are hard at work there, including Greg Mortenson’s CAI, Mercy Corps and Doctor’s Without Borders.
As Rashid points out:
Strategically, much is at stake. The fighting in Swat is not just against extremism but for the hearts and minds of future generations.
We are fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda, and in any counter-insurgency effort the best weapons don’t shoot. By helping to stabilize Pakistan, we will not only make the world a better place, we will make our own nation safer. Unless that happens — and happens fast, the world is “sleepwalking its way to defeat” in Pakistan, as Rashid writes. And the cost of doing too little could be enormous.
