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 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 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.
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.
May 23rd, 2009 §
This week the BBC reporter Owen Bennett-Jones, who I do not know well but whose work I have long admired (if you want a good and concise read-in on recent history in Pakistan, do yourself a favor and order his book) put out this excellent report from the Northwest Frontier Province.
In it, he quoted locals fleeing Taliban-held areas of Swat, and described what he calls a changing attitude towards the Taliban in Pakistan. Read this section (emphasis mine):
I have come to a place about an hour’s drive from Peshawar, 50 miles (80km) from where there has been intense fighting.
There are many people on the move here who have run away from that fighting and they have brought with them eyewitness accounts of the brutal things they have seen under the Taliban’s control of the Swat valley over the past few months.
“They were beheading people, they were shooting innocent people without any warning, they were terrifying us,” one woman tells me.
“They were stopping our kids from going to school, they were kidnapping young boys.”
A man standing nearby is also eager to talk.
“With my own hands I have buried 18 people who were beheaded, even children,” he tells me grimly.
“They are not friends, they are not our allies, they’re our enemies, they are criminals, they are gangsters.”
Such strong public criticism of the Taliban is new – the mood has changed in Pakistan.
I agree with OBJ that the mood has changed in Pakistan, and I would argue that ordinary people in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas also turned against the Taliban some time ago. Months back, I was chatting online with a friend from Wana, in South Waziristan and he was positively enraged about “gansters,” as he called them, who make up the TTP, the Urdu acronym for the Taliban Movement of Pakistan. I asked why he chose the word “gangsters” and he shot a message back to me: “There is not a crime in the world they have not committed,” and went on to describe widespread robbery, gun battles in the streets, and their engagement in all sorts of smuggling.
The reports filtering out about life in southern Afghanistan are equally disturbing, as I describe in my book. On both sides of the AfPak border people’s lives are being chewed up by a brutal blend of extremism and crime, made worse by endemic corruption and a critical lack of governance.
But as much as this widening insecurity presents an enormous security challenge, it also presents an opportunity for western nations hoping to stabilize the region. Ordinary people both in Afghanistan and Pakistan want nothing more than a secure environment where they can live and prosper. There are widespread misperceptions here in the U.S. that the Pashtun tribes who populate the border areas are ungovernable. I argue that people in the border areas (and in fact people across both Afghanistan and Pakistan — just look at the lawyers movement in Pakistan or the recent protest by brave Afghan women in Kabul) want rule of law and better governance. Our best and only exit strategy for this region is to give that to them — and fast.
“Stability operations,” the new buzz word in Washington for nation-building, is not only the fastest and cheapest option, it is the morally right one, and it will improve our nation’s security too.
May 3rd, 2009 §
Want to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban?
Stop thinking of them as terrorists.
The Obama administration has promised “a new way of thinking about the challenges” facing the United States in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it’s also high time it starts thinking in a new way about America’s enemies themselves. The Taliban and al Qaeda have long portrayed themselves as holy warriors, battling under the flag of Islam. Most people in the West have accepted this characterization, imagining them as long-bearded fanatics, while Washington constantly refers to them as “terrorists” and “extremists.” No doubt they are. But, having studied their operations at the village level in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than three years, another descriptor also seems useful to me: criminal. When you examine the day-to-day activities keeping their networks financially afloat and probe how they interact with local communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda start to look a lot more mafiosi than mujahideen.
Read the full story here.
