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 22nd, 2009 §
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.
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 11th, 2009 §
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.
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.
