May 19, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Take the War to the Drug Lords
By GRETCHEN PETERS
A SKINNY man opened the gate at the sprawling compound in Quetta, in western Pakistan. When I asked if the property belonged to Afghanistan’s most powerful drug smuggler, he smiled and nodded. “Haji Juma Khan has 200 houses,” he said. “And this is one of them.”
I had been trying to track down Mr. Khan for years when I found this residence on a dusty, garbage-strewn alley. It hardly seemed an auspicious address for a man who American officials say moved as much as $1 billion worth of opium every year, hiring the Taliban to protect his colossal narcotics shipments and paying corrupt officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to look the other way.
I said I was a journalist and wanted to interview the boss. “He is on the run and we have not seen him,” said another man, who introduced himself as Mr. Khan’s clerk. “But please come inside and have a cup of tea.”
Even with the top man on the run, Mr. Khan’s network ran a string of heroin labs in the mountainous area where the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran merge. He had built huge underground storage bunkers in remote deserts for his product. He came to the attention of Western law enforcement officials for sending drug convoys made up of dozens of S.U.V.’s packed with narcotics, which were then unloaded onto ships along Pakistan’s southern coast.
Last October, about three months after I drank tea with his colleagues in Quetta, Mr. Khan was arrested and extradited to the United States. He is now jailed at New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics with intent to support a terrorist organization. His capture was a major, if little noticed, victory in the war on drugs in Afghanistan, although my contacts in Quetta tell me his relatives are keeping the network going strong.
Studying Mr. Khan’s operations allowed me to understand the challenges of fighting Afghanistan’s opium trade, which at once benefits the Taliban, Al Qaeda and corrupt officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. It also provided some insight on how to reshape our counternarcotics strategy.
So far, Western-led efforts to fight the opium trade in Afghanistan have focused mainly on eradicating poppy crops, a policy that has done little to hamper the drug lords and simply victimized poppy farmers and poor sharecroppers who work the land. As the Obama administration overhauls strategy in Afghanistan, installing Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the top commander, the focus of antidrug efforts should be on the smugglers and drug processors.
First, there must be stepped-up efforts to take down powerful traffickers like Mr. Khan and to cut off the Taliban’s opium profits, which the United Nations calculates to be worth $400 million a year. Their greatest earnings don’t come at the farming level, but from protecting shipments leaving farm areas and taxing drug refineries.
A good start would be using air attacks to destroy drug convoys carrying opium on smuggling trails toward the Pakistani border, using the same infrared technology employed along the Mexican border to avoid hitting civilian vehicles. Working with local law enforcement, NATO forces must also establish checkpoints along major arteries and border crossings and search all vehicles for drugs — even those belonging to senior Afghan government officials and their relatives. Taliban warriors may be able to slip over the mountainous borders in secret, but large drug shipments often go by road.
In October, NATO gave its commanders a mandate to destroy drug refineries, but many have been reluctant to do so. Not only should they take the offensive, but they should put an emphasis on arresting the chemists and other specialists operating the labs, who are difficult to replace. Some NATO nations in the Afghan coalition have placed restrictions on their troops that prevent them from participating in American-led counternarcotics operations. That’s short-sighted, given that Afghan heroin tends to end up on European streets. Until such restrictions are dropped, troops from those nations should be deployed to provide security, freeing up American and Afghan soldiers for combat linked to the opium trade.
In addition, until Afghanistan’s notoriously weak judiciary and police can be reformed, we should bring any major smugglers to the United States for trial, as was done with Mr. Khan.
Afghanistan’s drug problem extends beyond its borders. While Pakistan seems finally to be taking the fight to the Taliban elements in its northwestern frontier areas, it must simultaneously round up leaders of powerful cartels that operate from Baluchistan province in the southwest. These men supply insurgents with money, vehicles, communications equipment and weapons. Some even run guesthouses and hospitals that treat wounded Taliban soldiers. One alleged kingpin, Sakhi Dost Muhammad Notezai, has been wanted by American authorities since the late 1980s. Yet, despite evidence that his clan is still tied to smuggling opium, his son is the transportation minister for Baluchistan.
Stopping the drug flow is only half the battle: the money flows along separate routes from the opium, and disrupting financial flows may be tougher. To that end, Washington should subsidize efforts to regulate both Afghanistan’s bank transfers and the informal hawala network, the subcontinent’s unregulated version of the Western Union. Most hawala transfers are legitimate — Western aid groups in Afghanistan, for example, use it to send funds to rural field offices. But the system also moves drug money. The Treasury Department has put together a sound proposal that would not add costs for those using the hawala system but would allow the authorities to track who sent how much money, and to whom.
In the end, no counternarcotics program will make a difference in the war if Afghanistan and Pakistan fail to improve their governance. The Taliban are gaining ground not because they are well liked (they aren’t, in either place) but because the governments in both countries are seen as incompetent and corrupt. Many experts believe that corrupt officials on both sides of the border earn even more off the drug trade than the Taliban do.
As the Taliban and Al Qaeda become intertwined with smugglers like Haji Juma Khan, they swell in economic and military might. And then a drug problem that began as a regional headache becomes a global security nightmare: a two-headed monster of criminal smugglers and rich terrorist groups with deadly global ambitions.
Gretchen Peters is the author of “Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opini ... nted=print
Afghanistan
One good reason we fight in afghanistan
By Michael Gerson, For The Calgary Herald
July 11, 2009
Being an educated, professional woman in Afghanistan could not have been easy at any time during the last few decades. I recently met with a group of female government officials, brought to Washington by USAID and the U. S.-Afghan Women's Council. One, during the Taliban years, had run an underground school in her home for the criminal purpose of teaching girls. Another had built a community development program employing 25,000 Afghan women before she was put under close guard by the Taliban. Her home was looted, and her children were threatened with kidnapping.
Afghanistan is a country where women have made significant progress--but only compared to an oppressive past. Seven million children now attend school, compared to one million six years ago. The women I met now play public roles in education, public works and agriculture--unimaginable under the Taliban.
Yet Afghanistan is also a nation where girls have had acid thrown in their faces while walking to school and female police officers and public officials have been assassinated. Taliban and foreign extremists seem to take a particular interest in the intimidation, repression and humiliation of women.
And patriarchal attitudes are not confined to the fringes. The Shiite family law, recently passed by the Afghan parliament and signed by President Hamid Karzai, legalized marital rape and restricted the travel of women. (Under domestic and international pressure, the law is being revisited.)
Afghanistan remains one of the most difficult places on Earth to be a woman. A reaction of anger and militancy would be understandable. But the Afghan women I met take a different approach. Uniformly they argue that "education" is the most important response. By education, they do not mean only literacy. "People need to be educated in the values of our own religion," says Rahela Hashim Sidiqi, a senior adviser at Afghanistan's civil service commission. "They need to learn from other Islamic countries, such as Indonesia and Bangladesh. Even in Arab countries, education is not denied." The main challenge, says Sidiqi, is "the lack of education about Islam itself, particularly in rural areas where culture and Islam are mixed.
People don't see the difference between tradition and religion." These women talk of the Quran's teaching on property rights and respect for women as a source of progressive reform within Afghan culture. They speak with particular respect for Khadijah, Muhammad's wife, who, they argue, was educated and conducted business while married to the prophet. And they identify a number of prominent Afghan imams who defend these views. "They are the key," says Sidiqi. "We need a positive approach."
Clearly, this is a different kind of feminism. Rather than asserting an individualistic conception of rights, these women are arguing for respect and legal protection from within their religious tradition. They do not seek to overturn a cultural order, but to expand and humanize it. "If it shows respect to wear a scarf," says Sidiqi, "I wear a scarf. We respect other people--and we expect respect." The rights of Afghan women are not always seen at the forefront of American interests. Some foreign policy "realists" seem open to an accommodation with Islamist groups in Afghanistan that would sacrifice human rights in the cause of stability.
These women offer a practical rebuttal. They point out that the reconstruction of Afghanistan will not take place without the knowledge and skills of 52 per cent of its population. They believe women in Afghanistan possess the political advantage of being untainted by past warfare and corruption. And they have seen, according to Sidiqi, "that women are always fighting for the rule of law, because women and children are hurt most when there is no rule of law."
Why should America, in the midst of a costly war, care about the rights of Afghan women?Because Afghanistan, without the participation of women, will remain a failed and dangerous state.
And there is another reason-- because the betrayal of courage always matters, and always dishonours those who commit it. The dignity of women is not the only reason America and its NATO allies fight in Afghanistan-- but it is a good one.
Gerson is a columnist with Washington postwriters group
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 0&sponsor=
By Michael Gerson, For The Calgary Herald
July 11, 2009
Being an educated, professional woman in Afghanistan could not have been easy at any time during the last few decades. I recently met with a group of female government officials, brought to Washington by USAID and the U. S.-Afghan Women's Council. One, during the Taliban years, had run an underground school in her home for the criminal purpose of teaching girls. Another had built a community development program employing 25,000 Afghan women before she was put under close guard by the Taliban. Her home was looted, and her children were threatened with kidnapping.
Afghanistan is a country where women have made significant progress--but only compared to an oppressive past. Seven million children now attend school, compared to one million six years ago. The women I met now play public roles in education, public works and agriculture--unimaginable under the Taliban.
Yet Afghanistan is also a nation where girls have had acid thrown in their faces while walking to school and female police officers and public officials have been assassinated. Taliban and foreign extremists seem to take a particular interest in the intimidation, repression and humiliation of women.
And patriarchal attitudes are not confined to the fringes. The Shiite family law, recently passed by the Afghan parliament and signed by President Hamid Karzai, legalized marital rape and restricted the travel of women. (Under domestic and international pressure, the law is being revisited.)
Afghanistan remains one of the most difficult places on Earth to be a woman. A reaction of anger and militancy would be understandable. But the Afghan women I met take a different approach. Uniformly they argue that "education" is the most important response. By education, they do not mean only literacy. "People need to be educated in the values of our own religion," says Rahela Hashim Sidiqi, a senior adviser at Afghanistan's civil service commission. "They need to learn from other Islamic countries, such as Indonesia and Bangladesh. Even in Arab countries, education is not denied." The main challenge, says Sidiqi, is "the lack of education about Islam itself, particularly in rural areas where culture and Islam are mixed.
People don't see the difference between tradition and religion." These women talk of the Quran's teaching on property rights and respect for women as a source of progressive reform within Afghan culture. They speak with particular respect for Khadijah, Muhammad's wife, who, they argue, was educated and conducted business while married to the prophet. And they identify a number of prominent Afghan imams who defend these views. "They are the key," says Sidiqi. "We need a positive approach."
Clearly, this is a different kind of feminism. Rather than asserting an individualistic conception of rights, these women are arguing for respect and legal protection from within their religious tradition. They do not seek to overturn a cultural order, but to expand and humanize it. "If it shows respect to wear a scarf," says Sidiqi, "I wear a scarf. We respect other people--and we expect respect." The rights of Afghan women are not always seen at the forefront of American interests. Some foreign policy "realists" seem open to an accommodation with Islamist groups in Afghanistan that would sacrifice human rights in the cause of stability.
These women offer a practical rebuttal. They point out that the reconstruction of Afghanistan will not take place without the knowledge and skills of 52 per cent of its population. They believe women in Afghanistan possess the political advantage of being untainted by past warfare and corruption. And they have seen, according to Sidiqi, "that women are always fighting for the rule of law, because women and children are hurt most when there is no rule of law."
Why should America, in the midst of a costly war, care about the rights of Afghan women?Because Afghanistan, without the participation of women, will remain a failed and dangerous state.
And there is another reason-- because the betrayal of courage always matters, and always dishonours those who commit it. The dignity of women is not the only reason America and its NATO allies fight in Afghanistan-- but it is a good one.
Gerson is a columnist with Washington postwriters group
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 0&sponsor=
Bright-eyed youth the hope of Afghanistan
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldJuly 18, 2009
It is Kabul's SAIT, a vocational training school where 1,600 kids from all over Afghanistan with good high-school grades are getting, what is for them, the chance of a lifetime.
With papers in construction, computer technology, or auto mechanics, they are guaranteed jobs and will make as much as $500/ month--twice the national average wage.
I am here as a guest of the U. S. Mission to NATO. Their earnest young spokesmen take me with professional satisfaction to places where the international community, ultimately led by the U. S. State
Department through various agencies, has made a difference for good.
In front of me now in this austere, packed classroom is an earnest young man, who has risen to his feet as a mark of respect to visitors. It is that kind of a society, as well as one with a history of violence.
What are you going to do with your business diploma, I ask?
"I want to make Afghanistan a better place."
A canned response? "Come on, no PC answers, What do you really want to do?"
No, he's for real. He wants to work for the Independent Electoral Commission, now ramping up for the country's second presidential election. We were just there: 300 young men and women hacking away at PCs, updating the voters' list of 20 million, and looking dead serious about what they were doing.
"And you?" My target this time is a delightful young woman, dressed in the modern style with only a scarf over her head. "I want to make Afghanistan a better place." "How?" "I want to be a judge."
Such ambition, in a country where 10 years ago she would not have been allowed to go to school. Her instructor whispers in my ear, "She is married." "So how do your family feel about you being here?" "They support me fully," she says, in heavily accented but clear English.
Outside, private security guards with AK-47s patrol the grounds to make sure nobody assaults the dream, (and as the director jokes, to make sure the girls-only dorm stays girls-only.) Inside, dreams are gestating.
Likewise in an experimental farm that teaches simple ways to increase crop values.
Or, in a civil service school that got electricity from a mini hydro generator courtesy of the Lithuanian government, (and immediately installed satellite TV.)
And so it goes on. We travel in armoured vehicles, wearing flak jackets and a Humvee with a machine gun turret riding shotgun. But wherever we are taken, whether around Kabul or in the Montana-like wilderness of Gohr province, we see that hope is popping up like fireweed after a forest fire. It may not be much, but for medieval Afghanistan --the people with the satellite TV still heat their stoves with dried dung, their own included with that of their animals--it's a reckless lunge toward modernity.
Yet, one has to ask:When all hell is breaking loose in Helmand province--where four U. S. Marines were killed a few days ago in IED attacks, and fighting rages between British troops and Taliban insurgents in temperatures above 50 degrees and in Kandahar where Canadian troops are living the same life--are successful examples of rehabilitation and development worth telling?
For, here is an uncomfortable truth: The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is not economically viable. Its annual self-generated revenues are $750 million, but, the cost of the 134,000-man army it is building with foreign help will be three times that, before a road is paved or a clinic built. The place runs on outside money.
So, who are we deceiving? Ourselves? The Afghans who are so desperate for a better life that they take the considerable risk of co-operating with the foreigners, knowing that retribution awaits if it all goes wrong?
After a week in the country, I don't presume omniscience.
However, the reasons to press on are twofold.
First, it is foolhardy to suppose the embedded dysfunctions of the centuries can be vanquished in a few years. It will be a miracle if it is done in a few generations, although the bright-eyed enthusiasm of young, well-educated
Afghans suggests more may be possible than the cynics will ever concede.
Provide security, and development-- and therefore rising government revenues --will follow. Not for nothing does U. S. President Barack Obama pin his hopes on a civilian surge of development workers, to parallel the military surge now underway.
(And Canadian audiences should relish hearing him tout "defence, development and diplomacy" as the new best thing. It's what
Canadians have been doing for years in Afghanistan.)
This will take time. But it is possible.
Second, we must remember why we are there. Much as we admire the spirit of those Afghans who, wanting the same things we take for granted, lay it all on the line to get it, we are in Afghanistan to deny it to those who would hurt us and our way of life.
It's still cheap at the price.
That said, I have used the word "young" more often than I should in a single article. Yet, I confess I do hope that in serving our own best interests, we make life better for some really high-minded youngsters now setting forth on what will certainly be an adventurous life.
We just have to understand that our own best interests, really depend on them winning in the end --not the other guys.
Nigel haNNaford is travelliNg arouNd afghaNistaN.
NhaNNaford@theherald.
caNwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 3&sponsor=
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldJuly 18, 2009
It is Kabul's SAIT, a vocational training school where 1,600 kids from all over Afghanistan with good high-school grades are getting, what is for them, the chance of a lifetime.
With papers in construction, computer technology, or auto mechanics, they are guaranteed jobs and will make as much as $500/ month--twice the national average wage.
I am here as a guest of the U. S. Mission to NATO. Their earnest young spokesmen take me with professional satisfaction to places where the international community, ultimately led by the U. S. State
Department through various agencies, has made a difference for good.
In front of me now in this austere, packed classroom is an earnest young man, who has risen to his feet as a mark of respect to visitors. It is that kind of a society, as well as one with a history of violence.
What are you going to do with your business diploma, I ask?
"I want to make Afghanistan a better place."
A canned response? "Come on, no PC answers, What do you really want to do?"
No, he's for real. He wants to work for the Independent Electoral Commission, now ramping up for the country's second presidential election. We were just there: 300 young men and women hacking away at PCs, updating the voters' list of 20 million, and looking dead serious about what they were doing.
"And you?" My target this time is a delightful young woman, dressed in the modern style with only a scarf over her head. "I want to make Afghanistan a better place." "How?" "I want to be a judge."
Such ambition, in a country where 10 years ago she would not have been allowed to go to school. Her instructor whispers in my ear, "She is married." "So how do your family feel about you being here?" "They support me fully," she says, in heavily accented but clear English.
Outside, private security guards with AK-47s patrol the grounds to make sure nobody assaults the dream, (and as the director jokes, to make sure the girls-only dorm stays girls-only.) Inside, dreams are gestating.
Likewise in an experimental farm that teaches simple ways to increase crop values.
Or, in a civil service school that got electricity from a mini hydro generator courtesy of the Lithuanian government, (and immediately installed satellite TV.)
And so it goes on. We travel in armoured vehicles, wearing flak jackets and a Humvee with a machine gun turret riding shotgun. But wherever we are taken, whether around Kabul or in the Montana-like wilderness of Gohr province, we see that hope is popping up like fireweed after a forest fire. It may not be much, but for medieval Afghanistan --the people with the satellite TV still heat their stoves with dried dung, their own included with that of their animals--it's a reckless lunge toward modernity.
Yet, one has to ask:When all hell is breaking loose in Helmand province--where four U. S. Marines were killed a few days ago in IED attacks, and fighting rages between British troops and Taliban insurgents in temperatures above 50 degrees and in Kandahar where Canadian troops are living the same life--are successful examples of rehabilitation and development worth telling?
For, here is an uncomfortable truth: The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is not economically viable. Its annual self-generated revenues are $750 million, but, the cost of the 134,000-man army it is building with foreign help will be three times that, before a road is paved or a clinic built. The place runs on outside money.
So, who are we deceiving? Ourselves? The Afghans who are so desperate for a better life that they take the considerable risk of co-operating with the foreigners, knowing that retribution awaits if it all goes wrong?
After a week in the country, I don't presume omniscience.
However, the reasons to press on are twofold.
First, it is foolhardy to suppose the embedded dysfunctions of the centuries can be vanquished in a few years. It will be a miracle if it is done in a few generations, although the bright-eyed enthusiasm of young, well-educated
Afghans suggests more may be possible than the cynics will ever concede.
Provide security, and development-- and therefore rising government revenues --will follow. Not for nothing does U. S. President Barack Obama pin his hopes on a civilian surge of development workers, to parallel the military surge now underway.
(And Canadian audiences should relish hearing him tout "defence, development and diplomacy" as the new best thing. It's what
Canadians have been doing for years in Afghanistan.)
This will take time. But it is possible.
Second, we must remember why we are there. Much as we admire the spirit of those Afghans who, wanting the same things we take for granted, lay it all on the line to get it, we are in Afghanistan to deny it to those who would hurt us and our way of life.
It's still cheap at the price.
That said, I have used the word "young" more often than I should in a single article. Yet, I confess I do hope that in serving our own best interests, we make life better for some really high-minded youngsters now setting forth on what will certainly be an adventurous life.
We just have to understand that our own best interests, really depend on them winning in the end --not the other guys.
Nigel haNNaford is travelliNg arouNd afghaNistaN.
NhaNNaford@theherald.
caNwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 3&sponsor=
July 19, 2009
Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Pushghar, Afghanistan
I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.
But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”
Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.
Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.
But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.
While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.
“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”
It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.
This new school teaches grades one through six. I asked some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up: “Teacher,” shouted one. “Doctor,” shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.
Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”
So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opini ... nted=print
Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Pushghar, Afghanistan
I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.
But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”
Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.
Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.
But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.
While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.
“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”
It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.
This new school teaches grades one through six. I asked some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up: “Teacher,” shouted one. “Doctor,” shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.
Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”
So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opini ... nted=print
Democracy in the mud
By Nigel Hannaford,
Calgary HeraldJuly 21, 2009 10:20 AM
Afghanistan's mud is legendary. When wet, it's like paste. Dry, it turns rock hard.
Here at PRT 9 Chakhcharan, the Lithuanians-- following standard NATO practice--have made a fort out of it.
The Baltic soldiers are here as part of their government's NATO commitment, running a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Gohr province, one of 26 such teams in Afghanistan. In addition to its military effort, Canada has one in Kandahar, the British another in Helmand and the U. S. sponsors a dozen more.
At this provincial capital of Chakhcharan, hundreds of hard mud blocks --called hescos--enclose roughly 16 hectares, a hesco being a wire-framed, coarse fabric case about the size of a fridge. Filled with soft mud, allowed to dry, stacked two high and topped with razor wire, they're proof against bullet, RPG and explosive-filled vehicles.
They thus make the camp a reasonably secure base from which aid workers of several nations--Japanese, Danes, Georgians, a few Americans and the Lithuanians themselves--can set forth to do good works.
For, that is the whole purpose of a PRT.
However much of a frontier fort it might look like --and by the judicious use of field stone, the Lithuanians have achieved the feel of some castle overlooking their gloomy northern sea--no aggressive sortie departs its gates, just sufficient protection to make sure a civilian aid worker makes it where he is going, and back.
The purpose is entirely outreach to the community --which given the scarcity of PRTs, usually means reaching out a long way.
Specifically, the PRT is there to extend the reach of the Afghan government in Kabul, not that of NATO, explains U. S. political officer Brian Roraff, who for two years has been working out of PRT 9--a few kilometres out of Chakhcharan.
His life, and those of officers like him, is a round of meeting local administrators and coaching officials who, after 30 years of civil war, are rusty on administration skills: "It is our job to determine what community needs can be met, and feed the request to an agency willing and able to meet it."
Since 2002, the U. S. government has put $8.9 billion into building infrastructure. Other NATO governments and non-governmental organizations have followed suit: The result, 6,500 schools and 6,700 clinics, and 80 per cent of the population now within two hours of health care.
Seven years ago, it was a tenth of that. Give due credit for the road and bridge construction --there is a well-advanced plan to build a $1.7 billion ring road right around the country, where the security situation permits--and the appearance here and there of small power projects such as that in Sangbaar up the road from here that I spoke of in Saturday's column, and it's not hard to see why the PRT has become a popular institution in these parts.
Trouble is, it only looks like great progress until one looks at what remains to be done.
The country has about 27,000 villages. Local elected councils meet to decide priorities --a very elementary and apparently well-functioning form of representative government by Roraff's account--but most need everything.
And progress is also seasonal: Sangbaar, for instance, is only about 20 km from here, but in the winter months is completely cut off. Thousands of villages are in the same boat: Food security is an issue, health care at the mercy of the weather.
The country also struggles with perverse policies. Afghanistan has become a dumping ground for cheap imports and foodstuffs, that disincent local manufacturing and undermine native agriculture. Trace these situations to their roots, and one usually finds graft. Nor does it help the development of an economy in which loans are secured by property, that 30 years of war have destroyed many title records. Possession tends to be nine-tenths of the law
For every glimmer of hope, one thus finds a cloud of difficulty. Everything in Afghanistan has a long way to go: Progress seems intolerably slow and so easily interrupted.
However, one should not quite despair.
In the relative cool of dusk, I am summoned to the ramparts by the officer assigned to keep journalists from hurting themselves.
"Take a look at this," says Second Lieutenant Marius Varna.
"This" turns out to be a brand new village, not 100 metres from the walls of the fort. "That wasn't there four years ago. People just showed up one day and started building."
Now, there are dozens of the distinctive and noisy Afghan family compounds, with their own high mud walls and elaborate gates. They are there, says Varna, because they feel safe next to the PRT, rather as villages clustered around the bases of mediaeval strongholds in England, Germany or Lithuania.
Security and development; the one makes possible the other, the other gives point to the first, and the people have voted for both--with their feet.
Afghans want the same thing as everybody else. It's just a bit more difficult to make it happen.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
By Nigel Hannaford,
Calgary HeraldJuly 21, 2009 10:20 AM
Afghanistan's mud is legendary. When wet, it's like paste. Dry, it turns rock hard.
Here at PRT 9 Chakhcharan, the Lithuanians-- following standard NATO practice--have made a fort out of it.
The Baltic soldiers are here as part of their government's NATO commitment, running a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Gohr province, one of 26 such teams in Afghanistan. In addition to its military effort, Canada has one in Kandahar, the British another in Helmand and the U. S. sponsors a dozen more.
At this provincial capital of Chakhcharan, hundreds of hard mud blocks --called hescos--enclose roughly 16 hectares, a hesco being a wire-framed, coarse fabric case about the size of a fridge. Filled with soft mud, allowed to dry, stacked two high and topped with razor wire, they're proof against bullet, RPG and explosive-filled vehicles.
They thus make the camp a reasonably secure base from which aid workers of several nations--Japanese, Danes, Georgians, a few Americans and the Lithuanians themselves--can set forth to do good works.
For, that is the whole purpose of a PRT.
However much of a frontier fort it might look like --and by the judicious use of field stone, the Lithuanians have achieved the feel of some castle overlooking their gloomy northern sea--no aggressive sortie departs its gates, just sufficient protection to make sure a civilian aid worker makes it where he is going, and back.
The purpose is entirely outreach to the community --which given the scarcity of PRTs, usually means reaching out a long way.
Specifically, the PRT is there to extend the reach of the Afghan government in Kabul, not that of NATO, explains U. S. political officer Brian Roraff, who for two years has been working out of PRT 9--a few kilometres out of Chakhcharan.
His life, and those of officers like him, is a round of meeting local administrators and coaching officials who, after 30 years of civil war, are rusty on administration skills: "It is our job to determine what community needs can be met, and feed the request to an agency willing and able to meet it."
Since 2002, the U. S. government has put $8.9 billion into building infrastructure. Other NATO governments and non-governmental organizations have followed suit: The result, 6,500 schools and 6,700 clinics, and 80 per cent of the population now within two hours of health care.
Seven years ago, it was a tenth of that. Give due credit for the road and bridge construction --there is a well-advanced plan to build a $1.7 billion ring road right around the country, where the security situation permits--and the appearance here and there of small power projects such as that in Sangbaar up the road from here that I spoke of in Saturday's column, and it's not hard to see why the PRT has become a popular institution in these parts.
Trouble is, it only looks like great progress until one looks at what remains to be done.
The country has about 27,000 villages. Local elected councils meet to decide priorities --a very elementary and apparently well-functioning form of representative government by Roraff's account--but most need everything.
And progress is also seasonal: Sangbaar, for instance, is only about 20 km from here, but in the winter months is completely cut off. Thousands of villages are in the same boat: Food security is an issue, health care at the mercy of the weather.
The country also struggles with perverse policies. Afghanistan has become a dumping ground for cheap imports and foodstuffs, that disincent local manufacturing and undermine native agriculture. Trace these situations to their roots, and one usually finds graft. Nor does it help the development of an economy in which loans are secured by property, that 30 years of war have destroyed many title records. Possession tends to be nine-tenths of the law
For every glimmer of hope, one thus finds a cloud of difficulty. Everything in Afghanistan has a long way to go: Progress seems intolerably slow and so easily interrupted.
However, one should not quite despair.
In the relative cool of dusk, I am summoned to the ramparts by the officer assigned to keep journalists from hurting themselves.
"Take a look at this," says Second Lieutenant Marius Varna.
"This" turns out to be a brand new village, not 100 metres from the walls of the fort. "That wasn't there four years ago. People just showed up one day and started building."
Now, there are dozens of the distinctive and noisy Afghan family compounds, with their own high mud walls and elaborate gates. They are there, says Varna, because they feel safe next to the PRT, rather as villages clustered around the bases of mediaeval strongholds in England, Germany or Lithuania.
Security and development; the one makes possible the other, the other gives point to the first, and the people have voted for both--with their feet.
Afghans want the same thing as everybody else. It's just a bit more difficult to make it happen.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
July 22, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Class Too Dumb to Quit
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan
I’m here in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. This is the most dangerous part of the country. It’s where mafia and mullah meet. This is where the Taliban harvest the poppies that get turned into heroin that funds their insurgency. That’s why when President Obama announced the more than doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, this is where the Marines landed to take the fight to the Taliban. It is 115 degrees in the sun, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is addressing soldiers in a makeshift theater.
“Let me see a show of hands,” says Admiral Mullen, “how many of you are on your first deployment?” A couple dozen hands go up. “Second deployment?” More hands go up. “Third deployment?” Still lots of hands are raised. “Fourth deployment?” A good dozen hands go up. “Fifth deployment?” Still hands go up. “Sixth deployment?” One hand goes up. Admiral Mullen asks the soldier to step forward to shake his hand.
This scene is a reason for worry, for optimism and for questioning everything we are doing in Afghanistan. It is worrying because between the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are grinding down our military. I don’t know how these people and their families put up with it. Never have so many asked so much of so few.
The reason for optimism? All those deployments have left us with a deep cadre of officers with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, now running both wars — from generals to captains. They know every mistake that has been made, been told every lie, saw their own soldiers killed by stupidity, figured out solutions and built relationships with insurgents, sheikhs and imams on the ground that have given the best of them a granular understanding of the “real” Middle East that would rival any Middle East studies professor.
I’ve long argued that there should be a test for any officer who wants to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan — just one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer “yes,” you can go to Germany, South Korea or Japan, but not to Iraq or Afghanistan. Well, this war has produced a class of officers who are very out-of-the-box thinkers. They learned everything the hard way — not in classes at Annapolis or West Point, but on the streets of Fallujah and Kandahar.
I call them: “The Class Too Dumb to Quit.” I say that with affection and respect. When all seemed lost in Iraq, they were just too stubborn to quit and figured out a new anti-insurgency strategy. It has not produced irreversible success yet — and may never. But it has kept the hope of a decent outcome alive. The same people are now trying to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Their biggest strategic insight? “We don’t count enemy killed in action anymore,” one of their officers told me.
Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers running these wars understood that R.B.’s (“relationships built”) actually matter more than K.I.A.’s. One relationship built with an Iraqi or Afghan mayor or imam or insurgent was worth so much more than one K.I.A. Relationships bring intelligence; they bring cooperation. One good relationship can save the lives of dozens of soldiers and civilians. One reason torture and Abu Ghraib got out of control was because our soldiers had built so few relationships that they tried to beat information out of people instead. But relationship-building is painstaking.
And that leads to my unease. America has just adopted Afghanistan as our new baby. The troop surge that President Obama ordered here early in his tenure has taken this mission from a limited intervention, with limited results, to a full nation-building project that will take a long time to succeed — if ever. We came here to destroy Al Qaeda, and now we’re in a long war with the Taliban. Is that really a good use of American power?
At least The Class Too Dumb to Quit is in charge, and they have a strategy: Clear areas of the Taliban, hold them in partnership with the Afghan Army, rebuild these areas by building relationships with district governors and local assemblies to help them upgrade their ability to deliver services to the Afghan people — particularly courts, schools and police — so they will support the Afghan government.
The bad news? This is State-Building 101, and our partners, the current Afghan police and government, are so corrupt that more than a few Afghans prefer the Taliban. With infinite time, money, soldiers and aid workers, we can probably reverse that. But we have none of these. I feel a gap building between our ends and our means and our time constraints. My heart says: Mission critical — help those Afghans who want decent government. My head says: Mission impossible.
Does Mr. Obama understand how much he’s bet his presidency on making Afghanistan a stable country? Too late now. So, here’s hoping that The Class Too Dumb to Quit can take all that it learned in Iraq and help rebuild The Country That’s Been Too Broken to Work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Class Too Dumb to Quit
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan
I’m here in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. This is the most dangerous part of the country. It’s where mafia and mullah meet. This is where the Taliban harvest the poppies that get turned into heroin that funds their insurgency. That’s why when President Obama announced the more than doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, this is where the Marines landed to take the fight to the Taliban. It is 115 degrees in the sun, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is addressing soldiers in a makeshift theater.
“Let me see a show of hands,” says Admiral Mullen, “how many of you are on your first deployment?” A couple dozen hands go up. “Second deployment?” More hands go up. “Third deployment?” Still lots of hands are raised. “Fourth deployment?” A good dozen hands go up. “Fifth deployment?” Still hands go up. “Sixth deployment?” One hand goes up. Admiral Mullen asks the soldier to step forward to shake his hand.
This scene is a reason for worry, for optimism and for questioning everything we are doing in Afghanistan. It is worrying because between the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are grinding down our military. I don’t know how these people and their families put up with it. Never have so many asked so much of so few.
The reason for optimism? All those deployments have left us with a deep cadre of officers with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, now running both wars — from generals to captains. They know every mistake that has been made, been told every lie, saw their own soldiers killed by stupidity, figured out solutions and built relationships with insurgents, sheikhs and imams on the ground that have given the best of them a granular understanding of the “real” Middle East that would rival any Middle East studies professor.
I’ve long argued that there should be a test for any officer who wants to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan — just one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer “yes,” you can go to Germany, South Korea or Japan, but not to Iraq or Afghanistan. Well, this war has produced a class of officers who are very out-of-the-box thinkers. They learned everything the hard way — not in classes at Annapolis or West Point, but on the streets of Fallujah and Kandahar.
I call them: “The Class Too Dumb to Quit.” I say that with affection and respect. When all seemed lost in Iraq, they were just too stubborn to quit and figured out a new anti-insurgency strategy. It has not produced irreversible success yet — and may never. But it has kept the hope of a decent outcome alive. The same people are now trying to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Their biggest strategic insight? “We don’t count enemy killed in action anymore,” one of their officers told me.
Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers running these wars understood that R.B.’s (“relationships built”) actually matter more than K.I.A.’s. One relationship built with an Iraqi or Afghan mayor or imam or insurgent was worth so much more than one K.I.A. Relationships bring intelligence; they bring cooperation. One good relationship can save the lives of dozens of soldiers and civilians. One reason torture and Abu Ghraib got out of control was because our soldiers had built so few relationships that they tried to beat information out of people instead. But relationship-building is painstaking.
And that leads to my unease. America has just adopted Afghanistan as our new baby. The troop surge that President Obama ordered here early in his tenure has taken this mission from a limited intervention, with limited results, to a full nation-building project that will take a long time to succeed — if ever. We came here to destroy Al Qaeda, and now we’re in a long war with the Taliban. Is that really a good use of American power?
At least The Class Too Dumb to Quit is in charge, and they have a strategy: Clear areas of the Taliban, hold them in partnership with the Afghan Army, rebuild these areas by building relationships with district governors and local assemblies to help them upgrade their ability to deliver services to the Afghan people — particularly courts, schools and police — so they will support the Afghan government.
The bad news? This is State-Building 101, and our partners, the current Afghan police and government, are so corrupt that more than a few Afghans prefer the Taliban. With infinite time, money, soldiers and aid workers, we can probably reverse that. But we have none of these. I feel a gap building between our ends and our means and our time constraints. My heart says: Mission critical — help those Afghans who want decent government. My head says: Mission impossible.
Does Mr. Obama understand how much he’s bet his presidency on making Afghanistan a stable country? Too late now. So, here’s hoping that The Class Too Dumb to Quit can take all that it learned in Iraq and help rebuild The Country That’s Been Too Broken to Work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/opini ... nted=print
Sacrifices will be for naught if we flee Afghanistan
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldJuly 28, 2009 9:28 AM
The unfortunate thing about Canada's military mission to Afghanistan is that Canadians are not being reminded daily of why we're really there.
It's a public relations issue, and totally understandable. But, in 2011 it's still going to box the government in, at a time when it wants the widest possible policy options.
For, the narrative from both government and opposition is that we are there doing good works. Canadians like that, as it fits our dominant self-image. Importantly, Canadian troops, some of whom express a genuine affection for the Afghan people they've met serving over there, also like it. There's something deeply rewarding in the knowledge that what you're doing makes a difference: It also helps when you're grieving a lost comrade, that it is not all for nothing.
However, it could turn out that way anyway if Canada doesn't stay the course.
That is, we do indeed build schools, inoculate children against polio and rehabilitate irrigation systems, but we're really there as part of a multilateral war-fighting mission to deny terrorists the use of a country slightly larger than Alberta. There are, after all, many places where we could be paving roads and building clinics. Afghanistan gets attention because that's where the 9/11 plot was hatched after which, as we were repeatedly told, "everything changed."
Development is part of the strategy, the hearts-and-minds part of the war, not an end in itself.
This ill-founded communications approach matters then, because as things stand when July 2011 rolls around, Parliament wants to declare a job well done, and end the military mission.
This, regardless of whether or not the Afghan government in Kabul sits sufficiently secure in the saddle that it can finish the job for us, that we went to do.
The odds are that it will not be ready, and will continue to need the support of NATO countries, Canada among them. To end the mission in 2011 would thus be like Ottawa unilaterally pulling out of the 1939-1945 War in 1943, and leaving the rest of the allies to put the boots to Hitler. We did not in fact do that then: We should not do it in 2011. But, the government's communications strategy leaves the way wide open for those who will say this country has done enough for Afghanistan's widows and orphans, when they were never the real issue and al-Qaeda, and its Taliban hosts, were.
None of this is to diminish the progress that has been made.
In a third-world kind of way, driving around Kabul is encouraging. Unless you have the right plates, you can't take a car within half a kilometre of the airport. (Smart travellers pack light.) But, the planes of seven airlines crowd the ramp. Commercial life is growing: Three cellphone companies compete for business. Five western-style hotels are full of Chinese businessmen. If traffic jams are a marker for prosperity--Toyota jams, to be precise, for there is little else on the road but trucks--Kabul's chamber of commerce must be delighted. (Yes, there is one.) Oppressed women? Burkas are seen, but not that often: More common is a shawl over the head. Girls go to school, some to higher education. (I met a couple training to be carpenters, which is about as untraditional as it gets in Afghanistan.) There are checkpoints everywhere, and private security is a huge business: Anybody of substance has to buy it. But, bomb outrages are sufficiently uncommon now that street life--the bazaars, the small shops, the stands, the throng--has returned.
None of this was true 10 years ago, when the country was in the Taliban's grip, and, it is the Afghan police and national army that now keeps this municipal peace, not NATO. (The Afghan National Army, now 90,000 strong on its way to 134,000, has emerged as a national institution capable of running its own search-and-destroy operations against the Taliban. The police force, whose role is far more about low-level security than criminal investigation, is a work in progress.)
It is also true that for all that some Afghan provinces labour on in corruption or open warfare--Helmand and Kandahar for instance --others are in the hands of reforming governors and peaceful by Afghan standards. (Even where the Taliban are hated, traditional banditry remains a scourge and kidnapping is big business.)
So, things are moving in the right direction. But they are right who say stable government will take generations. It will, in any case, take more than two years.
In Kabul, I asked a state department official the best way to really screw things up in Afghanistan.
"We all leave too soon," was the answer.
That is precisely what the Canadian Parliament is presently committed to doing.
The story needs to be retold. Development and diplomacy are vital, but until we have done all we can do to leave the Kabul government in charge of its own house, Canada has a job to do in Afghanistan that can only be done by its army. Canadians must understand that, or everything we have done will ultimately be for naught.
nhannaford@theherald. canwest.coM
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 0&sponsor=
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldJuly 28, 2009 9:28 AM
The unfortunate thing about Canada's military mission to Afghanistan is that Canadians are not being reminded daily of why we're really there.
It's a public relations issue, and totally understandable. But, in 2011 it's still going to box the government in, at a time when it wants the widest possible policy options.
For, the narrative from both government and opposition is that we are there doing good works. Canadians like that, as it fits our dominant self-image. Importantly, Canadian troops, some of whom express a genuine affection for the Afghan people they've met serving over there, also like it. There's something deeply rewarding in the knowledge that what you're doing makes a difference: It also helps when you're grieving a lost comrade, that it is not all for nothing.
However, it could turn out that way anyway if Canada doesn't stay the course.
That is, we do indeed build schools, inoculate children against polio and rehabilitate irrigation systems, but we're really there as part of a multilateral war-fighting mission to deny terrorists the use of a country slightly larger than Alberta. There are, after all, many places where we could be paving roads and building clinics. Afghanistan gets attention because that's where the 9/11 plot was hatched after which, as we were repeatedly told, "everything changed."
Development is part of the strategy, the hearts-and-minds part of the war, not an end in itself.
This ill-founded communications approach matters then, because as things stand when July 2011 rolls around, Parliament wants to declare a job well done, and end the military mission.
This, regardless of whether or not the Afghan government in Kabul sits sufficiently secure in the saddle that it can finish the job for us, that we went to do.
The odds are that it will not be ready, and will continue to need the support of NATO countries, Canada among them. To end the mission in 2011 would thus be like Ottawa unilaterally pulling out of the 1939-1945 War in 1943, and leaving the rest of the allies to put the boots to Hitler. We did not in fact do that then: We should not do it in 2011. But, the government's communications strategy leaves the way wide open for those who will say this country has done enough for Afghanistan's widows and orphans, when they were never the real issue and al-Qaeda, and its Taliban hosts, were.
None of this is to diminish the progress that has been made.
In a third-world kind of way, driving around Kabul is encouraging. Unless you have the right plates, you can't take a car within half a kilometre of the airport. (Smart travellers pack light.) But, the planes of seven airlines crowd the ramp. Commercial life is growing: Three cellphone companies compete for business. Five western-style hotels are full of Chinese businessmen. If traffic jams are a marker for prosperity--Toyota jams, to be precise, for there is little else on the road but trucks--Kabul's chamber of commerce must be delighted. (Yes, there is one.) Oppressed women? Burkas are seen, but not that often: More common is a shawl over the head. Girls go to school, some to higher education. (I met a couple training to be carpenters, which is about as untraditional as it gets in Afghanistan.) There are checkpoints everywhere, and private security is a huge business: Anybody of substance has to buy it. But, bomb outrages are sufficiently uncommon now that street life--the bazaars, the small shops, the stands, the throng--has returned.
None of this was true 10 years ago, when the country was in the Taliban's grip, and, it is the Afghan police and national army that now keeps this municipal peace, not NATO. (The Afghan National Army, now 90,000 strong on its way to 134,000, has emerged as a national institution capable of running its own search-and-destroy operations against the Taliban. The police force, whose role is far more about low-level security than criminal investigation, is a work in progress.)
It is also true that for all that some Afghan provinces labour on in corruption or open warfare--Helmand and Kandahar for instance --others are in the hands of reforming governors and peaceful by Afghan standards. (Even where the Taliban are hated, traditional banditry remains a scourge and kidnapping is big business.)
So, things are moving in the right direction. But they are right who say stable government will take generations. It will, in any case, take more than two years.
In Kabul, I asked a state department official the best way to really screw things up in Afghanistan.
"We all leave too soon," was the answer.
That is precisely what the Canadian Parliament is presently committed to doing.
The story needs to be retold. Development and diplomacy are vital, but until we have done all we can do to leave the Kabul government in charge of its own house, Canada has a job to do in Afghanistan that can only be done by its army. Canadians must understand that, or everything we have done will ultimately be for naught.
nhannaford@theherald. canwest.coM
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 0&sponsor=
August 17, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Afghanistan’s Tyranny of the Minority
By SELIG S. HARRISON
Washington
AS the debate intensifies within the Obama administration over how to stabilize Afghanistan, one major problem is conspicuously missing from the discussion: the growing alienation of the country’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun tribes, who make up an estimated 42 percent of the population of 33 million. One of the basic reasons many Pashtuns support the Taliban insurgency is that their historic rivals, ethnic Tajiks, hold most of the key levers of power in the government.
Tajiks constitute only about 24 percent of the population, yet they largely control the armed forces and the intelligence and secret police agencies that loom over the daily lives of the Pashtuns. Little wonder that in the run-up to Thursday’s presidential election, much of the Taliban propaganda has focused on the fact that President Hamid Karzai’s top running mate is a hated symbol of Tajik power: the former defense minister Muhammad Fahim.
Mr. Fahim and his allies have been entrenched in Kabul since American forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001 with the help of his Tajik militia, the Northern Alliance, which was based in the Panjshir valley north of the capital. A clique of these Tajik officers, known as the Panjshiris, took control of the key security posts with American backing, and they have been there ever since. Washington pushed Mr. Karzai for the presidency to give a Pashtun face to the regime, but he has been derided from the start by his fellow Pashtuns with a play on his name, “Panjshir-zai.”
“They get the dollars, and we get the bullets,” is the common refrain among Pashtuns critical of the government. “Dollars” refers to the economic enrichment of Tajiks and allied minority ethnic groups through an inside track on aid contracts. The “bullets” are the anti-Taliban airstrikes and ground operations in Pashtun areas in the south and east of the country.
While Mr. Karzai has tried to soften the image of Tajik domination by appointing Pashtuns to nominally important positions, much of the real power continues to rest with Tajiks. For example, he appointed a Pashtun, Abdul Rahim Wardak, to replace Mr. Fahim as defense minister — but a trusted Panjshiri, Bismillah Khan, remained an army chief of staff and kept fellow Tajiks as his top corps commanders and in other vital spots, including director of military intelligence, army inspector general and director of counternarcotics forces.
The National Security Directorate, which oversees the civilian and military secret police and intelligence agencies, is headed by a Northern Alliance veteran, Amrullah Saleh. Michael Semple, a former adviser to the European Union representative in Kabul, told me that Mr. Saleh had appointed “some credible Pashtun provincial directors” but that “the intelligence services are still basically seen as anti-Pashtun and pro-Northern Alliance because the power structure in the directorate is still clearly dominated by the original Northern Alliance group,” and above all because “they also have control of the prosecution, judicial and detention branches of the security services.”
The Obama administration is pinning its hopes for an eventual exit from Afghanistan on building an Afghan National Army capable of defeating the insurgency. But a recent study by the RAND Corporation for the Pentagon, noting a “surplus of Tajiks in the A.N.A. officer and NCO corps,” warned of the “challenge of achieving ethnic balance, given the difficulty of recruiting in the Pashtun area.” The main reasons it is difficult to recruit Pashtuns, one United Nations official recently said, are that “70 percent of the army’s battalion commanders are Tajiks” and that the Taliban intimidates the families of recruits. It doesn’t help that many of the army units sent to the Pashtun areas consist primarily of Tajiks who do not speak Pashto.
Pashtun kings ruled Afghanistan from its inception in 1747 until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973. Initially limited to the Pashtun heartland in the south and east, the Afghan state gradually incorporated the neighboring Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek areas to the north and west.
It was understandable, then, that Pashtun leaders tried to make the last king, Zahir Shah, the president of the interim government that ruled from 2002 until the first presidential election in 2004. The king, revered by the Pashtuns, was to have limited powers, with Mr. Karzai, as prime minister, in day-to-day control. The Tajiks, however, objected, and on the eve of the national assembly that set up the interim government, the Bush administration’s special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, sided with the Tajiks and had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.
Pashtun nationalism alone does not explain the Taliban’s strength, which is fueled by drug money, Islamist fervor, corrupt warlords, hatred of the American occupation and the hidden hand of Pakistani intelligence agencies. But the psychological cement that holds the disparate Taliban factions together is opposition to Tajik dominance in Kabul. Until the power of the Panjshiris is curbed, no amount of American money or manpower will bring the insurgency to an end.
Selig S. Harrison is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opini ... 0514962-dN oRwVzKgcLoPP/rHyMpg&pagewanted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Afghanistan’s Tyranny of the Minority
By SELIG S. HARRISON
Washington
AS the debate intensifies within the Obama administration over how to stabilize Afghanistan, one major problem is conspicuously missing from the discussion: the growing alienation of the country’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun tribes, who make up an estimated 42 percent of the population of 33 million. One of the basic reasons many Pashtuns support the Taliban insurgency is that their historic rivals, ethnic Tajiks, hold most of the key levers of power in the government.
Tajiks constitute only about 24 percent of the population, yet they largely control the armed forces and the intelligence and secret police agencies that loom over the daily lives of the Pashtuns. Little wonder that in the run-up to Thursday’s presidential election, much of the Taliban propaganda has focused on the fact that President Hamid Karzai’s top running mate is a hated symbol of Tajik power: the former defense minister Muhammad Fahim.
Mr. Fahim and his allies have been entrenched in Kabul since American forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001 with the help of his Tajik militia, the Northern Alliance, which was based in the Panjshir valley north of the capital. A clique of these Tajik officers, known as the Panjshiris, took control of the key security posts with American backing, and they have been there ever since. Washington pushed Mr. Karzai for the presidency to give a Pashtun face to the regime, but he has been derided from the start by his fellow Pashtuns with a play on his name, “Panjshir-zai.”
“They get the dollars, and we get the bullets,” is the common refrain among Pashtuns critical of the government. “Dollars” refers to the economic enrichment of Tajiks and allied minority ethnic groups through an inside track on aid contracts. The “bullets” are the anti-Taliban airstrikes and ground operations in Pashtun areas in the south and east of the country.
While Mr. Karzai has tried to soften the image of Tajik domination by appointing Pashtuns to nominally important positions, much of the real power continues to rest with Tajiks. For example, he appointed a Pashtun, Abdul Rahim Wardak, to replace Mr. Fahim as defense minister — but a trusted Panjshiri, Bismillah Khan, remained an army chief of staff and kept fellow Tajiks as his top corps commanders and in other vital spots, including director of military intelligence, army inspector general and director of counternarcotics forces.
The National Security Directorate, which oversees the civilian and military secret police and intelligence agencies, is headed by a Northern Alliance veteran, Amrullah Saleh. Michael Semple, a former adviser to the European Union representative in Kabul, told me that Mr. Saleh had appointed “some credible Pashtun provincial directors” but that “the intelligence services are still basically seen as anti-Pashtun and pro-Northern Alliance because the power structure in the directorate is still clearly dominated by the original Northern Alliance group,” and above all because “they also have control of the prosecution, judicial and detention branches of the security services.”
The Obama administration is pinning its hopes for an eventual exit from Afghanistan on building an Afghan National Army capable of defeating the insurgency. But a recent study by the RAND Corporation for the Pentagon, noting a “surplus of Tajiks in the A.N.A. officer and NCO corps,” warned of the “challenge of achieving ethnic balance, given the difficulty of recruiting in the Pashtun area.” The main reasons it is difficult to recruit Pashtuns, one United Nations official recently said, are that “70 percent of the army’s battalion commanders are Tajiks” and that the Taliban intimidates the families of recruits. It doesn’t help that many of the army units sent to the Pashtun areas consist primarily of Tajiks who do not speak Pashto.
Pashtun kings ruled Afghanistan from its inception in 1747 until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973. Initially limited to the Pashtun heartland in the south and east, the Afghan state gradually incorporated the neighboring Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek areas to the north and west.
It was understandable, then, that Pashtun leaders tried to make the last king, Zahir Shah, the president of the interim government that ruled from 2002 until the first presidential election in 2004. The king, revered by the Pashtuns, was to have limited powers, with Mr. Karzai, as prime minister, in day-to-day control. The Tajiks, however, objected, and on the eve of the national assembly that set up the interim government, the Bush administration’s special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, sided with the Tajiks and had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.
Pashtun nationalism alone does not explain the Taliban’s strength, which is fueled by drug money, Islamist fervor, corrupt warlords, hatred of the American occupation and the hidden hand of Pakistani intelligence agencies. But the psychological cement that holds the disparate Taliban factions together is opposition to Tajik dominance in Kabul. Until the power of the Panjshiris is curbed, no amount of American money or manpower will bring the insurgency to an end.
Selig S. Harrison is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opini ... 0514962-dN oRwVzKgcLoPP/rHyMpg&pagewanted=print
Afghans risk much to vote
Calgary HeraldAugust 21, 2009
They braved suicide bombers, rocket attacks, and countless threats to their lives, to exert their democratic right to vote in Afghanistan's second presidential election. The winner won't be declared for weeks but the clear victory is the election itself, testament to the will of the Afghan people and their clear desire for peace and good government.
Anyone still wondering what Canada and NATO forces are doing there need look no further for the answer than in the millions of Afghan men and women who turned out to vote, despite the many reasons to have stayed home. There is widespread disillusionment in the political system. The government is seen as corrupt, and incumbent, Hamid Karzai, has generally proven himself to be a weak leader unable to deliver upon his promises. Taliban insurgents vowed to disrupt the vote, threatening to cut off the fingers of anyone who had the ink-stained mark of having cast a ballot.
Dozens of violent incidents were reported around the country and innocent people killed and yet it's believed nearly 60 per cent of eligible voters showed up anyway, well above the 40 per cent of Albertans who bothered to vote in the last provincial election.
Afghans are a hopeful people, full of courage and conviction. They stood up to the oppressive Taliban militants by marching to the polls and forming lineups before they even opened. They voted with their feet and risked their lives for a shot at someday having a legitimate and truly representative government. The world must not abandon them now.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
Calgary HeraldAugust 21, 2009
They braved suicide bombers, rocket attacks, and countless threats to their lives, to exert their democratic right to vote in Afghanistan's second presidential election. The winner won't be declared for weeks but the clear victory is the election itself, testament to the will of the Afghan people and their clear desire for peace and good government.
Anyone still wondering what Canada and NATO forces are doing there need look no further for the answer than in the millions of Afghan men and women who turned out to vote, despite the many reasons to have stayed home. There is widespread disillusionment in the political system. The government is seen as corrupt, and incumbent, Hamid Karzai, has generally proven himself to be a weak leader unable to deliver upon his promises. Taliban insurgents vowed to disrupt the vote, threatening to cut off the fingers of anyone who had the ink-stained mark of having cast a ballot.
Dozens of violent incidents were reported around the country and innocent people killed and yet it's believed nearly 60 per cent of eligible voters showed up anyway, well above the 40 per cent of Albertans who bothered to vote in the last provincial election.
Afghans are a hopeful people, full of courage and conviction. They stood up to the oppressive Taliban militants by marching to the polls and forming lineups before they even opened. They voted with their feet and risked their lives for a shot at someday having a legitimate and truly representative government. The world must not abandon them now.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
August 23, 2009
A School Bus for Shamsia
By DEXTER FILKINS
EVEN BEFORE THE men with acid came, the Mirwais Mena School for Girls was surrounded by enemies. It stood on the outskirts of Kandahar, barely 20 miles from the hometown of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder. Just down the road from the school, in an area known as Old Town, residents had built a shrine to Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban commander with the fiercest reputation, who made his name by massacring members of the Hazara minority. He was killed in an American-led operation in 2007. Also nearby sat the Sarposa Prison, where, in June 2008, Taliban fighters and suicide bombers attacked, freeing more than a thousand criminals and comrades. The area around the Mirwais Mena School is the Taliban heartland. Teaching girls to read was not something that would escape their notice. Across the country, the Taliban have made the destruction of schools, particularly schools for girls, a hallmark of their war.
The Mirwais Mena School — L-shaped, cement, two stories, with canvas tents donated by the United Nations — was built in 2004 with a grant from the Japanese government. A plaque out front gives the date; it hangs on the 10-foot-high cement wall built to shield the students. Kandahar’s Mirwais Mena neighborhood sits just off the national highway. A rutted mud path called Panjwai Road cuts through the center of the neighborhood and up an outcropping of bare rock that rises 500 feet. A single electrical wire runs into Mirwais Mena from a pole along the highway; no one can remember the last time it carried any current.
The attackers appeared in the morning on Nov. 12 of last year, as the girls were walking to school. The men came on three motorcycles, each one carrying a driver and a man on back. They wore masks. Each of the men riding on back carried a small container filled with battery acid. The masked men circled for several minutes as the girls streamed to school. Then they moved in.
Shamsia Husseini and her sister, Atifa, were walking along the highway when they spotted the men on the motorbikes. Shamsia, then 17, was old enough to be married; she was wearing a black scarf that covered most of her face. Shamsia had seen Taliban gunmen before and figured the men on the motorcycles would pass. Then one of the bikes pulled alongside her, and the man on back jumped off. Through the mask, he asked Shamsia what seemed like a strange question.
“Are you going to school?”
The masked man pulled the scarf away from Shamsia’s face and, with his other hand, pumped the trigger on his spray gun. Shamsia felt as if her face and eyes were on fire. As she screamed, the masked man reached for Atifa, who was already running. He pulled at her and tore her scarf away and pumped the spray into her back. The men sped off toward another group of girls. Shamsia lay in the street holding her burning face.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magaz ... &th&emc=th
A School Bus for Shamsia
By DEXTER FILKINS
EVEN BEFORE THE men with acid came, the Mirwais Mena School for Girls was surrounded by enemies. It stood on the outskirts of Kandahar, barely 20 miles from the hometown of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder. Just down the road from the school, in an area known as Old Town, residents had built a shrine to Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban commander with the fiercest reputation, who made his name by massacring members of the Hazara minority. He was killed in an American-led operation in 2007. Also nearby sat the Sarposa Prison, where, in June 2008, Taliban fighters and suicide bombers attacked, freeing more than a thousand criminals and comrades. The area around the Mirwais Mena School is the Taliban heartland. Teaching girls to read was not something that would escape their notice. Across the country, the Taliban have made the destruction of schools, particularly schools for girls, a hallmark of their war.
The Mirwais Mena School — L-shaped, cement, two stories, with canvas tents donated by the United Nations — was built in 2004 with a grant from the Japanese government. A plaque out front gives the date; it hangs on the 10-foot-high cement wall built to shield the students. Kandahar’s Mirwais Mena neighborhood sits just off the national highway. A rutted mud path called Panjwai Road cuts through the center of the neighborhood and up an outcropping of bare rock that rises 500 feet. A single electrical wire runs into Mirwais Mena from a pole along the highway; no one can remember the last time it carried any current.
The attackers appeared in the morning on Nov. 12 of last year, as the girls were walking to school. The men came on three motorcycles, each one carrying a driver and a man on back. They wore masks. Each of the men riding on back carried a small container filled with battery acid. The masked men circled for several minutes as the girls streamed to school. Then they moved in.
Shamsia Husseini and her sister, Atifa, were walking along the highway when they spotted the men on the motorbikes. Shamsia, then 17, was old enough to be married; she was wearing a black scarf that covered most of her face. Shamsia had seen Taliban gunmen before and figured the men on the motorcycles would pass. Then one of the bikes pulled alongside her, and the man on back jumped off. Through the mask, he asked Shamsia what seemed like a strange question.
“Are you going to school?”
The masked man pulled the scarf away from Shamsia’s face and, with his other hand, pumped the trigger on his spray gun. Shamsia felt as if her face and eyes were on fire. As she screamed, the masked man reached for Atifa, who was already running. He pulled at her and tore her scarf away and pumped the spray into her back. The men sped off toward another group of girls. Shamsia lay in the street holding her burning face.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magaz ... &th&emc=th
August 28, 2009
Afghan Youths Seek a New Life in Europe
By CAROLINE BROTHERS
PARIS — On the edges of a Salvation Army soup line in Paris, a soft-spoken Afghan boy told the story recently of how he ended up in Europe, alone.
The boy, who said he was 15 but looked younger, recounted how his family left Afghanistan after his mother lost her leg in an explosion in 2004. They spent three years in Iran, where he went to school for the first time, learning English and discovering the Internet. After his father suffered a back injury that made working difficult, the boy, who declined to give his name, headed west.
He spent two months working 11-hour days in a clothing sweatshop in Istanbul, he said. He was then smuggled into Greece, where he was forced to work on a potato and onion farm near Agros for nine months, finally escaping in the back of a truck. He reached Paris by train after nearly a year on the road.
“I want to go to school,” he said in English. “I would like it if I could be — it sounds like a lot to ask — an engineer of computing.”
Thousands of lone Afghan boys are making their way across Europe, a trend that has accelerated in the past two years as conditions for Afghan refugees become more difficult in countries like Iran and Pakistan. Although some are as young as 12, most are teenagers seeking an education and a future that is not possible in their own country, which is still struggling with poverty and violence eight years after the end of Taliban rule.
The boys pose a challenge for European countries, many of which have sent troops to fight in Afghanistan but whose publics question the rationale for the war. Though each country has an obligation under national and international law to provide for them, the cost of doing so is yet another problem for a continent already grappling with tens of thousands of migrants.
In Italy, 24 Afghan teenagers were discovered sleeping in a sewer in Rome this spring, and last year two adolescents died in Italian ports — one under a semitrailer in Venice and another inside a shipping container in Ancona. In Greece, which says it is overwhelmed by asylum seekers from many countries, there is no foster system for foreign minors; only 300 can be accommodated in the whole country, officials say.
And in Paris this year, Afghans for the first time outnumber sub-Saharan Africans as the biggest group of unaccompanied foreign minors to request admission to child protection services, said Charlotte Aveline, a senior adviser on child protection at City Hall.
“Some arrive very beaten, very tired, but if they stay put for just one week they very quickly become adolescents again,” said Jean-Michel Centres of Exilés10, a citizens’ organization that works with the mainly Afghan migrants who gather around Villemin Square, close to the Gare de l’Est.
“First they ask where they can go to have papers, then where they can go to school, and where after that they can get a job,” Mr. Centres said.
The European Union does not keep statistics on the number of foreign children who are wandering Europe without their families, and the records of aid groups and government agencies vary greatly. But requests for asylum by unaccompanied Afghan minors suggest that there are thousands across Europe. The requests provide a baseline, experts say, because many more youths do not seek refugee status.
Blanche Tax, a senior policy officer at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Brussels, said that last year 3,090 Afghan minors requested asylum in Austria, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany — the European Union countries where their numbers rose the most sharply — more than double the 1,489 requests in those countries in 2007.
“Afghanistan is hemorrhaging its youth into Europe,” said Pierre Henry, director of France Terre d’Asile, an organization that works with the European Union, the United Nations refugee agency and the French government on asylum affairs.
The five Afghan boys interviewed for this article told of being exploited as under-age labor in Greece and Turkey and dodging beatings by the police. None would give his name in order to speak more freely.
A 17-year-old from the Afghan city of Ghazni said the police repeatedly tried to remove him and another boy from trucks in the port of Patras, Greece, where the authorities destroyed an Afghan squatter camp on July 12.
Once in France, the boys face more hardship. The Paris police have started conducting nightly searches to prevent Afghan migrants from sleeping in Villemin Square. The 15-year-old was placed in a cheap hotel, while others were put in temporary shelter in an unused subway station. Others find their own shelter under bridges and beside a canal.
The housing, financed by the state, is administered by France Terre d’Asile. The group helps guide the boys through the process of requesting assistance from the French child protection agency, registers their names and gives them French lessons.
“We have had some very good success stories,” said Ms. Aveline, the adviser at City Hall.
The boys interviewed for this article said they were in limbo, dreaming of going to school and having a normal life.
One teenager who has been in Paris for two months was deeply worried about what lies ahead. “How should I make a future?” he asked. “I’m 15 already. I’m on my own. What can I do?”
Yet a few days later, he was full of excitement because France Terre d’Asile had taken him to a swimming pool, the first time he had ever been to one. He was also taking French classes. From his pocket he produced a pencil and paper with pictures of fruits. “I like bananas,” he said in French. “I like apples.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/world ... nted=print
Afghan Youths Seek a New Life in Europe
By CAROLINE BROTHERS
PARIS — On the edges of a Salvation Army soup line in Paris, a soft-spoken Afghan boy told the story recently of how he ended up in Europe, alone.
The boy, who said he was 15 but looked younger, recounted how his family left Afghanistan after his mother lost her leg in an explosion in 2004. They spent three years in Iran, where he went to school for the first time, learning English and discovering the Internet. After his father suffered a back injury that made working difficult, the boy, who declined to give his name, headed west.
He spent two months working 11-hour days in a clothing sweatshop in Istanbul, he said. He was then smuggled into Greece, where he was forced to work on a potato and onion farm near Agros for nine months, finally escaping in the back of a truck. He reached Paris by train after nearly a year on the road.
“I want to go to school,” he said in English. “I would like it if I could be — it sounds like a lot to ask — an engineer of computing.”
Thousands of lone Afghan boys are making their way across Europe, a trend that has accelerated in the past two years as conditions for Afghan refugees become more difficult in countries like Iran and Pakistan. Although some are as young as 12, most are teenagers seeking an education and a future that is not possible in their own country, which is still struggling with poverty and violence eight years after the end of Taliban rule.
The boys pose a challenge for European countries, many of which have sent troops to fight in Afghanistan but whose publics question the rationale for the war. Though each country has an obligation under national and international law to provide for them, the cost of doing so is yet another problem for a continent already grappling with tens of thousands of migrants.
In Italy, 24 Afghan teenagers were discovered sleeping in a sewer in Rome this spring, and last year two adolescents died in Italian ports — one under a semitrailer in Venice and another inside a shipping container in Ancona. In Greece, which says it is overwhelmed by asylum seekers from many countries, there is no foster system for foreign minors; only 300 can be accommodated in the whole country, officials say.
And in Paris this year, Afghans for the first time outnumber sub-Saharan Africans as the biggest group of unaccompanied foreign minors to request admission to child protection services, said Charlotte Aveline, a senior adviser on child protection at City Hall.
“Some arrive very beaten, very tired, but if they stay put for just one week they very quickly become adolescents again,” said Jean-Michel Centres of Exilés10, a citizens’ organization that works with the mainly Afghan migrants who gather around Villemin Square, close to the Gare de l’Est.
“First they ask where they can go to have papers, then where they can go to school, and where after that they can get a job,” Mr. Centres said.
The European Union does not keep statistics on the number of foreign children who are wandering Europe without their families, and the records of aid groups and government agencies vary greatly. But requests for asylum by unaccompanied Afghan minors suggest that there are thousands across Europe. The requests provide a baseline, experts say, because many more youths do not seek refugee status.
Blanche Tax, a senior policy officer at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Brussels, said that last year 3,090 Afghan minors requested asylum in Austria, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany — the European Union countries where their numbers rose the most sharply — more than double the 1,489 requests in those countries in 2007.
“Afghanistan is hemorrhaging its youth into Europe,” said Pierre Henry, director of France Terre d’Asile, an organization that works with the European Union, the United Nations refugee agency and the French government on asylum affairs.
The five Afghan boys interviewed for this article told of being exploited as under-age labor in Greece and Turkey and dodging beatings by the police. None would give his name in order to speak more freely.
A 17-year-old from the Afghan city of Ghazni said the police repeatedly tried to remove him and another boy from trucks in the port of Patras, Greece, where the authorities destroyed an Afghan squatter camp on July 12.
Once in France, the boys face more hardship. The Paris police have started conducting nightly searches to prevent Afghan migrants from sleeping in Villemin Square. The 15-year-old was placed in a cheap hotel, while others were put in temporary shelter in an unused subway station. Others find their own shelter under bridges and beside a canal.
The housing, financed by the state, is administered by France Terre d’Asile. The group helps guide the boys through the process of requesting assistance from the French child protection agency, registers their names and gives them French lessons.
“We have had some very good success stories,” said Ms. Aveline, the adviser at City Hall.
The boys interviewed for this article said they were in limbo, dreaming of going to school and having a normal life.
One teenager who has been in Paris for two months was deeply worried about what lies ahead. “How should I make a future?” he asked. “I’m 15 already. I’m on my own. What can I do?”
Yet a few days later, he was full of excitement because France Terre d’Asile had taken him to a swimming pool, the first time he had ever been to one. He was also taking French classes. From his pocket he produced a pencil and paper with pictures of fruits. “I like bananas,” he said in French. “I like apples.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/world ... nted=print
September 11, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
To Save Afghanistan, Look to Its Past
By ANSAR RAHEL and JON KRAKAUER
NO matter who is ultimately certified as the winner of Afghanistan’s presidential election, the vote was plagued by so much fraud and violence, and had such low turnout, that it is inconceivable the Afghan people will regard the victor as a legitimate leader. And if a majority of Afghans do not consider the president and his government to be legitimate, the military campaign now being waged by the United States and its allies is doomed to fail, regardless of the number of troops deployed.
Current discussions about cobbling together mistrustful factions into a new power-sharing government will produce neither enduring democracy nor short-term peace. The slate must be wiped clean. Afghans need to start again from scratch and choose their leader by a fresh process that restores legitimacy to the national government.
Fortunately, such a process already exists — one that is both highly respected by the Afghan people and recognized in the Afghan Constitution: the convening of an emergency loya jirga, or grand assembly. The loya jirga has been called in times of national crisis in Afghanistan for centuries. In 1747, such an assembly in Kandahar selected Ahmad Shah Durrani as the first king of Afghanistan, uniting a patchwork of contentious tribal entities into the modern Afghan state. The loya jirga, moreover, is not only deeply rooted in Pashtun tradition, but is also consistent with notions of Western representative democracy.
Afghan society remains predominantly illiterate, agrarian and tribal. Indeed, the last king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah, often referred to himself as the “chief of all tribes.” Local disputes are routinely resolved by tribal elders seated on the ground in a circle, a gathering known as a jirga (or a shura in non-Pashtun regions). A loya jirga is, essentially, the same process on a much grander scale: an immense assembly of esteemed tribal leaders designated to debate issues of utmost national importance. Unlike presidential elections, which strike most Afghans as alien and fundamentally suspect, jirgas of all sizes are trusted and utterly familiar institutions.
According to the Constitution (which was itself ratified by a loya jirga in 2004), such a council can be convened “to decide on issues related to independence, national sovereignty, territorial integrity as well as supreme national interests.” Doing so does not depend on the support of any particular individual or group, including the president. While historically it was the king who most often initiated the process, the House of People, one of the two houses of Parliament, can directly convene a loya jirga at any time.
The Constitution further states that neither the president nor his ministers nor members of the Supreme Court have voting rights in a loya jirga; those are reserved for members of both houses of the Parliament and the provincial and district leaders. While in session, it trumps all other bodies of government. As the Afghan Constitution unambiguously declares: “The loya jirga is the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan faces a number of crises, any one of which would alone justify convening a loya jirga as soon as possible. But the most compelling reason for doing so is to have Afghans from disparate tribes, regions and ethnicities come together, outside the acting government, to select a president who will be considered legitimate by the people. No other process — not a presidential decree, a special commission, a court ruling, an elections committee, an act of Parliament or an internationally sponsored conference — could accomplish this.
Certainly, a loya jirga is no panacea. The emphasis on achieving consensus can cause discussions to drag on interminably. The process may not be immune from political intimidation or even violence. During the loya jirga that considered the Constitution, ethnic factions argued so vehemently that some Westerners feared the nation would splinter. In the end, however, such worries proved groundless. The Constitution was ratified. The loya jirga worked.
The debacle of last month’s election underscores a basic flaw in the efforts by the United States and other Western nations to solve Afghanistan’s problems: the country is simply not ready for direct presidential elections or a presidential system of government transplanted from a Western model of democracy.
A political structure like India’s, with a prime minister, would be a much better fit. And the proper mechanism for converting the Afghan government along these or any other lines is the loya jirga, rather than ad hoc political appointments (like anointing a chief executive to serve under the president), as some have suggested.
Because it is a unifying, time-honored and uniquely Afghan mechanism, a loya jirga offers the best hope for hitting the reset button and rapidly transforming Afghanistan’s political landscape. This would give the Afghan people a badly needed dose of optimism about the future of their beautiful, ravaged country.
Ansar Rahel, a lawyer, advised King Mohammad Zahir Shah’s loya jirga committee. Jon Krakauer is the author of “Into Thin Air” and the forthcoming “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.”
Op-Ed Contributors
To Save Afghanistan, Look to Its Past
By ANSAR RAHEL and JON KRAKAUER
NO matter who is ultimately certified as the winner of Afghanistan’s presidential election, the vote was plagued by so much fraud and violence, and had such low turnout, that it is inconceivable the Afghan people will regard the victor as a legitimate leader. And if a majority of Afghans do not consider the president and his government to be legitimate, the military campaign now being waged by the United States and its allies is doomed to fail, regardless of the number of troops deployed.
Current discussions about cobbling together mistrustful factions into a new power-sharing government will produce neither enduring democracy nor short-term peace. The slate must be wiped clean. Afghans need to start again from scratch and choose their leader by a fresh process that restores legitimacy to the national government.
Fortunately, such a process already exists — one that is both highly respected by the Afghan people and recognized in the Afghan Constitution: the convening of an emergency loya jirga, or grand assembly. The loya jirga has been called in times of national crisis in Afghanistan for centuries. In 1747, such an assembly in Kandahar selected Ahmad Shah Durrani as the first king of Afghanistan, uniting a patchwork of contentious tribal entities into the modern Afghan state. The loya jirga, moreover, is not only deeply rooted in Pashtun tradition, but is also consistent with notions of Western representative democracy.
Afghan society remains predominantly illiterate, agrarian and tribal. Indeed, the last king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah, often referred to himself as the “chief of all tribes.” Local disputes are routinely resolved by tribal elders seated on the ground in a circle, a gathering known as a jirga (or a shura in non-Pashtun regions). A loya jirga is, essentially, the same process on a much grander scale: an immense assembly of esteemed tribal leaders designated to debate issues of utmost national importance. Unlike presidential elections, which strike most Afghans as alien and fundamentally suspect, jirgas of all sizes are trusted and utterly familiar institutions.
According to the Constitution (which was itself ratified by a loya jirga in 2004), such a council can be convened “to decide on issues related to independence, national sovereignty, territorial integrity as well as supreme national interests.” Doing so does not depend on the support of any particular individual or group, including the president. While historically it was the king who most often initiated the process, the House of People, one of the two houses of Parliament, can directly convene a loya jirga at any time.
The Constitution further states that neither the president nor his ministers nor members of the Supreme Court have voting rights in a loya jirga; those are reserved for members of both houses of the Parliament and the provincial and district leaders. While in session, it trumps all other bodies of government. As the Afghan Constitution unambiguously declares: “The loya jirga is the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan faces a number of crises, any one of which would alone justify convening a loya jirga as soon as possible. But the most compelling reason for doing so is to have Afghans from disparate tribes, regions and ethnicities come together, outside the acting government, to select a president who will be considered legitimate by the people. No other process — not a presidential decree, a special commission, a court ruling, an elections committee, an act of Parliament or an internationally sponsored conference — could accomplish this.
Certainly, a loya jirga is no panacea. The emphasis on achieving consensus can cause discussions to drag on interminably. The process may not be immune from political intimidation or even violence. During the loya jirga that considered the Constitution, ethnic factions argued so vehemently that some Westerners feared the nation would splinter. In the end, however, such worries proved groundless. The Constitution was ratified. The loya jirga worked.
The debacle of last month’s election underscores a basic flaw in the efforts by the United States and other Western nations to solve Afghanistan’s problems: the country is simply not ready for direct presidential elections or a presidential system of government transplanted from a Western model of democracy.
A political structure like India’s, with a prime minister, would be a much better fit. And the proper mechanism for converting the Afghan government along these or any other lines is the loya jirga, rather than ad hoc political appointments (like anointing a chief executive to serve under the president), as some have suggested.
Because it is a unifying, time-honored and uniquely Afghan mechanism, a loya jirga offers the best hope for hitting the reset button and rapidly transforming Afghanistan’s political landscape. This would give the Afghan people a badly needed dose of optimism about the future of their beautiful, ravaged country.
Ansar Rahel, a lawyer, advised King Mohammad Zahir Shah’s loya jirga committee. Jon Krakauer is the author of “Into Thin Air” and the forthcoming “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.”
September 25, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Afghan Imperative
By DAVID BROOKS
Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.
There is simply no historical record to support these illusions. The historical evidence suggests that these middling strategies just create a situation in which you have enough forces to assume responsibility for a conflict, but not enough to prevail.
The record suggests what Gen. Stanley McChrystal clearly understands — that only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success. This is a doctrine, as General McChrystal wrote in his remarkable report, that puts population protection at the center of the Afghanistan mission, that acknowledges that insurgencies can only be defeated when local communities and military forces work together.
To put it concretely, this is a doctrine in which small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.
These are the realistic choices for America’s Afghanistan policy — all out or all in, surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building. And we might as well acknowledge that it’s not an easy call. The costs and rewards are tightly balanced. But in the end, President Obama was right: “You don’t muddle through the central front on terror. ... You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.”
Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither.
Afghanistan is central to this effort partly because it could again become a safe haven to terrorists, but mostly because of its effects on the stability of Pakistan. As Stephen Biddle noted in a recent essay in The American Interest, the Taliban is a transnational Pashtun movement active in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is part of a complex insurgency trying to topple the Pakistani regime.
Pakistan has a fragile government with an estimated 50 or more nuclear weapons. A Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would endanger the Pakistani regime at best, create a regional crisis for certain and lead to a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda at worst.
A Taliban reconquest would also, it should be said, be a moral atrocity from which American self-respect would not soon recover.
Proponents of withdrawal often acknowledge the costs of defeat but argue that the cause is hopeless anyway. On this, let me note a certain pattern. When you interview people who know little about Afghanistan, they describe an anarchic place that is the graveyard of empires. When you interview people who live there or are experts, they think those stereotypes are rubbish. They usually take a hardened but guardedly optimistic view. Read Clare Lockhart’s Sept. 17 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to get a sense of the way many knowledgeable people view the situation.
Amidst all the problems, the NATO coalition has a few things going for it. First, American forces have become quite good at counterinsurgency. They have a battle-tested strategy, experienced troops and a superb new leadership team. According to the political scientists Andrew J. Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli, since World War II, counterinsurgency efforts that put population protection at their core have succeeded nearly 70 percent of the time.
Second, the enemy is wildly hated. Only 6 percent of Afghans want a Taliban return, while NATO is viewed with surprising favor. This is not Vietnam or even Iraq.
Third, while many Afghan institutions are now dysfunctional, there is a base on which to build. The Afghan Army is a successful institution. Local villages have their own centuries-old civic institutions. The National Solidarity Program was able to build development councils in 23,000 villages precisely because the remnants of civil society still exist.
We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Afghan Imperative
By DAVID BROOKS
Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.
There is simply no historical record to support these illusions. The historical evidence suggests that these middling strategies just create a situation in which you have enough forces to assume responsibility for a conflict, but not enough to prevail.
The record suggests what Gen. Stanley McChrystal clearly understands — that only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success. This is a doctrine, as General McChrystal wrote in his remarkable report, that puts population protection at the center of the Afghanistan mission, that acknowledges that insurgencies can only be defeated when local communities and military forces work together.
To put it concretely, this is a doctrine in which small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.
These are the realistic choices for America’s Afghanistan policy — all out or all in, surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building. And we might as well acknowledge that it’s not an easy call. The costs and rewards are tightly balanced. But in the end, President Obama was right: “You don’t muddle through the central front on terror. ... You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.”
Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither.
Afghanistan is central to this effort partly because it could again become a safe haven to terrorists, but mostly because of its effects on the stability of Pakistan. As Stephen Biddle noted in a recent essay in The American Interest, the Taliban is a transnational Pashtun movement active in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is part of a complex insurgency trying to topple the Pakistani regime.
Pakistan has a fragile government with an estimated 50 or more nuclear weapons. A Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would endanger the Pakistani regime at best, create a regional crisis for certain and lead to a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda at worst.
A Taliban reconquest would also, it should be said, be a moral atrocity from which American self-respect would not soon recover.
Proponents of withdrawal often acknowledge the costs of defeat but argue that the cause is hopeless anyway. On this, let me note a certain pattern. When you interview people who know little about Afghanistan, they describe an anarchic place that is the graveyard of empires. When you interview people who live there or are experts, they think those stereotypes are rubbish. They usually take a hardened but guardedly optimistic view. Read Clare Lockhart’s Sept. 17 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to get a sense of the way many knowledgeable people view the situation.
Amidst all the problems, the NATO coalition has a few things going for it. First, American forces have become quite good at counterinsurgency. They have a battle-tested strategy, experienced troops and a superb new leadership team. According to the political scientists Andrew J. Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli, since World War II, counterinsurgency efforts that put population protection at their core have succeeded nearly 70 percent of the time.
Second, the enemy is wildly hated. Only 6 percent of Afghans want a Taliban return, while NATO is viewed with surprising favor. This is not Vietnam or even Iraq.
Third, while many Afghan institutions are now dysfunctional, there is a base on which to build. The Afghan Army is a successful institution. Local villages have their own centuries-old civic institutions. The National Solidarity Program was able to build development councils in 23,000 villages precisely because the remnants of civil society still exist.
We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/opini ... nted=print
Poverty?? LOL...Afghanistan is long gone…The End!
My father in law visited Afghanistan twice in last three years…and he was disgusted by what he saw there…he told me that he will never go back there again.
The death of Afghanistan - September 27, 1996.
This is where the concept of reincarnation comes to mind and gives hope to some people...until then, I’m gone fishing, somewhere in Quebec.
My father in law visited Afghanistan twice in last three years…and he was disgusted by what he saw there…he told me that he will never go back there again.
The death of Afghanistan - September 27, 1996.
This is where the concept of reincarnation comes to mind and gives hope to some people...until then, I’m gone fishing, somewhere in Quebec.
MHI at various occasions and through his actions has expressed great hope in the destiny of Afghanistan. I think as his murids we must be supportive of that vision and not articulate views that are not alligned to it.Biryani wrote:Poverty?? LOL...Afghanistan is long gone…The End!
My father in law visited Afghanistan twice in last three years…and he was disgusted by what he saw there…he told me that he will never go back there again.
The death of Afghanistan - September 27, 1996.
This is where the concept of reincarnation comes to mind and gives hope to some people...until then, I’m gone fishing, somewhere in Quebec.
I think that I, or anybody whether Ismailia Muslim or not, don’t have to necessarily agree upon everything that Hazar Imam says in worldly matters…Even Hazar Imam has said that in one of his interviews before. Though, it is absolutely necessary for an Ismaili Muslim to must agree upon everything said by Him in religious and spiritual matters…or else it’s a simple matter of abandonment of Ismaili Faith…
Most of Ismaili people don’t think like that due to several social and religious reasons…and I don’t mean to judge anybody, but personally I think, having that simple matter of discretion clouded…undermines the real meaning and interpretation of Imamat and it’s purpose. Particularly if someone is imposing their personal discretion on others just on the simple basis of being His spiritual Murid….for me it’s just impractical and illogical to live with for anybody.
Hazar Imam is definitely one of the leading thinkers and intellectuals of the world today and I greatly admire and value his suggestions and ideas on all matters. I could be wrong on my assessment on Afghanistan or any other worldly matter but I have a right to have that choice based on my own knowledge and intellect. So does everyone else.
Most of Ismaili people don’t think like that due to several social and religious reasons…and I don’t mean to judge anybody, but personally I think, having that simple matter of discretion clouded…undermines the real meaning and interpretation of Imamat and it’s purpose. Particularly if someone is imposing their personal discretion on others just on the simple basis of being His spiritual Murid….for me it’s just impractical and illogical to live with for anybody.
Hazar Imam is definitely one of the leading thinkers and intellectuals of the world today and I greatly admire and value his suggestions and ideas on all matters. I could be wrong on my assessment on Afghanistan or any other worldly matter but I have a right to have that choice based on my own knowledge and intellect. So does everyone else.
"The Community always follows very closely the personal way of thinkingBiryani wrote:I think that I, or anybody whether Ismailia Muslim or not, don’t have to necessarily agree upon everything that Hazar Imam says in worldly matters…Even Hazar Imam has said that in one of his interviews before.
of the Imam. It's one of the particularities of Ismailis." (interview
1965)
http://www.ismaili.net/intervue/651212.html
"The Community always follows very closely the personal way of thinking
of the Imam. It's one of the particularities of Ismailis.
That’s just the attitude of the Ismailia community that has been developed but I don’t think He is implicitly implying that the community must do so…
Yeah, that’s the interview where He had explained His role as an Imam…and personal capabilities and shortfalls as a human being. They are different ‘personalities’ and I think mixing them to make one is not such a great idea. As an Imam (divine authority), He is infallible and as a human being in worldly matters He is prone to mistakes and errors just like any other human being.
of the Imam. It's one of the particularities of Ismailis.
That’s just the attitude of the Ismailia community that has been developed but I don’t think He is implicitly implying that the community must do so…
Yeah, that’s the interview where He had explained His role as an Imam…and personal capabilities and shortfalls as a human being. They are different ‘personalities’ and I think mixing them to make one is not such a great idea. As an Imam (divine authority), He is infallible and as a human being in worldly matters He is prone to mistakes and errors just like any other human being.
Though, it’s not about Afghanistan but I just wanted to point out what He thinks and said about drinking alcohol in that interview. I think that’s exactly the attitude every Muslim should have regarding alcohol… thinking rationally with your own intellect for good, rather than just take it from scriptures and believe in it intellectually blinded.
As for as Afghanistan…what matters is how people will play on the ground…which can go either worse way or good…status quo is not optimistic and I just personally don’t see any hope because fundamentals are not in place or are misplaced….
A society can not be sustaining or progressing for long or built upon scratch without regional corporations…currently the whole area is just divided and controlled by foreigners by force which came from far and are duplicitous from within…you can find latest political and military reports about the area and see how screwed things are…
Anyways…that was just my two cents.
As for as Afghanistan…what matters is how people will play on the ground…which can go either worse way or good…status quo is not optimistic and I just personally don’t see any hope because fundamentals are not in place or are misplaced….
A society can not be sustaining or progressing for long or built upon scratch without regional corporations…currently the whole area is just divided and controlled by foreigners by force which came from far and are duplicitous from within…you can find latest political and military reports about the area and see how screwed things are…
Anyways…that was just my two cents.
In the CBC interview with Peter Mansbridge, MHI was asked about the hopeless situation in Afghanistan to which he replied that there are examples of countries which were 'basket cases' 50 years ago and today they have developed themselves and made significant progess.Biryani wrote:
As for as Afghanistan…what matters is how people will play on the ground…which can go either worse way or good…status quo is not optimistic and I just personally don’t see any hope because fundamentals are not in place or are misplaced….
Generally the Imam expresses himself according to the capacity of the audience, hence if he is with his murids he will appear differently than if he was with non-murids. For example, he makes Farmans extempore when he is with his murids and when he is with the Other, he reads statements.
To the television audience he will appear as a fallible human being because that is the capacity of the audience. However in his views on worldly and spiritual matters he is infallible. There is no dichotomy in that respect. His guidance on worldly and spiritual matters are to be respected and followed.
of course developing and third world emerged all right in last 50 years with less or more progress area wise, but you know, 50 years is a really long time in terms of how things matters in today’s world…I mean generally speaking, look at the events of this decade only…no one would have already imagined and predicted, for sure, of what had happened in 2001 and the aftermaths, the events in financial markets in U.S. and the world within last two years and so…you know, there is so much uncertainty in every aspect of human life nowadays that , I think, next 50 years would probably be like last 500 years or more in terms of changes that can occur ahead…what I sense from what I see is that politically, technologically, economically and socially…things are just hanging and moving in random orders…and will just depend on how we act or react with events down the road.
With Afghanistan, even NATO and other institutions lately are admitting defeat in sense of progress and showing no clear vision of what they are doing there or would be doing from here. I think the whole approach was wrong from the very beginning…and now it seems like they are just sucked into it with no strategy of further maneuvers or exit on hand…maybe it was just meant to be that way and they knew it. I hope but don’t see wherewithal for serious progress in that area. I think, within days after they leave, the board will be upside down. Also progress is relative and subjective matter for some people…
I don’t know where you got the message from that in His views He is infallible even in worldly matters…I think He was clear on that in that interview. And, God forbid, I really don’t think it will make him any lesser Imam or divine Authority.
With Afghanistan, even NATO and other institutions lately are admitting defeat in sense of progress and showing no clear vision of what they are doing there or would be doing from here. I think the whole approach was wrong from the very beginning…and now it seems like they are just sucked into it with no strategy of further maneuvers or exit on hand…maybe it was just meant to be that way and they knew it. I hope but don’t see wherewithal for serious progress in that area. I think, within days after they leave, the board will be upside down. Also progress is relative and subjective matter for some people…
I don’t know where you got the message from that in His views He is infallible even in worldly matters…I think He was clear on that in that interview. And, God forbid, I really don’t think it will make him any lesser Imam or divine Authority.
According to his Farmans, his guidance encompasses all matters (material and spiritual). Hence he must be infallible in all matters.Biryani wrote: I don’t know where you got the message from that in His views He is infallible even in worldly matters…I think He was clear on that in that interview. And, God forbid, I really don’t think it will make him any lesser Imam or divine Authority.
"You have looked to the Imam of the Age for advice and help in all matters..."
Islam, by contrast, is a total religion guiding all aspects of a Muslim's life. The faith establishes the moral framework within which material endeavour is to be encouraged and a 'social conscience' has always been a key part of our lives. [Speech 25 Nov 1982]
This discussion is getting a little bit off of the topic but more interesting to understand a lot of things.
Yes, His guidance encompasses all matters and is absolute truth but that is if it is directed to His murids in sort of like direct instructions or Farmans…
My understanding is that as a human being with flesh and bones and other humanly attributes He is just as much capable as humanly possible in worldly matters as His Highness The Aga Khan and his statements or actions will be reflecting that fact…or else it would be that people who believe in him as divine authority in religious and spiritual matters would have to interpret His every action and word as God’s words, does not matter where and whom He is addressing, which I think will contradict to what He said about Himself as a human being in that interview…
Though, as I said, He is also one of the top geniuses in a lot of matters of humanity and I find a lot of wisdom in His words on anything He talks about, aside from being the manifested God According to Ismaili faith but I personally am not comfortable mixing His role of an Imam and The Aga khan. I find that it might be leading to violation of the basic Islamic principle of Unity of God or Tauheed…
Another interesting point is that I think, we shouldn’t just idealize whatever Ismailies do, either as an individual or community in every aspect, as the principle of the Ismaili faith….just like Islam and Muslims are two different things and not everything what Muslims do reflects the true Islam…
The fact that Hazar Imam has taken the role as a leader of Ismaili community for it’s material and worldly uplift as well as religious or spiritual well being is kind of arbitrary due to the demands of the time and environment that we are living in and it’s great and appreciated a lot by everyone but, I think, that is not as something of a absolute nature for all Ismailies.
There are several examples where Hazar Imam’s business ventures or other social matters did not succeed as He wanted to or would have wanted to…so how is that explained?
Yes, His guidance encompasses all matters and is absolute truth but that is if it is directed to His murids in sort of like direct instructions or Farmans…
My understanding is that as a human being with flesh and bones and other humanly attributes He is just as much capable as humanly possible in worldly matters as His Highness The Aga Khan and his statements or actions will be reflecting that fact…or else it would be that people who believe in him as divine authority in religious and spiritual matters would have to interpret His every action and word as God’s words, does not matter where and whom He is addressing, which I think will contradict to what He said about Himself as a human being in that interview…
Though, as I said, He is also one of the top geniuses in a lot of matters of humanity and I find a lot of wisdom in His words on anything He talks about, aside from being the manifested God According to Ismaili faith but I personally am not comfortable mixing His role of an Imam and The Aga khan. I find that it might be leading to violation of the basic Islamic principle of Unity of God or Tauheed…
Another interesting point is that I think, we shouldn’t just idealize whatever Ismailies do, either as an individual or community in every aspect, as the principle of the Ismaili faith….just like Islam and Muslims are two different things and not everything what Muslims do reflects the true Islam…
The fact that Hazar Imam has taken the role as a leader of Ismaili community for it’s material and worldly uplift as well as religious or spiritual well being is kind of arbitrary due to the demands of the time and environment that we are living in and it’s great and appreciated a lot by everyone but, I think, that is not as something of a absolute nature for all Ismailies.
There are several examples where Hazar Imam’s business ventures or other social matters did not succeed as He wanted to or would have wanted to…so how is that explained?
There is a verse of Moman Chetamni which states:Biryani wrote:There are several examples where Hazar Imam’s business ventures or other social matters did not succeed as He wanted to or would have wanted to…so how is that explained?
620) Eji Ali jina chaltra samoon nav joi ae
Sri satguru ne vachane seva kari ae saar
Jem jem kalikar vadhase monivaro
Tem ali rajo chaltra karshe aapar
Cheto.....
620. Do not look at what Ali does, but obey what He says, for as the times
will change, Ali's actions may be beyond your comprehension.
October 2, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
Putting the ‘I’ in Aid
By PETER BERGEN and SAMEER LALWANI
Washington
THE top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is right to warn that efforts to rebuild that country depend on winning the “struggle to gain the support of the people.” And few issues do more to stoke the resentment of ordinary Afghans than the tens of billions of dollars of foreign aid from which they have seen little or no benefit. They see legions of Westerners sitting in the backs of S.U.V.’s clogging the streets of Kabul and ask themselves what exactly those foreigners have done to improve their daily lives.
Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world. And by some estimates 40 percent of international aid leaves the Afghan economy as quickly as it comes in — going to pay Western security contractors, maintain back offices in the West and pay Western-style salaries, benefits and vacations — while as little as 20 percent of that aid reaches its intended recipients. Compounding this problem, the salaries of imported civilian workers are orders of magnitude higher than those of their Afghan peers. Some employees of the United States Agency for International Development, for instance, earn more than 300 times the monthly pay of an Afghan teacher.
Yes, when it comes to large-scale projects like building roads and hospitals, Western contractors have to take the lead because Afghan companies are years away from having enough experience. But there is a way for the Afghan government to recoup some of the billions of dollars of aid flowing to those contractors and being recycled back to the West: tax it.
Foreign contractors and corporations working in Afghanistan do not pay income taxes there; and if they do pay taxes at all, it is to their home governments. America and its European allies could easily give up claims on taxes from their citizens working in Afghanistan and instead condition contracts so that the workers and the companies that employ them pay Afghan taxes. The loss in tax revenue suffered by Western countries would be trivial compared to the good will this would engender among Afghans. Right now the government’s tax revenues total a paltry $300 million. Taxing foreign technical assistance alone — an estimated $1.6 billion annually — could double this revenue.
And this would require little sacrifice from the 70,000 or so foreigners working in Afghanistan. Afghan taxes are quite low, with the highest bracket set at 20 percent, while technical advisers from Western development agencies can earn $9,000 to $22,000 per month and private contractors can earn even more. With Western unemployment rates high, it is unlikely that having to pay a relatively paltry amount of tax to Afghanistan would deter contractors or corporations from taking on lucrative work there.
The money isn’t the only issue: because it is dependent on foreign aid for about 90 percent of its budget, Afghanistan is fiscally and politically unaccountable to its people. The government needs to build a taxation bureaucracy or it will never develop many of the abilities critical to governance, like budgeting and allocating resources. Since the taxable Afghan population is now tiny — most citizens are either desperately poor or operate within the large black market economy — the quickest path to developing a working revenue system is by taxing the foreign workers and companies.
New tax revenues from foreign contractors should be used, above all, to pay down a substantial portion of the cost of building up the Afghan National Army, which is $1 billion to $2 billion annually. Foreign contractors have a vested interest in helping the army develop, as it will eventually provide the security that will allow them to continue enjoying their lucrative contracts after Western forces eventually withdraw.
While they face risks, contractors in Afghanistan are also faring quite well financially. It’s time they returned some of that wealth to the Afghan people.
Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Sameer Lalwani is a research fellow there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributors
Putting the ‘I’ in Aid
By PETER BERGEN and SAMEER LALWANI
Washington
THE top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is right to warn that efforts to rebuild that country depend on winning the “struggle to gain the support of the people.” And few issues do more to stoke the resentment of ordinary Afghans than the tens of billions of dollars of foreign aid from which they have seen little or no benefit. They see legions of Westerners sitting in the backs of S.U.V.’s clogging the streets of Kabul and ask themselves what exactly those foreigners have done to improve their daily lives.
Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world. And by some estimates 40 percent of international aid leaves the Afghan economy as quickly as it comes in — going to pay Western security contractors, maintain back offices in the West and pay Western-style salaries, benefits and vacations — while as little as 20 percent of that aid reaches its intended recipients. Compounding this problem, the salaries of imported civilian workers are orders of magnitude higher than those of their Afghan peers. Some employees of the United States Agency for International Development, for instance, earn more than 300 times the monthly pay of an Afghan teacher.
Yes, when it comes to large-scale projects like building roads and hospitals, Western contractors have to take the lead because Afghan companies are years away from having enough experience. But there is a way for the Afghan government to recoup some of the billions of dollars of aid flowing to those contractors and being recycled back to the West: tax it.
Foreign contractors and corporations working in Afghanistan do not pay income taxes there; and if they do pay taxes at all, it is to their home governments. America and its European allies could easily give up claims on taxes from their citizens working in Afghanistan and instead condition contracts so that the workers and the companies that employ them pay Afghan taxes. The loss in tax revenue suffered by Western countries would be trivial compared to the good will this would engender among Afghans. Right now the government’s tax revenues total a paltry $300 million. Taxing foreign technical assistance alone — an estimated $1.6 billion annually — could double this revenue.
And this would require little sacrifice from the 70,000 or so foreigners working in Afghanistan. Afghan taxes are quite low, with the highest bracket set at 20 percent, while technical advisers from Western development agencies can earn $9,000 to $22,000 per month and private contractors can earn even more. With Western unemployment rates high, it is unlikely that having to pay a relatively paltry amount of tax to Afghanistan would deter contractors or corporations from taking on lucrative work there.
The money isn’t the only issue: because it is dependent on foreign aid for about 90 percent of its budget, Afghanistan is fiscally and politically unaccountable to its people. The government needs to build a taxation bureaucracy or it will never develop many of the abilities critical to governance, like budgeting and allocating resources. Since the taxable Afghan population is now tiny — most citizens are either desperately poor or operate within the large black market economy — the quickest path to developing a working revenue system is by taxing the foreign workers and companies.
New tax revenues from foreign contractors should be used, above all, to pay down a substantial portion of the cost of building up the Afghan National Army, which is $1 billion to $2 billion annually. Foreign contractors have a vested interest in helping the army develop, as it will eventually provide the security that will allow them to continue enjoying their lucrative contracts after Western forces eventually withdraw.
While they face risks, contractors in Afghanistan are also faring quite well financially. It’s time they returned some of that wealth to the Afghan people.
Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Sameer Lalwani is a research fellow there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/opini ... nted=print
Yes, that’s absolutely right…but, I think, that is said and to be taken in the religious and spiritual context of His role as an Iman… and as He had said in that interview:
“…One has to make a very careful distinction here between worldly and religious matters. An Ismaili may ask My advice on a worldly problem, then not accept it…”
Hence, that choice is personal and discretionary and I think, having that choice is a not a sign of wavering faith in Him as the Imam of the time.
“…One has to make a very careful distinction here between worldly and religious matters. An Ismaili may ask My advice on a worldly problem, then not accept it…”
Hence, that choice is personal and discretionary and I think, having that choice is a not a sign of wavering faith in Him as the Imam of the time.
October 4, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
10 Steps to Victory in Afghanistan
Reform or Go Home
COUNTERINSURGENCY is only as good as the government it supports. NATO could do everything right — it isn’t — but will still fail unless Afghans trust their government. Without essential reform, merely making the government more efficient or extending its reach will just make things worse.
Only a legitimately elected Afghan president can enact reforms, so at the very least we need to see a genuine run-off election or an emergency national council, called a loya jirga, before winter. Once a legitimate president emerges, we need to see immediate action from him on a publicly announced reform program, developed in consultation with Afghan society and enforced by international monitors. Reforms should include firing human rights abusers and drug traffickers, establishing an independent authority to investigate citizen complaints and requiring officials to live in the districts they are responsible for (fewer than half do).
Other steps might include a census and district-level elections (promised since 2001, but never held), fair and effective taxation to replace kickbacks and extortion, increased pay to diligent local officials, the transfer of more budgetary authority to the provinces and the creation of local courts for dispute resolution.
If we see no genuine progress on such steps toward government responsibility, the United States should “Afghanize,” draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster that will come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban — which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.
— DAVID KILCULLEN, a former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and the author of “The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One”
•
End Suicide Attacks
TO win in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies must prevent the rise of a new generation of anti-American terrorists, particularly suicide terrorists.
The metric for measuring this threat is not the amount of territory controlled by the Taliban or Al Qaeda, but the number of people willing to be recruited as suicide terrorists. These individuals are motivated not by the existence of a terrorist sanctuary, but by deep anger at the presence of foreign forces on land they prize.
This is why the number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan, overwhelmingly against military targets, has skyrocketed as United States and NATO forces have increasingly occupied the country from 2006 on. There were nine attacks in 2005, 97 in 2006, 142 in 2007, 148 in 2008 and more than 60 in the first six months of this year.
It is imperative to decrease the number of suicide attacks. Given the ethnic divisions of the country, our best tactic is to use political and economic means to empower local Pashtuns to feel that they have greater autonomy from both Taliban and Western domination, and less need to respond violently.
A similar strategy toward Sunni groups in Anbar Province reduced anti-American suicide terrorism in Iraq and is our best way forward in Afghanistan.
— ROBERT A. PAPE, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”
•
If You Can’t Beat Them, Let Them Join
WITHIN a year, we must persuade large numbers of insurgents to lay down their arms or switch to the government’s side. Afghanistan’s doughty warriors have a tradition of changing alliances, but success will require both military operations focused on the insurgent leadership and, even more important, incentives for fighters at the local level.
Mid-level insurgents and their followers should be offered a chance to join a revised version of the Afghan Public Protection Force. These local self-defense forces should be expanded and tied to legitimate local governing structures — both official and tribal. The majority of development funds should be funneled to leaders to strengthen local governance and development and pay the militias’ salaries.
Local self-defense forces in Colombia, Peru, South Vietnam and, most recently, Iraq, have proved very successful. The creation of a viable force like this is the single most important benchmark for the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.
— LINDA ROBINSON, the author of “Tell Me How This Ends: Gen. David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq”
•
Pump Up the Police
FOR all the disputes over strategy, virtually everyone agrees that we need to strengthen the Afghan security forces, make them true partners and put them in the lead. Afghans want lasting security, and they want it to have an Afghan face.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander there, wisely wants to double the size of the Afghan Army and increase the police forces to 160,000 men. This requires not just money, but also a commitment to send more trainers, embedded advisers and partner units. At the moment, international forces in Afghanistan say they still lack about 30 percent of the trainers and mentors needed to train even the current police force.
Creating effective security forces will also require more aid to create a functioning local justice system with courts, lawyers and jails. This will take at least a decade, so for the short term we should assist efforts to revive Afghanistan’s traditional justice systems.
— ANTHONY CORDESMAN, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
•
Kick Out Corruption
TO defeat the insurgency, the Afghan government and its main partner, the United States, need to win the confidence of the public. Accountability must replace the widespread immunity enjoyed by officials who abuse their power.
Despite all the problems with our recent election, the incoming government will have a chance to start fresh, and a proper vetting of all new officials is the place to begin. This means establishing strict accountability mechanisms for high officials in the districts and provinces as well as in the ministries and directorates in Kabul. Simply shuffling abusive and incompetent officials among offices — as has been the norm over the past eight years — keeps the public from getting the governmental services it needs.
While the corruption in Kabul is well known, the alliances that American and other foreign forces have made at the local level with abusive officials and influential figures have emboldened those Afghans and alarmed the Afghan public. These alliances must be examined and stopped. The next government should make a statement by quickly clearing out some of the most blatantly corrupt officials.
— NADER NADERY, a commissioner on the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission
•
Learn to Tax From the Taliban
SKEPTICS of state-building proposals question whether the Kabul government — now almost fully dependent on foreign aid — will ever be able to support the military and police forces being trained. Yet there has been comparatively little investment by the international community in helping Kabul collect taxes, even though insurgents and corrupt officials have proved it can be done.
In addition to collecting taxes from the illegal opium trade, Taliban forces extort money from trucks carrying legal cargo through their territories and demand “protection fees” from local businesses, even hitting up construction projects financed by NATO.
Government officials also take illegal kickbacks — one governor in the eastern part of the country is reported to earn as much as $10 million a month extorting trucking firms. But this money doesn’t end up in state coffers — it just lines the governor’s deep pockets.
The “civilian surge” should include tax experts who could help federal and provincial officials develop mechanisms for collecting revenue — and make sure that money ends up where it belongs.
— GRETCHEN PETERS, the author of “Seeds of Terror”
•
Polls Have the Power
BY and large, my generation of military professionals trained for and thought about what we might call “Type A” war — modern war, featuring the clash of mechanized forces fielded by industrial states. Happily, we never had to fight the Soviets on the northern German plain, though Operation Desert Storm showed we might have been pretty good at it, had the balloon gone up.
In Afghanistan we’re fighting a “Type B” war that is in some of its essentials “postmodern.” Like postmodernism itself, the concept has a variety of meanings and may not represent a coherent set of ideas. But one thing is clear: the Type B enemy likely has little to lose — no territory to protect, few important targets at risk, perhaps even no life worth living. Thus the Type A objective of fatally weakening an opponent by destroying assets important to his success — in theory, a measurable process — is replaced in Type B war by the much more complicated, essentially unquantifiable task of defeating him.
In time, democracies tire of war, as well they should. Thus, the single most important factor a Type B enemy counts on is time. The outcome in Afghanistan may be determined already, simply because we’ve been there for eight years. The strategic center of gravity is American public opinion, which will tell us when we’ve run out of time. If you want to know how we are doing in Afghanistan, read the polls in America.
— MERRILL McPEAK, the chief of staff of the Air Force from 1990 to 1994
•
Take a Risk
WHILE in Afghanistan last summer as part of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s initial assessment team, I found many American and other international units more focused on protecting themselves than protecting the Afghan population. Traveling through the allegedly secure city of Mazar-i-Sharif with a German unit, for example, was like touring Afghanistan by submarine. What little I saw of the city was through a small slit of bulletproof glass in an armored personnel carrier. (While I was a light-infantry officer in both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I had never before traveled in an armored personnel carrier.) The Germans offered their assessment of security in the region, but since they lack regular face-to-face contact with the people living there, why should I trust their analysis? Can they speak with authority on the degree to which an insurgent campaign of intimidation is having an effect when they themselves keep the Afghans at such a distance?
It’s not just the Germans, though. Some American and other allied commanders also insist on protective measures that hamper troops from interacting with the population and gathering information on what is driving the conflict at the local level.
After eight years of war with little to show for American and allied efforts, many Americans have tired of the campaign in Afghanistan and are wary of putting our soldiers in greater danger. But if we are to be successful in Afghanistan, it is a risk we must take.
— ANDREW McDONALD EXUM, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security
•
Don’t Believe That We Can Afford to Lose
AMERICA cannot achieve even the minimal objective of preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens in Afghanistan without a substantial increase in forces over the coming year. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’s south is growing. The Afghan and international forces there now cannot reverse that growth. They may not even be able to stem it. That is the assessment of the top American commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
President Obama said in August, “If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.” Some of his advisers now say the opposite: Taliban control will not lead to terrorist havens. Why not? Osama bin Laden first built camps in the territory of a Taliban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in the mid-1980s. Relations between Al Qaeda and the Taliban remain close. Even if they do not invite Al Qaeda in, could they, unlike Pakistan, keep Al Qaeda out? The president was right: the triumph of the Taliban will benefit Al Qaeda.
Rejecting General McChrystal’s request for more forces leaves two options. The United States withdraws and lets Afghanistan again collapse into chaos, or it keeps its military forces and civilians in harm’s way while denying them the resources they need to succeed. Neither is acceptable.
— FREDERICK KAGAN, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and KIMBERLY KAGAN, the president of the Institute for the Study of War
•
Pakistani Patronage
THE government of Pakistan, through its intelligence agency, has long been a patron of the Afghan Taliban, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal recently warned that the collaboration continues. Pakistan sees the relationship as a way of hedging its bets in Afghanistan, an asset in its confrontation with India.
It is difficult to define a clear benchmark for ending that aid because the Pakistanis refuse to acknowledge that any relationship exists. But let us consider it to have ended or gone into remission if, a year from now, six consecutive months have gone by with no credible reporting of the sort that underlay the general’s observation.
The significance of this benchmark is threefold. First, Pakistani patronage is an impediment to subduing the Taliban. Second, it is an excellent gauge of how well or poorly NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan is going. Continued Pakistani dealing with the Taliban would reflect Islamabad’s judgment that it is going poorly enough that bets still must be hedged. Third, an end to the relationship would eliminate one of the biggest paradoxes in the rationale for the counterinsurgency: the Pakistani government that our efforts in Afghanistan are supposedly helping to save is assisting the forces from which we are trying to save it.
— PAUL R. PILLAR, a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the C.I.A. and a professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributors
10 Steps to Victory in Afghanistan
Reform or Go Home
COUNTERINSURGENCY is only as good as the government it supports. NATO could do everything right — it isn’t — but will still fail unless Afghans trust their government. Without essential reform, merely making the government more efficient or extending its reach will just make things worse.
Only a legitimately elected Afghan president can enact reforms, so at the very least we need to see a genuine run-off election or an emergency national council, called a loya jirga, before winter. Once a legitimate president emerges, we need to see immediate action from him on a publicly announced reform program, developed in consultation with Afghan society and enforced by international monitors. Reforms should include firing human rights abusers and drug traffickers, establishing an independent authority to investigate citizen complaints and requiring officials to live in the districts they are responsible for (fewer than half do).
Other steps might include a census and district-level elections (promised since 2001, but never held), fair and effective taxation to replace kickbacks and extortion, increased pay to diligent local officials, the transfer of more budgetary authority to the provinces and the creation of local courts for dispute resolution.
If we see no genuine progress on such steps toward government responsibility, the United States should “Afghanize,” draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster that will come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban — which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.
— DAVID KILCULLEN, a former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and the author of “The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One”
•
End Suicide Attacks
TO win in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies must prevent the rise of a new generation of anti-American terrorists, particularly suicide terrorists.
The metric for measuring this threat is not the amount of territory controlled by the Taliban or Al Qaeda, but the number of people willing to be recruited as suicide terrorists. These individuals are motivated not by the existence of a terrorist sanctuary, but by deep anger at the presence of foreign forces on land they prize.
This is why the number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan, overwhelmingly against military targets, has skyrocketed as United States and NATO forces have increasingly occupied the country from 2006 on. There were nine attacks in 2005, 97 in 2006, 142 in 2007, 148 in 2008 and more than 60 in the first six months of this year.
It is imperative to decrease the number of suicide attacks. Given the ethnic divisions of the country, our best tactic is to use political and economic means to empower local Pashtuns to feel that they have greater autonomy from both Taliban and Western domination, and less need to respond violently.
A similar strategy toward Sunni groups in Anbar Province reduced anti-American suicide terrorism in Iraq and is our best way forward in Afghanistan.
— ROBERT A. PAPE, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”
•
If You Can’t Beat Them, Let Them Join
WITHIN a year, we must persuade large numbers of insurgents to lay down their arms or switch to the government’s side. Afghanistan’s doughty warriors have a tradition of changing alliances, but success will require both military operations focused on the insurgent leadership and, even more important, incentives for fighters at the local level.
Mid-level insurgents and their followers should be offered a chance to join a revised version of the Afghan Public Protection Force. These local self-defense forces should be expanded and tied to legitimate local governing structures — both official and tribal. The majority of development funds should be funneled to leaders to strengthen local governance and development and pay the militias’ salaries.
Local self-defense forces in Colombia, Peru, South Vietnam and, most recently, Iraq, have proved very successful. The creation of a viable force like this is the single most important benchmark for the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.
— LINDA ROBINSON, the author of “Tell Me How This Ends: Gen. David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq”
•
Pump Up the Police
FOR all the disputes over strategy, virtually everyone agrees that we need to strengthen the Afghan security forces, make them true partners and put them in the lead. Afghans want lasting security, and they want it to have an Afghan face.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander there, wisely wants to double the size of the Afghan Army and increase the police forces to 160,000 men. This requires not just money, but also a commitment to send more trainers, embedded advisers and partner units. At the moment, international forces in Afghanistan say they still lack about 30 percent of the trainers and mentors needed to train even the current police force.
Creating effective security forces will also require more aid to create a functioning local justice system with courts, lawyers and jails. This will take at least a decade, so for the short term we should assist efforts to revive Afghanistan’s traditional justice systems.
— ANTHONY CORDESMAN, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
•
Kick Out Corruption
TO defeat the insurgency, the Afghan government and its main partner, the United States, need to win the confidence of the public. Accountability must replace the widespread immunity enjoyed by officials who abuse their power.
Despite all the problems with our recent election, the incoming government will have a chance to start fresh, and a proper vetting of all new officials is the place to begin. This means establishing strict accountability mechanisms for high officials in the districts and provinces as well as in the ministries and directorates in Kabul. Simply shuffling abusive and incompetent officials among offices — as has been the norm over the past eight years — keeps the public from getting the governmental services it needs.
While the corruption in Kabul is well known, the alliances that American and other foreign forces have made at the local level with abusive officials and influential figures have emboldened those Afghans and alarmed the Afghan public. These alliances must be examined and stopped. The next government should make a statement by quickly clearing out some of the most blatantly corrupt officials.
— NADER NADERY, a commissioner on the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission
•
Learn to Tax From the Taliban
SKEPTICS of state-building proposals question whether the Kabul government — now almost fully dependent on foreign aid — will ever be able to support the military and police forces being trained. Yet there has been comparatively little investment by the international community in helping Kabul collect taxes, even though insurgents and corrupt officials have proved it can be done.
In addition to collecting taxes from the illegal opium trade, Taliban forces extort money from trucks carrying legal cargo through their territories and demand “protection fees” from local businesses, even hitting up construction projects financed by NATO.
Government officials also take illegal kickbacks — one governor in the eastern part of the country is reported to earn as much as $10 million a month extorting trucking firms. But this money doesn’t end up in state coffers — it just lines the governor’s deep pockets.
The “civilian surge” should include tax experts who could help federal and provincial officials develop mechanisms for collecting revenue — and make sure that money ends up where it belongs.
— GRETCHEN PETERS, the author of “Seeds of Terror”
•
Polls Have the Power
BY and large, my generation of military professionals trained for and thought about what we might call “Type A” war — modern war, featuring the clash of mechanized forces fielded by industrial states. Happily, we never had to fight the Soviets on the northern German plain, though Operation Desert Storm showed we might have been pretty good at it, had the balloon gone up.
In Afghanistan we’re fighting a “Type B” war that is in some of its essentials “postmodern.” Like postmodernism itself, the concept has a variety of meanings and may not represent a coherent set of ideas. But one thing is clear: the Type B enemy likely has little to lose — no territory to protect, few important targets at risk, perhaps even no life worth living. Thus the Type A objective of fatally weakening an opponent by destroying assets important to his success — in theory, a measurable process — is replaced in Type B war by the much more complicated, essentially unquantifiable task of defeating him.
In time, democracies tire of war, as well they should. Thus, the single most important factor a Type B enemy counts on is time. The outcome in Afghanistan may be determined already, simply because we’ve been there for eight years. The strategic center of gravity is American public opinion, which will tell us when we’ve run out of time. If you want to know how we are doing in Afghanistan, read the polls in America.
— MERRILL McPEAK, the chief of staff of the Air Force from 1990 to 1994
•
Take a Risk
WHILE in Afghanistan last summer as part of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s initial assessment team, I found many American and other international units more focused on protecting themselves than protecting the Afghan population. Traveling through the allegedly secure city of Mazar-i-Sharif with a German unit, for example, was like touring Afghanistan by submarine. What little I saw of the city was through a small slit of bulletproof glass in an armored personnel carrier. (While I was a light-infantry officer in both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I had never before traveled in an armored personnel carrier.) The Germans offered their assessment of security in the region, but since they lack regular face-to-face contact with the people living there, why should I trust their analysis? Can they speak with authority on the degree to which an insurgent campaign of intimidation is having an effect when they themselves keep the Afghans at such a distance?
It’s not just the Germans, though. Some American and other allied commanders also insist on protective measures that hamper troops from interacting with the population and gathering information on what is driving the conflict at the local level.
After eight years of war with little to show for American and allied efforts, many Americans have tired of the campaign in Afghanistan and are wary of putting our soldiers in greater danger. But if we are to be successful in Afghanistan, it is a risk we must take.
— ANDREW McDONALD EXUM, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security
•
Don’t Believe That We Can Afford to Lose
AMERICA cannot achieve even the minimal objective of preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens in Afghanistan without a substantial increase in forces over the coming year. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’s south is growing. The Afghan and international forces there now cannot reverse that growth. They may not even be able to stem it. That is the assessment of the top American commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
President Obama said in August, “If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.” Some of his advisers now say the opposite: Taliban control will not lead to terrorist havens. Why not? Osama bin Laden first built camps in the territory of a Taliban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in the mid-1980s. Relations between Al Qaeda and the Taliban remain close. Even if they do not invite Al Qaeda in, could they, unlike Pakistan, keep Al Qaeda out? The president was right: the triumph of the Taliban will benefit Al Qaeda.
Rejecting General McChrystal’s request for more forces leaves two options. The United States withdraws and lets Afghanistan again collapse into chaos, or it keeps its military forces and civilians in harm’s way while denying them the resources they need to succeed. Neither is acceptable.
— FREDERICK KAGAN, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and KIMBERLY KAGAN, the president of the Institute for the Study of War
•
Pakistani Patronage
THE government of Pakistan, through its intelligence agency, has long been a patron of the Afghan Taliban, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal recently warned that the collaboration continues. Pakistan sees the relationship as a way of hedging its bets in Afghanistan, an asset in its confrontation with India.
It is difficult to define a clear benchmark for ending that aid because the Pakistanis refuse to acknowledge that any relationship exists. But let us consider it to have ended or gone into remission if, a year from now, six consecutive months have gone by with no credible reporting of the sort that underlay the general’s observation.
The significance of this benchmark is threefold. First, Pakistani patronage is an impediment to subduing the Taliban. Second, it is an excellent gauge of how well or poorly NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan is going. Continued Pakistani dealing with the Taliban would reflect Islamabad’s judgment that it is going poorly enough that bets still must be hedged. Third, an end to the relationship would eliminate one of the biggest paradoxes in the rationale for the counterinsurgency: the Pakistani government that our efforts in Afghanistan are supposedly helping to save is assisting the forces from which we are trying to save it.
— PAUL R. PILLAR, a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the C.I.A. and a professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/opini ... nted=print
An ex colleague of mine at work has her husband deployed in Afghanistan. I asked her about why her husband is in Afghanistan…after struggling to justify her answer with unsound reasons, she gave up and told me that she personally has no clue and they are just following what their government is telling them to do and they have no other choice right now… she said that she can’t even watch TV out of fear of getting the bad news.
What actually bothers me is not the deaths and destruction of Afghans or Americans; they both deserve each other. It is rather dying of these young Canadians in vain for nothing. They have no business combating half way across the world. Canada is sucked into this mess and losing it’s prestige as the traditional peace keeping blue berets. Just few years ago, typical Canadians traveling abroad were greeted with smiles and handshakes but that has been changed now with people’s resentment and anger shared along Americans. I hope Canada’s war in Afghanistan is Canada’s last war.
What actually bothers me is not the deaths and destruction of Afghans or Americans; they both deserve each other. It is rather dying of these young Canadians in vain for nothing. They have no business combating half way across the world. Canada is sucked into this mess and losing it’s prestige as the traditional peace keeping blue berets. Just few years ago, typical Canadians traveling abroad were greeted with smiles and handshakes but that has been changed now with people’s resentment and anger shared along Americans. I hope Canada’s war in Afghanistan is Canada’s last war.
October 7, 2009
Returned Artifacts Displayed in Kabul
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
KABUL, Afghanistan — On most days, the news from Afghanistan involves something exploding. Which is why Tuesday was such a surprise: instead of bombings, it brought the unveiling of stolen treasures, some as old as the Bronze Age.
The National Museum was celebrating the return of about 2,000 artifacts that had been smuggled into Britain over the years of war in Afghanistan. British authorities confiscated the smuggled items and, after several years spent figuring out where the artifacts had come from, sent them back to Afghanistan in February.
The pieces were on public display for the first time on Tuesday. Visitors peered into glass cases holding delicate blue bowls from the 12th century, a bird-shaped oil burner, and an assortment of tools described as cutter, shaver, bayonet and chopper.
“These news stories don’t always make the front pages, but they should,” Mark Sedwill, the British ambassador to Afghanistan, said of the artifacts’ return.
Afghanistan founded the museum in the 1920s, shortly after the country gained full control over its affairs from Britain. Situated at the crossroads of four great civilizations — Chinese, Central Asian, Indian and Persian — Afghanistan is a treasure trove for archaeologists.
“This whole area is so rich,” said Nancy Hatch Dupree, director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University, who has been involved with Afghan antiquities since the 1960s. “Part of the reason is its geopolitical location.”
By the time the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, the museum owned about 100,000 items. But when the pro-Moscow government collapsed in the early 1990s and civil war convulsed the country, artifacts began to disappear.
The neighborhood around the museum became too dangerous for government workers to visit. Archaeologists concerned about the museum’s fate negotiated with a rebel leader for the chance to reinforce it against intruders, but the steel doors they had installed proved ineffective. Thieves pulled them out of the mud walls, stole from the storeroom, and put the doors back.
Most of the artifacts in the Islamic room were burned when a rocket shell punched through the roof. “They were just little lumps of metal,” Mrs. Dupree recalled of the damaged items.
The plunder was devastating. Omara Khan Masoudi, the museum director, estimates that about 70 percent of the museum’s artifacts were stolen from 1992 to 1995, in the brutal years of civil war before the Taliban took over the country. The Taliban were not friends of the country’s archaeological heritage, either; they blew up ancient statues of Buddha in the name of Islam.
But some of the most important pieces the museum had were locked away in a secret location by museum administrators in the last years of the Communist government. The museum closed in 1991 and reopened again in 2004 after 13 years of war.
The items from Britain are not the first to be returned. About 13,000 artifacts have come back to Afghanistan from Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and the United States since the Taliban fell in 2001, according to Mr. Masoudi.
Some in the crowd on Tuesday were asking whether it was wise to display valuables.
Mrs. Dupree was sure that it was. “Afghanistan has to give a face to the world that they are more than just the Taliban and NATO,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/world ... &th&emc=th
Returned Artifacts Displayed in Kabul
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
KABUL, Afghanistan — On most days, the news from Afghanistan involves something exploding. Which is why Tuesday was such a surprise: instead of bombings, it brought the unveiling of stolen treasures, some as old as the Bronze Age.
The National Museum was celebrating the return of about 2,000 artifacts that had been smuggled into Britain over the years of war in Afghanistan. British authorities confiscated the smuggled items and, after several years spent figuring out where the artifacts had come from, sent them back to Afghanistan in February.
The pieces were on public display for the first time on Tuesday. Visitors peered into glass cases holding delicate blue bowls from the 12th century, a bird-shaped oil burner, and an assortment of tools described as cutter, shaver, bayonet and chopper.
“These news stories don’t always make the front pages, but they should,” Mark Sedwill, the British ambassador to Afghanistan, said of the artifacts’ return.
Afghanistan founded the museum in the 1920s, shortly after the country gained full control over its affairs from Britain. Situated at the crossroads of four great civilizations — Chinese, Central Asian, Indian and Persian — Afghanistan is a treasure trove for archaeologists.
“This whole area is so rich,” said Nancy Hatch Dupree, director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University, who has been involved with Afghan antiquities since the 1960s. “Part of the reason is its geopolitical location.”
By the time the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, the museum owned about 100,000 items. But when the pro-Moscow government collapsed in the early 1990s and civil war convulsed the country, artifacts began to disappear.
The neighborhood around the museum became too dangerous for government workers to visit. Archaeologists concerned about the museum’s fate negotiated with a rebel leader for the chance to reinforce it against intruders, but the steel doors they had installed proved ineffective. Thieves pulled them out of the mud walls, stole from the storeroom, and put the doors back.
Most of the artifacts in the Islamic room were burned when a rocket shell punched through the roof. “They were just little lumps of metal,” Mrs. Dupree recalled of the damaged items.
The plunder was devastating. Omara Khan Masoudi, the museum director, estimates that about 70 percent of the museum’s artifacts were stolen from 1992 to 1995, in the brutal years of civil war before the Taliban took over the country. The Taliban were not friends of the country’s archaeological heritage, either; they blew up ancient statues of Buddha in the name of Islam.
But some of the most important pieces the museum had were locked away in a secret location by museum administrators in the last years of the Communist government. The museum closed in 1991 and reopened again in 2004 after 13 years of war.
The items from Britain are not the first to be returned. About 13,000 artifacts have come back to Afghanistan from Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and the United States since the Taliban fell in 2001, according to Mr. Masoudi.
Some in the crowd on Tuesday were asking whether it was wise to display valuables.
Mrs. Dupree was sure that it was. “Afghanistan has to give a face to the world that they are more than just the Taliban and NATO,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/world ... &th&emc=th
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world ... 3jurm.html
November 13, 2009
Afghan Enclave Seen as Model to Rebuild, and Rebuff Taliban
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
JURM, Afghanistan — Small grants given directly to villagers have brought about modest but important changes in this corner of Afghanistan, offering a model in a country where official corruption and a Taliban insurgency have frustrated many large-scale development efforts.
Since arriving in Afghanistan in 2001, the United States and its Western allies have spent billions of dollars on development projects, but to less effect and popular support than many had hoped for.
Much of that money was funneled through the central government, which has been increasingly criticized as incompetent and corrupt. Even more has gone to private contractors hired by the United States who siphon off almost half of every dollar to pay the salaries of expatriate workers and other overhead costs.
Not so here in Jurm, a valley in the windswept mountainous province of Badakhshan, in the northeast. People here have taken charge for themselves — using village councils and direct grants as part of an initiative called the National Solidarity Program, introduced by an Afghan ministry in 2003.
Before then, this valley had no electricity or clean water, its main crop was poppy and nearly one in 10 women died in childbirth, one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
Today, many people have water taps, fields grow wheat and it is no longer considered shameful for a woman to go to a doctor.
If there are lessons to be drawn from the still tentative successes here, they are that small projects often work best, that the consent and participation of local people are essential and that even baby steps take years.
The issues are not academic. Bringing development to Afghans is an important part of a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at drawing people away from the Taliban and building popular support for the Western-backed government by showing that it can make a difference in people’s lives.
“We ignored the people in districts and villages,” said Jelani Popal, who runs a state agency that appoints governors. “This caused a lot of indifference. ‘Why should I side with the government if it doesn’t even exist in my life?’ ”
Jurm was tormented by warlords in the 1990s, and though it never fell to the Taliban, the presence of the central government, even today, is barely felt. The idea to change that was simple: people elected the most trusted villagers, and the government in Kabul, helped by foreign donors, gave them direct grants — money to build things like water systems and girls’ schools for themselves.
Local residents contend that the councils work because they take development down to its most basic level, with villagers directing the spending to improve their own lives, cutting out middle men, local and foreign, as well as much of the overhead costs and corruption.
“You don’t steal from yourself,” was how Ataullah, a farmer in Jurm who uses one name, described it.
The grants were small, often less than $100,000. The plan’s overall effectiveness is still being assessed by academics and American and Afghan officials, but the idea has already been replicated in thousands of villages across the country.
Anecdotal accounts point to some success. There have even been savings. When villages in the Jurm Valley wanted running water, for instance, they did much of the work themselves, with help from an engineer. A private contractor with links to a local politician had asked triple the price. (The villagers declined.)
Even such modest steps have not come easily. Jurm presented many obstacles, and it took a development group with determined local employees to jump-start the work here.
One basic problem was literacy, said Ghulam Dekan, a local worker with the Aga Khan Development Network, the nonprofit group that supports the councils here.
Unlike the situation in Iraq, which has a literacy rate of more than 70 percent, fewer than a third of Afghans can read, making the work of the councils painfully slow. Villagers were suspicious of projects, believing that the people in the groups that introduced them were Christian missionaries.
“They didn’t understand the importance of a road,” Mr. Dekan said.
Most projects, no matter how simple, took five years. Years of war had smashed Afghan society into rancorous bits, making it difficult to resist efforts by warlords to muscle in on projects.
“They said, ‘For God’s sake, we can’t do this, we don’t have the capability,’ ” Mr. Dekan said. “We taught them to have confidence.”
Muhamed Azghari, an Aga Khan employee, spent more than a year trying to persuade a mullah to allow a girls’ school. His tactic: sitting lower than the man, a sign of deference, and praising his leadership. He paid for the man to visit other villages to see what other councils had accomplished.
“Ten times we fought, two times we laughed,” Mr. Dekan said, using the Afghan equivalent of “two steps forward, one step back.”
When it came to women, villagers were adamant.
But forcing conditions would have violated a basic principle of the approach: never start a project that is not backed by all members of the community, or it will fail.
“People have to be mentally ready,” said Akhtar Iqbal, Aga Khan’s director in Badakhshan. If they are not, the school or clinic will languish unused, a frequent problem with large-scale development efforts.
Five years later, the village of Fargamanch has women’s literacy classes and a girls’ high school. Over all, girls’ enrollment in Badakhshan is up by 65 percent since 2004, according to the Ministry of Education. The number of trained midwives has quadrupled.
Health has also improved. Now, 3,270 families have taps for clean drinking water near their homes, reducing waterborne diseases.
The councils are also a check on corruption. When 200 bags of wheat mysteriously disappeared from the local government this year, council members demanded they be returned. (They were.)
When a minister’s aide cashed a check meant for a transformer, Mr. Ataullah spent a week tracking down a copy. (The aide was fired.)
“The government doesn’t like us anymore,” Mr. Azghari said, laughing. “They want the old system back.”
While Badakhshan’s changes are fragile, the forces of modernization are growing. Televisions have begun to broadcast the outside world into villages. Phone networks cover more than 80 percent of the province, triple what the figure was in 2001.
Perhaps most important, Afghans are tired of war, and seeing the benefits of a decade of peace might be enough to encourage new kinds of decisions.
Ghulam Mohaiuddin, a farmer, seethes when he remembers the past.
“The jihad was useless,” he said, sitting cross-legged in his mud-walled house.
Suddenly, a loud blast went off, startling his guests. He laughed. It was the sound of canal construction, not a bomb.
“Now we’ve put down our weapons and started building,” he said, smiling.
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world ... 3jurm.html
November 13, 2009
Afghan Enclave Seen as Model to Rebuild, and Rebuff Taliban
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
JURM, Afghanistan — Small grants given directly to villagers have brought about modest but important changes in this corner of Afghanistan, offering a model in a country where official corruption and a Taliban insurgency have frustrated many large-scale development efforts.
Since arriving in Afghanistan in 2001, the United States and its Western allies have spent billions of dollars on development projects, but to less effect and popular support than many had hoped for.
Much of that money was funneled through the central government, which has been increasingly criticized as incompetent and corrupt. Even more has gone to private contractors hired by the United States who siphon off almost half of every dollar to pay the salaries of expatriate workers and other overhead costs.
Not so here in Jurm, a valley in the windswept mountainous province of Badakhshan, in the northeast. People here have taken charge for themselves — using village councils and direct grants as part of an initiative called the National Solidarity Program, introduced by an Afghan ministry in 2003.
Before then, this valley had no electricity or clean water, its main crop was poppy and nearly one in 10 women died in childbirth, one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
Today, many people have water taps, fields grow wheat and it is no longer considered shameful for a woman to go to a doctor.
If there are lessons to be drawn from the still tentative successes here, they are that small projects often work best, that the consent and participation of local people are essential and that even baby steps take years.
The issues are not academic. Bringing development to Afghans is an important part of a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at drawing people away from the Taliban and building popular support for the Western-backed government by showing that it can make a difference in people’s lives.
“We ignored the people in districts and villages,” said Jelani Popal, who runs a state agency that appoints governors. “This caused a lot of indifference. ‘Why should I side with the government if it doesn’t even exist in my life?’ ”
Jurm was tormented by warlords in the 1990s, and though it never fell to the Taliban, the presence of the central government, even today, is barely felt. The idea to change that was simple: people elected the most trusted villagers, and the government in Kabul, helped by foreign donors, gave them direct grants — money to build things like water systems and girls’ schools for themselves.
Local residents contend that the councils work because they take development down to its most basic level, with villagers directing the spending to improve their own lives, cutting out middle men, local and foreign, as well as much of the overhead costs and corruption.
“You don’t steal from yourself,” was how Ataullah, a farmer in Jurm who uses one name, described it.
The grants were small, often less than $100,000. The plan’s overall effectiveness is still being assessed by academics and American and Afghan officials, but the idea has already been replicated in thousands of villages across the country.
Anecdotal accounts point to some success. There have even been savings. When villages in the Jurm Valley wanted running water, for instance, they did much of the work themselves, with help from an engineer. A private contractor with links to a local politician had asked triple the price. (The villagers declined.)
Even such modest steps have not come easily. Jurm presented many obstacles, and it took a development group with determined local employees to jump-start the work here.
One basic problem was literacy, said Ghulam Dekan, a local worker with the Aga Khan Development Network, the nonprofit group that supports the councils here.
Unlike the situation in Iraq, which has a literacy rate of more than 70 percent, fewer than a third of Afghans can read, making the work of the councils painfully slow. Villagers were suspicious of projects, believing that the people in the groups that introduced them were Christian missionaries.
“They didn’t understand the importance of a road,” Mr. Dekan said.
Most projects, no matter how simple, took five years. Years of war had smashed Afghan society into rancorous bits, making it difficult to resist efforts by warlords to muscle in on projects.
“They said, ‘For God’s sake, we can’t do this, we don’t have the capability,’ ” Mr. Dekan said. “We taught them to have confidence.”
Muhamed Azghari, an Aga Khan employee, spent more than a year trying to persuade a mullah to allow a girls’ school. His tactic: sitting lower than the man, a sign of deference, and praising his leadership. He paid for the man to visit other villages to see what other councils had accomplished.
“Ten times we fought, two times we laughed,” Mr. Dekan said, using the Afghan equivalent of “two steps forward, one step back.”
When it came to women, villagers were adamant.
But forcing conditions would have violated a basic principle of the approach: never start a project that is not backed by all members of the community, or it will fail.
“People have to be mentally ready,” said Akhtar Iqbal, Aga Khan’s director in Badakhshan. If they are not, the school or clinic will languish unused, a frequent problem with large-scale development efforts.
Five years later, the village of Fargamanch has women’s literacy classes and a girls’ high school. Over all, girls’ enrollment in Badakhshan is up by 65 percent since 2004, according to the Ministry of Education. The number of trained midwives has quadrupled.
Health has also improved. Now, 3,270 families have taps for clean drinking water near their homes, reducing waterborne diseases.
The councils are also a check on corruption. When 200 bags of wheat mysteriously disappeared from the local government this year, council members demanded they be returned. (They were.)
When a minister’s aide cashed a check meant for a transformer, Mr. Ataullah spent a week tracking down a copy. (The aide was fired.)
“The government doesn’t like us anymore,” Mr. Azghari said, laughing. “They want the old system back.”
While Badakhshan’s changes are fragile, the forces of modernization are growing. Televisions have begun to broadcast the outside world into villages. Phone networks cover more than 80 percent of the province, triple what the figure was in 2001.
Perhaps most important, Afghans are tired of war, and seeing the benefits of a decade of peace might be enough to encourage new kinds of decisions.
Ghulam Mohaiuddin, a farmer, seethes when he remembers the past.
“The jihad was useless,” he said, sitting cross-legged in his mud-walled house.
Suddenly, a loud blast went off, startling his guests. He laughed. It was the sound of canal construction, not a bomb.
“Now we’ve put down our weapons and started building,” he said, smiling.
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.