The Compulsive Explainer

The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan

Foreign Affairs: the Soviet victory that never was

I am not a big fan of Foreign Affairs, but this article is reasonable and informative. The bottom line, in case you are to busy to read it, is that they doubt Obama's approach will work - simply because he doesn't understand the situation or its history.
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The initial stability of Najibullah’s government suggests that Afghans will assume responsibility for the fate of their government when the foreign footprint in their country has been sharply reduced -- but only if an outside patron is prepared to supply and equip Afghan forces. The central government in Kabul is strengthened when it sends gifts to the provinces rather than collecting taxes from them. But someone has to pay for this. The United Kingdom lavished resources on India in the nineteenth century; the Soviet Union sent billions of rubles to Afghanistan. Is Washington prepared to play such a role today?
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The United States, then, must ask itself some hard questions. Is Afghan President Hamid Karzai another Babrak Karmal, who was the Soviet Union’s initial preference as Afghanistan’s leader but who was unable to build a self-supporting regime that permitted his foreign benefactors to go home? Recent statements from Karzai suggesting that Afghanistan will need another five years to take over security and another 15 years of U.S. assistance will not inspire much confidence among U.S. policymakers.

It remains unclear whether the current Afghan government can find a Pashtun leader who enjoys enough credibility among the country’s non-Pashtuns in order to set up a durable central government. Karzai’s delay in naming a new cabinet is worrying. Although the Obama administration is hoping for the best, it needs to ask if it has its own Najibullah waiting in the wings. If so, now would be a good time for him to step forward.

A Contractor Army in Afganistan

Human Race and Other Sports

As of March 2009 there were approximately 70,000 private contractors working in Afghanistan whereas there were only 48,000 U.S soldiers in that country. According to a Congressional Research Study, the ratio of contractors to soldiers is the highest it’s been in any conflict in the history of the United States.

I have no objection to the use of mercenaries, they might be cheaper - although with outfits like Blackwater that is doubtful. But they should be kept under control - which these goons are not.

TomDispatch, as usual, has many more details, but they add up to one thing: we are being lied to by some skilled liars.

The Battle to Save America has been Lost

I said from the very beginning that the Iraq War was not about Iraq, but about America. Americans love war so much they can be easily convinced that another war is just what they need - and that a continual state of war is what defines America.

The result is the Long War, previously labeled the War Against Terror - or in reality: the War Against Evil - which can hardly be distinguished from the Crusades. We have returned to the Middle Ages and its holy wars. And to a medieval morality and economy. 

What we could have done was build an economy based on cooperation and innovation. What we actually did was fight the Cold War, from which we have never recovered. We have focused on war so much, we can think of nothing else. 

The Long War has become a war against The People, who no longer dare show their faces. 

With these pleasant thoughts in mind, I was interested in this article in Tomgram: Meet the Commanded-in-Chief by Tom Englehardt:
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Victory at Last!

It’s been a long time coming, but finally American war commanders have effectively marshaled their forces, netcentrically outmaneuvering and outflanking the enemy.  They have shocked-and-awed their opponents, won the necessary hearts-and-minds, and so, for the first time in at least two decades, stand at the heights of success, triumphant at last. 

And no, I’m not talking about post-surge Iraq and certainly not about devolving Afghanistan.  I’m talking about what’s happening in Washington.

You may not think so, but on Tuesday night from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered. 

And give credit to the victors.  Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant.  Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot. 

The Real Situation in Afghanistan

This can be summarized easily: a total mess - which is not surprising, since it has been devastated by war for decades. Back in the Seventies, when I was a traveler in South-East Asia,  Afghanistan was a favorite place for low-budget travelers. The people treated you wonderfully. The women had to cover themselves up, but they felt secure and stayed for long periods. None of this is left, the country has been taken over by the warlords, who are criminals of the worst sort - who were put in power by the Americans to combat the Taliban. As result, Afghan society has been devastated.

The Dec. Harper's Magazine has an article The Master of Spin Moldak: undercover with Afghanistan's drug-trafficing border police. The writer is a Canadian free-lance journalist who is befriended in Pakistan by some local young Afghan men with good connections back home. They take him across the border and show him around (while showing off their new friend to their old friends). I can relate, this happened to me in Turkey once; in the undeveloped world people like to show of their friends from the outside world, and this gives you a fantastic opportunity to see the people as they are.

The article is long, and I will only share the ending, where he meets the master of Spin Boldak, Colonel Abdul Razik. The Colonel's grandmother had just died and he had shown up for her funeral:
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At last, Samiullah took me by the hand and, picking our way through the seated congregation, we approached the dais. As we got closer, I became aware of a young man sitting amid the whitebeards and knew immediately that this was Colonel Razik. The elders made space for me, and I got down on the dais. “This is Matthieu. He is a Canadian guest,” said Samiullah.

Razik and I contemplated each other for a moment. He looked even younger than his thirty years and had a boyishly handsome, guileless face with a square jaw and clear eyes. It was not at all the face of a fire-breathing warlord. A tuft of short hair poked out from under his hat in what was nearly a widow’s peak. He was dressed simply, in a white cotton shalwar kameez and a gray pinstriped waistcoat. Only his full mouth, with its crop of slightly crooked, strong-looking teeth, gave any hint of his great vigor and violence.

Pausing in his conversation, Razik greeted me with a reserved tone, and we shook hands. I told him I was a friend of Sikander’s, and he said I was welcome here. I thanked him for his men’s hospitality.
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Military officers like General Vance find themselves in a peculiar fix when confronted with characters like Abdul Razik. These entrenched figures hold posts or wear uniforms whose legitimacy must be respected. But many of those who maintain their power through corruption and coercion were originally installed by the U.S. military—a fact not lost on Afghans, who tend to have longer memories than Westerners here on nine- or twelve-month rotations.

I asked General Vance if he was aware that Razik was directly involved in the drug trade. “Yes,” he said. “We are completely aware that there are a number of illicit activities being run out of that border station.” He had few illusions about Razik, with whom he interacts directly. “He runs effective security ops that are designed to make sure that the business end of his life runs smoothly, and there is a collateral effect on public order,” he told me. “Ideally, it should be the other way around. The tragedy of Kandahar is that it’s hard to find that paragon of civic virtue.

”Indeed, honest people in Afghanistan don’t often occupy the halls of power, and they don’t usually have the resources to be the first in line for big development contracts. Should one’s security restrictions allow one to stroll the streets, however, one will find them there, pushing carts of vegetables, positively begging strangers to join them for a cup of tea that might cost them half their day’s salary. If one looks a little harder, one will find them in crumbling little homes in a poor area on the edge of town: places of exile, to which honest men have been marginalized either by force or by choice. In other cases—such as that of Malalai Kakar, Kandahar’s top female police officer, who was shot in September of last year by unknown assailants, or that of Alim Hanif, chief judge of the new Central Narcotics Tribunals Appeals Court, killed outside his house in Kabul by masked men—the honest Afghans will be found in the cemetery.

As for Razik, he remains alive and very much the master of the borderlands. Occasionally, outside forces will annoy him: in July, CNPA teams, working with DEA mentors, raided two caches of hashish in Razik’s territory, arresting one of his commanders in the process. But Razik is hardly at odds with his government. After the first round of national elections closed on August 20, his men forcibly took Spin Boldak’s ballot boxes into his house for “safekeeping” overnight. It was just one of the many reports of electoral fraud in Kandahar Province, which polled overwhelmingly for President Karzai, according to the independent Election Commision of Afghanistan. The count from Spin Boldak’s polling stations: Karzai, 8,341; his main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, 4.

The Taliban

Open Security 24 November

Now that our fearless leader has decided to intensify the conflict in Afghanistan, perhaps we should know more about the Taliban, our latest enemy. I have condensed this article, and learned something in the process. But I have time, and most Americans do not. They are flying blind - with the usual consequences.

Reading this summary, and taking the time to understand it, will take you maybe 15 minutes - but that is 12 minutes more than most Americans can handle.

Rahimullah Yousufzai, the well-known Peshawar editor of The News International, has been covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for the past thirty years.

The Taliban are an inward looking group. They are indigenous and they have been consistently saying and proving that they are only concerned about Afghanistan.

The Taliban's links with al Qaeda have grown over the years, since they have been fighting together for long. They have fought a common enemy in a common trench, given blood to each other; so now the bonds are much stronger.

The Taliban emerged in the autumn of 1994. I was the first one to go to Kandahar and tell the world about the Taliban. In fact I was there in Kabul immediately after Najibullah [the Soviet -backed president who had taken shelter in a UN compound prior to his execution by the Taliban], was hanged. I did not see the execution but I saw their bodies hanging from the electricity pole.

The Taliban were able to stop lawlessness in a very short time. During the rule of the Mujahideen, there were about 42 check posts between Chaman (border town in Balochistan) and Kandahar. Under the Taliban there were only three. The security was excellent. I traveled at night and nothing happened. Under the Mujahideen robberies were common. They brought peace after so many years of war. I was there when the Taliban came to power. The people welcomed them since they were tired of the excesses of the Mujahideen.

They ended drug trafficking. They did it with very few resources, no international help and no alternative crops for the farmers. They simply issued a decree banning poppy. And look now; it is feeding the insurgency and has increased manifolds under the watch of the Americans and their allies. And today, it's not only the Taliban which is benefiting from narcotics trade but others in power also have a share in it.

The Taliban's biggest criticism was that the fighting never ended. The Taliban in due course of time became like any other armed group. They were unable to transform themselves from an armed group into a political organization. So the Taliban became another armed faction which wanted power at all costs, especially since they were in war with the Northern Alliance. They never held any peace talks. They wanted to rule alone, there was no effort made to forge alliances. They really never had any socio-economic policies to improve the life of the people.

The belief that the Taliban were a Pakistani creation is not true, although eventually there were contacts. Pakistan asked the Taliban not to bomb Bamiyan Buddha, they refused. Pakistan asked them to hand over Osama Bin Laden, they refused. Pakistan asked Taliban to hand over Pakistani criminals and militants who had taken refuge in Afghanistan and some of them were with the Taliban, they refused to hand over even one Pakistani.

When the Americans wanted to defeat the Taliban initially, they sided with the wrong people, they befriended these warlords. The same warlords who were defeated by the Taliban were brought back to power. These warlords were hated, that's one reason why the people turned against the government in the first place.

The Americans are faltering. They have lost the way; they do not know what to do. They are moving from one disaster to another. Obama came up with a new policy when he came to power. He inserted 21000 new troops and changed the commander. He also started focusing more on Pakistan. Now they are doing another review since the first policy has obviously failed. Now the second review is going on. The Americans are actually trying to extradite themselves from the problem. The memories of Vietnam are still fresh, that is the problem. Obama has been asked for 40,000 more troops, which is going to push Obama deeper into the Afghan problem. Afghanistan is known as a graveyard of empires for a reason.

How do you do a hearts-and-minds policy with people in uniform. And that too with foreign troops! The foreign presence is not liked- the way they behave, their cultural and religious ignorance. The way they carry out their search operations, the way they bomb people which cause civilian casualties-- all cause deep resentment. It's too late.

Hearts and minds means that you go out of your camps and heavily-guarded fortresses and you interact with the locals on a very regular basis. You ask them for their problems and help them with money and other assistance. But they can't go out like that, wherever they go, the roads are mined. Children have been taught how to explode the bombs; IEDs are planted by the Taliban and the remote is given to a child and when they see the vehicle coming, they push the trigger.

What they can do is perhaps to buy some people. Which I think is the new policy-- 'to buy' the insurgents. The Americans have come up with a very insulting term ? 'ten dollar a month Taliban'-- the notion that 10-15 percent are committed Taliban and the rest are fighting for money.

The Taliban is spreading in Pakistan largely because the army is using heavy weapons against the people.

America Punishes it Enemies - Whether They are its Enemies or Not

This makes perfect sense to Americans. After all, they are in charge of the world, and they get to decide who is good and who is bad - and to act accordingly. Their greatest fear is to be seen as weak, and their strongest impulse, therefore, is to make people fear them. They want others, especially small, weak countries, to treat them as gods - but for some reason they don't want to do this.

Right now, for example, the Taliban is considered an enemy of America - very flattering for the Taliban, who were put in power by America, during its conflict with the USSR - and who have no power outside Afghanistan and Pakistan - and no plan to destroy America itself. It just wants complete control over its own area - in other words, self-determination. These are not very nice people, by any standards - but hardly a threat to the world, or to America.

It has always opposed the opium trade: successfully, when it was in power - while America's allies, the local warlords, have profited mightily by it. True, it has modified this policy, because of extreme pressure from the American military, and now only taxes these warlords - but that is only an temporary expedient.

Meanwhile, the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan suffer - both from the Taliban and from American missiles. But this is only collateral damage, and not important. America is destroying its enemies, and that is all that matters.

A Common-Sense Attitude Towards Terrorism

From Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram

Bruce Schneier is a security guru, a real one. And he has been pointing out, over and over, that we need to use some common sense when dealing with terrorism, and not become obsessed with counter-terrorism theater. 

Real counter-terrorism work, however is ordinary police work, and most of it is boring, routine stuff. Unfortunately, Americans have become addicted to drama and spectacles - and uninterested in plain facts. Banking, for example, used to be boring until it discovered how to be wildly profitable and therefore dramatic. And the Bush administration made the War on Terror dramatic too. But I am digressing. Schneier says:
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Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling.
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We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice -- not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer. Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

Supporting real security even though it's invisible, and demonstrating indomitability even though fear is more politically expedient, requires real courage. Demagoguery is easy. What we need is leaders willing both to do what's right and to speak the truth.

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.
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Today, we can project indomitability by rolling back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures. Our leaders have lost credibility; getting it back requires a decrease in hyperbole. Ditch the invasive mass surveillance systems and new police state-like powers. Return airport security to pre-9/11 levels. Remove swagger from our foreign policies. Show the world that our legal system is up to the challenge of terrorism. Stop telling people to report all suspicious activity; it does little but make us suspicious of each other, increasing both fear and helplessness.
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Counterterrorism is also hard, especially when we're psychologically prone to muck it up. Since 9/11, we've embarked on strategies of defending specific targets against specific tactics, overreacting to every terrorist video, stoking fear, demonizing ethnic groups, and treating the terrorists as if they were legitimate military opponents who could actually destroy a country or a way of life -- all of this plays into the hands of terrorists. We'd do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable. The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don't need to pretend otherwise.

Abdolkarim Soroush

From the New York Review

Grave, soft-spoken, the exiled Iranian religious scholar Abdolkarim Soroush is a living record of the Iranian revolution. As a fanatical young supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini, he helped purge Iran's universities of leftists and secularists in the early 1980s. Later, as a founder and editor of Kiyan, a monthly journal of religion and philosophy, he upset his orthodox revolutionary colleagues by arguing that Islamic law should be viewed as a product of its time, subject to alteration as society evolves. Soroush has since denounced Iran's system of government, what he calls its "republic of faith," as harmful both to Islam and to politics, an argument that led to his expulsion from Iranian academic life in 2000 and, more recently, an extended sojourn in Europe and the United States. Until this year, driving troublemakers abroad has been a useful and politically inexpensive way for the Islamic Republic to deal with dissent. Iranian history is full of people who lost their relevance after leaving Iran. But this, so far, has not happened to Soroush.
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Soroush's open letter was addressed to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and it conveyed an ironic awareness of their respective standing as religious authorities. Although Khamenei's supporters refer to him as a grand ayatollah, the highest rank in Shiism's clerical hierarchy, he is known among leading Shia religious scholars to be an indifferent theologian. Since he became Supreme Leader on Khomeini's death in 1989, Khamenei has favored a dry, severe interpretation of Islam—the interpretation favored by the conservative constituency he has courted, and which is rejected by Soroush, who is an authority on the thirteenth-century mystic poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi.

Business and War

"Why," I have been wondering, "does American business support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan?" We can safely assume it supports it because nothing happens without its approval - at least at the national level. Washington and Big Business are practically synonymous.

So I started thinking, and thinking about this was easy. What is the basic metaphor of business? War. What is the basic business of business? The exercise of power. And what is war?  Nothing but raw, ruthless power in action. The general outlook of business is compatible with that of war. 

War also takes money that is badly needed for social programs - something you would expect business to support since it is composed of people. However, this not quite true. Business may composed of the common people, but it is controlled by the ultra-rich - who have plenty of money to take care of themselves. They want this transfer of wealth to continue, and war helps that happen.

It is also true that war has been good for business, particularly the war business - at least in the US. I have to give Marx credit for pointing that out, although I fault him for other things.

Japan learned that war, in the long run, was not beneficial, and it has not forgotten that hard lesson. Iraq and Afghanistan have not forgotten that lesson either: that war is destructive, and they long to get back to peaceful times again - but America will not let them.

U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban

From the NY Times

WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.

United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.

In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the “joint integrated prioritized target list.” That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.

The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.

Currently, they said, there are about 50 major traffickers who contribute money to the Taliban on the list.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” one of the generals told the committee staff. The generals were not identified in the Senate report, which was obtained by The New York Times.
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How this can be done under international law is a mystery to me. The American military can decide who they want to kill - and then kill them without a legal review of any kind. This is exactly what I said in We Have the Right to Kill Whomever We Please. 

The article ends on this note:
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A major unresolved problem in the counternarcotics strategy is the fact that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains wide open, and the Pakistanis are doing little to close down drug smuggling routes.

A senior American law enforcement official in the region is quoted in the report as saying that cooperation with Pakistan on counternarcotics is so poor that traffickers cross the border with impunity.

“We give them leads on targets,” the official said in describing the Pakistani government’s counternarcotics tactics, adding, “We get smiles, a decent cup of tea, occasional reheated sandwiches and assertions of progress, and we all leave with smiles on our faces.”
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He could have said the same thing of Afghanistan's other borders. Drugs flow through them with impunity - as they always have done.

As they have done with America's own borders. Money talks, and drug raids only make drugs more profitable.