Away from the quick fix...

Excellent op-ed on narcotics today by Crisis Group's Nick Grono and Joanna Nathan. They succinctly rebut black and white solutions to the drug problem (large-scale eradication and regulated legalization) and suggest some wiser measures:

1. Target the 20-25 top traffickers with extradition and asset seizures.
2. Destroy labs and warehouses (ANA backed by NATO).
3. Cooperate with Iran and Pakistan to shut down middlemen operating on their terrain.
4. Focus alternative livelihood programs on areas before they produce poppy in order to inoculate farmers to its influence.

Skeptics might argue that these steps are difficult to implement with the current levels of corruption, or that they require of politicians an unrealistic embrace of moral ambiguity and long time horizons. I don't think Grono and Nathan would disagree, but they remind us that "it is much easier to say what won't work than what will."

"The challenge," they write, "will be to keep (politicians) focused on smart courses of action that yield long-term results – and away from superficially "easy" policies that end up backfiring." We should do what we can to help make these arguments.

Four steps to reduce civilian casualties

Today Rick Inderfurth has a piece today arguing that civilian casualties are "rising to the top of the list" of woes in Afghanistan and setting out four steps to reduce them. Let's take a look:

First, the and NATO should publicly adopt the goal of "zero innocent civilian casualties," as recommended a year ago by retired General Barry McCaffrey...to accomplish this, military tactics must change to limit casualties even where this means, in McCaffrey's words, "Taliban units escape destruction by hiding among the people."

So this would essentially be an oath to 'first do no harm'...Such a declaration would be valuable, as long as it was actually observed.

Easier said than done--especially since the current command would tell you they are doing everything possible to avoid civilian deaths. It's clearly not working. McCaffrey, in a June memo (worth reading in its entirety), has some insights into how this approach might be operationalized:

Away until Tuesday...

I'm out of the office, but will resume posting on Tues...a good memorial day weekend to all.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous

Check out “Narcotecture in Herat,” Monocle’s excellent narrated slideshow of the gaudy mansions blooming in Herat. Journalist Rachel Morarjee (better known for her work at the Financial Times) accompanies photographer Ash Sweeting inside some of these lavish shrines built on opium. It’s not pretty...

A premise of the piece is that “Herat’s past glories are slowly being erased by new fortunes,” and they speak with groups like Agha Khan who are “waging a losing battle to prevent the city’s heritage being bulldozed to make way for acres of glass and candy colored mansions.” Unfortunately, the piece doesn’t offer many details about what specifically is being destroyed, and my sense was that these mansions--objectionable as they might be--don’t necessarily threaten Herat’s cultural heritage.

The conclusions asks “whether the rest of the city’s heritage survives the outbreak of peace and prosperity the way that it outlasted three decades of war remains to be seen”…clever, but more than a bit cynical. Whatever aesthetic or moral objections it might provoke, the construction boom comprises roughly half of Afghanistan’s economic growth and has a multiplier effect which helps a lot of ordinary Afghans. Even with many of the funds are leaving the country, as Sweeting keenly observes with a shot of a “Made in China” tag on a bouquet of plastic flowers, and even with impunity and growing inequity, I imagine few Heratis would wish to end their recent peace and prosperity.

Nevertheless, these words and images are striking, and give us a glimpse at an under told story of the new Afghanistan.

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Photos: Ash Sweeting, Monocle (c).

Cohen and Barton: Alternatives to Musharraf

Today Craig Cohen and Rick Barton of CSIS argue, in a Washington Post op-ed, that alternatives to Musharraf exist, and "the United States must put itself on the side of the Pakistani people before it finds itself overtaken by events":

Pakistan’s four provinces are larger in population and size than many European countries. Rather than threatening aid cut offs to Pakistan, the United States should maintain current levels, but reward provincial, city and local governments, opposition parties and civil society organizations that share our long-term objectives in Pakistan.

Rather than bemoan that Musharraf is America’s only alternative, we should start contributing to the development of new leaders across the country.

In particular, they recommend we triple our investment in education, which currently only accounts for 2.54% of US assistance to Islamabad.

Farah: Iraq offers bigger bang for the buck...

Douglas Farah has an interesting post related to the LA Times piece...

Guess what? There is an Iraq/al Qaeda link

Last year, the CIA boosted its presence in Pakistan and Aghanistan to ~50 clandestine operatives in order to track down HVT1 and HVT2 (aka high-value targets one and two, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahri.) While the intel surge hasn’t produced any substantiated leads ("We're not any closer" said a military official on the brief), the CIA recently identified a pernicious trend that is not without irony: al Qaeda’s operations, once starved for cash after 9/11, are being kept afloat by cash flowing out of Iraq.

To summarize: the administration said we needed to go into Iraq because Saddam had connections to al Qaeda. While it turns out that this link was fallacious, post-Saddam Iraq is now the engine that keeps al Qaeda’s operations awash in cash, recruits and technical training.

Greg Miller writes today in the LA Times that Iraq has become AQ’s “most profitable franchise”:

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S.officials said that al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as from kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity. He suggests that Musharraf’s deal with “tribal leaders” has facilitated flows from Iraq and has “made travel easier for operatives migrating to Pakistan after taking part in the insurgency in Iraq. Some of those veterans are leading training at newly established camps and are positioned to become the 'next generation of leadership' in the organization, said the former senior CIA official.”

Miller’s article is well worth a read. MORE

Karzai's tightrope act...

President Karzai, visiting Shindand district (near the Iranian border), had to walk a fine line in a speech that followed a series of civilian deaths at the hands of international forces. Karzai criticized the tactics of these forces--even as he argued the need to their continued presence. (In a separate interview with
Pakistan television he said "Foreign troops would not leave till Al Qaeda, which is active in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is wiped out, and this may take two or three years or more.") He criticized the Taliban for targeting civilians even while saying that crimes committed by genuine Afghan Taliban (as opposed to foreign jihadists) were forgivable, and even as he urged Mullah Omar to join him in talks.

Karzai is put in an exceedingly difficult position by the recent civilian deaths. He has long called for restraint in air-strikes and search and seizure tactics, but it’s clear that international forces will do what they see fit regardless of his protests. The president assured the crowd in Shindand that it would not happen again, but does anyone believe he can really deliver on this promise?

Did someone pull Dadullah's leg?

If true, it's one of the stranger twists in the "war on terrorism"...

Newspaper: US Spy hid Dadullah's artificial leg during NATO attack Islamabad, May 17 (Deutsche Presse-Agentur): The Taliban have arrested an aide to Mullah Dadullah who allegedly not only provided information to US forces that led to the militant commander's death in Afghanistan but also hid his artificial leg as troops closed in, a Pakistani newspaper said Thursday.

'We have captured Din Mohammed, an American spy who played a key role in trapping Mullah Dadullah,' an unnamed Taliban commander told Pakistan's The News in a telephone interview...'When American and Afghan army forces attacked the house, Dadullah was searching for his leg while his men started fighting,' the Taliban commander told the newspaper...

In Kandahar, the fallout from Dadullah's death came in the form of two attacks, a coordinated roadside bombing and a suicide attack on Asadullah Khalid, the governor of Kandahar province. According to one report, Khalid was probably singled out because he  was seen as "gloating" over Dadullah's corpse (which had been exhibited to the media and buried without ceremony rather than being returned to his family.)

Khalid was not hurt, but three men were killed and seven injured; his response: "After Dadullah's death, the Taliban have become quite reactionary and desperately emotional."

Mullah Dadullah's death confirmed

The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base reports this morning that "Forensic evidence has confirmed that Mullah Dadullah has been killed in a skirmish with Afghan troops fighting alongside British and American special forces. Authorities were hesitant to announce Dadullah’s death as it had been erroneously reported several times previously.... Unidentified sources in the Taliban report that Mullah Omar has already begun to search for a replacement."

Dadullah was the insurgency's top field commander and orchestrated a shift in Taliban tactics toward suicide attacks and beheadings. The Taliban has lost several senior commanders in the past six months, but it is not clear the toll it is taking on the organization's operations. According to Afghan intelligence, three of the Taliban leaders freed in March in a prisoner swap for Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo (Mullah Shah Mansoor, Dadullah’s brother, Mullah Hamdullah and Commander Ghafar) were also killed.

Coming soon...

This past week I've been consumed by this nuclear volume that I'm editing. It's now wrapping, which means I can return to posting tomorrow.

Monday and Tuesday I attended a conference in New York on promoting coherence between counternarcotics and peace-building  with a focus on Columbia and Afghanistan. It was sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Fundacion Ideas Para La Paz, and the NYU's Center on International Cooperation, organizations that are willing to think outside of the standard policy strictures. While the proceedings were off the record, there were some great discussions and insights, and I'll be sharing my thoughts on these issues in the coming days...

Civilian toll: 90 in two weeks

Even as US forces apologized and paid reparations yesterday for the wrongful deaths of 19 civilians a month ago, reports have come in that 21 more civilians were killed in a NATO airstrike last night. Reuters notes that the incident "brings to nearly 90 the number of civilian deaths blamed by Afghan officials on Western troops in the past two weeks". Public support for international counterinsurgency operations is shrinking.

NATO has announced its intent to change its operations to minimize civilian casualties (why the inquiry took so long to initiate is anyone's guess). The answer must include less reliance on air strikes, but what else, specifically, can be done if the military objectives remain unchanged?

Governor: Air raid kills 21 civilians in Afghanistan
KANDAHAR, May 9, (Reuters)     By Ismail Sameen: An air strike by Western forces killed 21 civilians, including women and children, in Afghanistan, a provincial governor said on Wednesday, the latest in a string of civilian casualties that has riled Afghans. MORE

A new tactic from the 'think tank' of paramilitaries?

Michael-Shtender Auerbach, associate director of Century's Prospects for Peace middle east initiative, writes here on a development that has been off-the-radar: the recent use of aerial tactics by the Tamil Tigers, a militant secular secessionist movement notorious for its innovativeness (until recently, the Tigers were responsible, by a wide margin, for more suicide bombings than any other terrorist organization.)

Why should the coalition take note? Auerbach warns that an IISS study has found "commercial links between the LTTE, Al Qaeda, and militants in Afghanistan."

If this is any indication of the LTTE influence, the possibility for future use of aerial assaults from insurgents in Iraq to Al Qaeda linked groups in Morocco and Pakistan to Palestinian militants in the occupied territories to Hezbollah in Lebanon-– are all but certain to follow.

Even without similarities in ideology or sympathies, the LTTE inadvertently "acts as a 'think tank' for terrorists worldwide; constantly inventing new tactics that are so devastatingly effective, groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Shining Path, and Chechen fighters are eager to integrate them into their organizations."

From the use of female suicide bombers (made famous with the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi in 1991) to the deployment of suicidal naval units - the Tigers are always on the cutting edge of the advancement of non-state terror and are, in fact, the only terrorist organization that has land, sea and air capabilities...

Auerbach's article is well worth a read, and available below...MORE

Photos: Al Jazeera

Big price tag, inconsistent results

The NY Times today has a good account of Afghanistan's inconsistent troop training. Some skepticism is in order: each of the past four years we've heard that the armed forces are getting better, receiving more equipment, more professional training, etc. Training security forces is the centerpiece of the Administrations Afghanistan request this year, and will cost $9.3 billion over the next two years, dwarfing the rest of the reconstruction budget. But are we really making progress? Is this spending better diversified?

The number of soldiers in the ANA has basically flat-lined even as the various insurgents appear more numerous and more capable. More troubling is the question of allegiances, which has always lay at the heart of this venture. The push for national unity, which had great momentum a couple years ago, is running out of steam, and this has profound implications. Case in point: Iraq-- billions spent on training has been at best ineffectual, and at worst counterproductive, as the country descends into factional fighting.

Afghanistan faces a similar risk. One Dutch officer interviewed notes that the Afghan soldiers "just have their own islands, and protect their families, and protect their villages, and that is it.”  Security forces without political accountability, to paraphrase Barney Rubin, are just men with guns.

The Times also highlights another structural problem, one which I had not encountered before:

"In a Western unit, several noncommissioned officers would be leading small teams within a unit of similar size. Afghan and American officers said the absence of this core of enlisted leadership had stemmed from high rates of illiteracy and the enduring influence of the Soviet Union’s training of its own Afghan proxies, which emphasized centralized leadership."

Am I being too pessimistic?

Some excerpts from the article follow...MORE

Asleep at the switch?

Apologies for the lack of new content--I've been focused the past couple weeks on the other half of my obligations at the Century Foundation (I also write on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament issues.) You can read my latest piece (co-written with Joe Cirincione) here and check out the findings from our conference here.  I promise some fresh material tomorrow.