New Report on the ‘Forgotten War’

The European Council on Foreign Relations has a new report out calling for U.S. and European governments to “overhaul their strategies and strike a 'grand bargain' to stabilise the country.” Significantly, it urges enticing moderates into the fold of governance and legitimacy through money and other incentives.

There will be no stability in Afghanistan unless “moderate” insurgents embrace constitutionalism and enter democratic politics. Since the Bonn Agreement in the wake of the September 11th attacks, the coalition has supported the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, better known as the Northern Alliance, which brought together the main Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara groupings. For obvious reasons it had no significant links to the Pashtuns who make up 42% of Afghanistan’s population.22 After 2001, despite Karzai’s Pashtun background, Pashtun tribal leaders were largely excluded from government and have been ever since. Many have thus aligned themselves with the resurgent Taliban. The coalition and the Afghan government must work to convince them that they can pursue their interests democratically.

There have already been signs that this is at least possible. Though President Karzai’s overtures to reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar were rebuffed, the Taliban, while insisting on a number of conditions, have been receptive to the idea of negotiations as proposed within Karzai's "Peace Jirga". The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently gave his backing to these negotiations, again with conditions attached, but the US administration remains sceptical.

Political agreements - like the failed Musa Qala deal in 2006 overseen by the then ISAF commander, General David Richards – should aim to isolate the “hard-core”, many of whom are foreigners, from more moderate, indigenous groups. Such political agreements would also help avoid the violent tactics that may have won NATO military victories last year but cost vital public support because of high civilian casualties.

An effective policy in the short term would be to identify insurgent leaders willing to cut a deal. The coalition could then operate a system of “divide and rule”, whereby intransigent insurgents would see their erstwhile comrades rewarded with a package of financial and other incentives which add up to a better deal than that offered by the Taliban. (emphasis added by editor).

The report urges European governments to send more troops to Afghanistan, eliminate or reduce the national caveats on their troops, and reverse their “underperformance” by increasing reconstruction aid. On the flip side, the report pushes the U.S. to shift its combat strategy to a more political one and abandon its counter-narcotics plans of aerial spraying or buying up opium crops. It recommends the U.S. shift the onus of the problem onto traffickers and concentrate on arresting and prosecuting drug lords and their governmental supporters.

Bagram holds more than twice as many as Guantanamo

The secretive American detention center at Bagram base now holds more than twice as many prisoners as Guantanamo Bay, according to a New York Times report. Despite American efforts to shut down the base prison and transfer detainees to Afghan facilities and oversight, the number of prisoners has continued to grow as Guantanamo stopped taking in detainees.

The Afghan facility can only hold half the people that it was initially designed for, and construction has been slowed down by security and legal issues. Meanwhile human rights groups say treatment of detainees at Bagram, which was formerly abysmal culminating with the beating deaths of two detainees, has improved overall, but overcrowding complaints persist.

Overcoming the Obstacles to Establishing a Democratic State in Afghanistan

Col. Dennis Young of the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College adds to the chorus of voices urging the Bush administration to divert troops, effort and financial aid to Afghanistan. He also suggests five adjustments to current ISAF and U.S. strategies:

A roundup from December

Here’s a short news roundup of significant developments in or concerning Afghanistan from December:

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
The House approved the 2008 defense authorization bill, which in addition to providing $189.4 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, creates an office for a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and a bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting for more oversight of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The SIGAR is a much-needed agency to track down corruption and mismanagement in Afghanistan, much as its equivalent has done in Iraq. With this extra level of oversight and ensuring that reconstruction aid is invested properly, it will hopefully help get Afghan reconstruction back on track.

Brown's Plan for Afghanistan
UK prime minister Gordon Brown outlined his new plan for Afghanistan that included increasing aid by £450 million and tough benchmarks for Afghan security forces, encouraging Afghans to take responsibility for their own security.

Brown told MPs that aid would be given for "high impact" projects such as better roads, power supplies and clean water, as well as loans for small businesses and funding for civic groups and community development projects to improve local and national government.

You can read a transcript of Brown’s plan here. His emphasis on Afghans taking “ownership” and responsibility for their future and security is important.

In testimony before the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence on Dec. 10, RAND analyst Seth Jones explained the fast growth of the Afghan insurgency, thusly:

“The answer is simple,” one senior Afghan government official told me in October 2007. “The people are losing faith in the government. Our security forces cannot protect local villages, and our institutions struggle to deliver basic services.”

He testified that people are turning to the Taliban, not because they believe in extremism but because they are losing patience with the government’s inefficacy and corruption.

Indeed, the primary challenge in Afghanistan is one of governance. Governance includes the set of institutions by which authority in a country is exercised.11 It involves the government’s ability at the national or sub-national level to establish law and order, effectively manage resources, and implement sound policies. An insurgency reflects a process of alternative state building, where insurgents compete to provide governance to the population. Insurgents take advantage of weak governance and assume state-like functions. They tax and set up administrative structures for the population they control.

A Key Test for the Afghan National Army
The Afghan National Army seems to have proven itself in a key test last month – retaking the small dusty, but strategic toehold town of Musa Qala from the Taliban. Its symbolism was tied mainly to the fact that it was the only significant town controlled by the Taliban. As Guardian reporter Jason Burke put it, “For both sides, the struggle for the small country town represents in microcosm the battle for the country as a whole.”

But the offensive also spotlights the fact that despite its success, the Afghan National Army remains severely under-equipped and under-helped.

While U.S. officials cite the achievements of the Afghan military, the force has historically suffered from high attrition rates. It has also lacked sufficient military aid and trainers, and has been hobbled by old weaponry, Afghan defense officials say.

Video: Interview with Gen. McNeill, Rashid, MacDonald

Yesterday, the NewsHour with Jim Leherer ran a good segment on Afghanistan featuring commentary by Gen. Dan McNeill, Ahmed Rashid, and Norine MacDonald (from Senlis Council). The transcript, along with streaming video, is available here.

Center on Public Integrity updates its contractor database

The Center for Public Integrity has just updated its Windfalls of War report, an investigation of US contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The original report, published in 2003, won the George Polk Award for journalism. It took six months to complete and involved a research team of 20 (along with  73 Freedom of Information Requests!)

The updated report, which lists the top 100 contractors, has some striking findings:

• "U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown more than 50 percent annually, from $11 billion in 2004 to almost $17 billion in 2005 and more than $25 billion in 2006."
• "Iraq remains the clear priority of the U.S. government, the Center's research shows, with more than seven times as many contracting dollars designated for spending there as for Afghanistan."
• "Of the $13 billion awarded through cost-plus contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2004 to 2006, 30 percent was awarded through simple cost-plus, fixed-fee arrangements that offer no incentives for performance or cost savings."

The Center for Public Integrity website includes a search engine that crawls hundreds of budget documents, including reports, audits, testimony, project site inspections and correspondence. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively difficult to disaggregate spending in Afghanistan from that in Iraq in the current format (this is, in part, a function of the way many of these expenses are deliberately melded in budget documents.) I have contacted the folks at CPI, and will see if we can compile a list of the top contractors (and contracts) in Afghanistan.

Leaked map shows much of country a "no go"

A revealing map from the Times of London:

 The Times, Dec 5, Nick Meo in Kabul: Almost half of Afghanistan is now too dangerous for aid workers to operate in, a leaked UN map seen by The Times shows. In the past two years most foreign and Afghan staff have withdrawn from the southern half of the country, abandoning or scaling back development projects in rural areas and confining themselves to the cities or the less risky north....

The unpublished map, acquired by The Times in Kabul, is for UN staff and aid workers and illustrates risk levels across the nation. It shows a marked deterioration in security since 2005, when compared with a similar map from March of that year. Then only a strip along the Pakistan border and areas of mountainous Zabul and Uruzgan provinces in the south were too dangerous for aid workers. Now nearly all the ethnic Pashtun south and east is a no-go zone categorised as high or extreme risk and there are even pockets in the north of the country that are becoming dangerous for aid workers.

Assessing Afghanistan: NATO's 63 new metrics

Reuters reports yesterday that NATO has drawn up a "standardized system" of 63 metrics it will use to track progress in Afghanistan. U.S. Army Gen. John Craddock said that "I would submit to you that, to date, most of the assessments of progress have been against anecdotal information," or measured in terms of outputs such as schools built or roads paved. "All good things," he notes, "But the question in my mind is: What's the effect it's produced?" Were the roads blocked? Were the classrooms empty?

I find it more than a little bit troubling that NATO is only getting to this discussion six years in to the intervention. This sort of thinking should have been integrated from day one. In their defense, they probably had metrics, and are now revisiting them to make them meaningful.

It is, of course, a devilishly complicated undertaking. Which metrics to choose? How to weight one against another? And how to gather reliable data from the multitude of unverified sources that include donor countries, the UN, GOA, NGOs? Everyone is keeping score, but based on a different set of rules. Just thinking about it makes my head spin. I would love to see the 63 metrics NATO settled on, and hear how it plans to measure them (if anyone has insights on this, drop a line or a comment...)

NATO revamps measures of Afghan progress, by Andrew Gray (Reuters) 5 December 2007: WASHINGTON -- NATO has developed a standardized system for tracking progress in Afghanistan because the war so far has been judged largely using anecdotal evidence, the alliance's top commander said on Tuesday.

             

Competing with opium poppy?

Well, Afghanistan has finally found a crop that can compete with poppy...

Afghanistan Cannabis Crop Up 40 Percent, By RAHIM FAIEZ KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The fields of Balkh province in northern Afghanistan were free of opium poppies this year, a success touted often by Afghan and international officials. But one look at Mohammad Alam's fields uncovers an emerging drug problem.

Ten-foot-tall cannabis plants flourish in Alam's fields. The crop — the source of both marijuana and hashish — can be just as profitable as opium but draws none of the scrutiny from Afghan officials bent on eradicating poppies.

Cannabis cultivation rose 40 percent in Afghanistan this year, to 173,000 acres from 123,550 in 2006, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimated in its 2007 opium survey. The crop is being grown in at least 18 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, according to the survey released last month.

The U.N. report singles out Balkh as a "leading example" of an opium-free province, saying other areas should follow "the model of this northern region where leadership, incentives and security have led farmers to turn their backs on opium." However, a section of the report says the increase in marijuana cultivation "gives cause for concern."

Quoteboard

"If you're coming as our friends, don't. If you're coming as our enemies, we will fight you."
     - Zmarai, Arghandab district police chief, in response to Taliban threats.
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