Karzai Cozies Up To Taliban

With the Taliban insurgents said to be spreading throughout the Afghanistan countryside, Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he’s in almost daily contact with the insurgents.

“Only this week I’ve had more than five or six major contacts, approaches, by the leadership of the Taliban trying to find out if they can come back to Afghanistan,” Karzai told reporters.

Of course it’s not clear why the Taliban would be reaching out to Karzai for permission to “come back to Afghanistan.” According to the Senlis Council the Taliban have already come back to Afghanistan in a big way and are closing in on Kabul.

By the way, here’s a picture of another Karzai, Hamid’s brother Ahmad, said to be a big wheel in the opium trade. Ahmad is shown meeting with notorious warlord Gul Agha. Nice, very nice.

 

Taliban On the Run? Hardly.

We’ve become accustomed to the Afghanistan rituals. There are the grim ramp ceremonies and the coverage of the flag-draped coffins of the dead being “repatriated” to Canada.

Then there’s the ritual of the embedded reporter telling us of the bravery and commitment of our soldiers in the combat zone.

We also get the ritual briefings from mid-level and senior officers about the latest mission and how we’re capturing this and driving the insurgents out of there and there and there. They always make sure to get out the message that it’s a tough struggle but we’re slowly winning. We just need a couple years more. Hmm.

It’s these boastful and often groundless claims by the colonels and generals that sully the sacrifice of their soldiers. Remember how they gleefully pronounced Panjwai clear of the Taliban? They told us they were going to keep it that way. Yeah, sure. Didn’t happen. The Taliban left, more or less intact, and returned when it suited them. They didn’t have to wage a fierce battle to reclaim Panjwai, they just walked back in.

A report just released by the Senlis Council paints a grim picture completely at odds with our military leaders’ glowing optimism. From The Guardian:

The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into the group’s hands, according to a report by an independent thinktank with long experience in the area.

Despite the presence of tens of thousands of Nato-led troops and billions of dollars in aid, the insurgents, driven out by the US invasion in 2001, now control “vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries,” the Senlis Council says in a report released today.

On the basis of what it calls exclusive research, it warns that the insurgency is also exercising a “significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people, who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change”.

The council goes as far as to state: “It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when this will happen and in what form. The oft-stated aim of reaching the city in 2008 appears more viable than ever and it is incumbent upon the international community to implement a new strategic paradigm for Afghanistan before time runs out”.

The Senlis assessment is confirmed by Oxfam and, according to The Guardian, is also affirmed by “senior British and US military commanders.”

We need to realize that our military’s bag of tricks is just about empty. It’s a matter of too little, too late. The question now is how many more ramp ceremonies we’re going to permit before people like Rick Hillier come clean with us?

We’re not fighting the Taliban’s war and they’re not fighting ours. The trouble is, it’s the outcome of their war, the political war of insurgency, that will decide the future of Afghanistan. Centuries of fighting off foreigners has shown them how to defeat massively superior armed force. A couple of decades ago it was the Soviets. They had all the toys – special forces, armoured vehicles, tanks, artillery, strike fighters and attack helicopters – and they were willing to be awfully brutal in using them. But they didn’t win.

Here’s something else to ponder. Once the Taliban achieve a critical mass of legitimacy, how long will it be before the others – the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, throw in with them and drive out Karzai? If that happens, what are we going to do then? It’s time to start watching the other players, the warlords such as Dostum, Hekmatyar, and Gul Agha.

 

Taking the Fight into Pakistan

The idea has been bandied about before – go after the Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists in their lairs inside Pakistan. It’s an option George w. Bush himself brought up this week. It’s a decision that also could have enormous ramifications, the sort that the frat boy Bush has repeatedly shown himself unwilling to grasp until it’s too late.

Richard Nixon did it. He sent his military forces swarming into Cambodia to attack the safe havens of the North Vietnamese army infiltrators. He kicked proper hell out of the place, killed an awful lot of civilians, and maybe bought himself a year’s grace before the inevitable.

The idea is the same but the turf is not and neither are the people our side would have to deal with, the Pashtun. It’s sort of like putting a bare foot into a bag full of scorpions. You’re going to get stung, it’ll hurt like hell and it might even kill you. Chances are good, when it’s over, you’ll realize you made a huge mistake.

The Toronto Sun’s Eric Margolis has travelled through these lands and he knows better:

I spent a remarkable time in this wild medieval region during the 1980s and ’90s, travelling alone where even Pakistani government officials dared not go, visiting the tribes of Waziristan, Orakzai, Khyber, Chitral, and Kurram, and their chiefs, called “maliks.”

These tribal belts are always called “lawless.” Pashtun tribesmen could shoot you if they didn’t like your looks. Rudyard Kipling warned British Imperial soldiers over a century ago, when fighting cruel, ferocious Pashtun warriors of the Afridi clan, “save your last bullet for yourself.”

…there is law: The traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, that strictly governs behaviour and personal honour. Protecting guests was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and wrote of it extensively in my book, War at the Top of the World.

The 40 million Pashtun — called “Pathan’ by the British — are the world’s largest tribal group. Imperial Britain divided them by an artificial border, the Durand Line, now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan’s Pashtun number 28 million, plus an additional 2.5 million refugees from Afghanistan. The 15 million Pashtun of Afghanistan form that nation’s largest ethnic group.

The tribal agency’s Pashtun reluctantly joined Pakistan in 1947 under express constitutional guarantee of total autonomy and a ban on Pakistani troops entering there.

But under intense U.S. pressure, President Pervez Musharraf violated Pakistan’s constitution by sending 80,000 federal troops to fight the region’s tribes, killing 3,000 of them.

In best British imperial tradition, Washington pays Musharraf $100 million monthly to rent his sepoys (native soldiers) to fight Pashtun tribesmen.

As a result, Pakistan is fast edging towards civil war.

The anti-communist Taliban movement is part of the Pashtun people. Taliban fighters move across the artificial Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to borrow a Maoism, like fish through the sea. Osama bin Laden is a hero in the region.

Bush/Cheney & Co. do not understand that while they can rent President Musharraf’s government in Islamabad, many Pashtun value personal honour far more than money, and cannot be bought.

Any U.S. attack on Pakistan would be a catastrophic mistake.

Margolis (quite correctly in my opinion) argues that carrying the fighting into Pakistan will only widen the war and transform it into a battle against western occupation. Think Iraq. Secondly, he points out that Musharraf’s fate lies in the hands of his army’s officers who may topple the general in response to US or NATO attacks. His third point is that this tactic could reignite the movement for a unified Pashtun homeland, Pashtunistan, that could fatally undermine the modern Pakistan state which, in case you need reminding, has a troublesome nuclear arsenal. Lastly he notes the US military has a mixed record from taking on what were, at best, weak and small opponents – such as Iraq. Pakistan, with its half-million soldier military, could well be much more than the US and NATO could handle.

Those Bush administration and Harper government officials who foolishly advocate attacking Pakistan are playing with fire.

 

We’ve Lost Our Bragging Rights

About a year ago Canada’s military leadership heralded a great victory in Panjwai District. We had met the Taliban and thoroughly defeated them. Those who hadn’t run away died where they stood. Sweet victory. We not only showed the Taliban but we also showed everyone else in NATO how it was done, that the insurgents could be crushed.

Well we got a few months out of that at least. Local Afghans returned to their homes. We got on with reconstruction and winning the hearts and minds.

And then the Taliban decided they’d like to return. They announced their arrival with IEDs, improvised explosive devices, a form of booby trap that took three Canadian lives in June and six more earlier this week.

Grame Smith of the Globe & Mail says our fortunes in Panjwai have taken a turn for the worse:

“…parts of the district are falling back into Taliban hands, locals say, after security duties were handed to a ragtag police force that quickly found itself overwhelmed by a lack of supplies and reduced to banditry for survival.

“The 05 Police Standby Battalion, a reserve unit, became notorious for corruption and desertions soon after it deployed to Panjwai this spring. The police unit also marked a new low point in the recent history of policing in the region when a police commander revived an old feud with an official from the National Directorate for Security, the Afghan intelligence agency.

“The personal dispute spiralled into open warfare between the two law-enforcement agencies around the villages of Mushan and Talokan in recent weeks, according to police who survived the battles, and village elders from the district.

“Ismatullah, a young police commander, said his 05 Battalion unit was assigned in April to take over security in Mushan, about 50 kilometres southwest of Kandahar city. By his own admission, Ismatullah says his men quickly resorted to thievery to supply themselves with things in short supply: money, food, bullets and fuel.

“Ismatullah says his unit contained 40 officers when they arrived in Mushan, but he now commands only a handful of men after 14 died, five were injured, and others ran away.

“Another police commander from the 05 Battalion, a middle-aged former mujahedeen fighter named Obidullah, said his unit in Zangabad has suffered similar losses. He commanded 50 police earlier this year, he said, but deaths and desertions have left him with 20 men.

“The recent battles in Mushan started without any Taliban involvement, Obidullah said: The conflict was only between tribal relatives of two factions who held grudges dating back to the 1980s. But the infighting weakened the government forces and insurgents were able to seize the western edge of the district, he said.

“Lieutenant-Colonel Rob Walker, Canada’s battle group commander, said in a recent interview that he knows the 05 Battalion has struggled. The district has grown more restive since early June, he said, but it’s hard to tell why the police have suffered so many casualties.

“‘They started getting hit,’ he said. ‘Was it because they were extorting people? Was it because they’re soft targets for the Taliban?'”

 

The Bitter Truth

Canada’s and NATO’s policies in Afghanistan are fundamentally flawed. We’re just not getting this right and it makes the loss of each of our soldiers killed over there especially bitter to take.

Since I began this blog back in August, I’ve been writing about the profound mistakes we’re making in Afghanistan. If you do a quick search of this site you’ll find those articles and there are plenty of them. Taken together, they stand as an indictment of our sitting prime minister and his top soldier, General Rick Hillier.

I wish that I had some genius no one else has, that I was prescient at a mystical level. I don’t and I’m not. The fact is that everything I’ve drawn upon in coming to my criticisms is relatively common knowledge, not even very obscure. Insurgency and counter-insurgency is probably the most clearly defined form of warfare that exists. It’s the only form of warfare in which the weakest side – the one that fights at a huge disadvantage in firepower, manpower, communications and mobility – almost always wins. It’s been practised time and again and it’s an experiment that produces consistent results. Every mistake that we’re making in Afghanistan today has been demonstrated repeatedly in the past.

But what do I know. Fortunately I don’t have to rely on my say so. The US military has finally come to its senses, digested the lessons of history (some of that history they themselves made) and produced a new counter-insurgency field manual FM 3-24. It virtually catalogues everything we’re doing wrong in Afghanistan. Check out Lawrence of Arabia, Col. T.E. Lawrence has his excellent accounts of his successful insurgency in the Middle East in WWI. There are several others.

Now Thomas Walkom, writing in today’s Toronto Star, summarizes a report written by Gordon

Smith, now director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, is Canada’s former ambassador to NATO and a former deputy minister of foreign affairs. His Canada in Afghanistan: Is it Working? was done for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, a Calgary think-tank that is not known for being squishy on matters military.

Smith maintains that negotiating with the Taliban is our only realistic option:

“‘We do not believe that the Taliban can be defeated or eliminated as a political entity in any meaningful time frame by Western armies using military measures,’ he says.

“The reasons for this are fourfold. First, the Taliban are still the dominant force among Pashtuns in Afghanistan’s south, where Canadian troops are operating. NATO bête noire Mullah Omar ‘remains unchallenged as leader of the Taliban,’ Smith writes. ‘There is no alternative representing Pashtun interests who has more clout than he.’

“Second, neighbouring Pakistan ‘is highly ambivalent about crushing the Taliban insurgency.’ While technically on NATO’s side in this matter, important elements of the Pakistani state apparatus, Smith writes, continue to support the Taliban as their proxy in Afghanistan – mainly as a way to fend off what they see as hostile Russian and Indian influences.

“To destroy the Taliban would be to end Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, he says – which perhaps explains Islamabad’s less than total support for the NATO mission.

“Third, the NATO strategy of using air power and heavy armour is backfiring. So is the policy of opium eradication. One destroys Afghan lives, the other their livelihoods. The net result, writes Smith (and here he echoes reports from the London-based Senlis Council), is to make Afghans even more hostile to NATO troops.

“Fourth, NATO countries don’t have the will to fight a protracted war in a faraway country.
‘If NATO states it will only be satisfied with a decisive military victory, the Taliban will call our bluff,’ Smith says. ‘The Taliban have demonstrated greater resolve, tactical efficiency and ability to absorb the costs of war over the long term than have NATO forces.’

“As a result, ‘talking to the Taliban’ emerges as the only feasible solution. ‘Given the costs of war,’ he writes, ‘NATO needs to look candidly at the prospects – aware that there can be no guarantee – of a political solution.'”

Smith is clearly right that we’re not going to somehow win this battle but he ends his discourse a bit too soon. Not mentioned is the real hurdle that will remain to be cleared – restoring some balance in political power in Afghanistan.

The Pashtun of Afghanistan are the Shia of Iraq – a majority. Thanks for 5+ years of Western indifference the Kabul government has come to be dominated by warlords, drug lords and common criminals of the minority Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaris and Turkmen. As far as they’re concerned, the Afghan civil war is over and they’re the victors. The Taliban are obviously not accepting that result and want to renew the civil war.

To settle this conflict NATO or the US or Pakistan or all of them (India included) will have to use their influence to get these mortal enemies, the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, to engage in some sort of legitimate power-sharing. The US will also have to use its influence to prevent India from exploiting Afghanistan to wage a proxy war against Pakistan. But, if we cannot broker some genuine agreement between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance we’ll have to decide whether we’re going to become embroiled in their civil war or step completely away from it.

This is a real conundrum but it’s one that might have been avoided had George Bush not turned indifferent to Afghanistan in 2001 so that he could conquer Iraq. The US should have played a more direct role in shaping Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban government. It should have developed a legitimate political entity to represent the majority Pashtun and it should have given Karzai essential support to prevent the warlords and drug lords from seizing political power. Our side should have kept that scum out of government and thereby prevented the corruption of the country’s security services that simply drives the Pashtun into the arms of the Taliban.

We have to recognize that we can’t turn back the clock to 2001 (unless we oust the warlords and go to war with the Northern Alliance mujahideen). We can’t use firepower to legitimize a corrupted regime. We can’t even expect our firepower to defeat this insurgency. So just what the hell are we doing there? It’s time we revisited that debate.

 

O.K. Corral – Kajaki Style

The Independent reports that British commanders are gearing up for what they claim will be the decisive battle for control of Afghanistan. Put simply, the Brits (and NATO) are counting on the Taliban coming out this year, although hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, and either be destroyed where they stand or mauled so badly that their popular support among the Pashtun people collapses. This, of course, begs the question of whether the Taliban is willing to follow the NATO script.

If the Taliban are simply willing to commit suicide, the Brits’ predictions may prove to be right on the money. If the Talib, however, don’t want to fight the conventional war, the one where NATO holds all the cards, and instead fight their war, a war of insurgency, then the Brits are wrong. In any insurgency, the decisive year is the final year of the conflict and the odds are 4-1 that turns out to be the year the foreigners pull up stakes and leave.

NATO’s Achilles’ Heel still lies in the woeful lack of combat boots on the ground. This year they’re going to try to clear – and hold – the area around the Kajaki dam to allow the power plant to be repaired. Beyond that, it’ll mainly be “search and destroy” type missions, whipping around from place to place, clearing out the bad guys and then leaving and allowing the bad guys to move back in.

I really hope the Taliban are as stupid as NATO is counting on them to be. I hope they get totally trashed this year so that maybe we can just leave the country to the warlords and thugs and drug barons who run the government and get our troops home. I’m hoping and apparently so is NATO.

 

Why We’re Losing in Afghanistan

I’ve written at length as to why we’re not going to win in Afghanistan but sometimes it’s good to hear from an expert. Michael Scheuer is an expert – on al–Qaeda and Afghanistan. He retired from the US Central Intelligence Agency in 2005. From 1996 to 1999 he was the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center.

Scheuer recently wrote an article published in the journal of the Jamestown Foundation describing how we’re mismanaging the campaign in Afghanistan:

“Afghanistan is again being lost to the West, even as a coalition force of more than 5,000 troops launches a major spring offensive in the south of the country. The insurgency may drag on for many months or several years, but the tide has turned. Like Alexander’s Greeks, the British and the Soviets before the US-led coalition, inferior Afghan insurgents have forced far superior Western military forces on to a path that leads toward evacuation. What has caused this scenario to occur repeatedly throughout history?

Scheuer writes that Western forces keep making the same mistakes: “…the West has not developed an appreciation for the Afghans’ toughness, patience, resourcefulness and pride in their history. Although foreign forces in Afghanistan are always more modern and better armed and trained, they are continuously ground down by the same kinds of small-scale but unrelenting hit-and-run attacks and ambushes, as well as by the country’s impenetrable topography that allows the Afghans to retreat, hide, and attack another day.” Gee, remember when Rick Hillier was swaggering around, boasting that we were shipping out to Afghanistan to kill a “few dozen scumbags”?

“The latest episode in this historical tradition has several distinguishing characteristics. First, Western forces – while better armed and technologically superior – are far too few in number. Today’s Western force totals about 40,000 troops. After subtracting support troops and North Atlantic Treaty Organization contingents that are restricted to non-combat, reconstruction roles – building schools, digging wells, repairing irrigation systems – the actual combat force that can be fielded on any given day is far smaller, and yet has the task of controlling a country the size of Texas that is home to some of the highest mountains on Earth.

“Second, the West underestimated the strength of the Taliban and its acceptability to the Afghan people. When invading in 2001, the West’s main targets were al–Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al–Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mullah Omar and their senior lieutenants, and because the operation specifically targeted a group of top leaders, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was not sealed, and so not only did the pursued troika escape, so did most of their foot soldiers.

“Those escapees are now returning in large numbers, and are better armed, trained and organized than on their exit. It seems likely, in fact, that the force being fielded by the Taliban and their allies – al–Qaeda, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, among others – is at least equal in number to the coalition.

“Furthermore, the membership of the force is not just a few Taliban remnants and otherwise mostly new recruits; rather, they are the veteran fighters that the coalition failed to kill in 2001 and early 2002. The Taliban forces are not new; they are the seasoned, experienced mujahideen who are – like former president Richard Nixon in 1972 – tanned, rested and ready to wage the jihad.

“Western leaders in Afghanistan are also finding that many Afghans are not unhappy to see the Taliban returning. Much of the reason lies in the fact that the US-led coalition put the cart before the horse. Before the 2001 invasion, the Taliban regime was far from loved, but it was appreciated for the law-and-order regime it harshly enforced across most of Afghanistan. Although women had to stay home, few girls could go to school and the odd limb was chopped off for petty offenses, most rural Afghans could count on having security for themselves, their families and their farms and/or businesses.

“The coalition’s victory shattered the Taliban’s law-and-order regime and, instead of immediately installing a replacement – for which there were not enough troops in any event – coalition leaders moved on to elections, implementing women’s rights and creating a parliament, while the bulk of rural Afghanistan returned to the anarchy of banditry and warlordism that had prevailed before the first Taliban era.

“Now in the sixth year of occupation, Western leaders are confronted not only by a stronger-than-2001 enemy, but also by the resurgent insularity and anti-foreign inclinations of the Afghan people.

“Today, the Afghans perceive themselves to be doubly ruled, and doubly badly ruled, by foreigners: the US-led coalition and the pro-Western, nominally Islamic, detribalized and corruption-ridden government of President Hamid Karzai. This perception of a “foreign yoke”, along with spreading warfare, little reconstruction and endemic banditry, has created a fertile nationalistic environment for the Taliban and their allies to exploit.

“The future for the West in Afghanistan is bleak, and it is made more discouraging by the fact that much of the West’s defeat will be self-inflicted because it did not adequately study the lessons of history.”

Why are we hearing no discussion of these problems, nothing from Harpo, Gordo and Hillier? Why isn’t the opposition raising these issues? Have we succumbed to “stay the course” and “support the troops” because no one has the courage to take a stand? If you really want to support the troops, don’t waste their lives on a bungled cause.

 

Pulling Rabbits Out of NATO’s Hat

Within a couple of months the Taliban and their allies are expected to launch their Spring Offensive. By all accounts this year’s offensive is supposed to be the biggest ever since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.

It has been reported that this year the Taliban will be showing up with its own coalition of the willing which may see mujahideen from the north, some warlords and the drug lords joining the Taliban to give NATO fits and to drive the already shakey Karzai administration out of power.

NATO is bracing for the big event, even hobbling together a Fast Reaction Force designed to quickly reinforce any area in danger of being overrun.

We tend to forget that for a country as large, in size and population, as Afghanistan, NATO forces are stretched thin on the ground. If the Taliban come with the expected force, they’ll have their hands full holding on to the areas they still control and defending Kabul.

The Guardian reports that the Americans will be making quite an extraordinary request at today’s NATO conference in Spain. Apparently they’ll be asking NATO to undertake its own Spring Offensive, I guess to somehow pre-empt the bad guys.

It might not be a bad idea if you had your own territory under control and if you had enough surplus troops and equipment and support to mass the sort of force needed to go on the offensive without leaving yourself exposed and vulnerable behind the offensive. But NATO doesn’t have its own territories under control nor does it have surplus troops and equipment to mount this sort of offensive.

Given the mess the Americans have made just two countries over, we should be really skeptical about embracing any US adventures in Afghanistan.

 

Partners in Torture?

One of the most controversial aspects of Canada’s participation in the Global War Without End on Terror has been the fate of those captured by our forces.

It appears that once we get them in the bag, we give them a quick medical check and then hand them over either to US or Afghan authorities. Eventually the detainees names are reported to the International Red Cross but that’s it. Unlike the Dutch contingent, Canada does nothing to follow up on these prisoners to ensure they’re properly treated or, to be more direct, not tortured.

The Afghan security forces are known not only for their corruption but also their brutality. Without foreign oversight they pretty much have a free hand in dealing with their captives.

The question becomes whether Canada is complicit in torture by delivering suspected insurgents into the hands of those we have reason to believe will mistreat them? Under our law, a person is deemed to intend the logical consequences of his acts. Turning a blind eye isn’t good enough.

It’s time General Hillier got off his duff and started explaining Canada’s position on the torture question.