Our biggest problem is with the foreigners – we just hate them. Our families, our children, our women – everyone hates them. — Pashtun village elder
Damn, I hope Obama doesn’t ruin his whole presidency trying to prove how tough he is by waging an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Yes, unwinnable. — Howie Klein (aka DownwithTyranny!)
Some of the mydd commenters on my previous diary — Obama’s Afghan War: kill Pashtuns, destroy their villages, leave — I feel need to ignore for a moment scaremongering labels — Al Queda! Militants! Taliban! Bin Laden! Islamic extremists! — and get to know objectively what the U.S. is doing and involved with in Afghanistan. Absolutely the best place to start (in my humble . . .) is Afghanistan: chaos central in Le Monde diplomatique. Chris Sands gives you that ground-level view on how and why the Taliban’s fortunes have turned around so sharply since the summer of 2005. It’s not actually because “they hate us for our freedoms,” or because they’re a bunch of Bin Laden fanboys. It’s the hopeless economy (especially in the South and East), it’s Karzai’s toothlessness and corruption, it’s the occupying American troops and the deaths from U.S. missile strikes, and it’s the insecurity, chaos and kidnappings. These things are what the United States is fighting for. What we may think we are fighting against — Bin Laden, Al Queda, The Taliban of 2001-2 – are a mirage. I don’t think people who look seriously at the situation will think differently.
Sands’ article begins:
As the summer of 2005 faded, everyone in Kabul had forgotten there was a war on. American soldiers bought carpets in Chicken Street bazaar; mercenaries downed vodka in restaurants before wandering upstairs to sleep with Chinese prostitutes. The brothels were in the same neighbourhoods as the mansions that militia commanders were building themselves with CIA funds and drug money. . . .
Something not right about the smell of the above, and the Taliban knew its time was coming.
In the spring of 2006, Kabul’s imams complained publicly that officials were corrupt and alcohol was easily available. They were also angry at house raids by foreign soldiers in rural areas and accused them of molesting women. . . . When rioters tore through Kabul on 29 May, it was no big surprise.
The voices of ordinary Afghans are what best thing about Sands’ article. Just after the May, 2006 riot, Sands was in an Afghan village:
I couldn’t find anyone in Ghazni who admitted to taking the insurgents’ side: they said poverty and a lack of reconstruction caused people to rebel. Looking at the broken roads and crumbling homes, I saw what they meant.
Sands adds:
The more the Taliban turned to violence, the more they were seen as a force that could not be stopped. The bloodshed made people long for the stability of the old regime, if not its repressive laws. Villagers across the south and east [note from yesterday’s map that the south and east are predominantly Pashtun] had gained almost nothing from the US-led invasion, and many had lost good security. Among people in Logar, bordering Kabul, the anger was palpable. “Our biggest problem is with the foreigners – we just hate them. Our families, our children, our women – everyone hates them,” said an elder.-
In spring, 2007, Sands visited and talked to the locals in a now “frightening” Kandahar (emphasis added):
The police were accused of kidnappings and robberies, and the scars of suicide bombings pockmarked the streets. Residents admired the Taliban: the alternatives were dire. Democracy meant anarchy and, in the villages, a brutal occupation. “If I sit at a table with an American and he says he has brought us freedom, I will tell him he has fucked us,” said a father-of-two. He had fled Kandahar during the Taliban government because he was against its restrictions on education. “But I was never worried about my family,” he added. “Every single minute of the last three years I have been very worried.”
`America made our country ridiculously dangerous’ is constantly heard in the Sands piece. Continuing directly:
A religious leader from the district of Panjwayi described how 18 of his relatives had been killed in an air strike. Reports of civilians bombed from above were frequent. . . . Hamid Karzai kept demanding that the carnage stop, but it never did.
Later in the article:
[A] Taliban commander from Helmand described [to Sands] how the resistance had struggled to find support in the early years. But after innocent people had been detained or killed, the jihad had burst into life. Now even the Afghan army secretly gave them bullets and treated their wounded.
The above covers the whole gamut of why everything is going wrong for the U.S. occupation – the warlords, the ineffectual and/or sleazy U.S.-appointed `rulers’, the insecurity, the corruption, the U.S. missiles killing civilians, the patriotic hatred of occupation, etc. etc. And what are Obama’s solutions to this breakdown of authority? Well, apparently `more power to the regional warlords’ is part of the plan going forward. On that, the following from the Sands article:
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef [former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and Gitmo inmate] said men with blood on their hands were now the West’s great hope. “At the time of the Taliban, if someone killed another person it was possible to capture him, send him to court, punish him and execute him. Today, if someone goes to a village and kills 100 people, tomorrow he is given more privileges by the government. The Americans and the world community brought the warlords to power.”
And remember, as Jim Lobe says in Now, where were we in Afghanistan?, where Obama plans to beef up is centered on Afghanistan’s Pashtun regions:
The US has about 33,000 US troops currently deployed to Afghanistan. These are augmented by another 30,000 troops from other NATO countries, of which, however, only British, Canadian and Dutch contingents are fully cleared for combat in largely Pashtun areas in the east and south where the Taliban and its allies are strongest.
Lobe states that, among Obama’s planners, the main view on what our goals will be is the following:
The dominant view for now is that increasing security for the civilian population, particularly in the Pashtun areas where the Taliban are strongest – much as the US “surge” of 30,000 additional US troops purportedly accomplished in Iraq – is essential. Success should deprive the Taliban of much of its popular support and persuade “reconcilable” leaders to negotiate with the government and reduce the level of violence.
I disagree, and think Obama’s Afghanistan escalation has different and deadlier goals and methodology, which simply cannot be stated. You don’t really have to read between the lines of the following paragraph by Brian M. Downing (emphasis added) to get what I think the real plan is:
[A] rapid, fundamental change in the situation along the lines of the one that took place in Iraq is unlikely. The surge, at least in the next year or so, more likely aims to stave off defeat and bring a measure of security upon which counterinsurgency and tribal diplomacy can be pursued. The surge in Afghanistan may set the stage for a form of conflict whose name will never be officially uttered but which might be coming – a war of attrition. The US/NATO will seek to inflict high casualties on the Taliban and their allies in the expectation of bringing about greater tribal allegiance to the US/NATO side, and eventually also bringing about a political settlement with less ideologically-driven Taliban lieutenants. Such a settlement would likely entail autonomy in southern and parts of eastern Afghanistan, despite the social order that would be imposed there.
What does a war mean — on the ground to Afghan civilians — whose purpose will not be to gain, control, and pacify territory but simply to kill the bad guys so much and destroy their houses and resources so much that they give up? What does “inflict high casualties” mean in a war against `Taliban’ dressed identically to civilians, when U.S. war planners place an astronomically higher priority on the lives of U.S. military than on those of Afghan civilians? Because we know that ‘our casualties must be extremely low’ is how we have fought (Serbia and Iraq are two recent examples) and how we will fight, even though that method of fighting/occupying usually doesn’t work (and then we leave, sneering at the ungrateful country we’ve turned to rubble).
Finally, and on a somewhat hopeful note (i.e., yes, there are fairly important people (if academics are important) saying sensible things about what to do), Lobe concludes by quoting Gilles Dorronsoro:
In a new report released on Tuesday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Gilles Dorronsoro, a French expert on South Asia, argued that adding troops would actually be counter-productive because the mere presence of foreign soldiers in Pashtun areas has fueled the Taliban’s resurgence and that the best way to weaken it is to reduce military confrontations. In that respect, “the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency’s momentum is to start withdrawing troops”.
Indeed, Dorronsoro argues, as do other critics, that most effective way to ensure that Afghan territory is not used as a base to attack the US is to “delink” the Taliban from al-Qaeda, “which is based mostly in Pakistan”.
“We will be in a much better position to fight al-Qaeda if we don’t have to fight the Afghans,” he said. “We have to stop fighting the Taliban because it is the wrong enemy.”
