The following first appeared in The National on 7 December 2009.
How Barack Obama came to decide on a new Afghanistan strategy is by now well known. By late October both the fact that additional troops were required and the number of troops to send had been agreed upon. What remained was to decide whether to announce a tentative withdrawal date.
The US president was in favour of this to gain “leverage” with the Afghan and Pakistani governments as well as to reassure a war-weary public at home. He got his wish, but as a result the president was left with a war strategy that satisfied neither his allies nor his opponents.
Mr Obama wants these additional troops in and out of Afghanistan in a year and a half. Those that have raised a hue and cry over his supposed artificial deadline would do well to remember that the so-called “surge” in Iraq lasted approximately the same amount of time. Furthermore, he has stated that the situation in Afghanistan after 18 months would shape any decision to withdraw.
Those that wanted a firmer expiration date for the conflict do not warrant more than a brief rebuke. After eight years of fighting the coalition has left Afghanistan in a worse state, destabilised Pakistan, and sparked what could potentially be a regional power struggle centred in Afghanistan. At the very least, Afghanistan must be stabilised to undo whatever damage has been done thus far.
Yet, there are genuine concerns about the new strategy. Foremost among these is the limitation Mr Obama has placed on the US commitment to Afghanistan’s security. Mr Obama has made it clear that he will only do so much before Afghanistan’s security would be exclusively an Afghan problem and he wants this to happen as soon as possible. To do this he has taken more than a few pages from the strategy in Iraq. For better or worse, the war in Afghanistan is shaping up to be another war in Iraq.
The surge in Iraq worked in large part, because both the Mahdi Army and the majority of Sunni insurgents either stopped fighting or switched sides. There is reason to believe that the Taliban will react the same way: this has been a penchant of Pashtun tribal fighters going back to the time of the British Empire. Some may choose to side with the coalition either out of hatred for the Taliban or naked opportunism. The result will probably be a decrease in violence after a brief spike at the beginning of the fighting season in May next year.
But the surge was not a success in Iraq because violence went down. It was successful because it gave an opening for the government to assert itself, and allowed politics to replace violence as a means to resolve conflicts. This will be a greater challenge in Afghanistan.
The Taliban are not winning with arms, they are winning with better governance. They are better than Kabul at providing services and upholding law and order.
The situation in Iraq should serve as a warning to proponents of the surge in Afghanistan. Security gains there have slid backwards as some Sunnis have returned to violence or, at least, grown openly hostile to Baghdad because of its failure to uphold promises. In some ways, the imminent US withdrawal has escalated simmering political tensions as minority groups scramble to grasp what they can in advance of that date.
The situation could potentially be worse in Afghanistan. For all its many flaws, the Iraqi government is a democracy that is largely representative of its people. Hamid Karzai’s government has only the veneer of democracy and popular representation. He exploits ethnic ties and teams with local power brokers and warlords to project Kabul’s authority. Unless he is forced to change his ways, security gains will only allow him to entrench his interests and enshrine corruption and cronyism as the status quo in Afghan politics. For the sake of Afghanistan’s future, the centre of political power must be in Kabul, but not in this way. The Taliban feed off Pashtun national ambitions, but mostly from legitimate grievances with the central government. Any security gains are illusory so long as those grievances exist.
Even if the additional troops remain in Afghanistan for longer than 18 months, and even if security dramatically improves, the end result remains in doubt. The US singles out al Qa’eda as the reason it must finish the fight in Afghanistan, but the Taliban not al Qa’eda are the main enemy to be defeated. However, it will be al Qa’eda, not the Taliban, that will be the ultimate victors should the US fail in Afghanistan.
Terrorism is a tool used by such groups to goad the enemy into alienating a population through heavy-handed tactics and breaking its will to fight through a long, expensive and ultimately futile fight. Al Qa’eda specifically states that its goal is to bankrupt the US through expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The US may be far from bankrupt, but a withdrawal that does not leave Afghanistan free from the clutches of the Taliban will validate al Qa’eda’s tactics and long-term strategy. It would, in all likelihood, encourage like-minded groups to employ the same strategy to the detriment of global security. This means that setting prior limits on a commitment to a fight risks validating the strategy of al Qa’eda. This not only applies to the US, but to its allies, which includes the UAE.
The war in Afghanistan must be won to avoid this, but the long-term solution is not to fight al Qa’eda with soldiers. That is the least effective and most expensive method.
The goal should be to prevent the creation of other Afghanistans, underdeveloped corners of the world whose grievances can be exploited to build a safe haven for terror groups and a hornet’s nest for any would-be invaders.
There are many potential Afghanistans. Failure to prevent their decline, could result in some sort of military intervention to counter what is, essentially, a non-military problem. Al Qa’eda is winning because it set the terms of the conflict in Afghanistan. It is the responsibility of the international community to ensure that they do not do so again.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
The Taliban ought to remind us that history is reversible
The following was first published in The National on 22 October 2009.
At the end of every year Time magazine names its person of the year. The publication gives the award to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year”.
The award, with some notable exceptions, is a fairly accurate reflection of what was the most important story of the past year. The obvious choice this year is Barack Obama, but the US president would probably prefer not to receive it – he appears to have had enough trouble dealing with a Nobel Prize. Should the editors at Time decide to spare Mr Obama the headache, there is another, more suitable alternative.
December 2009 will mark the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and it seems appropriate for the magazine to mark the occasion by naming a man of the decade. There is precedent for this. In 1999 the magazine named a man of the century, Albert Einstein. But it should have been Adolf Hitler for demonstrating the awful potential of the most important political force of the modern age: nationalism.
Time chose science rather than politics as the defining characteristic of the century. But politics, man’s relationship with other men, more accurately reflects the state of mankind, not his achievements. And nationalism has changed the face of those relationships. Its rise marked the end of the age of empires. No longer is the world controlled by a relatively small group of global behemoths: empires controlling vast swathes of territory encompassing multiple groups of people of various identities. Scientific advances such as the computer, the aeroplane and the mobile phone may have made the world appear smaller, but in many ways it is a much bigger, much more daunting place in which to live.
The postcolonial, post-Cold War world is a far more cluttered place. In many corners of the globe, countries are being divided into smaller pieces and national identity is being more narrowly defined. The process has been often bloody.
There are of course important counter-examples, the United States being the most prominent. China and India also stand out as two populous and diverse but prosperous nation-states, as does what is left of post-Soviet Russia. However, in these countries stability and security are at times strained by violent internal strife, but they are held together by the strength of their respective governments. But, in countries with weak or new governments there is a potential for disaffected groups of people to coalesce into a political force and threaten the existence of a state with violence. Nowhere is this better seen than in the conflict that has taken up the better part of this decade: the war in Afghanistan.
Much of the world is beginning to show signs of recovery after the geopolitical balance of power was upset by the fall of the Soviet Union and before that the end of the imperial age of the 19th and early 20th centuries. New countries are emerging to fill the power vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. But Afghanistan was left out of this process. Or, more appropriately, it regressed.
The insurgency in Iraq ended when people grew tired of vying for control of the nation’s future through violence. They turned to politics instead to settle their grievances. But where the Iraqis had the advantage of a recent memory of a modern state and the collective identity it provides, the majority of Afghans have no experience of modern governance. In fact, more than half of the country is estimated to be under the age of 14 and thus, they have known nothing but near constant conflict. Instead tribal and ethnic identity have supplanted all other forms of identity.
They are certainly not unique in this regard. In many parts of the globe tribal ties and ethnicity are important or, at times, the defining aspects of a state. But the situation in Afghanistan stands out since there has been no modern form of government in the country since the 1970s, and then it dallied with it only briefly.
Afghanistan today is almost a window into the distant past, a Hobbesian world of pre-modernity where life is “nasty, brutish, and short” and a man’s right to another man’s property and life are defined by his ability to take them. And no man better embodies the recent history of Afghanistan than Mullah Omar, the father of the Taliban. He arrived on the scene in the midst of the Afghan civil war, a period of violence where life was literally nasty, brutish, and short, and imposed civic order through the strength of arms. The Taliban are an undeniably abhorrent organisation whose world views are incompatible with modern notions of human rights. But they and their ideological leader Mullah Omar also serve as a warning.
Several centuries of global development have been missed or lost by Afghanistan. In the absence of effective forms of governance and a lack of social and economic development, Afghanistan went backward, quickly. And its decline has had a severe impact on regional and international security. The poisonous effect that the Taliban have had on Pashtun tribal politics has focused and inflamed their nationalist sentiments, which now threatens the stability of Pakistan. Now Pakistan – as Afghanistan became before – is a safe haven for transnational terrorist groups.
But Afghanistan is only the world’s most extreme example. Despite the progress that most of the rest of the world made in the last century and the promise of even more in this one, there remain regions of the globe where our history is their present. And unless these areas are carried into the modern age, history’s bloody heritage has ways of catching up to us.
In support of Hitler’s nomination for man of the century, Elie Wiesel wrote that because of the German leader, “man is defined by what makes him inhuman”. He showed us the horrific potential of man’s hatred.
But Mullah Omar has shown us that man does not really change, and that the relative progress mankind has made in building peaceable civil societies is not irreversible. There is always is a Dark Age lurking somewhere around the corner.
At the end of every year Time magazine names its person of the year. The publication gives the award to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year”.
The award, with some notable exceptions, is a fairly accurate reflection of what was the most important story of the past year. The obvious choice this year is Barack Obama, but the US president would probably prefer not to receive it – he appears to have had enough trouble dealing with a Nobel Prize. Should the editors at Time decide to spare Mr Obama the headache, there is another, more suitable alternative.
December 2009 will mark the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and it seems appropriate for the magazine to mark the occasion by naming a man of the decade. There is precedent for this. In 1999 the magazine named a man of the century, Albert Einstein. But it should have been Adolf Hitler for demonstrating the awful potential of the most important political force of the modern age: nationalism.
Time chose science rather than politics as the defining characteristic of the century. But politics, man’s relationship with other men, more accurately reflects the state of mankind, not his achievements. And nationalism has changed the face of those relationships. Its rise marked the end of the age of empires. No longer is the world controlled by a relatively small group of global behemoths: empires controlling vast swathes of territory encompassing multiple groups of people of various identities. Scientific advances such as the computer, the aeroplane and the mobile phone may have made the world appear smaller, but in many ways it is a much bigger, much more daunting place in which to live.
The postcolonial, post-Cold War world is a far more cluttered place. In many corners of the globe, countries are being divided into smaller pieces and national identity is being more narrowly defined. The process has been often bloody.
There are of course important counter-examples, the United States being the most prominent. China and India also stand out as two populous and diverse but prosperous nation-states, as does what is left of post-Soviet Russia. However, in these countries stability and security are at times strained by violent internal strife, but they are held together by the strength of their respective governments. But, in countries with weak or new governments there is a potential for disaffected groups of people to coalesce into a political force and threaten the existence of a state with violence. Nowhere is this better seen than in the conflict that has taken up the better part of this decade: the war in Afghanistan.
Much of the world is beginning to show signs of recovery after the geopolitical balance of power was upset by the fall of the Soviet Union and before that the end of the imperial age of the 19th and early 20th centuries. New countries are emerging to fill the power vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. But Afghanistan was left out of this process. Or, more appropriately, it regressed.
The insurgency in Iraq ended when people grew tired of vying for control of the nation’s future through violence. They turned to politics instead to settle their grievances. But where the Iraqis had the advantage of a recent memory of a modern state and the collective identity it provides, the majority of Afghans have no experience of modern governance. In fact, more than half of the country is estimated to be under the age of 14 and thus, they have known nothing but near constant conflict. Instead tribal and ethnic identity have supplanted all other forms of identity.
They are certainly not unique in this regard. In many parts of the globe tribal ties and ethnicity are important or, at times, the defining aspects of a state. But the situation in Afghanistan stands out since there has been no modern form of government in the country since the 1970s, and then it dallied with it only briefly.
Afghanistan today is almost a window into the distant past, a Hobbesian world of pre-modernity where life is “nasty, brutish, and short” and a man’s right to another man’s property and life are defined by his ability to take them. And no man better embodies the recent history of Afghanistan than Mullah Omar, the father of the Taliban. He arrived on the scene in the midst of the Afghan civil war, a period of violence where life was literally nasty, brutish, and short, and imposed civic order through the strength of arms. The Taliban are an undeniably abhorrent organisation whose world views are incompatible with modern notions of human rights. But they and their ideological leader Mullah Omar also serve as a warning.
Several centuries of global development have been missed or lost by Afghanistan. In the absence of effective forms of governance and a lack of social and economic development, Afghanistan went backward, quickly. And its decline has had a severe impact on regional and international security. The poisonous effect that the Taliban have had on Pashtun tribal politics has focused and inflamed their nationalist sentiments, which now threatens the stability of Pakistan. Now Pakistan – as Afghanistan became before – is a safe haven for transnational terrorist groups.
But Afghanistan is only the world’s most extreme example. Despite the progress that most of the rest of the world made in the last century and the promise of even more in this one, there remain regions of the globe where our history is their present. And unless these areas are carried into the modern age, history’s bloody heritage has ways of catching up to us.
In support of Hitler’s nomination for man of the century, Elie Wiesel wrote that because of the German leader, “man is defined by what makes him inhuman”. He showed us the horrific potential of man’s hatred.
But Mullah Omar has shown us that man does not really change, and that the relative progress mankind has made in building peaceable civil societies is not irreversible. There is always is a Dark Age lurking somewhere around the corner.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
US must find courage for a knifefight in Afghanistan
The following was first published in The National on October 13, 2009.
Much has been made of the current popularity of a certain book in the Obama White House. Lessons in Disaster blames the American defeat in Vietnam on a failure to establish clear goals for its involvement there, and it appears to be having a marked effect on thinking on Capitol Hill. In particular, the chapter entitled “Never deploy military means in pursuit of indeterminate ends” appears to have frozen a hitherto decisive strategic discussion on the war in Afghanistan.
Divining the influence of the book has captivated the US press, and at least at one press conference the White House has been asked about it. Members of both the current and previous US administrations have been at pains to distinguish the war in Afghanistan from the disaster of Vietnam, with some justification. But one comparison, at least on the US side, is apt: the whys of the war have a habit of being drowned out by the hows as the fighting drags on and victory grows ever more elusive.
But the shift from why to how is also natural, and not necessarily a bad one. In many ways, too much attention on the purpose of the war now threatens defeat. The US invaded Afghanistan to overthrow al Qa’eda in response to the September 11 attacks. The Taliban were only important insofar as they stood in the way of capturing Osama bin Laden. With the architects of the most horrific act of terrorism on US soil in hiding, America became complacent. Neglect of post-war reconstruction efforts and the failure to develop an effective Afghan government allowed the Taliban to regroup and re-insinuate itself into the country. In the eight years since, the Taliban have become the main adversary while al Qa’eda and bin Laden have faded into the background.
Enter General Stanley McChrystal, whose suggestions on a new strategy to reverse the negative trends in Afghanistan are currently under discussion by the Obama administration. The new commander of the US and coalition forces has advised focusing on protecting the population and increasing troop levels, both to accomplish the first goal and speed up the training of Afghan forces. Much like the feted “troop surge” in Iraq, the aim is to employ the principles of counterinsurgency to create a period of relative security which boosts the authority of the central government over the population.
Mr Obama is less receptive to such suggestions than he might once have been. Not only are the lessons of the US military’s last major defeat being digested, but the controversial outcome of the recent Afghan presidential elections has cast doubt on the appropriateness of Gen McChrystal’s advice.
The Afghan government has been a persistent impediment to progress. The controversy surrounding the re-election of Hamid Karzai has only posed an even greater barrier to securing the country and overcoming the Taliban. Whereas once it was only corrupt and ineffective, its basic legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Afghans is now in question.
Even counterinsurgency’s most ardent advocates admit that military efforts in Afghanistan depend on events in Kabul. The support of the population is crucial. Unless the US, its allies and Karzai’s government become better than the Taliban at earning the trust of the Afghans, any victory will be temporary. And as coalition forces are seen, at best, as guests in the country, the Afghan government has a central role to play in any counterinsurgency plan.
Unfortunately, despite the legitimate medium and long-term concerns the White House has about Gen McChrystal’s new plan, there are few good alternatives. A group led by the vice president, Joe Biden, is advocating another course of action: reduce forces and focus efforts on killing senior al Qa’eda and Taliban leaders. With the success of unmanned drone aircraft assassinations of top targets in remote locations, it is easy to see why this might be a tempting alternative to putting additional American lives in danger. But it would also be a mistake. To do so would let the initial reasons for invading Afghanistan shape the strategy for a war that is no longer about killing members of al Qa’eda. Gen McChrystal’s advice is troubled by concerns about the long-term effectiveness of counterinsurgency, but Mr Biden’s plan promises only short-term gains. If organisations like the Taliban and al Qa’eda have demonstrated anything, it is that their existence does not depend on one man or any group of men.
The choice facing Mr Obama is not easy, but all signs point to his embracing Gen McChrystal’s suggestions – he did, after all, hire the man for his specific expertise on counterinsurgency. But the detractors have made their voices heard and the whys will have to be answered before the US renews its commitment to Afghanistan.
The worry is that every time Mr Obama has justified the war, he has framed it as if September 11 happened yesterday and al Qa’eda presented a clear and present danger to America’s national security. It doesn’t, and continuing to paint it as such has poisoned an urgent debate on the most effective manner to win in Afghanistan. After eight years, the war has only made the world less safe by destabilising both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the US has a duty to undo what it has done.
In any war, and especially in wars fought by democracies, why you fight is exceedingly important. Mr Obama is concerned that accepting Gen McChrystal’s call for more troops would be his Gulf of Tonkin resolution. And just like Lyndon Johnson, Mr Obama would be forced to stand before the American people and lie, saying he would not commit “American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land”.
He would do well to recall another quote by John Paul Vann, a leading figure in the Vietnam War: “This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle – you know who you’re killing.”
The US faces defeat if it retreats to the air against an enemy that must be fought with knives and rifles. And even if knives and rifles do not guarantee victory, America owes it to the Afghan people, and the world, to try.
Much has been made of the current popularity of a certain book in the Obama White House. Lessons in Disaster blames the American defeat in Vietnam on a failure to establish clear goals for its involvement there, and it appears to be having a marked effect on thinking on Capitol Hill. In particular, the chapter entitled “Never deploy military means in pursuit of indeterminate ends” appears to have frozen a hitherto decisive strategic discussion on the war in Afghanistan.
Divining the influence of the book has captivated the US press, and at least at one press conference the White House has been asked about it. Members of both the current and previous US administrations have been at pains to distinguish the war in Afghanistan from the disaster of Vietnam, with some justification. But one comparison, at least on the US side, is apt: the whys of the war have a habit of being drowned out by the hows as the fighting drags on and victory grows ever more elusive.
But the shift from why to how is also natural, and not necessarily a bad one. In many ways, too much attention on the purpose of the war now threatens defeat. The US invaded Afghanistan to overthrow al Qa’eda in response to the September 11 attacks. The Taliban were only important insofar as they stood in the way of capturing Osama bin Laden. With the architects of the most horrific act of terrorism on US soil in hiding, America became complacent. Neglect of post-war reconstruction efforts and the failure to develop an effective Afghan government allowed the Taliban to regroup and re-insinuate itself into the country. In the eight years since, the Taliban have become the main adversary while al Qa’eda and bin Laden have faded into the background.
Enter General Stanley McChrystal, whose suggestions on a new strategy to reverse the negative trends in Afghanistan are currently under discussion by the Obama administration. The new commander of the US and coalition forces has advised focusing on protecting the population and increasing troop levels, both to accomplish the first goal and speed up the training of Afghan forces. Much like the feted “troop surge” in Iraq, the aim is to employ the principles of counterinsurgency to create a period of relative security which boosts the authority of the central government over the population.
Mr Obama is less receptive to such suggestions than he might once have been. Not only are the lessons of the US military’s last major defeat being digested, but the controversial outcome of the recent Afghan presidential elections has cast doubt on the appropriateness of Gen McChrystal’s advice.
The Afghan government has been a persistent impediment to progress. The controversy surrounding the re-election of Hamid Karzai has only posed an even greater barrier to securing the country and overcoming the Taliban. Whereas once it was only corrupt and ineffective, its basic legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Afghans is now in question.
Even counterinsurgency’s most ardent advocates admit that military efforts in Afghanistan depend on events in Kabul. The support of the population is crucial. Unless the US, its allies and Karzai’s government become better than the Taliban at earning the trust of the Afghans, any victory will be temporary. And as coalition forces are seen, at best, as guests in the country, the Afghan government has a central role to play in any counterinsurgency plan.
Unfortunately, despite the legitimate medium and long-term concerns the White House has about Gen McChrystal’s new plan, there are few good alternatives. A group led by the vice president, Joe Biden, is advocating another course of action: reduce forces and focus efforts on killing senior al Qa’eda and Taliban leaders. With the success of unmanned drone aircraft assassinations of top targets in remote locations, it is easy to see why this might be a tempting alternative to putting additional American lives in danger. But it would also be a mistake. To do so would let the initial reasons for invading Afghanistan shape the strategy for a war that is no longer about killing members of al Qa’eda. Gen McChrystal’s advice is troubled by concerns about the long-term effectiveness of counterinsurgency, but Mr Biden’s plan promises only short-term gains. If organisations like the Taliban and al Qa’eda have demonstrated anything, it is that their existence does not depend on one man or any group of men.
The choice facing Mr Obama is not easy, but all signs point to his embracing Gen McChrystal’s suggestions – he did, after all, hire the man for his specific expertise on counterinsurgency. But the detractors have made their voices heard and the whys will have to be answered before the US renews its commitment to Afghanistan.
The worry is that every time Mr Obama has justified the war, he has framed it as if September 11 happened yesterday and al Qa’eda presented a clear and present danger to America’s national security. It doesn’t, and continuing to paint it as such has poisoned an urgent debate on the most effective manner to win in Afghanistan. After eight years, the war has only made the world less safe by destabilising both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the US has a duty to undo what it has done.
In any war, and especially in wars fought by democracies, why you fight is exceedingly important. Mr Obama is concerned that accepting Gen McChrystal’s call for more troops would be his Gulf of Tonkin resolution. And just like Lyndon Johnson, Mr Obama would be forced to stand before the American people and lie, saying he would not commit “American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land”.
He would do well to recall another quote by John Paul Vann, a leading figure in the Vietnam War: “This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle – you know who you’re killing.”
The US faces defeat if it retreats to the air against an enemy that must be fought with knives and rifles. And even if knives and rifles do not guarantee victory, America owes it to the Afghan people, and the world, to try.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Football separates men from the boys
The following was first published in The National on 10 September 2009.
The football season begins today. If that sentence has you checking your calendar, let me rephrase: The football, not soccer, season begins today. This statement will no doubt anger fans of the “beautiful game”. Big deal.
The worst soccer fans can muster are Millwall supporters, whose slogan “everyone hates us, and we don’t care” is also shared with snivelling adolescents. They pale in comparison to fans of the Oakland Raiders to whom Hunter S Thompson referred to as “beyond doubt the sleaziest and rudest and most sinister mob of thugs and wackos ever assembled” – and this from a man who once counted among his bosom buddies members of the Hells Angels.
Or perhaps they can once again rouse Will Batchelor to defend soccer. His sports column in The National this week said football was one part professional wrestling and two parts all-you-can-eat buffet, less sport than drama involving men in tight pants. He is not alone in harbouring such delusions.
Most soccer fans regard their North American cousins with disdain. To these woefully uninformed residents of the ward for the terminally ignorant, football is a sport for soft, flabby men who need time to catch their breath between downs, frequent commercial interruptions for loo breaks and medieval levels of body armour to avoid injury.
I dare them to tell that to a 130kg defensive end, a mountain of muscle with the speed and agility of Usain Bolt. Your average quarterback needs that padding just to survive the first down, and that defensive end needs it to keep himself from breaking his neck when he hits his target with all the kinetic energy of a runaway freight train.
Granted, rugby players do not wear padding, but hop on youtube and watch a rugby tackle, then go watch a quarterback get hit on his blindside. There is no comparison. If anything, removing the pads would make football less dangerous. When boxing introduced the padded glove, permanent head injuries became more common. Before gloves were introduced, punching someone in the jaw was just as likely to break your hand as his jaw. This made one think twice about where they were aiming. Now the average pugilist can hammer away at his opponent’s skull and suffer no ill effect.
But sometimes body armour is just called for. We do not deride the Yorkshire or Lancashire cavalry for wearing all that armour during the War of the Roses. The game of football is played by sumo wrestlers who can sprint, it is prudent to take precautions.
Soccer is indeed beautiful. The countless hours professional players devote towards honing their skills is revealed in the marvels of footwork and ball control on the pitch. Their endurance is unmatched in most team sports. But soccer is to football as fencing is to war. Some people prefer the former, others the latter.
Much of the hostility between soccer and football is over a shared name. This is the result of having a common ancestor, a game that is still played in the United Kingdom as the Royal Shrovetide Football match – a sport so brutal that the rules include: no killing.
Maybe Millwall should challenge the Raiders to a match and settle the debate once and for all, instead of just whinging.
Real football is not everyone’s cup of tea. Those people who prefer the refined emotions of say a ballet as opposed to the tango will probably stick to soccer or cricket. But real sports fans, who understand that it is about a contest between men, will want to tune in from tonight. And if there are any real men left watching soccer, they are welcome to join us.
The football season begins today. If that sentence has you checking your calendar, let me rephrase: The football, not soccer, season begins today. This statement will no doubt anger fans of the “beautiful game”. Big deal.
The worst soccer fans can muster are Millwall supporters, whose slogan “everyone hates us, and we don’t care” is also shared with snivelling adolescents. They pale in comparison to fans of the Oakland Raiders to whom Hunter S Thompson referred to as “beyond doubt the sleaziest and rudest and most sinister mob of thugs and wackos ever assembled” – and this from a man who once counted among his bosom buddies members of the Hells Angels.
Or perhaps they can once again rouse Will Batchelor to defend soccer. His sports column in The National this week said football was one part professional wrestling and two parts all-you-can-eat buffet, less sport than drama involving men in tight pants. He is not alone in harbouring such delusions.
Most soccer fans regard their North American cousins with disdain. To these woefully uninformed residents of the ward for the terminally ignorant, football is a sport for soft, flabby men who need time to catch their breath between downs, frequent commercial interruptions for loo breaks and medieval levels of body armour to avoid injury.
I dare them to tell that to a 130kg defensive end, a mountain of muscle with the speed and agility of Usain Bolt. Your average quarterback needs that padding just to survive the first down, and that defensive end needs it to keep himself from breaking his neck when he hits his target with all the kinetic energy of a runaway freight train.
Granted, rugby players do not wear padding, but hop on youtube and watch a rugby tackle, then go watch a quarterback get hit on his blindside. There is no comparison. If anything, removing the pads would make football less dangerous. When boxing introduced the padded glove, permanent head injuries became more common. Before gloves were introduced, punching someone in the jaw was just as likely to break your hand as his jaw. This made one think twice about where they were aiming. Now the average pugilist can hammer away at his opponent’s skull and suffer no ill effect.
But sometimes body armour is just called for. We do not deride the Yorkshire or Lancashire cavalry for wearing all that armour during the War of the Roses. The game of football is played by sumo wrestlers who can sprint, it is prudent to take precautions.
Soccer is indeed beautiful. The countless hours professional players devote towards honing their skills is revealed in the marvels of footwork and ball control on the pitch. Their endurance is unmatched in most team sports. But soccer is to football as fencing is to war. Some people prefer the former, others the latter.
Much of the hostility between soccer and football is over a shared name. This is the result of having a common ancestor, a game that is still played in the United Kingdom as the Royal Shrovetide Football match – a sport so brutal that the rules include: no killing.
Maybe Millwall should challenge the Raiders to a match and settle the debate once and for all, instead of just whinging.
Real football is not everyone’s cup of tea. Those people who prefer the refined emotions of say a ballet as opposed to the tango will probably stick to soccer or cricket. But real sports fans, who understand that it is about a contest between men, will want to tune in from tonight. And if there are any real men left watching soccer, they are welcome to join us.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
A plan lacking nothing but allies and Afghans
The following was first published in The National on September 2, 2009.
The Obama administration certainly can’t be accused of a less than thorough review of the war efforts in Afghanistan. The latest strategic assessment submitted by General Stanley McChrystal on Monday was merely the culmination of a comprehensive review of the situation in Afghanistan that began almost as soon as Barack Obama took office. It took the better part of a year, a long time when the United States is on the losing side of the conflict. Meanwhile popular support is decreasing in the US and among many of its European allies. Time may have been a luxury Mr Obama had in short supply, but he seems to have made good use of what little he had.
First there was the broadening of the scope of the conflict to include Pakistan, a notion that has come to be termed AfPak. It neatly encapsulates the reality that the conflict in Afghanistan is inseparable from the problem of militancy in Pakistan’s hinterlands. While the US and coalition allies may be forced to respect the borders of a close Nato ally, the Pashtuns who make up the overwhelming majority of the Taliban’s fighters do not. Neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan can be secured separately, so their problems must be tackled at the same time.
Mr Obama ordered a policy review of US efforts in Afghanistan ahead of the Nato conference in April. What resulted was a new, grand strategy for the war. No longer would the US and its allies measure its success by counting bodies, both American and Taliban. Instead, the focus would be on protecting the Afghans from the Taliban, speeding up a stagnant reconstruction effort and, most importantly, building the Afghan capacity for security and governance – a comprehensive approach dubbed counterinsurgency.
Gen McChrystal’s job was to figure out how to make Mr Obama’s vision actually work. Arguably, the greatest problem preventing success against the Taliban in Afghanistan is a lack of commitment. The overwhelming majority of fighting is being conducted by the US and a handful of other countries. While the US now has over 60,000 troops in the country, they are not enough. US commanders are already clamouring for reinforcements, but they will not be authorised by the US Congress without some assurance of progress. Nor are its allies likely to shoulder any greater portion of the combat burden.
But the war effort needs more than just a greater number of “trigger pullers”. Coalition countries such as France, Italy and Germany have never played much of a combat role in Afghanistan, yet together they have nearly 10,000 personnel in the country. They could be put to better use, particularly in the training of the Afghan security forces. The 42 nations that comprise the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (Isaf) must become more than a veneer of international co-operation in efforts to secure the country.
Presumably, this is what Gen McChrystal was referring to when he said that the war in Afghanistan needed “a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort”. As it is, both the combat and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly “Americanised”. This is not a sustainable trend. Nato countries in particular can’t shirk the burden. To do so would further undermine the already tenuous credibility of the organisation.
But despite the obvious necessity for coalition countries to shoulder a greater share of the responsibilities in Afghanistan, this is the real world. France and Germany may be major Nato partners, but their leaders answer first and foremost to their voters, not to the Nato secretary-general. Even the UK, the second largest contributor to Isaf, may not be in Afghanistan for much longer as popular support for the war has all but dissipated. Thus the need for a better economy of resources is all the more pressing. While a better use of the manpower on hand is needed, there is still a pressing need for more bodies to keep Afghanistan secure and to rebuild a country broken by three decades of conflict. The solution lies in the Afghans themselves.
The Afghan army is projected to grow from 93,000 to 134,000 in two years. By all possible measures this is a massive undertaking. There are also long term concerns about creating such a large military, which the coalition cannot sustain forever and the Afghan economy cannot support on its own. And as troubled as the army is, the police are in an even worse state. Often poorly equipped and underpaid, if they are paid at all, the Afghan police are often more hated than the Taliban. Without support from Kabul or its provincial representatives, many police have turned to banditry or bribes to support themselves.
The government in Kabul is increasingly becoming a hindrance to victory. While the US and its allies could feasibly win the fight against the Taliban, any success will be temporary so long as the central government remains rife with corruption, nepotism or even in complicity with the Taliban. David Kilcullen, a senior adviser to Nato generals, put it best, calling counterinsurgency “a competition for governance”. By almost every possible measure the US, its allies and Kabul are losing that competition. Many Afghans have turned to Taliban courts and police in areas that they control since they are considered more effective than what Kabul could produce.
After nearly a decade of combat and eight months of strategic review, the US has managed to assemble an effective strategy to secure and rebuild Afghanistan. It has the will and the leadership in place to execute that strategy. But ultimate success hangs on a corrupt and ineffective Afghan government that is, at best, uninterested in reforming its actions. Until this changes, success in Afghanistan is academic.
The Obama administration certainly can’t be accused of a less than thorough review of the war efforts in Afghanistan. The latest strategic assessment submitted by General Stanley McChrystal on Monday was merely the culmination of a comprehensive review of the situation in Afghanistan that began almost as soon as Barack Obama took office. It took the better part of a year, a long time when the United States is on the losing side of the conflict. Meanwhile popular support is decreasing in the US and among many of its European allies. Time may have been a luxury Mr Obama had in short supply, but he seems to have made good use of what little he had.
First there was the broadening of the scope of the conflict to include Pakistan, a notion that has come to be termed AfPak. It neatly encapsulates the reality that the conflict in Afghanistan is inseparable from the problem of militancy in Pakistan’s hinterlands. While the US and coalition allies may be forced to respect the borders of a close Nato ally, the Pashtuns who make up the overwhelming majority of the Taliban’s fighters do not. Neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan can be secured separately, so their problems must be tackled at the same time.
Mr Obama ordered a policy review of US efforts in Afghanistan ahead of the Nato conference in April. What resulted was a new, grand strategy for the war. No longer would the US and its allies measure its success by counting bodies, both American and Taliban. Instead, the focus would be on protecting the Afghans from the Taliban, speeding up a stagnant reconstruction effort and, most importantly, building the Afghan capacity for security and governance – a comprehensive approach dubbed counterinsurgency.
Gen McChrystal’s job was to figure out how to make Mr Obama’s vision actually work. Arguably, the greatest problem preventing success against the Taliban in Afghanistan is a lack of commitment. The overwhelming majority of fighting is being conducted by the US and a handful of other countries. While the US now has over 60,000 troops in the country, they are not enough. US commanders are already clamouring for reinforcements, but they will not be authorised by the US Congress without some assurance of progress. Nor are its allies likely to shoulder any greater portion of the combat burden.
But the war effort needs more than just a greater number of “trigger pullers”. Coalition countries such as France, Italy and Germany have never played much of a combat role in Afghanistan, yet together they have nearly 10,000 personnel in the country. They could be put to better use, particularly in the training of the Afghan security forces. The 42 nations that comprise the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (Isaf) must become more than a veneer of international co-operation in efforts to secure the country.
Presumably, this is what Gen McChrystal was referring to when he said that the war in Afghanistan needed “a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort”. As it is, both the combat and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly “Americanised”. This is not a sustainable trend. Nato countries in particular can’t shirk the burden. To do so would further undermine the already tenuous credibility of the organisation.
But despite the obvious necessity for coalition countries to shoulder a greater share of the responsibilities in Afghanistan, this is the real world. France and Germany may be major Nato partners, but their leaders answer first and foremost to their voters, not to the Nato secretary-general. Even the UK, the second largest contributor to Isaf, may not be in Afghanistan for much longer as popular support for the war has all but dissipated. Thus the need for a better economy of resources is all the more pressing. While a better use of the manpower on hand is needed, there is still a pressing need for more bodies to keep Afghanistan secure and to rebuild a country broken by three decades of conflict. The solution lies in the Afghans themselves.
The Afghan army is projected to grow from 93,000 to 134,000 in two years. By all possible measures this is a massive undertaking. There are also long term concerns about creating such a large military, which the coalition cannot sustain forever and the Afghan economy cannot support on its own. And as troubled as the army is, the police are in an even worse state. Often poorly equipped and underpaid, if they are paid at all, the Afghan police are often more hated than the Taliban. Without support from Kabul or its provincial representatives, many police have turned to banditry or bribes to support themselves.
The government in Kabul is increasingly becoming a hindrance to victory. While the US and its allies could feasibly win the fight against the Taliban, any success will be temporary so long as the central government remains rife with corruption, nepotism or even in complicity with the Taliban. David Kilcullen, a senior adviser to Nato generals, put it best, calling counterinsurgency “a competition for governance”. By almost every possible measure the US, its allies and Kabul are losing that competition. Many Afghans have turned to Taliban courts and police in areas that they control since they are considered more effective than what Kabul could produce.
After nearly a decade of combat and eight months of strategic review, the US has managed to assemble an effective strategy to secure and rebuild Afghanistan. It has the will and the leadership in place to execute that strategy. But ultimate success hangs on a corrupt and ineffective Afghan government that is, at best, uninterested in reforming its actions. Until this changes, success in Afghanistan is academic.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
War, death, destruction? It must be America’s fault …
The following was first published in The National on 18 August 2009.
As a US citizen travelling and living abroad, one grows accustomed to being treated with dislike, distaste, disdain or some combination of the three. To many, we are uncouth, arrogant warmongers who trample through the world oblivious to the pain and suffering we leave in our wake. Partly, these feelings are born of disappointment: America, many feel, has failed to live up to its promise. The great democratic experiment, the beacon of human rights and free speech to the world, is a big, fat hypocrite.
Even if we examine only recent events, the litany of grievances is long. The US condemns human rights violations throughout the world, but we apparently ignore 60 years of Palestinian suffering. We tout the virtues of democracy, but prop up dictators and autocrats. We condemn the actions of groups such as Hizbollah, Hamas, the Taliban and other so-called non-state actors, but forget that their existence is due in part to our own military primacy. And although religious freedom is enshrined in our constitution, we harbour prejudices towards Muslims, labelling them terrorists. And, worst of all, we are too ignorant even to realise the wrongs our nation is inflicting on the world.
True, Americans, by and large, know little of the world beyond our own borders. It is a function of our national wealth and our geography. We fail to grasp the implications of detaining an international movie star such as Shahrukh Khan because no one in introverted America knew who he was. And this drives the rest of the world mad.
Like Marie Antoinette, the average American stays locked in a palace solving the world’s problems with cake. But it’s hard to hate a Marie Antoinette who doesn’t know any better, which is why Americans hear the oft-repeated line from new acquaintances abroad: “I love Americans, but hate America.”
I heard this over and over when I went to a friend’s wedding in Pakistan, a country that nurtures an especially deep-seated dislike for the United States. It’s not hard to see why.
The war in Afghanistan has spilled over violently into Pakistan. Until his recent death, the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud waged a bitter war to unseat the Pakistani government with an army of religious zealots and thousands of kilos of high explosives. Faced with this threat, the only help Islamabad got was a scolding from Washington that it needed to do more to stop him.
Naturally, most Americans would feel that criticisms of their country are unjustified, even ungrateful. The United States Agency for International Development alone has a budget of $20 billion and a mandate to solve the world’s problems.
Even in this age of globalisation, most Americans are isolationist by nature. We would prefer to leave the world to its own devices. At the same time, we look upon the Old World with condescending pity, and feel the weight of our national good fortune. Thus we are easily aroused when called to right the world’s injustices. If the US were a person, it would be a teenager with a trust fund: opinionated but woefully ignorant, well-meaning but gratingly condescending, generous but with a sense of entitlement that ruins the sentiment.
While some of the criticisms of the US are valid, at worst it is only partly to blame. Yes, the absence of an effective post-invasion strategy in Afghanistan allowed a resurgence of the Taliban. Yes, a lack of understanding in Washington of the intricacies of tribal politics means they often fail to navigate through complex inter-relationships with the necessary nuance and subtlety.
But while Pakistan did not create the Taliban, and arguably neither did the US, it certainly did little to solve the problem. Its misguided military policies foster groups such as the Taliban for use as potential irregular forces against its enemies.
The Pakistani government’s neglect of the country’s largely ungoverned hinterlands has created a no-man’s land where extremist organisations can hide and recruit from a disenfranchised population. Yet the country is so blindly nationalistic in its policy-making, it even went so far as to quietly support the Taliban under Pervez Musharraf because it viewed Indian involvement in Afghanistan’s reconstruction efforts as an assault on Pakistan’s western borders.
Of course, it’s hard to argue this when you’re in Islamabad, especially when the person you’re arguing with is feeding you: that’s not cowardice, just good manners.
Much of the blame the US received, deserved and otherwise, is a result of being the only superpower left after the dust settled on the Cold War. As the US president Harry Truman famously said: “The buck stops here.”
Other countries may decry US attempts to police the world, but who else is going to do it? No one else can, and the alternative is to revert to a time when countries settled their issues on the battlefield. The wars of today are not existential clashes between global behemoths. Rather they are small wars, with small casualties.
Undoubtedly America has committed many wrongs in its brief history, but it has also changed the course of history. If you are going to blame America for foisting democratic values on others and trampling over cultural sensibilities, you must also give it credit for putting human rights and free speech on the global agenda.
This is all a matter of perception and image as much as reality. America invented the modern public relations industry. Maybe now is a good time to put it to use.
As a US citizen travelling and living abroad, one grows accustomed to being treated with dislike, distaste, disdain or some combination of the three. To many, we are uncouth, arrogant warmongers who trample through the world oblivious to the pain and suffering we leave in our wake. Partly, these feelings are born of disappointment: America, many feel, has failed to live up to its promise. The great democratic experiment, the beacon of human rights and free speech to the world, is a big, fat hypocrite.
Even if we examine only recent events, the litany of grievances is long. The US condemns human rights violations throughout the world, but we apparently ignore 60 years of Palestinian suffering. We tout the virtues of democracy, but prop up dictators and autocrats. We condemn the actions of groups such as Hizbollah, Hamas, the Taliban and other so-called non-state actors, but forget that their existence is due in part to our own military primacy. And although religious freedom is enshrined in our constitution, we harbour prejudices towards Muslims, labelling them terrorists. And, worst of all, we are too ignorant even to realise the wrongs our nation is inflicting on the world.
True, Americans, by and large, know little of the world beyond our own borders. It is a function of our national wealth and our geography. We fail to grasp the implications of detaining an international movie star such as Shahrukh Khan because no one in introverted America knew who he was. And this drives the rest of the world mad.
Like Marie Antoinette, the average American stays locked in a palace solving the world’s problems with cake. But it’s hard to hate a Marie Antoinette who doesn’t know any better, which is why Americans hear the oft-repeated line from new acquaintances abroad: “I love Americans, but hate America.”
I heard this over and over when I went to a friend’s wedding in Pakistan, a country that nurtures an especially deep-seated dislike for the United States. It’s not hard to see why.
The war in Afghanistan has spilled over violently into Pakistan. Until his recent death, the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud waged a bitter war to unseat the Pakistani government with an army of religious zealots and thousands of kilos of high explosives. Faced with this threat, the only help Islamabad got was a scolding from Washington that it needed to do more to stop him.
Naturally, most Americans would feel that criticisms of their country are unjustified, even ungrateful. The United States Agency for International Development alone has a budget of $20 billion and a mandate to solve the world’s problems.
Even in this age of globalisation, most Americans are isolationist by nature. We would prefer to leave the world to its own devices. At the same time, we look upon the Old World with condescending pity, and feel the weight of our national good fortune. Thus we are easily aroused when called to right the world’s injustices. If the US were a person, it would be a teenager with a trust fund: opinionated but woefully ignorant, well-meaning but gratingly condescending, generous but with a sense of entitlement that ruins the sentiment.
While some of the criticisms of the US are valid, at worst it is only partly to blame. Yes, the absence of an effective post-invasion strategy in Afghanistan allowed a resurgence of the Taliban. Yes, a lack of understanding in Washington of the intricacies of tribal politics means they often fail to navigate through complex inter-relationships with the necessary nuance and subtlety.
But while Pakistan did not create the Taliban, and arguably neither did the US, it certainly did little to solve the problem. Its misguided military policies foster groups such as the Taliban for use as potential irregular forces against its enemies.
The Pakistani government’s neglect of the country’s largely ungoverned hinterlands has created a no-man’s land where extremist organisations can hide and recruit from a disenfranchised population. Yet the country is so blindly nationalistic in its policy-making, it even went so far as to quietly support the Taliban under Pervez Musharraf because it viewed Indian involvement in Afghanistan’s reconstruction efforts as an assault on Pakistan’s western borders.
Of course, it’s hard to argue this when you’re in Islamabad, especially when the person you’re arguing with is feeding you: that’s not cowardice, just good manners.
Much of the blame the US received, deserved and otherwise, is a result of being the only superpower left after the dust settled on the Cold War. As the US president Harry Truman famously said: “The buck stops here.”
Other countries may decry US attempts to police the world, but who else is going to do it? No one else can, and the alternative is to revert to a time when countries settled their issues on the battlefield. The wars of today are not existential clashes between global behemoths. Rather they are small wars, with small casualties.
Undoubtedly America has committed many wrongs in its brief history, but it has also changed the course of history. If you are going to blame America for foisting democratic values on others and trampling over cultural sensibilities, you must also give it credit for putting human rights and free speech on the global agenda.
This is all a matter of perception and image as much as reality. America invented the modern public relations industry. Maybe now is a good time to put it to use.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Hillary's message to India: welcome to the world stage
The following was first published in The National on July 21, 2009.
A cynic might say that Hillary Clinton’s visit to India this week is about money, and in part it is. India is a potential market worth billions of dollars in trade, especially in nuclear technology and arms sales: the secretary of state’s whirlwind tour paves the way for American companies to bid for their share.
And with the Russians and the French already having signed agreements to build nuclear power plants in India, the White House desperately needed one of its own or faced a backlash in Congress.
But Mrs Clinton’s trip was about much more than that. It is the latest stage in efforts begun under the Bush administration to ensure that India plays a more responsible role in the international community.
The civilian nuclear co-operation deal signed by India and the US at the end of last year was aimed at bringing India into the nuclear fold without requiring it to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). It forced the separation of the civilian and military aspects of India’s programme, formalised the previously voluntary ban on nuclear weapons tests, provided assurances that nuclear fuel imports would not be used in weapons construction and allowed for UN inspections of civilian nuclear facilities.
These are all good things. But if the US had lost out on lucrative construction contracts and the jobs that come with them, then the nuclear energy deal would have been a liability rather than a benefit for the Obama administration, especially in the current economic downturn.
The potential benefit for US companies is considerable: India plans to increase the amount of energy it generates from nuclear power from 4,020MW to 52,000MW by 2020. The US will build at least two of the new reactors required.
In addition, the two countries have signed an end-use monitoring agreement designed to ensure that no country can misuse, transfer or sell US armaments or technology. This will help the American aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who in the absence of such an agreement have been prevented from selling advanced fighter aircraft to India.
Critics of this Indo-American rapprochement argue that India should not be rewarded for its refusal to sign the NPT; that the nuclear co-operation deal provides insufficient safeguards to prevent growth in India’s nuclear weapons stockpile because it can still use domestic sources of uranium to make weapons; that it sets a dangerous precedent for other non-signatories such as Israel and Pakistan; and that because inspectors have no access to India’s military nuclear facilities there is too little assurance that it will not misuse American technology.
With India’s rights to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods yet to be negotiated, this last issue in particular remains thorny. But while some of the criticisms are valid, the nuclear co-operation deal was probably the best the world could obtain from India, and its record of voluntary participation in non-proliferation efforts should allay most of the concerns.
Inside India, meanwhile, domestic critics have cautioned that the country is making dangerous concessions on its national sovereignty. Barriers to imports of nuclear fuel and technology imposed after the nuclear weapons test in 1974 forced India to develop its own expertise in enrichment and reactor construction. The critics argue that bringing in foreign expertise provides only a short-term benefit, while placing potential limitations on India’s capability to maintain a nuclear deterrent against Pakistan and, more important, China.
There are also concerns that renewed nuclear imports and arms sales could be used as leverage to mould India’s foreign policy from Washington, especially in the dispute over Kashmir.
But these domestic critics are both wrong and short-sighted. India has more than enough uranium reserves to maintain a nuclear weapons programme, but not to build an effective civilian energy one. International sanctions on uranium imports mean that the cost of running nuclear reactors is significantly higher than if India had signed the NPT, so nuclear energy would be neither affordable nor widespread without this co-operation agreement. Nor is the US seeking to force India’s hand on the issue of India-Pakistan relations. If anything, Mrs Clinton took great pains to state that these deals were entirely separate from US concerns on that issue.
India’s implicit accession into the nuclear weapons club is yet another sign that its global clout is increasing in pace with its impressive economic growth. Yet too often it has failed to take its rightful place in the international community. Indeed, on issues as diverse as climate change and regional security, India has been a hindrance to progress almost as often as it has been a help.
The country continues to oppose carbon emissions caps; it exports a significant portion of the 136,000 barrels of gasoline Iran needs to keep its economy moving, drastically reducing the effectiveness of international sanctions; the simmering conflict with Pakistan divides Islamabad’s attention between its eastern and western borders when it should be wholly devoted to tackling the growing insurgency problem along the Durand Line; and India’s refusal to sign the NPT hampers efforts to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons, despite its record of relatively responsible use of nuclear technology.
But efforts to punish India for its assertions of national sovereignty have been fruitless. Despite sanctions, India has harnessed the power of the atom, and no high-minded ideals will turn back the clock on its nuclear capabilities. Furthermore, it is an economic dynamo that has overcome many adversities to emerge as one of the most promising developing nations.
In the end, India will be persuaded to participate more responsibly in world affairs with the carrot of encouragement, not the stick of punishment.
A cynic might say that Hillary Clinton’s visit to India this week is about money, and in part it is. India is a potential market worth billions of dollars in trade, especially in nuclear technology and arms sales: the secretary of state’s whirlwind tour paves the way for American companies to bid for their share.
And with the Russians and the French already having signed agreements to build nuclear power plants in India, the White House desperately needed one of its own or faced a backlash in Congress.
But Mrs Clinton’s trip was about much more than that. It is the latest stage in efforts begun under the Bush administration to ensure that India plays a more responsible role in the international community.
The civilian nuclear co-operation deal signed by India and the US at the end of last year was aimed at bringing India into the nuclear fold without requiring it to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). It forced the separation of the civilian and military aspects of India’s programme, formalised the previously voluntary ban on nuclear weapons tests, provided assurances that nuclear fuel imports would not be used in weapons construction and allowed for UN inspections of civilian nuclear facilities.
These are all good things. But if the US had lost out on lucrative construction contracts and the jobs that come with them, then the nuclear energy deal would have been a liability rather than a benefit for the Obama administration, especially in the current economic downturn.
The potential benefit for US companies is considerable: India plans to increase the amount of energy it generates from nuclear power from 4,020MW to 52,000MW by 2020. The US will build at least two of the new reactors required.
In addition, the two countries have signed an end-use monitoring agreement designed to ensure that no country can misuse, transfer or sell US armaments or technology. This will help the American aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who in the absence of such an agreement have been prevented from selling advanced fighter aircraft to India.
Critics of this Indo-American rapprochement argue that India should not be rewarded for its refusal to sign the NPT; that the nuclear co-operation deal provides insufficient safeguards to prevent growth in India’s nuclear weapons stockpile because it can still use domestic sources of uranium to make weapons; that it sets a dangerous precedent for other non-signatories such as Israel and Pakistan; and that because inspectors have no access to India’s military nuclear facilities there is too little assurance that it will not misuse American technology.
With India’s rights to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods yet to be negotiated, this last issue in particular remains thorny. But while some of the criticisms are valid, the nuclear co-operation deal was probably the best the world could obtain from India, and its record of voluntary participation in non-proliferation efforts should allay most of the concerns.
Inside India, meanwhile, domestic critics have cautioned that the country is making dangerous concessions on its national sovereignty. Barriers to imports of nuclear fuel and technology imposed after the nuclear weapons test in 1974 forced India to develop its own expertise in enrichment and reactor construction. The critics argue that bringing in foreign expertise provides only a short-term benefit, while placing potential limitations on India’s capability to maintain a nuclear deterrent against Pakistan and, more important, China.
There are also concerns that renewed nuclear imports and arms sales could be used as leverage to mould India’s foreign policy from Washington, especially in the dispute over Kashmir.
But these domestic critics are both wrong and short-sighted. India has more than enough uranium reserves to maintain a nuclear weapons programme, but not to build an effective civilian energy one. International sanctions on uranium imports mean that the cost of running nuclear reactors is significantly higher than if India had signed the NPT, so nuclear energy would be neither affordable nor widespread without this co-operation agreement. Nor is the US seeking to force India’s hand on the issue of India-Pakistan relations. If anything, Mrs Clinton took great pains to state that these deals were entirely separate from US concerns on that issue.
India’s implicit accession into the nuclear weapons club is yet another sign that its global clout is increasing in pace with its impressive economic growth. Yet too often it has failed to take its rightful place in the international community. Indeed, on issues as diverse as climate change and regional security, India has been a hindrance to progress almost as often as it has been a help.
The country continues to oppose carbon emissions caps; it exports a significant portion of the 136,000 barrels of gasoline Iran needs to keep its economy moving, drastically reducing the effectiveness of international sanctions; the simmering conflict with Pakistan divides Islamabad’s attention between its eastern and western borders when it should be wholly devoted to tackling the growing insurgency problem along the Durand Line; and India’s refusal to sign the NPT hampers efforts to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons, despite its record of relatively responsible use of nuclear technology.
But efforts to punish India for its assertions of national sovereignty have been fruitless. Despite sanctions, India has harnessed the power of the atom, and no high-minded ideals will turn back the clock on its nuclear capabilities. Furthermore, it is an economic dynamo that has overcome many adversities to emerge as one of the most promising developing nations.
In the end, India will be persuaded to participate more responsibly in world affairs with the carrot of encouragement, not the stick of punishment.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Soldier, soldier: has the new world of war passed you by?
The following was first published in The National on 26 June 2009.
To meet required budget cuts, the British ministry of defence is considering slashing the size of its standing army to its lowest level since the Crimean war in the 1850s. The ministry argues that this is the only way that it can preserve funding to maintain the country’s presence in Afghanistan. While the cuts are more a reflection of the global economic crisis than any nod to history, they are significant in a historical context.
The Crimean war is considered the first modern war. It marked the beginning of a new era in combat, drastically changing the way wars were fought. Major conflicts have a way of doing that: at some point technology surpasses the prevailing body of military scholarship and generals are often forced to learn and adapt to these changes on the battlefield, with bloody consequences.
The famous Charge of the Light Brigade demonstrated just how far strategic thinking lagged behind the realities of combat at the time. The British commander Lord Cardigan’s ill-advised charge on Russian gun emplacements at the Battle of Balaclava heralded the end of the horse cavalry. As the French Marshal Pierre Bosquet observed: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. C’est de la folie.” The humiliating aftermath of Balaclava led the British to outlaw the sale of military commissions to salvage the nation’s military reputation. Likewise, the incoming army chief, General Sir David Richards, is determined to apply a “ruthless focus” on Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan, at the expense of its military capacity, to recover the nation’s tarnished military reputation.
But as with the so-called “riddle of the trenches” in the First World War, a stalemate where neither force can overcome the defences of the other, armies must constantly examine their tools and strategies or risk facing a situation for which they have no answer.
Ever since George Bush’s ill-fated declaration of an end to major combat operations in Iraq and the poorly conceived drawdown of forces in Afghanistan, the US and its allies have struggled to unravel their own riddle of the trenches: a Gordian knot of sectarian tensions and historic rivalries exacerbated by the presence of foreign troops and non-state actors such as al Qa’eda. To attempt to quell the violence, troops trained to kill more efficiently than their enemies were suddenly asked to perform duties more akin to police work and public diplomacy.
The lack of preparedness for the insurgencies in both countries, and the touting of such strategies as “shock and awe”, showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat environment. In a way, it is shock and awe itself that was the cause of the oversight. Military technology in the West has developed to a point at which waging conventional war on the West is suicide. The overwhelming military might of the US armed forces alone could wipe out nearly every combination of the world’s armies. But, in essence, trillions of US dollars and American ingenuity have resulted in solving the riddles of the last war, not the current one.
Nothing demonstrates this more than the US Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS). Launched in 2003, the programme aimed to create a hi-tech army in which a sophisticated digital communications network tied individual soldiers to a battery of sensors, unmanned aerial and ground vehicles and mobile artillery pieces, with the effect of greatly increasing that soldier’s lethal capacity. But the system was designed with large land battles in mind, which is not a threat the US currently faces. Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have awoken the US in particular to the inadequacies of its tools. The foremost military power suddenly found itself on horseback facing an enemy it was not meant to fight.
Since 2006, the budget for FCS has been slashed and its goals scaled back; most importantly, funding for new self-propelled artillery has been ended altogether. Artillery is a tool used to wage war against other armies and ill-suited to fight insurgents who blend in with civilians. The US secretary of defence, Robert Gates, is also planning drastic cuts in the US Marine Corps’ troubled Osprey programme, the US Air Force’s next-generation fighter jet, the F-22, and portions of the US Navy’s fleet modernisation plan. Instead the focus has turned to low-cost, low-tech improvements to the ability of US forces.
The most famous example has been the current popularity of counterinsurgency. Insurgencies are nothing new, nor is the notion of counterinsurgency; or as it has come to be referred to in modern military parlance, Coin. But the application of its principles has done more to stabilise Iraq in the past two years than any previous effort by the US to kill or capture its way to victory. So, has the US discovered its blitzkrieg to the Taliban’s trenches? It is too early to tell.
It took four years in Iraq to discover a means to end a deadly cycle of sectarian violence. While in Afghanistan, the coalition has yet to discover a successful strategy after almost eight years. The US hopes that applying Coin principles that focus, among other things, on minimising civilian casualties and maximising population security will in time win the war against the Taliban. And since protecting the population means vast amounts of “boots on the ground” the US is signficantly increasing the size of its military forces. While it is demonstrably true that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have highlighted how poorly prepared the US and its allies were to fight what are sometimes termed small wars, the jury is still out on whether we have truly reached another Battle of Balaclava. What is clear is that US and western military might has changed the face of the battlefield and forced its foes to adapt to exploit weaknesses.
Yet, in the current environment, it seems unwise for the UK to reduce its forces. If it truly wishes to regain its damaged military prestige, and certainly the British have a long estabilished history of quelling insurgencies, then slashing the size of its army is the least best way of accomplishing this. Britain will find that its new wars look rather like its old wars.
To meet required budget cuts, the British ministry of defence is considering slashing the size of its standing army to its lowest level since the Crimean war in the 1850s. The ministry argues that this is the only way that it can preserve funding to maintain the country’s presence in Afghanistan. While the cuts are more a reflection of the global economic crisis than any nod to history, they are significant in a historical context.
The Crimean war is considered the first modern war. It marked the beginning of a new era in combat, drastically changing the way wars were fought. Major conflicts have a way of doing that: at some point technology surpasses the prevailing body of military scholarship and generals are often forced to learn and adapt to these changes on the battlefield, with bloody consequences.
The famous Charge of the Light Brigade demonstrated just how far strategic thinking lagged behind the realities of combat at the time. The British commander Lord Cardigan’s ill-advised charge on Russian gun emplacements at the Battle of Balaclava heralded the end of the horse cavalry. As the French Marshal Pierre Bosquet observed: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. C’est de la folie.” The humiliating aftermath of Balaclava led the British to outlaw the sale of military commissions to salvage the nation’s military reputation. Likewise, the incoming army chief, General Sir David Richards, is determined to apply a “ruthless focus” on Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan, at the expense of its military capacity, to recover the nation’s tarnished military reputation.
But as with the so-called “riddle of the trenches” in the First World War, a stalemate where neither force can overcome the defences of the other, armies must constantly examine their tools and strategies or risk facing a situation for which they have no answer.
Ever since George Bush’s ill-fated declaration of an end to major combat operations in Iraq and the poorly conceived drawdown of forces in Afghanistan, the US and its allies have struggled to unravel their own riddle of the trenches: a Gordian knot of sectarian tensions and historic rivalries exacerbated by the presence of foreign troops and non-state actors such as al Qa’eda. To attempt to quell the violence, troops trained to kill more efficiently than their enemies were suddenly asked to perform duties more akin to police work and public diplomacy.
The lack of preparedness for the insurgencies in both countries, and the touting of such strategies as “shock and awe”, showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat environment. In a way, it is shock and awe itself that was the cause of the oversight. Military technology in the West has developed to a point at which waging conventional war on the West is suicide. The overwhelming military might of the US armed forces alone could wipe out nearly every combination of the world’s armies. But, in essence, trillions of US dollars and American ingenuity have resulted in solving the riddles of the last war, not the current one.
Nothing demonstrates this more than the US Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS). Launched in 2003, the programme aimed to create a hi-tech army in which a sophisticated digital communications network tied individual soldiers to a battery of sensors, unmanned aerial and ground vehicles and mobile artillery pieces, with the effect of greatly increasing that soldier’s lethal capacity. But the system was designed with large land battles in mind, which is not a threat the US currently faces. Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have awoken the US in particular to the inadequacies of its tools. The foremost military power suddenly found itself on horseback facing an enemy it was not meant to fight.
Since 2006, the budget for FCS has been slashed and its goals scaled back; most importantly, funding for new self-propelled artillery has been ended altogether. Artillery is a tool used to wage war against other armies and ill-suited to fight insurgents who blend in with civilians. The US secretary of defence, Robert Gates, is also planning drastic cuts in the US Marine Corps’ troubled Osprey programme, the US Air Force’s next-generation fighter jet, the F-22, and portions of the US Navy’s fleet modernisation plan. Instead the focus has turned to low-cost, low-tech improvements to the ability of US forces.
The most famous example has been the current popularity of counterinsurgency. Insurgencies are nothing new, nor is the notion of counterinsurgency; or as it has come to be referred to in modern military parlance, Coin. But the application of its principles has done more to stabilise Iraq in the past two years than any previous effort by the US to kill or capture its way to victory. So, has the US discovered its blitzkrieg to the Taliban’s trenches? It is too early to tell.
It took four years in Iraq to discover a means to end a deadly cycle of sectarian violence. While in Afghanistan, the coalition has yet to discover a successful strategy after almost eight years. The US hopes that applying Coin principles that focus, among other things, on minimising civilian casualties and maximising population security will in time win the war against the Taliban. And since protecting the population means vast amounts of “boots on the ground” the US is signficantly increasing the size of its military forces. While it is demonstrably true that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have highlighted how poorly prepared the US and its allies were to fight what are sometimes termed small wars, the jury is still out on whether we have truly reached another Battle of Balaclava. What is clear is that US and western military might has changed the face of the battlefield and forced its foes to adapt to exploit weaknesses.
Yet, in the current environment, it seems unwise for the UK to reduce its forces. If it truly wishes to regain its damaged military prestige, and certainly the British have a long estabilished history of quelling insurgencies, then slashing the size of its army is the least best way of accomplishing this. Britain will find that its new wars look rather like its old wars.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
The Taliban: if you’re not beating them, you’re losing
In late March, Barack Obama made his long-awaited speech on Afghanistan in which he framed what could be termed as the point of the war: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qa’eda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country in the future.
He announced an increase of 17,000 combat troops to reinforce the roughly 60,000 Nato soldiers in Afghanistan, and an additional 4,000 to train the Afghan security forces. He called for a greater commitment from donor nations and Nato member states, for Pakistan to eliminate safe havens for Taliban militants along the country’s porous border with Afghanistan, and for an end to corruption in the Afghan government and greater oversight on reconstruction projects. In doing so, he hit all the right notes, but failed to address fully how the United States planned to accomplish this monumental task. One of the possible answers has just been provided by the Center for New American Security (CNAS), a new Washington-based think tank staffed by some of the foremost authorities on counterinsurgency.
That the Obama administration will pay close attention to the recommendations of CNAS is without doubt. Two of the report’s authors, David Kilcullen and Nathaniel Fick, helped General David Petraeus to write the US army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, as did the group’s president, John Nagl.
The report, entitled Triage: The next twelve months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, paints a dire picture of the state of the war. Civilian casualties are rising (up 41 per cent from 2007), as are the number of attacks (550 a day in 2007 compared with 50 per day in 2002). The Taliban now operate in three quarters of Afghanistan’s 400 districts, up from half last year. Meanwhile approval ratings for the Afghan government have plummeted from 80 per cent in 2005, after the last elections, to 49 per cent (little wonder when the country is 176th on Transparency International’s list of the world’s 180 most corrupt countries). The report’s authors observe: “In counterinsurgency campaigns, if you are not winning, then you are losing.” By all possible measures, the US and its allies are most certainly not winning.
The purported intent of the report is not to reverse these trends but to stabilise the losses. As the title suggests, the authors advise that the US prioritise its goals over the next year to avoid losing any more ground to the Taliban and provide a stable platform for the upcoming Afghan elections. In Afghanistan this means focusing on securing as much of the population as possible, with the implication that there will be portions of the country conceded to the Taliban: the report goes so far as to suggest one particular area, the Korengal valley, dubbed the Valley of Death by American troops, sparsely populated but the site of near constant fighting.
The report argues that the potential Taliban propaganda victory of a troop withdrawal is outweighed by the disproportionate cost of securing the area. This recommendation is undeniably harsh, since it means abandoning Afghans, even temporarily, to the Taliban. But, ultimately, an end to the fighting will probably result in an immediate improved quality of life for those people, albeit under the eyes of an oppressive Taliban leadership.
The second recommendation is to take advantage of the so-called civilian surge announced by Mr Obama to impose greater transparency on the Afghan government by embedding experts within the various ministries. With the majority of Afghans feeling little confidence in the central government, efforts must be made to improve its image – not through propaganda but with demonstrable improvements in governance.
As the report argues, the US should not tie these efforts to any particular Afghan administration and should carry on the efforts until and after the presidential elections in August. Accomplishing this will require co-ordination with the US’s often unwilling allies. In particular, talking the Europeans into signing up to this plan will require much persuasion from the Obama administration. Past efforts by European partners, namely the police training programme, have either been sidelined or duplicated by the Americans out of an insufficient commitment from Europe or disagreements over the manner in which the programme is conducted. Nevertheless, the US would be hard pressed to carry out both the military and political aspects of the war on its own, so its allies must step up.
The options for the deteriorating situation in Pakistan are much less clear. The military cannot simply cross the Durand line into the territory of a US ally to eliminate Taliban safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas. But there are things the US can stop doing to make the situation “less worse”. For instance, the US air campaign by unmanned drones kills more civilians than militants, even if, as the US contends, the Taliban inflates the number of innocent deaths. Additionally, these strikes are deeply unpopular in Pakistan and decrease popular support for the nation’s involvement in the US’s campaign against the Taliban.
That may be changing. The spread of the Taliban into the Northwest Frontier Province alarmed many Pakistanis, and the nation’s campaign against the militants enjoys widespread support. If for no other reason, the US should halt its air strikes to capitalise on the current anti-Taliban sentiment.
The report’s authors differ slightly on this issue. They see the Pakistani military’s tactics as counterproductive. While they would undoubtedly agree that the Taliban must be ousted from Pakistan, they do not think that the country’s military is up to the task – so much so that they call for an end to US military support for Pakistan, arguing: “Regardless of whether Pakistan’s military is incompetent or in collusion with the Taliban, it makes little sense to continue to devote such a high percentage of US aid to an ineffective force when other options exist.” The other option is the police, and the report argues for greater funding for them.
None of these recommendations is a recipe for defeating the Taliban. Instead they are the first steps on the road to not losing. But the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has deteriorated to the point where that is the best the US can hope for in the immediate future.
He announced an increase of 17,000 combat troops to reinforce the roughly 60,000 Nato soldiers in Afghanistan, and an additional 4,000 to train the Afghan security forces. He called for a greater commitment from donor nations and Nato member states, for Pakistan to eliminate safe havens for Taliban militants along the country’s porous border with Afghanistan, and for an end to corruption in the Afghan government and greater oversight on reconstruction projects. In doing so, he hit all the right notes, but failed to address fully how the United States planned to accomplish this monumental task. One of the possible answers has just been provided by the Center for New American Security (CNAS), a new Washington-based think tank staffed by some of the foremost authorities on counterinsurgency.
That the Obama administration will pay close attention to the recommendations of CNAS is without doubt. Two of the report’s authors, David Kilcullen and Nathaniel Fick, helped General David Petraeus to write the US army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, as did the group’s president, John Nagl.
The report, entitled Triage: The next twelve months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, paints a dire picture of the state of the war. Civilian casualties are rising (up 41 per cent from 2007), as are the number of attacks (550 a day in 2007 compared with 50 per day in 2002). The Taliban now operate in three quarters of Afghanistan’s 400 districts, up from half last year. Meanwhile approval ratings for the Afghan government have plummeted from 80 per cent in 2005, after the last elections, to 49 per cent (little wonder when the country is 176th on Transparency International’s list of the world’s 180 most corrupt countries). The report’s authors observe: “In counterinsurgency campaigns, if you are not winning, then you are losing.” By all possible measures, the US and its allies are most certainly not winning.
The purported intent of the report is not to reverse these trends but to stabilise the losses. As the title suggests, the authors advise that the US prioritise its goals over the next year to avoid losing any more ground to the Taliban and provide a stable platform for the upcoming Afghan elections. In Afghanistan this means focusing on securing as much of the population as possible, with the implication that there will be portions of the country conceded to the Taliban: the report goes so far as to suggest one particular area, the Korengal valley, dubbed the Valley of Death by American troops, sparsely populated but the site of near constant fighting.
The report argues that the potential Taliban propaganda victory of a troop withdrawal is outweighed by the disproportionate cost of securing the area. This recommendation is undeniably harsh, since it means abandoning Afghans, even temporarily, to the Taliban. But, ultimately, an end to the fighting will probably result in an immediate improved quality of life for those people, albeit under the eyes of an oppressive Taliban leadership.
The second recommendation is to take advantage of the so-called civilian surge announced by Mr Obama to impose greater transparency on the Afghan government by embedding experts within the various ministries. With the majority of Afghans feeling little confidence in the central government, efforts must be made to improve its image – not through propaganda but with demonstrable improvements in governance.
As the report argues, the US should not tie these efforts to any particular Afghan administration and should carry on the efforts until and after the presidential elections in August. Accomplishing this will require co-ordination with the US’s often unwilling allies. In particular, talking the Europeans into signing up to this plan will require much persuasion from the Obama administration. Past efforts by European partners, namely the police training programme, have either been sidelined or duplicated by the Americans out of an insufficient commitment from Europe or disagreements over the manner in which the programme is conducted. Nevertheless, the US would be hard pressed to carry out both the military and political aspects of the war on its own, so its allies must step up.
The options for the deteriorating situation in Pakistan are much less clear. The military cannot simply cross the Durand line into the territory of a US ally to eliminate Taliban safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas. But there are things the US can stop doing to make the situation “less worse”. For instance, the US air campaign by unmanned drones kills more civilians than militants, even if, as the US contends, the Taliban inflates the number of innocent deaths. Additionally, these strikes are deeply unpopular in Pakistan and decrease popular support for the nation’s involvement in the US’s campaign against the Taliban.
That may be changing. The spread of the Taliban into the Northwest Frontier Province alarmed many Pakistanis, and the nation’s campaign against the militants enjoys widespread support. If for no other reason, the US should halt its air strikes to capitalise on the current anti-Taliban sentiment.
The report’s authors differ slightly on this issue. They see the Pakistani military’s tactics as counterproductive. While they would undoubtedly agree that the Taliban must be ousted from Pakistan, they do not think that the country’s military is up to the task – so much so that they call for an end to US military support for Pakistan, arguing: “Regardless of whether Pakistan’s military is incompetent or in collusion with the Taliban, it makes little sense to continue to devote such a high percentage of US aid to an ineffective force when other options exist.” The other option is the police, and the report argues for greater funding for them.
None of these recommendations is a recipe for defeating the Taliban. Instead they are the first steps on the road to not losing. But the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has deteriorated to the point where that is the best the US can hope for in the immediate future.
Beware the troop surge … Afghanistan is not Iraq
The following was first published by The National on January 6, 2009
The number of US troops in Afghanistan will almost double in the coming months as part of a new military strategy to win the war. US military commanders hope to apply the “surge” strategy that proved so effective in turning the tide of the war in Iraq.
A massive increase in the number of soldiers there allowed the coalition forces not only to attack the insurgents, but also to prevent them from returning once they were driven out. Since the US faces the same issues in Afghanistan as in Iraq because of insufficient troop numbers, the reasoning is that a similar surge will have the same effect. Additionally, the US hopes to replicate the highly successful tribal militia system that was the key to driving al Qa’eda out of Iraq. But it will face its stiffest opposition to this new strategy from the Afghan government itself.
In a recent interview President Hamid Karzai spoke out strongly against both a surge and the creation of tribal militias. He has been voicing his disapproval for the past few years at the increasing civilian casualties caused by coalition airstrikes, and has condemned any potential intensification in the fighting inside Afghanistan itself. With more than 6,000 Afghan civilians killed since the beginning of the war, most of them by coalition forces, Mr Karzai’s reluctance to see a resurgence in violence is understandable.
But few people are listening to him any more, least of all the Americans. He has been derisively referred to as “the mayor of Kabul” since he assumed the presidency in 2002. The central government has never been able to extend its influence far beyond the capital and in the past two years it has lost what little authority and credibility it had in the face of continued civilian deaths, ineffective civil institutions and a resurrected Taliban. In his defence, Mr Karzai warned the US for years that the Taliban was not defeated, that stagnant reconstruction efforts risked alienating the Afghan people against their government, and that warlords hired by the US to help to fight the Taliban used brutal tactics that only increased support for the insurgency. He has instead called for reconciliation talks with the Taliban and for any new fighting to be directed at militant safe havens in the southern Helmand province and in Pakistan.
The US will probably pay no more heed to the concerns of Mr Karzai than it did in the first seven years of the occupation. However, that does not mean that his warnings should be ignored. Such a drastic increase in foreign troops will spell a new period of heightened violence, and civilian casualties would spike as a result. It should be remembered that it was the desire for peace that first led the Afghan people to embrace the Taliban during the civil war that erupted in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. With the Taliban in effective control of much of Afghanistan’s south, some semblance of normal life has begun to emerge for those people — albeit under the watchful eyes of an intolerant regime. A resumption of hostilities may merely push Afghans further into the arms of the insurgency.
On the other hand, the Taliban are not a homogenous force of religious fundamentalist fighters. Rather, they are a loosely affiliated conglomerate of religious ideologues, tribal fighters, criminal gangs and nationalists. In its harshest form the Taliban cannot be allowed to control any segment of Afghanistan: nor should the horrors that the previous Taliban government inflicted on its people be forgotten, despite the current anarchy in the country. More moderate elements, however, can and should be approached by the US.
Reconciliation with more moderate segments of the Taliban should be the goal of US commanders rather than attempting to arm the tribes. Unlike in Iraq, the tribes of Afghanistan are fractured by decades of internecine fighting and power struggles. The Taliban exploit these tribal divisions and use them to recruit the disenfranchised. In other words, there is no internal coherence to the tribes that make their organisation into a militia significantly easier than grabbing a group of civilians off the streets of Kabul. And the end result would be to pit pro- and anti-Taliban elements of a tribe against one another rather than to co-opt former insurgents. This defeats the entire purpose of the tribal militia.
However, those elements of the Taliban that prove resistant to attempts to co-option and incorporation into the political structure will have to be fought and defeated. And this will undoubtedly require more troops. The Afghan national army would be the preferred tool, but it is currently too ill-equipped and poorly trained for the task. But any new offensive by foreign forces must be extremely mindful of civilian casualties, as every dead Afghan further alienates the population against the occupation.
In the end, the US and its allies must become better than the Taliban at providing what Afghans want: security. The coalition has thus far concentrated too much on the assassination of Taliban leadership and other military means of winning the war. But in doing so it is making the same mistakes made by countless occupiers of Afghanistan before it. The country has been under the dominion of nearly every great power in history. As a gateway between the East and West it has been a battlefield on which civilisations have fought for global and regional influence from far into antiquity.
No wonder, then, that Afghanistan is one of the most under-developed countries in the world, its potentially lucrative natural resources remain untapped, and so much of its population remains mired in poverty. George Bush probably knew little if anything of Afghanistan’s history when he overthrew the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and its Taliban rulers in 2001. Nor has the neglect of reconstruction efforts in the seven years since the occupation began shown that members of his administration are any better students of history. All the Afghans want is peace and a chance for a better life. The US has yet to give that to them, and until it does, America will be on the losing side of this war.
The number of US troops in Afghanistan will almost double in the coming months as part of a new military strategy to win the war. US military commanders hope to apply the “surge” strategy that proved so effective in turning the tide of the war in Iraq.
A massive increase in the number of soldiers there allowed the coalition forces not only to attack the insurgents, but also to prevent them from returning once they were driven out. Since the US faces the same issues in Afghanistan as in Iraq because of insufficient troop numbers, the reasoning is that a similar surge will have the same effect. Additionally, the US hopes to replicate the highly successful tribal militia system that was the key to driving al Qa’eda out of Iraq. But it will face its stiffest opposition to this new strategy from the Afghan government itself.
In a recent interview President Hamid Karzai spoke out strongly against both a surge and the creation of tribal militias. He has been voicing his disapproval for the past few years at the increasing civilian casualties caused by coalition airstrikes, and has condemned any potential intensification in the fighting inside Afghanistan itself. With more than 6,000 Afghan civilians killed since the beginning of the war, most of them by coalition forces, Mr Karzai’s reluctance to see a resurgence in violence is understandable.
But few people are listening to him any more, least of all the Americans. He has been derisively referred to as “the mayor of Kabul” since he assumed the presidency in 2002. The central government has never been able to extend its influence far beyond the capital and in the past two years it has lost what little authority and credibility it had in the face of continued civilian deaths, ineffective civil institutions and a resurrected Taliban. In his defence, Mr Karzai warned the US for years that the Taliban was not defeated, that stagnant reconstruction efforts risked alienating the Afghan people against their government, and that warlords hired by the US to help to fight the Taliban used brutal tactics that only increased support for the insurgency. He has instead called for reconciliation talks with the Taliban and for any new fighting to be directed at militant safe havens in the southern Helmand province and in Pakistan.
The US will probably pay no more heed to the concerns of Mr Karzai than it did in the first seven years of the occupation. However, that does not mean that his warnings should be ignored. Such a drastic increase in foreign troops will spell a new period of heightened violence, and civilian casualties would spike as a result. It should be remembered that it was the desire for peace that first led the Afghan people to embrace the Taliban during the civil war that erupted in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. With the Taliban in effective control of much of Afghanistan’s south, some semblance of normal life has begun to emerge for those people — albeit under the watchful eyes of an intolerant regime. A resumption of hostilities may merely push Afghans further into the arms of the insurgency.
On the other hand, the Taliban are not a homogenous force of religious fundamentalist fighters. Rather, they are a loosely affiliated conglomerate of religious ideologues, tribal fighters, criminal gangs and nationalists. In its harshest form the Taliban cannot be allowed to control any segment of Afghanistan: nor should the horrors that the previous Taliban government inflicted on its people be forgotten, despite the current anarchy in the country. More moderate elements, however, can and should be approached by the US.
Reconciliation with more moderate segments of the Taliban should be the goal of US commanders rather than attempting to arm the tribes. Unlike in Iraq, the tribes of Afghanistan are fractured by decades of internecine fighting and power struggles. The Taliban exploit these tribal divisions and use them to recruit the disenfranchised. In other words, there is no internal coherence to the tribes that make their organisation into a militia significantly easier than grabbing a group of civilians off the streets of Kabul. And the end result would be to pit pro- and anti-Taliban elements of a tribe against one another rather than to co-opt former insurgents. This defeats the entire purpose of the tribal militia.
However, those elements of the Taliban that prove resistant to attempts to co-option and incorporation into the political structure will have to be fought and defeated. And this will undoubtedly require more troops. The Afghan national army would be the preferred tool, but it is currently too ill-equipped and poorly trained for the task. But any new offensive by foreign forces must be extremely mindful of civilian casualties, as every dead Afghan further alienates the population against the occupation.
In the end, the US and its allies must become better than the Taliban at providing what Afghans want: security. The coalition has thus far concentrated too much on the assassination of Taliban leadership and other military means of winning the war. But in doing so it is making the same mistakes made by countless occupiers of Afghanistan before it. The country has been under the dominion of nearly every great power in history. As a gateway between the East and West it has been a battlefield on which civilisations have fought for global and regional influence from far into antiquity.
No wonder, then, that Afghanistan is one of the most under-developed countries in the world, its potentially lucrative natural resources remain untapped, and so much of its population remains mired in poverty. George Bush probably knew little if anything of Afghanistan’s history when he overthrew the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and its Taliban rulers in 2001. Nor has the neglect of reconstruction efforts in the seven years since the occupation began shown that members of his administration are any better students of history. All the Afghans want is peace and a chance for a better life. The US has yet to give that to them, and until it does, America will be on the losing side of this war.
Monday, June 8, 2009
From Jimmy Choos to boys’ toys, men just make stuff better
The following was first published in The National on May 4, 2009
Like many men, I have often been bewildered by womankind’s love affair with the shoe. I have watched with fascination and frustration as otherwise perfectly sane human beings coo over footwear. While I am not immune to the allure of a pair of five-inch skyscraper heels, I am baffled by how they can dominate a woman’s attention and draw her unwavering affection in a way to which men can only aspire. They seem to enjoy the search as much as the acquisition. My father chalked this up to mankind’s cave-dwelling days, when the men would hunt woolly mammoth and the women would scour grocery stores looking for the best deals on roots and berries.
Women take particular pride in shopping for the best deal. It is an accepted axiom that for every man there is a woman telling him how much money she saved today. But in all fairness, men too have a love affair with “things”. We appreciate craftsmanship and have an eye for beauty. It’s no accident that so many men design the clothes that women covet.
I used this argument to explain to my girlfriend why I would be spending a day at the Big Boys Toys Super Show in Abu Dhabi last week, but she just rolled her eyes. No wonder it’s Christian and not Christine Louboutin, Jimmy and not Jemima Choo, Yves and not Eve Saint Laurent, I said: women just don’t get workmanship. Ask any man why a Ferrari is so appealing and he’ll talk about engines and suspension. Ask a woman and she’ll tell you it’s pretty and red.
For those who don’t know or are chromosomally challenged, the Big Boys Toys Super Show is a celebration of the best in four- and two-wheeled transportation, sound systems that need municipality approval to install and watercraft straight out of Q’s laboratory in a Bond movie. In short, stuff I can’t afford. But that’s not the point. Big Boys Toys is the Guggenheim for the gearhead.
Thousands of men shelled out up to Dh250 to pay homage to other men’s ingenuity. There were novelty acts, such as the Segway. No sane man would spend thousands of dollars for the privilege of looking ridiculous, but we sure want to ride on one.
Some exhibits defied rational explanation, such as the Swarovski crystal-encrusted, 18-carat gold-plated table football set. Or 18-carat gold laminated playing cards with poker chips bedazzled with crystals. These are items of conspicuous consumption that only a rap star could love. I fail to see how making something sparkle adds to its appeal, but then I don’t get Mark Rothko either. Yet enough people pay barrowloads of cash for both to make me think I’m missing out.
Less ambiguous were the motoring exhibits, from your run of the mill supercar to the elite of the elite: the one-of-a-kind Maxximus G-Force, the world’s fastest street legal car. Of course, when the car in question can carry only nine minutes’ worth of fuel, fastest and street legal become meaningless terms. But that does not detract from its appeal.
The brainchild of a chauffeur and a slightly mad philanthropist who bankrolled the project, the G-Force does 0-60 mph in 2.1 seconds (or, in Dubai, zero to wrapped round a lamppost in just under 5). Combine that speed with its retro appeal, and the G-Force made the assorted Ferraris, Porsches and even a Ford GT on display look like Volvos.
For those who find the four-wheeled demode, there was the T-Rex, a reverse trike driven by a 1,400cc motorcycle engine. It has the horsepower of a Lotus Elise but only half the weight. Driving one is supposed to be as thrilling as riding a superbike, but less likely to land you in traction.
For adrenalin junkies who relish the thought of reconstructive surgery, and brandish scars and hospital bills as receipts for a life well spent, the vehicles in the off-road section were a ticket to hair-raising, white-knuckled thrill rides. Custom-made desert buggies with 600hp engines promised to propel you over (and possibly through) sand dunes. Snowmobiles converted for use in the desert that accelerated from 0 to 100kph in 2.7 seconds offered tantalising brushes with death, if only you could hang on long enough. Since someone apparently bought nine, my investment tip of the week is to buy hospitals.
As great as Big Boys Toys was as a spectacle, it was more than that. It was a celebration of men’s technical skills and imagination, as well as their ability to make really poor financial decisions. However, in retrospect, drooling over the carbon-fibre bonnets of sports cars is no less mad than fondling a pair of satin pumps — although buying the latter is less likely to land you in the poorhouse. Maybe its real purpose was to make those half-priced stilettos appear reasonable by comparison. I bet the show’s organiser was a woman.
What Iraq needs now is a diplomatic surge
The following was first published in The National on April 22, 2009
The apparent success of the US troop “surge” in stabilising Iraq and the recent success in conducting provincial elections have been heralded as a turning point in the nation’s fortunes. Despite occasional outbreaks of violence, the activity of insurgents is greatly reduced in scope and ferocity. A sense of normal life is returning to many parts of the country. The temptation is to believe that Iraq has indeed turned a corner; that the population, tired of six years of war, is rejecting violence and choosing to settle its differences in the political arena. But appearances, as they so often tend to be, are deceptive.
Firstly, violence and the organised groups who perpetrate it have not disappeared. A bomb blast targets Shiites in Baghdad; a truck bomb targets US forces and Iraqi police in Mosul, where the remnants of al Qa’eda in Iraq operate; yet another in the troubled Diyala province, where Sunnis face off against Kurds in the ethnically mixed town of Baquba. All these attacks happened in the past month, showing that sectarian tensions still exist and manifest themselves violently.
Despite this, there appears to be truth to the claim that Iraq is rejecting violence as a means to control the destiny of the nation. The most powerful evidence for this belief, beyond the simple reduction in violence, is the enthusiasm with which the Iraqis have embraced the political process. Even in 2005, when security was far from guaranteed, Iraqis turned out in droves for the legislative elections. And the most recent provincial elections were an even greater success, with the Iraqi security forces, not the Americans, overseeing the security of millions of Iraqis queuing up to cast their votes.
Even the results tend to show that a sectarian Iraq made up of ethnically cleansed regions divided between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds is not what most people want. The prime minister, Nouri al Maliki, and his Dawa party made huge gains in the polls on a platform advocating an Iraq unified under a strong central government. The biggest losers were the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and the Kurds, both of whom have pushed for a loose federal structure.
The long-term implications for their defeat are not clear yet. One argument is that the victory of the Dawa party and its like-minded compatriots will allow for greater progress on vital parliamentary issues, such as a unified hydrocarbons law. Thus far, debate on these issues has been poisoned by the Kurds seeking to control the vast oil resources of the north and Shiites in Basra trying to reap the benefit of those in the South. This is entirely plausible.
The declining political power of the Kurds and secessionist-minded Shiites means that the current composition of the government could be upset and made to include Mr Maliki’s allies, rather than his rivals. But the true litmus test for the proponents of this belief will come in the national elections at the end of this year. If the trend towards greater centralisation continues, a likely scenario, then the blocks on productive parliamentary debate could indeed be removed.
This would not necessarily be a positive thing for Iraq. Already there are troubling signs that Mr Maliki is abusing his popular mandate to exploit his rivals’ weaknesses to the detriment of Iraq’s long-term security.
The greatest concern is the final status of Kirkuk in the north of Iraq. Claimed by the Kurds and sitting on 12 per cent of the country’s known oil reserves, the city and the province from which it takes its name have been embroiled in a bitter tug-of-war between Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government. Under the regime of Saddam Hussein, Kurds and other non-Arab minorities were expelled from the city and the provincial lines were redrawn to create a de facto Arab majority in what was once a mainly Kurdish area. Thus the city of Kirkuk has taken on a Jerusalem-like status for the Kurds, symbolising the repression they suffered under the previous regime. So they are not likely to surrender their claims on the city, regardless of what the rest of the country may say in the polls.
Yesterday, the United Nations delivered a report on Kirkuk to Baghdad, which according to western government sources advocates a set of power-sharing options for the province and the city. This is unlikely to please either the Kurds or Baghdad.
The Kurds already feel betrayed that both Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution and its predecessor, Article 58 of the Transitional Administration Law that called for a reversal of the ethnic cleansing of Kirkuk and a referendum on the final status of the city and province, were never implemented. The UN report will only cement in the minds of the Kurdish leadership that their dreams of a Kirkuk incorporated into an autonomous Kurdish region are becoming increasingly distant.
Yet a compromise must be struck. The Kurds must understand that their vision of a Kurdish nation are not realistic and their continued intransigence only weakens their position in the long term. Iraqis are tired of the fruitless debate and the citizens of Kirkuk, which has not received the reconstruction funds it desperately needs because of the uncertainty about its future, want progress and care less about the ideological considerations.
For his part, Mr Maliki must not be too emboldened by his recent successes, Iraq is increasingly secure and his ability to boost the authority of the central government is indeed impressive; but Iraqis do not want another strong man, they want a unifier. And unity between the various sects, ethnicities and interests means compromise.
Finally, the United States must do more to shepherd the parties through this debate. Until now, it has preferred to leave it in the hands of the United Nations to foster agreement, but the UN lacks the clout to do so. It was a brave decision to provide the additional troops needed to quell the growing violence in Iraq in 2007. Perhaps it is time for an equally brave move to commit diplomatic resources to the debate over Kirkuk — a diplomatic surge, if you will.
'You have to solve Kirkuk'
The following was first published as part of a series on foreign policy challenges facing Barack Obama for The National on February 7, 2009
The provincial elections held a week ago in Iraq were hailed by both Iraqis and the international community as a success and a sign of the country’s growing stability. Despite rising levels of violence leading up to election day, the day itself was largely quiet. An estimated 60 per cent of the country’s voting population came out to participate in the democratic process, despite fears that violence would keep most people at home.
The elections were also a litmus test for Barack Obama’s withdrawal plan for the US military. With the elections successfully held under the eyes of Iraqi, not US, security forces, and the defeated parties largely accepting their losses in the polls, there are increasing signs that security is improving.
The elation in Washington was evident in the congratulations issued by senior military and diplomatic personnel. Gen David Petraeus, who had long warned that security gains in Iraq were “fragile and reversible”, lauded “the millions of Iraqi citizens who exercised their fundamental right to self-determination”. Gen Raymond Odierno, the commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the most recent US ambassador to Iraq, issued a joint statement saying: “Iraqi security forces successfully protected millions of Iraqis and enabled them to express their opinions freely in 14 of Iraq’s governates.”
Yet, despite the flurry of well-wishes and sighs of relief from the US leadership, Gen Odierno and Mr Crocker’s statements are telling: Iraq has 18 provinces. The remaining four were not included in this round of elections, nor is there any prospects for their inclusion in the near future.
This is because they are embroiled in controversy between an increasingly assertive central government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which wants to enfold these provinces into an autonomous Kurdish region. At the centre of the debate is Kirkuk province, which sits on about 13 per cent of Iraq’s oil reserves.
But for the Kurds, the fight over Kirkuk is about much more than oil. “Kirkuk has become an emotional issue for the Kurds,” said Dr Henri Barkey, the chairman of the International Relations department at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania.
Under the previous Baathist regime, Kurds were ethnically cleansed from the province under a policy of Arabisation.
In the 1970s, more than 100,00 non-Arab minorities, including the Kurds, were expelled from their homes in the capital city Kirkuk, after which the province is named, to make room for Arab oilfield workers, mostly Shia Iraqis.
“Districts in the province with predominantly Kurdish and Turkomen populations were folded into neighbouring provinces, and Arab districts in other provinces were joined up with Kirkuk province,” said Dr Barkey. The new cleansed area was renamed At-Ta’mim, from the Arabic word for nationalisation.
Therefore, Kirkuk is seen as symbolic of the oppression they suffered under the previous regime. And to redress their grievances, they seek a “normalisation of the demographic balance”, according to Dr Michael Knights, the head of the Iraq programme at the Washington Institute for Near East studies. “Kirkuk [the city] has a Jerusalem-like status to the Kurds. It is a symbol of their national ambitions.”
For its part, the central government has resisted efforts by the Kurds to incorporate Kirkuk into an autonomous Kurdish region. The dispute in government over who will control this province has poisoned the debate on other essential political agreements such as a unified hydrocarbons law and a constitutional revision. In the current make-up of the central government, Kurds control the presidency and thus have veto power over all legislation. They have used this as a weapon to force concessions. As Mohammed Ihsan, the KRG minister for the extra-regional affairs, said in an interview with the International Crisis Group last year: “If I can’t have it my way, I’m going to block your way.”
When an initial provincial election law in Iraq was passed in 2008, which included a provision for power-sharing in Kirkuk, the Kurdish MPs walked out of the vote in protest. The measure was then vetoed by the president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd. A subsequent attempt at passing the provincial law only succeeded when it was agreed that Kirkuk, and three other disputed territories, would be excluded.
The US largely has remained quiet in the debate, leaving the mediation to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), the body empowered by the UN Security Council to broker political reconciliation. According to Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s deputy programme director for the region, the US merely wants a “peaceful settlement to the disputes”.
Most watching this appear to agree there is the potential for an outburst of hostility between the sides should the dispute go unresolved. No one feels the argument will explode imminently into armed conflict. As Dr Knights puts it: “This is not a fight between enemies.”
Yet he believes there is still the possibility of “scuffles that turn into gunfights or assassinations”.
Any breakdown in the security situation in Kirkuk would require the US or its allies in Iraq to step in, as the federal government is prevented from sending troops into the city under a long-standing memorandum of understanding.
Should Baghdad violate this agreement, the potential for open hostilities would become that much greater, and, according to Dr Knights, would risk a serious backlash from the US.
Despite the fact that Kirkuk was not included in the latest round of provincial elections, the results could have an impact on the debate. Dr Barkey believes that an “electoral victory for the nationalists would be a blow to Kurdish desires for greater autonomy”.
Initial results show gains for nationalist movements in Iraq, particularly for the candidates supported by Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s Dawa party.
Such success would mean a reconstitution of the balance of power in Baghdad. Mr Maliki’s current coalition includes the Kurds and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), a Shiite party with a federalist agenda for southern Iraq.
If there are significant nationalist gains in the provincial polls, then “Maliki may not need the Kurds and the ISCI”.
Yet, such a victory will not lead to a resolution on Kirkuk. It may, however, push the Kurds to the bargaining table.
The International Crisis Group has pushed for a grand bargain on the disputed territories, in which autonomy for the Kurds, particularly in the development of its oil reserves, would be exchanged for a delay on the status of Kirkuk.
However, both Drs Barkey and Knights believe this is a mistake.
Dr Barkey said: “Kurds immediately rejected the ICG report, because they don’t want to trade oil for soil. The territories are more important to them.”
Dr Knights sees the Kurdish intransigence as a political manoeuvre. “There will be no grand bargain, because the Kurds cannot afford to back down. The government holds all the cards.”
With the region reliant on money from Baghdad to fund administrative services and pay security forces, “the only card the Kurds hold in the debate is physical control of the territories”. Both men still believe that the Kurds are open for negotiations on the status of the disputed territories, but “Kirkuk is where they will dig in”, said Dr Knights.
Dr Barkey believes a dual bargain must be struck. In the city itself, there will probably be “a Brussels-like solution” where the city is given a separate standing. “But in the end, if you want the Kurds to remain in Iraq, you have to give them territory.”
Dr Knights is more circumspect about a debate that “has been going on for decades”. He sees the core of the issue being in the powers allocated to provinces such as Kirkuk. While stronger provincial powers would allow Kirkuk to function as a special region outside the KRG and the federal area, “the indications are pointing to rapid re-centralisation, whereas the provincial councils are increasingly dependent on the federal government.
Yet, the debate will rage on, because, according to Dr Barkey, the Kurds will not relinquish their claims. “One way or another, you have to solve Kirkuk.”
Security at the mercy of greed
The following was first published as part of a series on foreign policy challenges facing Barack Obama for The National on January 31, 2009
Barack Obama has made securing Afghanistan the central pillar of his administration’s foreign policy platform. His decision to appoint Richard Holbrooke, a widely respected US diplomat, as his special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan emphasises the administration’s concern for the deteriorating security situation in the region.
Yet, according to many experts, US efforts in Afghanistan have focused too much on fighting the Taliban to the detriment of other more urgent needs, such as establishing security. They have urged Mr Obama to refocus US efforts or risk losing the war.
For many Afghans their greatest concern is not the Taliban, but the rising crime rate. Murder, kidnapping and sexual assault are on the rise and without a competent police force the central government cannot adequately protect its citizens.
The efforts to field a modern, professional force is plagued by numerous issues, but insufficient training, poor morale and lack of pay are some of the key problems.
Although statistics are hard to come by, Joanna Nathan, the senior analyst at the Kabul office of the International Crisis Group (ICG), said that even “the perceptions of a crime wave in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat” are enough to alienate the Afghan population from their government.
“These are major population centres filled with people who have no love of the Taliban, but they are growing increasingly disillusioned when they perceive that the government is not able to protect them from criminals.”
According to Ms Nathan, without the ability to provide security, “the central authorities cannot perform the basic function upon which government legitimacy rests”.
Part of the problem arises from the lack of co-ordination between the countries involved in Afghanistan. The majority of police training efforts are led by the United States; however, the European Union and other coalition partners have parallel programmes of their own. According to the ICG’s analysis of the training programmes, this multiplicity of efforts is expanding, compounding the problem.
Risto Lammi, the head of the International Policing Co-ordination Board secretariat, the organisation attempting to co-ordinate the divergent programmes, said in an interview in October that the training efforts had “no definite, single umbrella or point with overall authority on police programmes and a chain of command with clear division of work [between the players].”
This has begun to change. The United States has funnelled US$3.8 billion (Dh14bn) into training efforts over the past two years, and there has been a greater push for co-ordination of programmes. In 2007, the International Policing Co-ordination Board was established to oversee all training efforts.
While such co-operative councils are vital, they do little to directly impact the concerns of ordinary Afghans. Instead, it has been the Focused District Development, a US programme to train, mentor and develop local police on a district by district basis that has been welcomed by most citizens.
The process involves taking the local police force out of the district for eight weeks of training. They return as an elite-style force named the Afghan Civil Order Police.
The programme has worked so well that locals often beg to keep the retrained force in their district, according to Sloan Mann, the managing director of Development Transformations, a company that specialises in civilian-military integration.
However, according to the ICG’s Ms Nathan, district-by-district training is “the start – not the end – of a process”. Unless accompanied by the “political will from the top to change things and really tackle corrupt systems and abusive leaders”, this mentoring programme will fall short of what is needed to protect the civilian population, she said.
Dr Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institute, agrees that the challenge for the new US administration and the Afghan government will be tackling “corruption, low salaries, poor equipment and poor leadership” in the police.
Police chiefs are often political appointees who exploit their position and their subordinates for personal gain, said Mr Mann, who, prior to establishing Development Transformations, was a development adviser with the United States Agency for International Development attached to the US Special Forces command.
Mr Mann said he had heard of several police chiefs in Farah, Oruzgan, Kandahar and Helmand provinces who were purportedly in command of up to 15 officers, but employed less than half that number, keeping the salaries of the rest.
Those police officers genuinely employed often have trouble receiving their pay on time, or at all.
For some officers, their only means of pay are ad hoc roadblocks where they demand tolls from lorry drivers.
Many are also reduced to making mafia-like demands of protection money from shopkeepers, which undermines their credibility with the local populace. “If the police are forced to steal from the people and not able to do their jobs, then we have a problem,” said Mr Mann.
With the odds stacked so high against the police, an entire culture must be adjusted before programmes such as the FDD can have their full intended effect. “It is no use simply training someone and sending them out into the same conditions,” said Ms Nathan.
The effects of corrupt bosses and insufficient support from the government have had a noticeable impact on morale. Attrition rates among the police force are around 21 per cent annually. Without pay, many are unable to afford to remain in the force or resort to bribe taking. Others become heroin addicts.
These all contribute to the poor reputation of the police and hamper recruiting efforts. And while there are some good and professional police in Afghanistan, they feel that “the system is stacked against them”, said Ms Nathan. “If corruption at the centre means that appointments are made for large bribes rather than merit, then they are undermined.”
The Taliban has used the perceived corruption in the police force to score propaganda victories. A proclamation from the spiritual head of the organisation, Mullah Omar, said: “If the police of a state consists of people who are immoral and irreligious, who are drug addicts and whom their families turn away, how can they protect the property, dignity and honour of the people?”
The insurgency makes a point to target the police during its raids, both because they view them as the more lightly armed and poorly trained element of the Afghan Security Forces, and because they are so widely reviled by Afghans. As a result, deaths among police from insurgent attacks are three times higher than in the army. According to the Commanding General of CSTC-A, Major Gen Robert Cone, 17 per cent of the police force is thought to be dead or wounded.
Violence is growing: 2008 was the deadliest year for US troops. A leaked draft of the latest US National Intelligence Estimate described the country as being in a “downwards spiral”.
The lack of effective policing means that many villagers are now looking to the Taliban to protect them and Mr Obama must make tackling security a top goal of any new strategy, Ms Nathan said.
What the Afghans want is protection from criminals, including those in their own government, she said.
“The majority of people are still far more scared what would happen if the foreign forces left than if they stay,” said Ms Nathan.
“Harnessing this popular goodwill and making sure it is not lost any further is crucial.”
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