I'm running out of ways to describe how difficult Kandahar is becoming, and more so each day. A good friend was just a little over 100 metres away yesterday evening when the foreign offices were attacked. Lucky guy. With him was someone else I interviewed a few months ago for an article I'm writing for The National. The commander of a group of men in a private security company, he had told me how dozens of his friends had died over the course of his work. Last night while he was out with friends, the group that he works with now were all killed in the blast.
We're only at the beginning of the summer. Four or five months to go before we realise that the surge didn't really work. If only we could fast-forward to that point and avoid all the deaths to come.
Heard this morning about a bus travelling on the Herat-Kandahar road which was shot up by NATO troops. Above you can hear one of the victims explaining what happened. He seems to be the only one in the Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar City; the rest were taken to the main base at Kandahar Airfield (KAF).
A couple of pictures follow:
I type to you now without the sound of a generator in the background. Yes, it's that time of the week - we have city power. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of working with a generator in the next room, let me just tell you that it makes it difficult to think; by the end of the day you often feel like someone has been bashing your head all day. Turning the generator off is one of the most pleasant moments in my day.
...which is why it baffles me that restoring Kandahar's city-power isn't more of a priority for the guys who are 'winning hearts and minds' (supposedly) this summer in the city. I get that without sorting out Kajaki and Dahla dams paying for fuel for massive generators to supply the city with power is a little like burning money, but we seem to be doing that anyway so why not go for the short-term fix on this one when it could make SUCH a difference.
Anyway, rant over. Another interesting thing I heard yesterday is that shopkeepers are tearing up and throwing out their stocks of Seven Star cigarettes on account of a rumour that the company have written the word "Allah" inside the filter so that by smoking Seven Star somehow you are burning or desecrating the name of God. People really seem to be taking this one to heart.
UPDATE: (25 minutes later) The power went again. We're back on generator. Yuk.
AGAIN UPDATE: Things like this don't help either...
"The storm is coming. Believe you me. The storm is coming. I try telling people, but it seems they're all just making themselves busy with fixing the leaky roof or the squeaky door. The storm will destroy their entire house and city, though. The storm is coming. You have two options: get out now, or climb down into your bunker and hope that the storm will pass and that you're still alive six months from now. The storm is coming." (Businessman in Kandahar City).
Kandahar, it seems, has changed. Felix and I were away for a little over two months, and during that time security conditions in the city have worsened considerably. The threat comes not just from the Taliban -- who are able to carry out occasional prominent operations and move around the city -- but also criminal groups. Kidnappings, robberies, intimidation -- these seem to be par for the course for residents inside the city.
'The surge' is coming, too, and everyone knows it. Some families are sending women and children away, either to Quetta or to Kabul; those who could afford to do so had mostly done this already. Young people who manage to find work or study opportunities outside Kandahar are staying away. "Come back to Kandahar?" said one Kandahari friend of mine now working in Kabul. "You've got to be kidding, right?"
I haven't really had a chance to catch up on what's going on outside the city, let alone what's going on in the districts, but I hope reporting this summer is going to be better than this recent article ("Barrel-chested governor Canada's 250-lb political weapon in Kandahar" by Murray Brewster). Steve Coll's blog post on everyone's favourite brother is a must-read.
I'm knee-deep in research work and reading of my own. On my bed-side table for the coming couple of weeks (ok, I don't have a bed-side table...) are:
Another book I've been dipping into recently is Patrick Porter's Military Orientalism (Hurst, 2009), an excellent take on the way militaries see each other and adapt to their 'enemy'. I haven't yet read the chapter which deals with the Taliban, but I'll be sure to comment here when I do.
The things we're working on have completely filled our plates for the next half year or so: a collection of Taliban 'poems' or songs that we're putting out a translation of next year; a second volume together with Mullah Zaeef on the history of the Taliban movement 1980s-present day that we hope will address all the things everyone said he neglected to mention in the first book; and a large research project for New York University on the extent of links between the Taliban and al Qaeda (and all the various affiliates of both) which tackles everything from the 1970s onwards.
Newspapers, politicians and the military on both sides of the Atlantic are salivating at the prospect of a great clash in Marjah (Helmand) in the coming days -- "the most dangerous areas of central Helmand in a series of daring raids — the biggest since the first Gulf war" (Sunday Telegraph, UK) -- and you'd be forgiven for forgetting the human cost.
Good thing that we have Holly Pickett's latest blog post to remind us that war affects real people with real lives -- strategise all you like, but remember all of this is about people in the end. Holly's photos are hard to look at. That's the point.
I just got back from an incredibly depressing lecture by John Nagl at King's College London entitled "Afghanistan and its lessons for the future of conflict." Unashamedly addressing the problem from the perspective of the US army, Nagl took us through his conception of counterinsurgency warfare, how the US -- in his analysis -- have responded and learnt from mistakes made in the past, and what this might mean for Afghanistan at the moment and the wars of the future.
There were quite a few points and broad themes where we were in complete agreement: the absolute importance of the information or 'strategic communications' element in Afghanistan to any success that might manifest itself, or in terms of any buy-in from Afghans; we agree on the importance of history ("history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes") and on the need for careful, diligent study in order to prevent repeating the mistakes of the past.
We differ, though, primarily on the different basis of our professional and personal experience. John Nagl served many years in the US Army, taking part in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as well as Operation Enduring Freedom post-2001. He is concerned with the institution that he knows best (the US military), the people who form its staff and worried about its ability to adapt to change from within. These are all valuable pursuits, but it's a very different world to the one that I inhabit, sharing in the ordinary problems and insecurity that Afghan friends face on a daily basis -- with the caveat, of course, that I have a foreign passport and can leave at any point that I choose.
Almost entirely absent from tonight's presentation was the Afghan narrative -- the ordinary experiences of people who have to exist at the sharp end of the spear. I'm not even talking about the 'counter-narrative' which we're starting to see more of from the policy community -- specifically the kind of thing that Mullah Zaeef's book seeks to encourage, and that recent talk of negotiations will only promote further (at least in name).
To that end, I am incredibly worried about his seemingly wholehearted endorsement of 'community defence initiatives'. I don't think I need to go into the reasons why creating and funding tribal militias in southern Afghanistan is to open Pandora's Box -- others have written about it -- but the US military's continued involvement with this idea (with what amounts, by now, to wilful ignorance of the very loud counter-discourse) indicates, to my mind and from where I'm sitting, an emphasis on short-term fixes over long-term strategy and consistent communication of those goals.
There's a whole literature now from scholars, military practitioners, and also from within the US establishment, on how and why the fostering of these tribal or local defence groups is a bad idea, and the only thing to explain it is a reliance on something I like to call 'hope tactics'. About half a year ago, I received an email from a American soldier about to deploy to Nuristan. He'd read a post I'd written together with Felix on tribal militias and wanted to know more about why I thought it wouldn't work. In the end we had to agree to disagree, but he had these words in final response:
It's not that militias are good or bad for Afghans - rather which militias, in which geographical/political setting, with what mission, under whose supervision/ownership, for what purpose, and with what training. In my view - seconded by quite a few Afghans I have interviewed - a locally sourced, tribally/communally managed, non-militarized, properly trained over the long-run, arbakai force may be the preferable solution in some areas of Afghanistan.
...which is all fine and well, except just to go ahead anyway in the hope that you'll be the one who can make it work (even if we forget that people are never deployed long enough to see this kind of thing through to the conclusion and in the kind of detail and perspective that an incredibly important decision like this should entail) is just wishful thinking.
There was also a lot of talk of 'enemies' tonight. Obviously there is a dialectic at the core of counterinsurgency studies -- the insurgent vs the counterinsurgent -- but to my mind this needs to be complicated by the on-the-ground reality that there are no such clear lines dividing government, people, Taliban and all the myriad of other 'groups', particularly in somewhere like southern Afghanistan. While the Q&A session afterwards had him admit more of this detail and 'messiness', this didn't come across in the quite confident presentation that preceded.
Finally, the most worrying of all was his suggestion that, for the future, maybe "the military needs to become more like the State Department, and the State Department need to become more like the military." One of the biggest problems -- in my analysis -- that we suffer from in southern Afghanistan is western political establishments' almost complete reliance on the military to form policy in the absence of their own more creative and useful alternatives. We see this with the United States in particular, but also in the United Kingdom. What we most certainly DON'T need, is a further creep of political power into the hands of the military who, we must remember, only come with a limited toolbox and set of resources to respond to different kinds of problems, notwithstanding Professor Nagl's hopes to the contrary.
“The reality was that [Afghanistan] was viewed as an unwanted headache and one which seemed increasingly impossible to solve. This much is made clear from official government documents from the period, which reflect the sense of defeatism and intellectual exhaustion that permeated the highest echelons of the British state. [...] Governments had cast around for a ‘silver bullet’ to solve the crisis, oscillating between markedly divergent positions. [...] thinking on [Afghanistan] now appeared more rudderless than ever.
[...] a policy vacuum allowed the notion of ‘talking to terrorists’ to once more re-enter British calculations.”
I've doctored the above passage a little, but it's certainly an interesting parallel for the present day discussion. The passage is, in fact, discussing post-1975 Northern Ireland and the British government's return to a policy of clandestine discussions through intermediaries with figures from within the Provisional IRA.
The book does caution against drawing parallels between different circumstances -- everything is local, after all -- but the fact that even a brief read in the book will remind you of what is happening with international policy towards the Taliban at the moment is an indicator that there are at least lessons to be learnt here: ending political stalemate in the greater Kandahar area at the moment should be the single priority of any efforts to find 'a solution', but doing so from a point of strategic bankruptcy will inevitably be to the detriment of everyone's long-term future.
Felix and I are busy putting together presentations for the UK and USA at the moment. In case any of you are in either of those countries, please see the list of presentations below. I'll try to keep it updated, but in any case the most up-to-date list will always be on the book's website itself -- here.
UNITED KINGDOM
January 21st, 2010 -- Talk -- School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Distance can be cruel. Separation may only be the beginning of our problems, but it is almost certainly the root. I don't believe in a 'clash of civilisations', except in the sense that we ourselves create similar dynamics with our actions.
This distance is easily found in Kandahar: Kabul is 305 miles away by road (that you can't take because it is too dangerous) or an hour by plane. The urgency of the situation in southern Afghanistan is not evident when you pass through government offices in Kabul, nor is it readily apparent in Kandahar itself. The main staging area for foreign troops in the south is Kandahar Airfield or KAF, itself some 11 miles away from Kandahar City. As you can see in the video above, there is also a separation on the roads, where convoys pass by local traffic as if from another planet.
Language is another problem: foreigners for the most part don't speak Pashtu, and I found that the Afghan translators employed by foreign troops aren't always Pashtu speakers either -- I went to Arghandab a few weeks ago and found only one translator who seemed to have a firm command; the rest knew a few words before lapsing into Dari.
Then when we talk about the Taliban, there are misunderstandings on both 'sides'. Obama's objectives -- despite all the drawn out policy reviews and speeches intended to delineate exactly these -- are opaque to almost everyone down here. Similarly when it is the turn of foreigners to look in and assess the long-term goals of 'the Taliban'.
Journalists themselves are separated from the people in Kandahar:
I'm worried Lang's death will lead to further scaling back of reporting from Afghanistan.
As it is, Canadians already get a limited view of Afghanistan. The handful of Canadian reporters who do cover the country are based at the NATO base at the Kandahar airfield and save occasional trips to Kabul, Canadian reporters are rarely assigned to cover stories outside the Canadian zone of operations.
It was with these issues in mind that I travelled to Arghestan today. It's only two hours drive from Kandahar City to the district centre in Arghestan, but you'd be lucky to find someone who'll go with you. This is not to say that the district is dangerous -- far from it in fact -- but that the distances are an obstacle even for Afghans.
The road out to the district centre is newly-built and, according to the district chief, one of the main development projects which have been carried out in the district since he took over some three years ago. Only in a few areas did our driver have some worries about passing through safely; for most parts of the road we were completely undisturbed -- there was even very little traffic heading to and from Arghestan.
I'll save the details of this trip for a separate article I'm writing for publication elsewhere, but suffice it to say that Arghestan poses a number of interesting questions: why, in the first place, is the district one of the few places in Kandahar province where you can travel so freely? Is it indeed, as many allege, because the insurgency uses Arghestan as a pathway between Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, transporting wounded fighters and other supplies, or because their is some sort of unspoken deal ('don't scratch my back and I won't scratch yours')? Is the almost complete absence of foreigners (and I imply money and development projects as part of this) a reason for the calmness in the district, or is the calmness a reason for the absence of foreigners and their money?
I certainly didn't come back from the brief trip with any firm answers on these questions. The district chief seems to be a good choice, doing useful work and liked by the people. Arghestan, we should remember, is Afghanistan's second biggest district by area, and for someone to be able to keep the lid on the situation (with only 80 policemen assigned to the district, reduced from 138 last year) is at least worthy of our attention and careful assessment.
Back in the City, people are depressed and seem to have lost any of the little hope they had a few months ago -- back when we were all waiting for a 'new' strategy that was actually 'new'; back when it seemed people had become serious about Afghanistan.
Recent weeks have brought their own changes and surprises: the head of the Mohammadzai tribal shura, a friend of Felix and I, was kidnapped just over a week ago from Ayno Meena, one of the safer areas around the City. A policeman was shot dead in Wesh, a residential area located close to Spin Boldak district centre, shattering illusions of what local people thought of as one of the last safe areas in Kandahar; people stopped going out at night for a week after the policeman was shot.
It seems nowhere is safe any more, least of all the city.
I often get asked for book recommendations by people who are about to deploy/work in/travel to (etc) Afghanistan. The choices here are a bit unorthodox -- more on account of what I omitted rather than the choices themselves, I would imagine -- but I think these five books should offer the basis for a good working understanding of some of the 'themes'.
There's no specific order to these books, although you're probably better off leaving David Edwards' Before Taliban till later on in your studies.
An Unexpected Light was the book that made me want to come to Afghanistan in the first place. I read it while I was still in secondary school and knew that this was a place I wanted to end up someday. A detailed account of Elliot's travels in Afghanistan during the 1990s, the book offers an indispensable introduction to cultural and historical principles in Afghanistan.
This is the sequel to Heroes of the Age (also a must-read), and it covers the 1980s jihad (from 1979 to 1995). It's a fine example of what good writing and research on Afghanistan should look like -- something we should all aspire to -- and introduces the changes that the 1980s brought to Afghan political culture, and shows how the Taliban were an outgrowth of this period.
One of the first books I read when I first came to Afghanistan, this explores social environment and cultural identity, especially as it relates to the NGO and assistance community. It doesn't take you all the way up to the present day, but it's an excellent summary (read: indictment) of the post-2001 period.
None of the first three books go into much detail on the specifics of Afghan history, but Dorronsoro is the best primer on the past 30 years. Many books are written without the benefit of significant 'field' exposure to the Afghanistan that lies outside Kabul, embassies and MRAPs, but Dorronsoro (thankfully) does not fall into this category.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my own addition to the pile (full disclosure: I was one of the editors of this book). At a time when much of the world's attention falls on Afghanistan -- for good or for ill -- there are few books that convey a real and unfiltered sense of the Taliban movement and their roots in the villages of southern Afghanistan. This book does that. And the fact that I spent close to four years working to get this book translated, edited and published should tell you something about how important I think it is that policy-makers read this book.
