Afghanistan

'Fly Freely' - Afghan Women's Poetry

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I'm going through our selection of poems written by young and old Talibs and remembered a different set of poems that I translated from the Dari a few years ago, those of Nadia Anjuman. I'll be republishing these poems online soon -- since the old website has lapsed and doesn't work any more -- but you can order the full printed version on the HAWCA website. It includes an essay written by Christina Lamb, the complete side-by-side English-Dari translation of Nadia Anjuman's book of poems as well as four stories written by victims of violence against women. This is one of my favourites among the collection: Fly Freely (2001)

On a day when my thoughts bring me firewood

as a gift instead of cold feelings

On a day when my eyes are wide open

As if

By seeing a withered leaf, oceans would flow

On a day when my hands are inspired

to weave clothes full of wheat and roses

for the body of this creation

On a day when my lullaby can

grant sleep to the eyes of the sick and street-bound children

On a day when with soaring melodies

pray

to the fire spirits

On that day,

I will write a poem, a great romance

sweet as a palm tree and as enchanting as the moon.

Marie Colvin in Kandahar for the Sunday Times

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There's an interesting piece in today's Sunday Times by Marie Colvin on Kandahar. It's stuck behind a paywall, I'm afraid, so you'll have to get it via LexisNexis or do a google search in a couple of days to see if someone copies it out elsewhere.

It's an interesting story for the detail it brings out from Kandahar city. Colvin presents a picture of an increased Taliban focus on the city as a result of pressure from the outer districts where American/ISAF forces have been carrying out operations in recent weeks. One of the problems with this article, though, is that she gets the timing the wrong way round. A photo caption, for example, states that "the Taliban have begun assassinating government officials after infiltrating the city." The Taliban's assassination campaign has been up and running for several years now. There is nothing new, either, in the claim that the Taliban have decided to focus on the city as a special priority.

Already back in November/December 2009 a decision was taken to flood the city with Taliban supporters or sympathisers (and to reach out to those already living there). Much has been written on the areas that the Taliban gravitated to -- for a mixture of tribal/qawmi and geographical-kinship reasons -- but this piece suggests what's going on is a new development. One interesting data point, though, is the extent of the violence. She visits Mirwais hospital to get a sense of the numbers:

"The hospital's reception desk keeps three separate books to record the bloodshed. One is for Taliban shotings, the second for IEDs and vehicle bombs and the third for "innocent deaths" -- from road accidents and natural causes. The receptionist said that 14 or 15 injured victims of Taliban attacks, mostly men, were being brought in every day."

Not all of these are assassination attempts, of course. But certainly the numbers being targeted nowadays is high. Even back in late summer this year there it wasn't unusual for 4 or 5 people to be killed in a single day.

A key point left out of this article is the fact that assassinations are not exclusively carried out by the Taliban. A long-standing rumour in the city even holds that the early assassination campaign reinvigorated around 2006-7 was spearheaded by old Kandahari Hezb-e Islami affiliates/supporters from the older mujahedeen generation. A larger number still are completely unrelated and carried out independently of the Taliban's assassination commission (yes, there's an official ruling body to assess who gets targeted and who doesn't), the result of an environment where anything goes, where the rule of law is absent and where there is simply too much violence happening to make everything a priority.

***

Apologies for the absence. Have been taking some time together with Felix Kuehn to finish off a book-length study of the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda (and their affiliates) 1970-2010, commissioned and part-funded by New York University's Center on International Cooperation and the Norwegian government. More on that to follow.

Hope Is Not A Strategy

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I was browsing through my father's pile of books a while back and I came across a hardback with a great title: 'Hope Is Not A Strategy'. (It's not about politics, or Afghanistan, so don't bother looking it up).

And they're right. It's not.

Which brings me to an article I'm reading at the moment: Alex Thier's "Afghanistan's Rocky Path to Peace". You can see in this photo I took of my notes that I enjoyed the near-fairy-tale like quality of the article's assumptions:

thier.jpg
thier.jpg

The words that occur with great frequency in this article are conditional: 'could' appears 8 times, 'might' appears 12 times and 'would' occurs 29 times (and also the word 'will' 29 times, as if force of suggestion will make something happen).

It's probably just me, but I came away from this article with the sense -- if this was as far as we might allow ourselves to think in terms of a possible negotiated settlement -- that there is no way this can ever happen. For all that is presented is hope. Hope that this might change. He even says that the possibility would require "the stars to align".

That's not enough. There are enough alternative possibilities to the outline presented in this article that mean the concluding paragraph falls flat on its face.

"Do the Afghan people get a say? After 30 years of war they are among the poorest and most traumatized people on earth. But they are possessed of endurance and an indomitable spirit. If the indigenous, neutral leadership that supports a just peace could find its voice, that might spur a movement that presses the parties to reconcile."

I say it again. Hope. Is. Not. A. Strategy.

Kandahar Timeline 1979-2010

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Many of you have already downloaded and visited my previous post which contained a PDF version of a chronology of events in Kandahar from September 2001 up to the present day. For various other projects in the past (most of all, for work in connection with Mullah Zaeef's My Life With the Taliban) I have found it useful to put together event data of varying levels of granularity.

Various projects made it difficult for me to work on compiling these various chronologies and event lists, but I finally found time to finish it off this week. Accordingly, please visit http://www.alexstrick.com/timeline/ for a more or less complete listing of events that took place in or relating to Kandahar from 1979-2010. Some years are less thoroughly presented than others, but this will change as I incrementally update the timeline over the next few months as I simultaneously go through the final stages of editing (together with Felix Kuehn) Mullah Zaeef's second and forthcoming book.

I hope, also, to be able to find time to explain how I put the raw data together and was able to present it in this format. In short, I used an extremely nifty piece of software called Tinderbox (Mac only, apologies...) and was given a lot of help by some people who understand its ins and outs far better than I currently do. So special thanks to Mark Anderson for that, and to Mark Bernstein for writing the software in the first place. I use Tinderbox for almost all of my work these days (data gathering, data sorting, data organisation... the list goes on) and strongly recommend others with high-volume complex data projects to give it a try.

Anyway, find the timeline here and please don't hesitate to get in touch with comments/corrections.

From 'Ghazal' by Shin Gul Aajiz

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These lines from a poem written by Shin Gul Aajiz and published on the Taliban's website sometime in late 2007:

The river of your love took me, I am going

If I am a drop, you are the sun of beauty

I am a garden of flowers because of your love’s spring

It's one of the poems that Felix and I are editing together for a collection to be published by Hurst Books in early 2011. Lots of different styles, forms and subject matter. The one above is about yearning for his 'beloved'. Many are political (motivational anthems angry with the 'kuffar') but these by no means dominate the collection we've kept since 2006.

Kandahar Chronology (September 2001-October 2009)

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I compiled this chronology of significant events relating to Kandahar province last year. The primary source for these dates/events was the New York Times' archive, but then (almost) everything has been double-sourced. Everything from about 2008 onwards was while I was here in Kandahar so that then is my own observations and event listings. Perhaps someone will find it useful and it will save someone somewhere some time.

Here is the file:

LINK

Ask the Scholars: when and where was Mullah Mohammad Omar born?

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As part of the NYU study, I've been doing some delving into the ages of various key members of the Taliban and those affiliated with 'Al Qaeda' and the various associated groups. While doing this, I came across a whole host of differing accounts of Mullah Mohammad Omar's age and birthplace. I thought I'd list some that I came across as a way of showing how the 'scholarly community' is often deeply divided on really basic issues.

  • Sana Haroon (in Frontier of Faith) says that his 'hometown' was Uruzgan
  • John Cooley (in Unholy Wars) says that he was born in Maiwand district, Kandahar province
  • Bruce Riedel (in the execrable The Search for Al Qaeda) says that he comes from Uruzgan province
  • Kamal Matinuddin (in The Taliban Phenomenon) states that he was born in 1961 in "Nauda village of Panjwayi district", Kandahar province; that he later moved with his family to Deh Rawud district of Uruzgan province, and then later migrated back to Sangisar in Kandahar province. Matinuddin's account is frequently cited.
  • Rohan Gunaratna (in Inside Al Qaeda) states that he was born in 1962 in Uruzgan
  • Steve Coll (in Ghost Wars) states that he was born in 1950 in Nodeh village in Kandahar province
  • Dexter Filkins (in The Forever War) dances around the issue and states merely that he was based in Sangisar
  • Ahmed Rashid (in Taliban) says that he was born in 1959 in Nodeh village near Kandahar and that he moved with his family during the 1980s jihad to Tirin Kot in Uruzgan province
  • Michael Griffin (in Reaping the Whirlwind) states that he was "from Maiwand" in Kandahar province
  • A hagiographical Arab jihadi account of Mullah Mohammad Omar's life ("The Giant Man", published by Al-Tibyan Publications) states that he was born in 1962 in Uruzgan
  • Another Arab jihadist profile on Azzam.com states that he was born in 1960 in Noori village in Kandahar province
  • Mullah Zaeef (in My Life With the Taliban ) says that he was born in Uruzgan around 1962
  • The French review Politique Internationale says -- in the introduction to one of the few interviews made by a western news outlet with Mullah Mohammad Omar -- that he was born in 1965 in a village near Kandahar.

That's a variance of 15 years in the different estimates, and I haven't even included the various speculations in newspaper and magazine print -- of which there are volumes.

It all goes back to issues of information and openness among the Taliban. I'm reading Philip Short's excellent biography of Pol Pot in the evenings here in Kandahar, and I came across this passage:

Even then, he did so reluctantly. For two decades he had operated under multiple aliases: Pouk, Hay, Pol, '87', Grand-Uncle, Elder Brother, First Brother - to be followed in later years by '99' and Phem. "It is good to change your name," he once told one of his secretaries. "The more often you change your name the better. It confuses the enemy." Then he added, in a phrase which would become a Khmer Rouge mantra: "If you preserve secrecy, half the battle is already won." The architect of the Cambodian nightmare was not a man who liked working in the open.

I'm wary of drawing comparisons between the Khymer Rouge and the Taliban, if only because it seems easy to do so on the surface, but secrecy over basic points is certainly something that they shared.

Please let me know if you come across any 'interesting' citations of where Mullah Mohammad Omar was born; I even vaguely recall reading somewhere that he was born in Kunar province, but can't remember where I read it.

UPDATE: Someone very helpfully suggested I read this Dutch report from 1999 as to the childhood and early years of Mullah Mohammad Omar. Go to Google Translate if you don't understand Dutch.

New(ish) Kandahar Blogs

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Just a short shout-out to three blogs also posting from Kandahar for those who don't already follow them. Not everything is always interesting, but given the dearth of information they're worth keeping up with.

Kandahar Diary - PSC Contractor based down in Kandahar, managing operations all over the south it seems.

Knights of Afghanistan - Observations from an Expat Country Manager for an Afghan PSC, based down in Kandahar

Free Range International - Most of you will already read these guys, but now they're increasingly posting from Kandahar rather than just from Nangarhar.

Jere van Dyk's 'Captive'

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I'm looking forward to this book, just reviewed (below) by Publisher's Weekly. Quite apart from the whole survival-memoir thing, Jere knows a lot about the Haqqanis (having spent time with them during the 1980s).


"Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban" (Jere Van Dyk)

Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban Jere Van Dyk. Times, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8827-4

An American journalist exploring the war zone on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reports unwanted lessons in its perils in this harrowing memoir. Having traveled with the “freedom fighters” in the '80s, Van Dyk thought he had the connections and knowledge to navigate the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but he was captured by a fractious band of Taliban fighters in 2008. Van Dyk (In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey) and his Afghan guides spent 44 days in a dark cell. Well-fed but terrified, he felt a nightmare of helplessness and disorientation. Dependent on a jailer who mixed solicitude with jocular death threats and a ruthless Taliban commander who could free or kill him on a whim, the author performed Muslim prayers in an attempt to appease his captors; wary of murky conspiracies involving his cellmates, he “was afraid of everybody, including the children.” Van Dyk's claustrophobic narrative jettisons journalistic detachment and views his ordeal through the distorting emotions of fear, shame, and self-pity. But in telling his story this way, he brings us viscerally into the mental universe of the Taliban, where paranoia and fanaticism reign, and survival requires currying favor with powerful men. The result is a gripping tale of endurance and a vivid evocation of Afghanistan's grim realities. 1 map. (June 22)

Kandahar's Electricity Problems

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I'm with the short-termers on this one:

Convinced that expanding the electricity supply will build popular support for the Afghan government and sap the Taliban's influence, some officers want to spend $200 million over the next few months to buy more generators and millions of gallons of diesel fuel. Although they acknowledge that the project will be costly and inefficient, they say President Obama's pledge to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011 has increased pressure to demonstrate rapid results in their counterinsurgency efforts, even if it means embracing less-than-ideal solutions to provide basic public services.

...

U.S. diplomats and reconstruction specialists, who do not face the same looming drawdown, have opposed the military's plan because of concerns that the Afghan government will not be able to afford the fuel to sustain the generators. Mindful of several troubled development programs over the past eight years, they want the United States to focus on initiatives that Afghans can maintain over the long term. (excerpted from The Washington Post)

I wrote about this a few weeks back, suggesting that it would probably be better just to pay for fuel and generators so as to deliver something tangible and real for people in Kandahar City. Martine van Bijlert (one of the co-founders of AAN) just posted a must-read commentary from her recent trip down to Kandahar in which she notes that:

I have returned from Kandahar shaken. Not because of the blasts and the warnings and the feelings of apprehension, but because of how dark the future looks when I listen to what people have to say. I fear that all the shiny plans will do very little to change that.

Electricity would, at the very least, be something that the government and foreigners could point to as having improved -- only, that is, if it can be maintained past just a few months. The last two times we had regular and reliable electricity -- just after Governor Torialai Weesa was appointed to the post for a month or so, and in the run-up to the Presidential and Provincial Council Elections -- nobody benefited from the provision of the service because (a) there was very little follow-up in terms of publicising and trying to advertise and remind people it was there and (b) because it soon stopped and people went back to moaning about how useless the government and foreigners are.

Kandahar Survey

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This is a pretty useful survey to read through. I have my usual concerns about how it was conducted, who they spoke to, who did the interviews, where people were interviewed, how they managed to get through all these long lists of questions etc etc, but there are some general trends here which reflect things said by people I speak to.

The conclusion presents a bleak picture:

This survey's findings indicate endemic corruption, along with a lack of security and basic services, in Kandahar Province. Collectively, this sets conditions for a disenfranchised population to respond either by not supporting the government due to its inability to deliver improvements in the quality of life or, worse yet, by supporting the Taliban.

We should keep in mind, though, that this survey was carried out between December 23-29, 2009, a period that -- compared to now -- was and felt much safer. The exponential increase of insecurity, particularly in Kandahar City, since then would surely give more pause for thought. Next time they're doing these surveys I'd be interested to see some data collected on whether people are sending family members outside the province in anticipation of the coming summer; I've heard mountains of anecdotal evidence that this is the case, but something concrete would be useful to confirm this.

[h/t to Nathan Hodge at Wired's Danger Room Blog for distributing this survey online]