"Afghans Find Success Harder to Gauge," by Scott Peterson (in Kabul) - the Christian Science Monitor, 15 September 2006
KABUL – Few ever dared dream that Afghanistan, five years after US forces toppled the Taliban, would be Utopia.
But few, also, would have predicted that chronic weak governance, worsening security, and a resurgent Taliban would prompt senior US officials to warn against allowing Afghanistan to collapse again into a "failed state."
The metric for success has changed repeatedly for Afghans, whose high hopes - buoyed in late 2001 by unprecedented promises of Western support - have been repeatedly deflated.
Many feel a familiar foreboding, akin to the disintegration at the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989, which led to years of civil war - and, finally, to more stable Taliban rule.
"My biggest worry is not the Taliban ... but the degree of cooperation of the population with the Taliban," says Homayoun Shah Assefy, a former presidential candidate and strong critic.
"In Maoist terms, they are swimming like fish in a friendly sea.... The gap between the government and the people is widening," says Mr. Assefy. "It's never too late to do good things, but we are moving toward a dangerous situation that is getting worse, not better."
Opium production has soared by nearly half in the past year, to 92 percent of world supply - most significantly in Taliban-heavy provinces of the south, where, many believe, it may help finance the militants. Army and police forces remain weak, and billions in rebuilding have yet to bring steady electricity even to Kabul.
President Hamid Karzai has said that his government, widely perceived among Afghans to be mired in corruption, could not resist a day without 38,000 US and NATO troops there. "The system is not working," says Assefy. "It can't defend itself."...
[Afghanistan's democratic] evolution has hardly begun, and is endangered - as attacks mount against schools, police stations, and government offices - by spreading Taliban influence. NATO forces, launching what they say is a new hearts-and-minds strategy, have battled for two weeks in the south, and claim to have killed more than 500 insurgents.
"There are two realities in competition: a political reality, of problematic but growing democracy; and a security reality, of the encroaching Taliban and insecurity, and it's like a race between them," says an American analyst in Kabul.
"The fundamental principle of politics is delivering services," says the analyst, ticking off problems from open sewers to ineffective parliament to warlordism - that have undermined public faith. "Donors have missed a really important point here: "If Karzai can't deliver services, then democracy can't function."...
US and British forces in Iraq have sometimes attempted to blend military force with the benefits of governance, to defeat insurgents, often with only temporary results. But that template has yet to be widely tested here, where initial contingents of the International Security Assistance Force didn't deploy outside of Kabul for 18 months.
The result of such "economy of force," military officers here now admit, was a vacuum that complicated government control. NATO forces in the south have been pushed to 10,000 from 4,000 this year; in Helmand Province, 100 Special Forces troops now have nearly 5,000 British troops on the ground.
"We are looking for that psychological ... effect that won't make it easy for the Taliban to crawl in at night and recruit $5-a-day foot soldiers," says NATO military spokesman Maj. Luke Knittig. Up to "70 percent perhaps [of Afghans] that just want to make sure they are on the winning side, and you want to win them over."...
"The Taliban: Regrouped, Rearmed," by Peter Bergen (op ed) - the Washington Post, as reprinted in the Statesman Journal (Salem, OR), 14 Sept 2006
...When I traveled in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, the Taliban threat had receded into little more than a nuisance. But now the movement has regrouped and rearmed. Bolstered by a compliant Pakistani government, hefty cash inflow from the drug trade and a population disillusioned by battered infrastructure and lackluster reconstruction efforts, the Taliban is back — as is Afghanistan’s once forgotten war....
I recently traveled to Afghanistan for three weeks, meeting with government officials, embedding with U.S. soldiers from the 2-4 Infantry and interviewing senior American military officers. I found that while the Taliban may not constitute a major strategic threat to President Hamid Karzai’s government, they have become a serious tactical challenge for U.S. and NATO troops, as the war here intensifies. And their threat is only amplified by their ubiquity and invisibility.
“In this place, they are everywhere,” explained Mohammed, our interpreter. “They are sitting here as a farmer. Then they are Taliban.”
When I visited Zabul province in July, Lt. Col. Frank Sturek was in charge of U.S. military operations there. Sturek, from Aberdeen, Md., earned his insurgent-fighting stripes in Mosul, Iraq, under the tutelage of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. When I spoke to Sturek, he had recently lost two of his men in firefights with the Taliban. In a nighttime interview conducted by flashlight in the mud compound, Sturek described a two-hour struggle on July 19 against about 120 Taliban who were armed with mortars, recoil-less rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Judging from newly dug graves, Sturek estimated 35 to 40 Taliban had been killed.
Despite their numerous casualties, the Taliban are much more willing than Iraqi insurgents to engage in pitched battles, Sturek said. “These guys will mix it up,” he said, “and they use a lot more direct fire.” In the five months he had been in Afghanistan, he noted, none of the Taliban fighters his men had fought had ever surrendered.
Echoing all other U.S. officers I interviewed in Afghanistan, Sturek emphasized that the Taliban threat required a political solution, not a military one, and that expanding the U.S. presence and reconstruction efforts into remote areas would win the long-term conflict. “You can win every firefight you want, but the battle is in these villages,” he said. “This is where you change the minds of the people — or at least create a doubt that the Taliban are not preaching the right message.”...
The Afghan population remains generally pro-American, and its appetite for more conflict is low after more than two decades of war. However, the risks of a slide into Iraq-style chaos remain. Averting it would require Washington to end the Afghan drug trade and compel Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban warriors’ havens [on its territory]. These are both tall orders, but Washington could gain real leverage in the area of reconstruction. So far, it has appropriated only $9 billion for Afghan reconstruction, as compared with $34 billion for Iraq, even though Afghanistan is larger, more populous and has greater infrastructure needs. And of the appropriated amount, only $2.5 billion, a State Department official told me, has been spent.
In the absence of greater U.S. investments in roads, power and water resources, the Taliban will surely prosper and continue to gain adherents. Unless they take decisive action now, U.S. policymakers may be looking back in a few years, asking themselves why they lost Afghanistan despite the promise the country showed after the fall of the Taliban regime.
"Rebuilding a Country - Or an Insurgency?," by Andrew Maykuth (interview with Barnett Rubin) - the Philadelphia Inquirer, 14 September 2006.
NEW YORK - A leading Afghanistan scholar says that America's military counterterrorism strategy has failed to eliminate the Taliban - and may actually be contributing to the growth of the insurgent Islamist group.
Barnett R. Rubin, director of studies and senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, said in a recent interview that a strategy devoted to destroying Taliban remnants had diverted resources from developing a strong central government in Kabul.
"There was from the beginning and still is a contradiction between the counterterrorism or counterinsurgency mission and the mission of building a stable, sovereign Afghan national state," said Rubin, a Philadelphia native who served as an adviser to the U.N. special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, in 2001....
Rubin, who has made more than 20 trips to Afghanistan since 2001 and is author of the 1995 book The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, placed much of the blame on the Bush administration's focus on destroying terrorists rather than addressing the conditions under which terrorists thrive.
"They didn't understand that Afghanistan was not just a terrorist base," Rubin said. "The issue there is not just are you a moderate Muslim, or are you an Islamic extremist? It's one of the poorest countries in the world - literally it's one of the four or five poorest countries in the world."...
He said the international community's strategy toward opium production was typical of the counterproductive approach.
After initially ignoring the resurgence of poppy production among Afghan's poor farmers, the United States responded this year by sponsoring an eradication program in southern Helmand province - source of about half the world's opium supply - without first developing infrastructure or plausible alternative opportunities for farmers.
"Putting the enforcement first rather than the development first, we have actually turned farmers in some areas against us and driven them into the arms of terrorists," Rubin said.
After the eradication program started, the Taliban distributed notes to mosques in Helmand promising to defend the farmers.
"So naturally the farmers look to the Taliban as their protectors, and of course the drug dealers contributed money to the Taliban as well," Rubin said....
Added 17 September:
"The Death of an Afghan Optimist," by Barnett R. Rubin (op ed) - the Washington Post, 17 September 2006, p.B02 (registration required)
Hekmat Karzai, a cousin of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, called me from Kabul last Sunday. "Barney," he said. "We lost a friend today." A suicide bomber had blown up the car of Hakim Taniwal, the governor of Paktia province on Afghanistan's frontier with Pakistan, killing him and two aides....
As his name indicated, this bearded sociologist was part of the Tanai tribe, one of Afghanistan's border groups so often depicted as fierce and warlike. But Taniwal, educated in Europe, exemplified another side of tribal life -- the soft-spoken elder who leads and reconciles by wisdom and eloquence....
The last time we spoke, Taniwal repeatedly emphasized that stability was possible only with the support of ordinary Afghans. "We should invest in peace," he said, "not in fighting." He backed military operations based on precise intelligence, but such operations, he believed -- even if they killed, captured or routed some Taliban -- would have little long-lasting effect without popular support and economic development. Elders from 10 provinces, whom I met the day before my visit with Taniwal, had agreed, denouncing corrupt state officials. The people have totally lost trust in the government, they told me.
The Taliban "are slowly neutralizing the people," Taniwal said. "The government can't protect them, so they will go to the other side. They will not help the government to keep security." An elder from the neighboring province had offered a similar conclusion: "If the people were not distressed with the current government, the Taliban could not do anything. If the government starts negotiation with the elders and recognizes them, then we will be the police for the government."...
Taniwal wanted the coalition to "pressure Pakistan more and more to keep the people there and also arrest and send them to Afghanistan." But for him, pressuring Pakistan was aimed not at destroying the Taliban but at reintegrating them. He wanted them, and all Afghans, "not to solve problems with the Kalashnikov. The Taliban should join with the government, the society, and have their own party," like the Taliban's sympathizers in Pakistan, who run in elections....
Iraq is another case where US officials made missteps early on that alienated local public opinion. The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran gives a detailed account of several of the perhaps idealistic but disastrously misdirected and misled efforts that contributed to this:
"Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran - the Washington Post, 17 September 2006, p. A01 (registration requied). Taken from Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, recently published by Knopf. Chandrasekaran was the Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. (Another good, recent book about US governance in Iraq is LA Times reporter T. Christian Miller's Blood Money, from Little, Brown & Co.)
After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.
To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration....
The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort....
James K. Haveman Jr., who was selected to oversee the rehabilitation of Iraq's health care system.
Haveman, a 60-year-old social worker, was largely unknown among international health experts, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense.
Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world....
Haveman arrived in Iraq with his own priorities. He liked to talk about the number of hospitals that had reopened since the war and the pay raises that had been given to doctors instead of the still-decrepit conditions inside the hospitals or the fact that many physicians were leaving for safer, better paying jobs outside Iraq. He approached problems the way a health care administrator in America would: He focused on preventive measures to reduce the need for hospital treatment.
He urged the Health Ministry to mount an anti-smoking campaign, and he assigned an American from the CPA team -- who turned out to be a closet smoker himself -- to lead the public education effort. Several members of Haveman's staff noted wryly that Iraqis faced far greater dangers in their daily lives than tobacco. The CPA's limited resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies.
Haveman didn't like the idea that medical care in Iraq was free. He figured Iraqis should pay a small fee every time they saw a doctor. He also decided to allocate almost all of the Health Ministry's $793 million share of U.S. reconstruction funds to renovating maternity hospitals and building new community medical clinics. His intention, he said, was "to shift the mind-set of the Iraqis that you don't get health care unless you go to a hospital."
But his decision meant there were no reconstruction funds set aside to rehabilitate the emergency rooms and operating theaters at Iraqi hospitals, even though injuries from insurgent attacks were the country's single largest public health challenge....
Imagine how Iraqi health care professionals must have felt about working with American authorities whose priorities were so far off base in terms of what their country urgently needed.
Haveman doesn't seem like a stupid or deliberately harmful person, but he does seem awfully self-oriented. The cardinal sin in public relations is to ignore what your target audience is worried about. It sounds like Haveman couldn't even be bothered to ask himself what Iraqis' realities were.
The main points that Chandrasekaran makes in this section of his book is that a Pentagon official hired CPA staff on the basis of political loyalty to President Bush rather than on the basis of expertise or managerial ability, and that that decision had disastrous consequences. But there's another quality that all of the officials profiled by Chandrasekaran share, and it's by no means unique to Bushies (though I must say it does seem cultivated among them). Call it self-ism: it's a mix of self-absorption, self-importance, self-satisfaction, and unquestioned self-worth.
It's toxic to any kind of public enterprise -- including public diplomacy -- because it inherently devalues other people and their perceptions and their concerns. That approach might make important people feel great, but it does nothing to achieve desired results or to advance national interests.