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Pakistan urges Afghanistan to help free youths
By ASIF SHAHZAD - Associated Press
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan's interior minister on Sunday called on Afghanistan's president to help win freedom for around 30 young Pakistanis held captive by the Pakistani Taliban.
Afghan Taliban Releases 4 Kidnapped Turkish Engineers
VOA News September 04, 2011
Afghanistan's Taliban movement has released four Turkish engineers who were kidnapped last December in the eastern province of Paktia.
Afghan forces kill 21 insurgents
KABUL, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Afghan forces backed by NATO-led troops have killed 21 insurgents and arrested 11 others over the past 24 hours, a press release of Interior Ministry said Saturday.
Special forces step up secret Afghanistan attacks
Rafael Epstein September 5, 2011 The Sydney Morning Herald
AUSTRALIAN special forces in southern Afghanistan are stepping up their involvement in controversial secret ground attacks and drone strike missions aimed at killing key Taliban insurgent suspects.
Biden's Burden: Last One Standing in Afghanistan Policy Wars
The Washington Note By Steve Clemons Saturday, Sep 03 2011
Now that General David Petraeus has mothballed his uniforms, turned the ISAF command in Afghanistan over to General John Allen, and taken Leon Panetta's chair at the CIA, the next to last big name who fought for primacy in DC's Afghanistan policy wars is, for the most part, off to other pastures.
At the start of the Obama administration, the two arenas that mattered when it came to political power -- the issues defining who was "big" in Obama Land -- were either the global financial crisis or the Afghanistan War.
More Afghan soldiers deserting the army, NATO statistics show
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Sunday, September 4, 2011
KABUL - At least one in seven Afghan soldiers walked off the job during the first six months of this year, according to statistics compiled by NATO that show an increase in desertion.
Deciphering Mullah Omar's Eid Message
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty September 2, 2011 Abubakar Siddique
In what could be considered the Taliban's "state-of-the-union" address, Mullah Mohammad Omar marked the end of Ramadan with a message of moderation.
A decade on, it's time to quit
Sunday Star Times By ANTHONY HUBBARD 04/09/2011
Ten years into the war on terror, New Zealand's participation seems worryingly tarnished and increasingly pointless.
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Pakistan urges Afghanistan to help free youths
By ASIF SHAHZAD - Associated Press
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan's interior minister on Sunday called on Afghanistan's president to help win freedom for around 30 young Pakistanis held captive by the Pakistani Taliban.
The youths were abducted in Afghanistan four days ago after crossing into Kunar province on a day trip from their border villages in Bajur tribal region.
The Pakistani Taliban said it captured them because they belong to a tribe that set up a militia force backed by Pakistani government to fight the militants.
The minister, Rehman Malik, told reporters he asked Afghan President Hamid Karzai to help free the boys. "I request that you get them released," he said.
Afghan officials have said they were not aware of the kidnapping.
Pakistani officials have said the captives were under 16. The Taliban claimed they have released the youngsters and are holding only young men.
Also Sunday, Hakimullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed his fighters have the upper hand in two Pakistani regions close to the Afghan border. He urged Muslims to support them, according to a video monitored by the SITE Intel Group, which tracks militant websites.
It was Mehsud's first appearance in such a video since he admitted a role in the failed May 1, 2010 attempt to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square.
Militants from Afghanistan have been attacking security checkpoints in Pakistan in recent months. The Pakistani army has said the attackers fled the military's offensives in Pakistan and are using Afghan territory as a safe haven.
The militants are trying to overthrow Pakistan's pro-Western government and have carried out scores of attacks since 2007.
Hakimullah's video message was released to coincide with the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan last week.
He said the militants scored victories in the Swat and Mohmand regions during Ramadan but gave no details. He called on Muslims to join the fight, saying, "the answer to all our problems lies in jihad."
Hakimullah took over the Pakistani Taliban in 2009 after his predecessor Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in a U.S. missile strike.
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Afghan Taliban Releases 4 Kidnapped Turkish Engineers
VOA News September 04, 2011
Afghanistan's Taliban movement has released four Turkish engineers who were kidnapped last December in the eastern province of Paktia.
The insurgent group handed over the four Turks to the International Committee of the Red Cross in neighboring Ghazni province late Saturday into early Sunday.
The Taliban said it freed the men as a humanitarian gesture in honor of Eid al-Fitr, a Muslim festival that marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. One of the released hostages, who gave his name only as Imam, told the French news agency that he and his compatriots were not tortured in captivity.
Gunmen abducted the four Turks and their Afghan driver on December 26, 2010 while the five men were traveling in Paktia. Afghan officials said the Turkish engineers worked for a company building border posts in the area.
Afghan insurgents occasionally have kidnapped foreigners in recent years, releasing some after negotiations, but killing others.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.
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Afghan forces kill 21 insurgents
KABUL, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Afghan forces backed by NATO-led troops have killed 21 insurgents and arrested 11 others over the past 24 hours, a press release of Interior Ministry said Saturday.
"Afghan police in coordination with army and NATO-led troops have killed 21 rebels and captured 11 others during series of operations across the country over the past 24 hours," the press release emphasized.
Seven more insurgents have been injured during the operations, it further said.
However, it did not say if there were any casualties on security forces over the mentioned period.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to make comment.
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Special forces step up secret Afghanistan attacks
Rafael Epstein September 5, 2011 The Sydney Morning Herald
AUSTRALIAN special forces in southern Afghanistan are stepping up their involvement in controversial secret ground attacks and drone strike missions aimed at killing key Taliban insurgent suspects.
Their commander, Major-General Peter ''Gus'' Gilmore, confirmed his senior officers had used missiles, fired from unmanned US aircraft, and defended his soldiers' ''capture-or-kill'' operations.
''Sometimes it will be an aerial strike, sometimes it will be committing a ground force, sometimes it will be, to be patient and wait,'' he said in an interview with The Age.
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The drone strikes are dubbed ''Kill TV'' or ''Taliban TV'' because soldiers watch live video feeds of bombs and missiles detonating, with one source admitting it is uncomfortable viewing. ''You can see everything,'' he said.
General Gilmore commands soldiers from the secretive commando and SAS regiments, who take part in the NATO campaign targeting insurgency leaders.
NATO special forces - including Australians - have tripled their activities, with 1879 missions and 916 ''targets'' killed or captured so far this year. In 2009, there were 675 missions with 306 adversaries killed or captured, according to figures recently released.
In a review of one disputed US drone strike, Kate Clark from the Afghanistan Analysts Network said there were ''systemic concerns'' over the intelligence used, and inquiries into casualties do not give ''due attention to existing alternative accounts'' from locals.
The ABC's Four Corners program tonight says it has documented several incidents in which it claims Australian soldiers targeted the wrong people and civilians were killed.
General Gilmore has not seen the ABC report but has backed his soldiers. "When they are on the ground, by themselves, and they have to make that split-second decision, cascading through their mind is this long line of training," he says.
"I don't worry because I have huge trust in our training and the judgment of the guys."
Critics of the Australian Defence Force and NATO want more details on the soldiers' rules of engagement and intelligence processes.
''If the ADF special forces believe that they are in full compliance with international law, the onus is on them to demonstrate that fact,'' said the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killing, Philip Alston.
''And the risks that follow from such a carte blanche [secrecy] are not hard to see.''
The Age has been told the details of one drone strike, which has not been referenced on the ADF's website.
In 2008, an Australian special forces commanding officer ordered a strike on an insurgent leader and four armed men, seen planting a home-made bomb or IED 20 to 30 kilometres from the Australian base in Oruzgan province.
Final permission from the NATO command in Kandahar was rescinded several times as the insurgents' vehicles passed hamlets and small compounds where the risk to civilians was considered too great.
The strike was finally authorised when the Afghans stopped moving - ''they were having a smoko'', according to one source.
Australian soldiers watched as the first weapon appeared to kill four of the men. The fifth man was killed with a second strike, after he was seen injured by the initial attack.
A warplane from another country was also involved,
but did not fire any weapons.
"The angst we go through with every single activity that may involve targeting or death, it is unprecedented," one soldier said.
The US can have more than 50 such aircraft in the skies above Afghanistan at any one time. The Predator and more advanced Reaper drones can drop as many as two 225 kilogram laser-guided bombs and fire up to four Hellfire missiles from 12 kilometres away.
The $28 million aircraft fly for up to 18 hours without refuelling, controlled by pilots on the US mainland and they are maintained in Afghanistan by private contractors.
Sources say the technology helps the military avoid civilian casualties, with vision from the drones analysed for hours and sometimes days to confirm the target.
Classified software is also used to predict the size and strength of the blast. Personnel on the ground sometimes help aid the drones' accuracy by placing devices in vehicles and on buildings.
Afterwards, video of locals rushing to the blast site is analysed, and mobile phone calls and emails are intercepted, to assess who was killed.
The ADF says it won't release detailed rules of engagement, methods used to compile target lists, or details of drone strikes.
''International laws explicitly and implicitly require a significant degree of transparency,'' said Philip Alston, now a professor at New York University. He said while the military did not need to reveal all details, ''without transparency there can be no accountability''.
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Biden's Burden: Last One Standing in Afghanistan Policy Wars
The Washington Note By Steve Clemons Saturday, Sep 03 2011
Now that General David Petraeus has mothballed his uniforms, turned the ISAF command in Afghanistan over to General John Allen, and taken Leon Panetta's chair at the CIA, the next to last big name who fought for primacy in DC's Afghanistan policy wars is, for the most part, off to other pastures.
At the start of the Obama administration, the two arenas that mattered when it came to political power -- the issues defining who was "big" in Obama Land -- were either the global financial crisis or the Afghanistan War.
In the latter case, President Obama conducted the single longest strategic review of US policy and doctrine since the Vietnam War. Those who had grips on some aspect of America's operation in Afghanistan were golden, globally recognized VIPs, got resources, appeared on Rachel Maddow's show, were as close as we get to the old Consuls of Rome. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) Richard Holbrooke, then under some criticism for not spending more time in the AfPak theatre, told me that "someone would be a fool to leave town when all the action on this portfolio was underway in the White House."
The stakeholders who fought hard over which way to go on Afghanistan were akin to the top Strategic Command generals and Soviet experts in presidential administrations during the Cold War.
Who were they and where have they gone?
America's most famous general, David Petraeus, was - as mentioned - one of these policy gladiators recently 'strategically redeployed' to direct the Central Intelligence Agency where his attentions will be global and more broadly strategic than the policy silos he has been running. One of Petraeus' honest but least heard statements made when recommending the number of troops and duration of deployments to Afghanistan was that he was not taking into account the global strategic needs that the US faced elsewhere and that he was focused just on the AfPak challenge - devoid of the larger picture. That narrow clarity is now over for the general and largely neutralizes his definitive hold on America's Afghanistan policy.
But others who had power stakes on Afghanistan and who fought hard inside Washington for their piece of the action were General Jim Jones, national security adviser to President Obama; Defense Secretary Robert Gates; AfPak envoy Richard Holbrooke, General Stanley McChrystal, US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry. Vice President Joe Biden too was a key force in the debate.
These were the players who skirmished and intrigued against each other building and breaking political alliances as some advocated a Taliban-conquering "all in" approach vs. those who believed America needed to narrow its objectives and not repeat history by doubling down endlessly in a Vietnam-like trap.
General Jones who at one point allied himself with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry to try and get Richard Holbrooke removed - which might have worked had draft letters between the men not leaked out - is no longer National Security Advisor and is now a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center working on energy policy.
Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who was slightly schizophrenic on Afghanistan, has now stepped down, succeeded by Leon Panetta. Gates was remarkably successful at securing the resources and policy parameters on Afghanistan that his lead generals advised but then would give speeches as I once heard him give at the Nixon Center (now the Center for the National Interest) criticizing over-militarizing our approach to the Afghanistan problem. Gates would say that there was no military solution to Afghanistan but of the resources we were committing to solve the problem, 99% was on the military side of the equation he would say -- and would underscore how short-sighted this was.
Richard Holbrooke died too young, his last words to his doctor, "you've got to end this war in Afghanistan." Holbrooke, who of all the key players, had the nightmare realities of Vietnam imprinted on to his DNA and who worked hard to prevent a recurrence of mistakes made in that war, nonetheless partly reflected the reality that the past had become the present.
Just before I was invited to take part in a debate on America's Afghanistan policy in the New York-based Intelligence Squared Debates (where I was on a team debating three others including my colleague and Southeast Asia expert Steve Coll), Holbrooke outlined for me what he saw as the absolute "musts" for US policy and what our constraints would be. From what I knew of the positions of Eikenberry, McChrystal, Petraeus, Jones, Biden and others - it was crystal clear that it would be nearly impossible to get strategic and operational coherence in Washington - no matter what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan. Petraeus had convinced the President and drawn him to his side on larger deployments, and Petraeus - who regularly admitted not being a strategist looking at America's larger strategic picture - called Holbrooke his "wing man." This was a big reversal from the days when the diplomats "led" and the military "did." But Holbrooke, regrettably, is gone.
Stanley McChrystal's position collapsed when Rolling Stone correspondent Michael Hastings captured a culture of commentary in the command staff around McChrystal in Afghanistan that was disdainful of civilian authority, particularly of Vice President Biden. McChrystal was fired for the transgressions - though Obama has buffered the general's fall with a modest advisory post. McChrystal is returning the favor by allegedly telling a number of journalists that "no trust" exists any longer between the Pentagon's generals and those running the National Security Council. But McChrystal is no longer relevant to the AfPak beat.
Ambassador and former ISAF Commander General Karl Eikenberry has just stepped down from his post in Kabul - famous for leaked memos to the White House profiling Hamid Karzai's bipolar behavior and emotional meltdowns and his incredibly bleak reads on the performance of the government and armed forces of Afghanistan. Eikenberry, in a set of farewell interviews recently, takes pride in the "civilian surge" in Afghanistan and feels that he is leaving the war-torn nation better off than when he arrived - but bottom line is that he too is off the Afghanistan beat.
One might argue that there should be others on this list - perhaps Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, our National Security then deputies Tom Donilon or Denis McDonough. Mullen kept his powder dry on many of the AfPak battles . Hillary Clinton didn't seem to play a defining role other than ferociously protecting Holbrooke from his rivals - which was in fact an important assist. Donilon and McDonough intervened on the edges but facilitated the voices involved rather than defining an outcome, with the one famous exception that McDonough told the assembled team during the final phase of the strategic review that a proposal to the President that didn't have a withdrawal trigger date for the surge forces being committed wouldn't be acceptable.
The last one standing is Joe Biden - not because he is the Vice President, but because he has clung behind the scenes to his original position that the US needed to scale down its military and political objectives in Afghanistan while his rivals have fallen by the wayside or have been replaced by others in their roles with lesser stature.
Joe Biden's warnings during the strategic review process that America needed to keep a modest military footprint, focus on al Qaeda, and set up the capacity to "shape the choices made by the Taliban" rather than the Petraeus formulation of "defeating al Qaeda and its affiliates" (i.e. the Taliban)" have ultimately emerged as President Obama's choice - but only after the military failed to translate hundreds of billions of dollars of resources and a large military deployment into success.
No one is fighting hard to be at the table when Afghanistan policy is discussed now. Rather than a path to power and national security celebrity, this portfolio is burdensome and tired.
But this is what Joe Biden is surprisingly good at managing - the portfolios that no one really wants, that may have been front burners in the public eye gone stale.
As an example, Biden drilled down deeply into the who's who of Iraq's byzantine political world, knowing not only the primary leaders of the cultural and ethnic rallying poles in the country - but the rivals of rivals within each of these factions. But perhaps more importantly, Biden also drilled down into the divides inside the US government - reconciling and forcing a bridge between rival State Department and Pentagon views on Iraq. He then built a non-public but important relationship with Ad Melkert, the UN's Special Representative for Iraq, who became a vital partner to Biden in hammering out the myriad back deals that have thus far kept Iraq from falling back into civil war and moving forward something that looks like the beginning of a representative democracy.
Biden has told me he doesn't want the Afghanistan portfolio; that he has enough to do and that there are others who can now implement the general course of action that President Obama has now outlined, committing to a withdrawal of surge forces by the end of 2012 and a withdrawal of all troops by 2014.
But there is no one left to really run the show. No one wants it.
Afghanistan's internal fragility in which a civil war is underway with a proxy war between India and Pakistan stacked on top is exactly the kind of Rubik's Cube challenge that Joe Biden excels at.
Biden's original Afghanistan plan with some modest hybridization and adjustment by President Obama is now the course we are on. Afghanistan spikes in the press now and then - most recently because of blowback from a stressed out American public realizing that the US is spending $120 billion a year in a nation with a $14 billion GDP, but on the whole - there is a long list of other topics that Americans prefer to distract themselves with rather than what is happening in this war.
Biden is the right guy to help Obama to deliver the political outcome in Afghanistan that we need to get to. Biden has thought through strategies to deal with components of the Taliban, understands the vital role Pakistan must play, gets the strategic gaming that is also part of the package and which would no doubt involve India, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps China and Russia.
Biden has won the policy battle. Now it's time for President Obama - after the debt ceiling disaster is hopefully averted - to call Biden for lunch and ask him to shoulder another of the biggest burdens and solve some of the biggest blunders of the Obama administration.
-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared
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More Afghan soldiers deserting the army, NATO statistics show
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Sunday, September 4, 2011
KABUL - At least one in seven Afghan soldiers walked off the job during the first six months of this year, according to statistics compiled by NATO that show an increase in desertion.
Between January and June, more than 24,000 soldiers walked off the job, more than twice as many as in the same period last year, according to the NATO statistics. In June alone, more than 5,000 soldiers deserted, nearly 3 percent of the 170,000-strong force.
Some Afghan officials say the figures point to the vulnerability of a long-standing Afghan policy that prohibits punishment of deserters. The rule, issued under a decree by President Hamid Karzai, was aimed to encourage recruiting and allow for some flexibility during harvest time, when the number of desertions spikes.
“I am personally in favor of removing that amnesty,” said Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, the chief of staff of the Afghan army. “We cannot turn a blind eye on the individuals who are doing something wrong.’’
As recently as September 2009, more Afghan soldiers had been quitting than joining the army, but that trend had been reversed by aggressive recruiting, salary increases and guarantees of regular leave.
Afghan and coalition military officials said they believe they can continue to make progress toward expanding the army to about 200,000 soldiers, despite the recent increase in desertions. But they acknowledged that it will be important for Afghanistan to reduce the dropout rate as the number of U.S. soldiers in the country begins to decline and as more of the security burden begins to shift toward the Afghan army.
“The army has got to figure out how to get their attrition down,” said Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who oversees NATO’s efforts to build up the Afghan security forces.
The attrition statistics since 2010 were provided by NATO’s training command in Kabul in response to a request by The Washington Post. The Afghan ministry of defense keeps its own statistics on attrition that are generally slightly lower than NATO’s but hew to the same trends. The Afghan government’s tallies include soldiers who return after being gone long enough to be considered deserters; NATO’s stats at this time do not.
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak said he doubted that dropouts would be a problem as Afghan forces took more responsibility in coming years.
“We have accelerated in a way which we have never accelerated before,” Wardak said in an interview last month, referring to the growth of the army. “In the beginning everybody was having doubt that we will not have recruits. But till today . . . there has been no problem with recruitment at all.”
Afghan and coalition officials said the soldiers who leave often complain about poor living conditions or commanders who do not allow a regular vacation schedule.
But Afghan and U.S. military officials also said poor leadership is a main reason soldiers desert the ranks. Those commanders who are corrupt or fail to ensure proper pay, food or vacation for their subordinates have higher attrition. These problems have been around for years, however, and coalition officials did not offer specific reasons for the rising attrition this year.
“We’re not seeing any linkage to the amount of fighting they’re doing,” said one U.S. military official who works with Afghan security forces. “It really boils down to leadership.”
Four months ago, Enayatullah, a 35-year-old soldier based in Kabul, traded in his $350-a-month salary to flip burgers at a high school cafeteria. Trained as a wrestler, he had been a member of a unit whose soldiers played for the army’s sports teams. When a new commander arrived and cut the daily food stipend and sent the soldiers on more missions to Wardak province, which is far more dangerous than Kabul, Enayatullah grew disgruntled. He quit, along with eight of his friends and fellow soldiers, he said.
“He made us all very disappointed,” Enayatullah said of the new commander. “I was happy with my profession. If they offered us what we had before, then we would be happy to go back.”
At one point this summer, the pace of desertions climbed to an annualized rate of 35 percent, though it has since declined.
NATO’s training command has developed an extensive plan to attempt to lower attrition further, saying an acceptable goal would be 1.4 percent per month — or about 17 percent a year. July’s attrition rate was 2.2 percent.
“If we’re in the same situation in 3.5 years” — when Afghans are scheduled to be in charge of their security — “then we have a problem,” said Canadian Maj. Gen. D. Michael Day, a deputy commander in NATO’s training mission in Kabul.
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Deciphering Mullah Omar's Eid Message
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty September 2, 2011 Abubakar Siddique
In what could be considered the Taliban's "state-of-the-union" address, Mullah Mohammad Omar marked the end of Ramadan with a message of moderation.
His three key points:
1. Afghanistan Focused
Mullah Omar did not directly address Kabul's and Washington's consistent demands that the Afghan Taliban dissociate itself from Al-Qaeda, but his speech took care to portray his organization as one with Afghans' interests in mind, not global jihad.
Much of Mullah Omar's message reads like a political manifesto in which a maverick promises the world once voted into power. In Mullah Omar's case, this does not mean recreating the Taliban Emirate in its former mold, but the establishment of "a real Islamic regime which is acceptable to all people of the country."
He promises that "all ethnicities will have participation in the regime and portfolios will be dispensed on the basis of merit." He even takes a conciliatory stance by stating that, "contrary to the propaganda launched by [our] enemies, the policy of the Islamic Emirate is not aimed at monopolizing power."
In a break from the designs of the anti-Soviet mujahedin guerrillas in the 1980s, Mullah Omar suggests that the Taliban's overarching goal is not limited to forcing international forces out and toppling the regime they support. Taking that as a given, he hints at the post-occupation order by allaying Afghan fears of another civil war. "The future transformations and developments would not resemble the developments following the collapse of communism, when everything of the country was plundered and the State Apparatus damaged entirely," he wrote in his widely-circulated Eid al-Fitr message.
Mullah Omar knows that popular Afghan sentiment will play a decisive role in who takes the reins of power as international forces look toward their exit. In an about-face from reality, he issues detailed orders for his cadres to protect civilians. "You should respect every common individual whether he is an old man, a young, a child, or a woman.... When you face a common man, think as if you were a commoner in his place and had no weapon.... In other words, consider that person you are confronting as your father, brother, or another close relative. How would you behave toward him?"
Like an astute politician, he also promises future prosperity. "Afghanistan has vast, arable land, rich mines, and high potential of energy resources. Therefore, we can make investments in these sectors under conditions of peace and stability."
The Taliban did little to rebuild Afghanistan or to revive its economy while in control of most of the country in the 1990s. The hard-line religious movement preferred dogma over material development.
2. Negotiations
Mullah Omar's Eid message confirms that the Taliban still views peace as a long way off. He acknowledges making contact with "some parties" (meaning Americans), but says these preliminary talks so far been limited to the issue of releasing prisoners. "[These contacts] can't be called a comprehensive negotiation for the solution of the current imbroglio of the country."
Like most Afghan politicians, he expresses confidence in his countrymen's ability to find common ground. "The Afghans have a splendid tradition for solving problems and reaching an understanding amongst themselves. But this is conditioned on no foreign intervention."
3. Neighbors
Mullah Omar opposes the long-term American presence in Afghanistan in the form of military bases. This must please Afghanistan's neighbors, most of whom -- Pakistan and Iran in particular -- oppose a long-term Western military presence in the region. But he has a stern warning for neighbors. Afghans fear that Islamabad and Tehran might be again scheming to rekindle a civil conflict in Afghanistan rather than dealing with it as a stable sovereign neighbor. "We advise all countries, including the neighbors, not to become part of any colonialist game concerning the future of Afghanistan, because this will serve no one's interests," Mullah Omar warns.
Such warnings won't be welcome in Islamabad, where some in the corridors of power still look at Taliban as a guardian of its own "interests" whenever it makes it back to Kabul via conquest or political dealings. The logic behind Pakistani support for Afghan Islamists is that, unlike Afghan nationalists, they won't be swayed by Afghan "national interests."
Ultimately, the actions of Mullah Omar and the Taliban he leads will speak louder than words. His concessions to political pluralism, commitment to a broad-based government, and civilian protection come as positive news to Afghans. They will also take heart from his visions of a prosperous Afghanistan. But they will be worried about his insistence on a "real Islamic regime." The onus is on the Taliban to present the public with a detailed sketch of such a regime. A return to the Taliban Emirate in the 1990s is clearly unacceptable to most Afghans, and perhaps many within the Taliban's ranks also envision a much different political system than the one they ran in the 1990s.
For now, Mullah Omar is savoring battlefield victories. He senses war weariness among Western publics and strong doubts in the region about the West's intentions in Afghanistan. "With the passage of each day, the Mujahedin becomes more familiar with the enemy's tactics; they are gaining access to hardware that is instrumental in causing greater losses to the enemy."
But if Mullah Omar is truly interested in reaching a negotiated solution, promising that "jihad will continue unabatedly" is not really the way to present it.
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A decade on, it's time to quit
Sunday Star Times By ANTHONY HUBBARD 04/09/2011
Ten years into the war on terror, New Zealand's participation seems worryingly tarnished and increasingly pointless.
New Zealand should get out of Afghanistan. It has spent nearly 10 years there, the decade of the "war on terror". But the war in Afghanistan is no longer about terrorism. It is a bloody, messy civil war. We don't have a dog in that fight.
This war has been largely secret. Neither the government nor the military has wanted to say much about it, and for good reasons. We are fighting alongside the corrupt and brutal Karzai government. We have been tainted by our association with it, especially on the matter of torture.
The war is also unwinnable, as even New Zealand military leaders now admit. New Zealand has long since done its bit for its American patron. "We should declare it a victory," says retired Kiwi diplomat Terence O'Brien, "and go home."
Last week a lot of the secrecy about the war disappeared, with the publication of Nicky Hager's book Other People's Wars. The response of John Key and various retired military leaders was typical – they attacked the man and rubbished the book without reading it. The first casualty in war is reasoned argument.
The book reveals that only two weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks, an SAS intelligence analyst, Major Louisa Parkinson, had already spotted the trouble with invading Afghanistan.
"It will be very difficult to remove the Taliban from power, since there is no rigid, formal structure," she wrote.
"The Taliban is as much an idea as an entity and its influence extends beyond Afghanistan's borders – particularly into Pakistan."
The American-led invasion, of course, bombed the Taliban government to bits. But after 10 years of fighting, the Taliban still rules a large part of Afghanistan.
There was a case for attacking the Taliban government in 2001, because it sheltered the al Qaeda terrorists who murdered so many innocent people in New York. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan on those grounds. But Osama bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda has long since disappeared as an important force in Afghanistan.
Key justified the New Zealand involvement in Afghanistan as helping in the war against terror. There are certainly plenty of terrorists there, not just among the Taliban but among the fighters led by tribal leaders, war lords and the Karzai government. But they do not pose a threat to New Zealand or the West. The Taliban wants power in Afghanistan. It shows no sign of attacking us.
The official public discussion about the war is paltry. But in January the new New Zealand chief of defence force, Lieutenant-General Rhys Jones, made the surprising admission to the Sunday Star-Times that in Afghanistan "the military can never win ... What we are there for is to try to make life a little better and to stabilise it so that rational politics can go ahead."
Rational politics, he said, would include the Taliban. Nobody claimed, Jones said, that we can turn Afghanistan into a western democracy. Back-door negotiations are now taking place between the Americans and the Taliban, as newspapers reported last week. President Obama has said he wants American troops out by 2014. In other words, the United States has also given up the idea of a military victory over the Taliban.
It is deeply sad, O'Brien says, that the West will leave Afghanistan "not much better than when we went in there. But that is the way of the world".
So the government's main argument for involvement – that it is a war against terror – fails. The "good news" part of its message about the war seems almost as flawed. The government likes to present our Provincial Reconstruction Team in Bamiyan province as providing "good works" and "nation-building". But this has been exaggerated.
A 2010 report on Bamiyan by NZAID, the official government body in charge of aid at that time, said: "The projects overseen by the [New Zealand Defence Force] through the PRT do not appear to be sustainable in any way and anecdotal evidence is that some have already failed."
It concluded that the defence force was "not an effective aid provider".
Defence, typically, tried to suppress these damning findings. These sentences were blanked out of the report released under the Official Information Act, on the spurious grounds that the information could prejudice "the security and defence of New Zealand".
Defence PR has always been ruthless in its pursuit of good news and its suppression of bad.
A secret defence report from 2003 showed that the military wanted to provide two key messages in talking about the PRT: "NZDF personnel are not going to war", and "The focus of this mission is reconstruction".
Defence has always had a PR advantage in the war. Most journalists who go there are embedded, that is, entirely under the care of the military. Their reports do not criticise their hosts. And the SAS's activities have always been shrouded in controversy.
However, controversy has arisen over the involvement of the SAS in taking prisoners who have been transferred to the Americans and Afghans and tortured.
Jerry Mateparae, the former defence force chief who was sworn in as governor-general this week, told the Sunday Star-Times on Thursday that he had "every confidence in the integrity of the New Zealand Special Air Service personnel and also the personnel in the Provincial Reconstruction team. I am confident in the decisions that I took as the chief of defence force and also the advice that I gave the government".
These bland and vague statements do nothing to settle the issue. And Jones himself said in January that transferred prisoners had been tortured. "We accept there will be times when, with hindsight, we will find, oops! This has occurred."
That is the trouble with the "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan. New Zealand has been fighting alongside a government which includes people who routinely torture. It has fought alongside American troops who have done the same.
The new book shows that plenty of Kiwi soldiers were unhappy about the attitude of the American troops. One SAS soldier said of the US Marines: "It's almost like they got given a licence to just be total dickheads and not think any longer about the value of human life."
New Zealand might have been justified in joining the invasion of Afghanistan. But 10 years later, everything has changed.
anthony.hubbard@star-times.co.nz
- Sunday Star Times
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