Losing Afghanistan

By David Axe

They came in broad daylight. Four men in a white hatchback, rolling into the village of Laken in eastern Afghanistan’s Khowst district. It was just before noon on October 23 last year. The men piled out of the hatchback, surprising two villagers. One they shot dead. Another they grabbed and tossed into the vehicle. As startled villagers looked on, the abductors sped away. A villager called the Afghan police. The police called the U.S. Army then set out to investigate.

The kidnappers’ identities and motive are unclear, but the Taliban are known to target interpreters, government officials and everyday Afghans who work with occupying NATO forces. The fate of the abducted individual is equally murky. Many kidnapping cases in Afghanistan are resolved when a body washes up in the local river or turns up by the side of the road. In a war that has claimed the lives of 2,000 NATO troops and at least 10,000 Afghans, October’s abduction might seem like a footnote.

In fact, it represented just one in a wave of kidnappings in the country’s embattled east, where a small number of NATO troops are fighting a holding action against emboldened extremists. NATO’s focus is on southern Afghanistan, particularly Kandahar, the traditional home of the Taliban. For months NATO has promised a renewed offensive in the south, but has repeatedly delayed the attack, citing an absence of popular support.

Injured Dutch troops at a memorial service for Dutch army Private 1st Class Timo Smeehuyzen, who died in a suicide bombing in June 2007 in Tarin Kowt, southern Afghanistan. Photo by David Axe

As reinforcements including 30,000 fresh American troops authorized by President Barack Obama pour into the south, forces in the east must hold the line. “I don’t have enough troops to cover every square inch,” U.S. Army Lt. Col. Thomas Gukeisen told City Paper in October as he outlined complex ideas for making better use of the soldiers he does have, including a heavier reliance on Afghan security forces and even enlisting local civilians as informants. But in the absence of U.S. protection, this strategy places Afghans in danger from the seemingly omnipresent Taliban.

NATO is caught in a tightening feedback loop of the bloodiest kind. Poor security has resulted in declining Afghan confidence in the alliance, further worsening the security picture and thus accelerating NATO’s de-legitimization. For many Afghans, this alarming trend means a constant, grating fear ultimately followed by the noisy rush of a vehicle, hands and guns reaching out, then the awful restraint. Terror. Pain. Darkness.

One by one, hundreds if not thousands of pro-alliance Afghans have disappeared, shoved at gunpoint into vehicles and spirited away. On November 13, a retired resistance fighter from the ‘80s named Tafsir –an apparent honorary Afghan police general, according to the U.S. Army—was abducted from his home in Behsood district. On February 4 this year, gunmen grabbed Baraki Barak district sub-governor Mohamed Yasin Ludin, whom U.S. State Department official Ron Barkley had described to City Paper as “one of the good guys,” meaning he had dared to accompany U.S. troops on their patrols.

“The biggest side effect of the deteriorating security situation is kidnapping,” said Mohammed Farid Hamidi, an Afghan human-rights advocate. “And Afghans are most at risk.” One abduction at a time, the Taliban is chipping away at the weakening foundation of local consent that allows NATO to function in this land-locked, mountainous country far from the borders of any NATO state.

And most voters in NATO countries don’t even realize it. The Laken abduction and Tafsir’s kidnapping were not mentioned in international new reports. Instead, they were documented by U.S. Army soldiers in classified reports filed on the hard-drives of top commanders and intelligence agents. Earlier this year, an undisclosed Army source leaked more than 100,000 of the situation reports to the Swedish non-profit group Wikileaks. In late July, Wikileaks made 90,000 of the reports, mostly dating from 2006 to late 2009, publicly available.

“Lasting reforms that tend to push human rights come about as a result of finding material that is being kept secret by organizations, because they fear exposure,” the group’s founder Julian Assange said while defending the data dump on CNN.

The Pentagon was displeased, to say the least. Some officers even claimed the leak would endanger Afghans who have helped NATO forces and are mentioned in the reports. “Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing,” U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, a top American military officer, told reporters. “But the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

Indeed, the Taliban has deliberately reinforced that fear. “We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the U.S.,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said. “If they are U.S. spies, then we know how to punish them.”

But Afghans cooperating with NATO have long been in danger –a truth the leaked reports underscore. In failing to protect Afghan civilians, the alliance, too, has blood on its hands. Voters can understand that better, thanks to Wikileaks. “These documents provide a fuller picture of what we have long known about Afghanistan: The war is going badly,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said.

Corruptistan

A curfew was in force. Roadblocks manned by armored soldiers and blue-clad policemen were everywhere. Afghan army helicopters circled overhead. NATO quick-reaction squads waited in idling vehicles. The last week of July, just days before Wikileaks dropped its information bomb, Kabul was on security lock-down as envoys from some 70 countries converged on the muddy, shabby capital city for a donors conference hosted by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

For Karzai, the assembled envoys and their entourages were surely an edifying spectacle. Less than a year prior, the U.N. had all but accused him of stealing the recent presidential election through massive voter fraud and intimidation. When he took the podium at the donors conference, Karzai gave no indication of his wobbling legitimacy. Instead, he praised the very electorate he had cheated. “I … want to highlight the patience and dignity with which our civilian population has borne the brunt of the conflict and the attacks of our common enemies,” he said. “But do not mistake our will to overcome them. Let our friends and partners be assured of the justness of our cause.”

In the days leading up to Karzai’s impressive performance, NATO ambassador to Afghanistan Mark Sedwill took the opportunity to address select publications in an Internet forum. City Paper managed to get on the list to hear the ambassador’s hard sell. “In certain, more difficult, outlying areas of the country, where the government does not have a strong presence, people are afraid and intimidated by the Taliban and maintain a quiet sitting on the fence posture –they are waiting to see what security, development and governance is provided,” Sedwill began.

“One figure sticks in my mind on the Taliban: According to ISAF figures, from 1 January to 10 April 2010, the insurgency caused 243 fatalities and 534 injuries, a total of 777 civilian casualties. This is around 50 percent higher than the same period in 2009. On a daily basis they target government workers, threaten teachers and girls going to school and regularly carry out assassinations, abductions and executions of government officials who are trying to improve the lives of all Afghans. This is not what people – in Afghanistan and anywhere else — want for themselves and their children.

“To the contrary, a number of polls show that the vast majority of Afghans do not want the Taliban regime back in power and have ever-increasing confidence in their government institutions.”

On that last point, one might wonder which polls Sedwill was citing. According to a survey of 6,500 Afghans in 32 of the country’s 34 provinces, published this year by the non-profit Integrity Watch Afghanistan, a full quarter of Afghans “felt deprived of access to the provision of justice and security” by their government. Corruption was the major reason they gave. “In 2007, the amount of bribes paid by the adult population was estimated at $466 million, while the current survey indicates that it is close to $1 billion.”

Perhaps most damningly, more than a third of those polled said corruption “was helping the expansion of the Taliban” by alienating Afghans from their (unfairly) elected government.

“There is always room for criticism and skepticism, simply because there is no quick fix to Afghanistan and the country will clearly be a work in progress for many years,” Sedwill said, in closing. “The greatest achievement of all is that there is now a better-off alternative to the Taliban regime, one that offers opportunities for the future.”

Not according to the IWA, there isn’t. “Corruption is rampant and has become more entrenched in all areas of life in Afghanistan,” the pollsters reported. “Corruption threatens the legitimacy of state-building, badly affects state-society relations, feeds frustration and the support for the insurgency, leads to increasing inequality (which spurs social conflict), violates basic human rights on a daily basis and impedes the rule of law according to Afghan standards, hinders access to basic public services, which impacts the poor most severely, and has a major negative effect on economic development.”

A few tens of thousands of American reinforcements, cooling their heels in and around Kandahar, won’t change that. Nor will they prevent the inexorable spread of the Taliban’s terror state and the abduction and murder of pro-NATO Afghans. Insecure and weakly governed by corrupt thugs, Afghanistan is getting worse, not better. In the classified reports published by Wikileaks, we have ample evidence of that. Now the Swedish group is promising to drop another 15,000 reports. Does anyone doubt they’re all bad news?

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