…everybody is now writing about everything in Afghanistan:

Burleson, William E. 2008. ‘The Kinsey Scale and the Pashtun: The Role of Culture in Measuring Sexual Orientation’, Journal of Bisexuality, Vol. 8, No. 3.

Good luck translating the name of that journal into Pashto.

And I was just complaining about militias. Here, for fairness’ sake, is the ANP:

Just another day with the Afghan National Police.

Context, at the Guardian:

Guardian photographer Sean Smith documents the methods used by Afghan National police in the arrest and questioning of a group of Pashtuns after an insurgent bomb went off in Paktia province, Afghanistan. The incident was filmed while Smith’s was embedded with Nato forces in June 2009

Local militias, tribal militias, ethnic militias, arbakais, Social Outreach Program, community defense and happiness brigades – whatever you want to call them – have failed and failed again throughout the history of Afghanistan. Some worked short term and then ended in disaster while others went straight to disaster (1840s, 1880s, Nadir, Dostum, auxiliary whatchamacallits down south). Some appear to be a joke. For example, the AP3 in Wardak. In regards to that, I’ve got one:

Q: What do you call 4 Hazaras with AK47s in a Ford Ranger?

A: A Pashtun tribal militia.

So the AP3 doesn’t have enough Pashtuns and I couldn’t bring my ‘89 Ford Ranger to Australia. That means immediate fail. However, the AP3 was never advertised as a tribal militia. It is just a derivative failure in the making. On the other hand, I no longer have to put up with snobby grad students mocking my “redneck” truck right up until the date they need me to drive their furniture across Bloomington.

More recently (last few years), government-sponsored militias have never got off the ground in the first place. Why? My best guess is that all the proposals for Pashtun tribal militias that will hopefully take on the Taliban all assume one fallacy: that Pashtun tribal identities, when and where they exist, are coherent social and/or political entities with a hierarchy of authority. They are not. There is no leader of, say, the Examplezai who can be approached, recruited and paid to deliver all of the Examplezais. THERE IS NO CHIEF. THERE IS NO LEADER. THERE ARE ONLY NOTABLE ELITES WITH FLUCTUATING LEVELS OF INFLUENCE. THIS IS NOT AL ANBAR.  But enough people haven’t bothered to actually check out the literature on that basic fact. And that fluctuating level of influence has been in a downward spiral since Amir Abdurrahman. There are at times people identified as tribal leaders with sufficient levels of influence to actually control sizable rural areas (i.e., apparently, Ajmal Khan). But will these people really work to further the interests of coalition forces and the central government? Or will they work only to further their (and hopefully their community’s) interests? And what sort of losers in the local power struggles will be created by the ascendancy of a paramount local authority? [some of this asked at the above link].

Basic argument: Pashtun tribal militias can’t be raised by outsiders to fight the Taliban.

Anyways, it has failed in the East and in the South. Can it fail in the north? RFE/RL reports From Kunduz:

One sign of that feeling in Afghanistan is the spontaneous rise of local militias in previously quiet districts like northern Konduz Province. Until just a few months ago, residents of the region had relied upon the national police and army for security.

A sign of the same sentiment in Washington is U.S. President Barack Obama’s request last week for senior U.S. officials to take a province-by-province look at Afghanistan’s local power structures. Officials say privately the goal is to weigh the possibility of partnering with benign local forces, or trying to co-opt hostile ones, against the slow progress of establishing wider central government control.

A flurry of recent reports have all argued for something similar, if not just saying that local forces can be used to push back the Taliban. But this RFE/RL article is an antidote to that. It’s as if they have been reading Josh Foust’s work. They cite an example:

But one certainty is that the Afghan central government today is not well-prepared to integrate local forces into its structure in the ways that may be needed to assure cooperation rather than competition. The experience of the Qala-e Zal district militia in Konduz Province provides an example. The local militia helps the hard-pressed national police and army to fight off Taliban incursions. But the relationship between the cooperating forces is entirely ad hoc.

The militia’s leader, Nabi, told Radio Free Afghanistan that he hopes his force one day will be integrated into the national security structure so that it can receive regular salaries from the government, rather than rely on funds from the local community. His hope comes from the fact that the governor of Konduz, who nominally reports to the Interior Ministry in Kabul, was one of the regional and local officials who urged him to raise the force.

But when Radio Free Afghanistan followed up with the Interior Ministry to see where Nabi’s prospects stood, it became clear that the ministry itself had no knowledge of his force or provisions for integrating it into its command structure.

Whoops. And furthermore, this is Nabi’s picture:

Well, I’m sure this fellow will do a good job of watching over his Turkmen or Uzbek manteqah. I just hope he doesn’t set up a roadblock. But he’s not going to be able to go after Talibs who are hanging out with other Pashtuns.

The RFE/RL quotes a critic of the various militia programs:

“Gorbachev came up with the idea of the ‘Afghanization’ of the Afghan war, and in the interest of Afghanizing the war [the Soviets] created militias, the warlords, the strongmen like General Dostum, General Atta, General ‘This’ and General ‘That,’ and those are the people that the United States is indirectly grappling with,” says Daud Sultanzoy, a member of the Afghan parliament from restive Ghazni Province.

“I think that we will be running the same risk of doing something similar. There are so many eerie similarities.”

He adds that, after three decades of war, it is difficult to find local leaders who are, in fact, truly local and who will not misuse any funds provided them. “When the Soviets came, they dismantled the tribal echelon by removing tribal leaderships, and the fundamentalists did the same thing,” Sultanzoy says.

I hope he’s not referring to Atta of Balkh. But anyways, I’m in agreement with him even if he comes from a position of bias as a representative for the central government.

If you want a more scholarly criticism of recent failures. Check out this, if you are wondering whether eastern mountain precedents can be transferred:

Susanne Schmeidl and Masood Karokhail. ‘The Role of Non-State Actors in ‘Community-Based Policing’ – An Exploration of the Arbakai (Tribal Police) in South-Eastern Afghanistan’, Contemporary Security Policy, Volume 30, Number 2, August 2009.

The abstract reads:

Despite the ousting of the Taliban and a subsequent peace agreement reached at the end of 2001, Afghanistan continues to struggle with insecurity. The existing security deficit of the Afghan state is currently filled by a wide array of (armed) non-state actors (ANSA). Even though much of the Afghan experience with ANSA has been negative, the inability of the state to provide comprehensive security necessitates a consideration of alternatives. One of such possible alternative, the community-based policing structure in south-eastern Afghanistan (arbakai) is explored in this article. We conclude that it is important to understand the context-specificity of ANSA before promoting overarching policies such as advocating a transferability of the arbakai outside their unique cultural and regional context. We also caution against the use ANSA beyond their capacities, such as for counter-insurgency purposes and formalize engagement with clear parameters to ensure accountability.

Underlining mine.

Well, I’m pretty sure it will be a book.

I was checking out new dissertations in the Proquest listings today as part of my effort to catalog all the ones that deal with Afghanistan. I found this:

The Coils of the Anaconda: America’s First Conventional Battle in Afghanistan by Lester W. Grau, Ph.D., University of Kansas, 2009 , 592 pages.

The summary of the abstract reads:

The battle was clumsy, but decisive. It was won by the combined efforts of American Armed Forces, Afghan ground forces, Canadian Light Infantry, and special forces from a variety of nations. It was a pick-up fight that started off badly, but training, good will, and professionalism pulled the operation together. It was Al Qaeda’s last conventional fight and America’s first conventional fight in Afghanistan. It broke the back of Al Qaeda and hastened their departure from the country. Lessons learned in air-ground coordination were successfully applied during the invasion of Iraq. As with any military operation or, indeed, human endeavor, Anaconda had its warts and problems.

Operation Anaconda generated several books, most in support of an agenda. What makes this dissertation different is that it: covers the entire battle instead of the first three days; provides a more-balanced view of air power and ground power in the battle; provides a historic view of Afghanistan before the events of 9/11; provides a good enemy picture; identifies the culminating event of the battle, and provides an analysis of what went right and what went wrong.

My basic problem with military historians is that they have a poor level of knowledge of Afghanistan history and society. Lester Grau does not have these problems.

But… good news and bad news. Bad news first: the page on Proquest says: “At the request of the author, this graduate work is not available for purchase.” The good news is that this almost always means that a book is on its way. I’m expecting something that is definitely worth a read. Lester Grau is not exactly a freshman on the matter of Afghanistan.

You can download three of his previous books:

The Soviet-Afghan War: how a superpower fought and lost. Edited by Lester W Grau and Michael A Gress. Available on Scribd.

The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan. By the Russian General Staff. Translated and edited by Lester W. Grau. Download PDF.

The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War. By Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau. Download PDF.

Two failed strategies from the past, combined into one new strategy?

Is this negative × negative = positive? Or negative + negative = negative? And have past failures (i.e., in the title of this blog entry) been ignored? First a brief survey of what may be coming.

If you already know this stuff pretty well and would like to skip the re-read, scroll down to the picture of the underpants gnome diagram below (blatantly stolen from Registan).

I’ll start with the NYT, from October 28th:

President Obama’s advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability. [...]

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar [...]

But military planners are also pressing for enough troops to safeguard major agricultural areas, like the hotly contested Helmand River valley, as well as regional highways essential to the economy… [...]

“We are not talking about surrendering the rest of the country to the Taliban,” a senior administration official said. Military officers said that they would maintain pressure on insurgents in remote regions by using surveillance drones and reports from people in the field to find pockets of Taliban fighters and to guide attacks, in particular by Special Operations forces.

Next up is an opinion piece from the Weekly Standard:

In its continuing search for an alternative to General Stanley McChrystal’s comprehensive counterinsurgency approach to the war in Afghanistan, and with President Obama having eliminated the minimalist counterterrorism plan of Vice President Joe Biden, the White House has lately been floating a split-the-difference trial balloon: “McChrystal Lite” or, to give the veep his due, “McChrystal for the cities, Biden for the countryside.”

The authors (Tom Donnelly and Tim Sullivan from AEI) then get into technical details and posit probabilities. And they seem to want a full surge, as one would expect from people who work at the American Enterprise Institute.

Back to  the newspapers, from WaPo on October 31st:

The military chiefs have been largely supportive of a resource request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, that would by one Pentagon estimate require the deployment of 44,000 additional troops. But opinion among members of Obama’s national security team is divided, and he now appears to be seeking a compromise solution that would satisfy both his military and civilian advisers. [..]

Before he can determine troop levels, his advisers have said, he must decide whether to embrace a strategy focused heavily on counterinsurgency, which would require additional forces to protect population centers, or one that makes counterterrorism the main focus of U.S. efforts in the country, which would rely on relatively fewer American troops. One option under review involves a blend of the two approaches, featuring an emphasis on counterterrorism in the north and some parts of western Afghanistan as well as an expanded counterinsurgency effort in the south and east, one of the officials said.

Staying with WaPo, two days later David Ignatius wrote:

As Obama has deliberated Afghanistan strategy, the debate has tended to polarize between “CI” and “CT” advocates. But this is a false argument. What the United States actually has in Afghanistan is a mixture. Obama must now decide whether to provide the resources — and take the risks — to test whether this combined strategy can succeed.

Speaking with Farid Zakaria and Newsweek, Tom Ricks commented:

In fact, the crucial judgments that have to be made involve what the troops will do and how much of Afghanistan to cover. Ricks said to me, “Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?” That sounds like a middle course that is smart and practical, which might need some more forces or perhaps can make do with the almost 100,000 already there. Obama should carefully consider these and other options before racing out to demonstrate how tough he is.

And once again, back to WaPo with some behind the scenes info:

The Pentagon’s top military officer oversaw a secret war game this month to evaluate the two primary military options that have been put forward by the Pentagon and are being weighed by the Obama administration as part of a broad-based review of the faltering Afghanistan war, senior military officials said.

The exercise, led by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, examined the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency effort aimed at building a stable Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed “counterterrorism plus.”

And most importantly, WaPo gives a possible time line for a decision:

Administration officials say Obama might settle on a plan but delay announcing it until after a runoff in the Afghan national elections, scheduled for Nov. 7. The president is to begin a 10-day trip to Asia on Nov. 11.

And recently, from the CS Monitor (h/t Ink Spots):

Put simply, there are two poles in Washington: the counterinsurgency experts, or COIN-istas [sic], who believe Afghanistan’s deteriorating security can only be reversed by adding tens of thousands of troops – perhaps as many as 80,000; and those who believe US interests in Afghanistan are few, and the best way to keep it on a low simmer is to employ a counterterrorism-like model – using drones, bombs, and special forces teams to keep Al Qaeda at bay. The debate has become protracted, with military commanders like Gen. Stanley McChrystal politely urging the commander in chief to make a decision soon.

So yeah. What about that intermediary phase/step? What happens there?

What sayeth the blogosphere? Gulliver at the group blog Ink Spots ( a must read from the moment it started, and honi soit qui mal y pense to anyone that thinks otherwise) – a blog that has lately been taking a hiatus from copious use of French in America – comments in regards to the NYT article above:

Might this be the best possible middle road? It sure seems to beat the hell out of “muddling through,” the other non-drawdown, non-escalation path currently being advocated by some people, in which we’d, uh, just keep doing what we’re doing (because that seems effective). The best line in the whole story cites one official calling the plan “McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country.”

Of course, if this approach is adopted, there will be critics who object to the “abandonment” of parts of the country, and others who question the effectiveness of a sequential, oil spots approach. Bernard Finel has raised some reasonable questions on this point here, and I hope to discuss them a bit more in the near future.

So what does Bernard Finel say? A lot. The friendly back and forth that start at taches d’huile stirs no mauvais quart d’heure. Finel starts with:

But while you’re consolidating government control inside the ink spots, they are consolidating insurgent control in their “ink spots.” Why assume our ink spots will spread, but theirs will shrink?

And once you have moved on, why can’t the insurgents resume operations in their ink spots? And how do you deal with the massive legitimacy loss from the inital abandonment?

…and ends with:

If that is the case, isn’t it obvious that the choice isn’t between well-crafted COIN and imperfect (due to intel and logistical limitations) CT, but between a genuinely half-assed COIN campaign and an imperfect CT approach? Which is why I worry that we are stacking ill-considered assumptions about “rolling COIN” and ink spots on top of the already heroic assumptions embedded in 3-24.

I am really try to understand all of this… but I just don’t get it. What am I missing?

Finel says a lot that leads up to that, mostly to do with the problems of implementation, sustained effort and resourcing. The article is essential reading and I encourage you to give it a once-over. Gulliver, of course, responds. The exchange is the best public debate I can find, and is thankfully free of the overly-politicized language found elsewhere.

That’s the present and the future. But what about the past? The strategies discussed sound familiar. The focus on counter-terrorism in rural areas sounds like Donald Rumsfeld’s “light footprint strategy” and the focus on cities sounds like the later Soviet strategy. First, a graphic illustration of the later Soviet “strategy.”

The shaded areas (the cities and the roads) are the level of control as the Soviets were heading out the door. Click here for a larger, better detailed, look at the map. The map is from page 186 of Gilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending (it’s in my top 5 books). I use strategy in quotation marks above as this is strategy as much as any desperate last resort is a strategy. I’ll get back to Dorronsoro. But first, from a 1987 article in the LA Times:

Kabul remains a beautiful and wild city. [...] But it is also a deeply troubled place. Since the war began 7 1/2 years ago, its population has jumped from 500,000 to more than 2 million. Since it is one of the few relatively safe places left in the country, people have flocked here for protection. So much of the countryside has been devastated by the war that Afghanistan has folded its population into this city-state– Kabulistan , the natives call it. With more than 4 million Afghans living as refugees in Pakistan and Iran, and up to 1 million killed in the war, Kabul’s current population may amount to one-third of Afghanistan’s remaining people.

Soviet armor and artillery, the so-called “rings of steel” defense, are positioned in concentric circles around the city and its immediate suburbs. Trips to other cities by road take days and are very dangerous. So Kabul has become a fortress town, connected to the rest of the world by infrequent commercial airline flights and to the Soviet Union by the military air umbilical cord. Diplomats have counted more than 50 Soviet military cargo flights in one day. Kabul has become like blockaded Berlin during the 1948 airlift.

Clear BS on the population guess. But what about those “concentric circles”? A US government publication writes:

Western diplomatic sources reported in early 1985 that guerrilla rocket attacks into Soviet military camps in and near Kabul reportedly had killed 60 and wounded 34. The Soviet response to these attacks included setting up a security network of eight concentric circles around Kabul: at each post an estimated 100 soldiers, plus eight to 10 tanks or APCs, were posted.

And in War in Afghanistan, Mark Urban notes that once the rocketing started increasing in range (up to 26km by 1988), defending Kabul with these rings became unfeasible with the number of troops available. However, he does note that Kabul experienced rocketing since 1984. [pp.64-5, 248-50]

Now back to Dorronsoro. On page 189 he notes that

Between 1980 and 1983 the Soviets adopted a defensive position, avoiding direct involvement and relying largely on the Afghan forces. [in 1982]… the Soviets attempted to improve the defenses of major towns.

That first sentence sounds like Rumsfeld’s Light Footprint strategy (but minus his reliance on shady local militia types in favor of the shady old ANA), doesn’t it?

Dorronsoro continues and describes the second phase (1984 and 1985) that resulted from the failure of the first phase (1980 to 1983). In the second phase the Soviets undertook large offensives throughout the country while again attempting to improve the defenses of urban areas. Basically, a dual surge that was stymied by the inability to hold territory due to lack of troop numbers. By 1986 the Soviets “were getting ready to pull out and were launching fewer offensives.” (p. 190).

It was this later phase that resulted in the map you see above.

Mark Urban describes a similar time frame. He writes (pp. 287-8):

From early 1986 the Soviet Army switched to a more defensive strategy. Rural operations were reduced and defences around towns increased while Mikhail Gorbachev prepared the army for withdrawal. During 1984-5 there were probably six offensives involving more that 5000 Soviet troops each. In 1986-9, if one excludes the actual withdrawals of Soviet garrisons, there was just one – Operation Highway.

Going off of formerly  secret archives, during the Soviet Afghan War there was a strategy that also sounds very familiar. From page 123 of Mitrokhin:

The Soviet nomenklatura was forced to change its tactics in the war and to abandon the idea of conquering the whole country at once. A plan was devised to keep firm control over the regions which could be effectively controlled and to introduce national, social and economic changes in them. They reckoned that this would allow them gradually to gain control of the whole country. The aim was to achieve a decisive victory in the northern zones bordering the Soviet Union first. Territorial committees for the defense of the revolution were set up in villages, streets and groups of houses. Surveillance of the population and its mood was stepped up and any movements and new people were noted.

Some translated Soviet documents very recently released by the National Security Archive have resulted in some media attention by various authors who noted the parallels (i.e. in The Guardian and the NYT). Nothing very original in those two articles. As far as lessons learned from the Soviet experience… well, Artemy Kalinovsky says it best while writing in Foreign Policy:

It’s a failure the United States apparently has no intention of repeating — to the extent that it doesn’t even seem to study it. The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual does not mention the Soviet experience once. One analyst told me that when she suggested including the conflict as a way to inform current policy, Pentagon officials seemed to have little awareness about what Moscow had been trying to do there or for how long.

So chto delat‘? What is to be done? Dorronsoro, who is very aware of history, suggests in his WaPo article:

To succeed, the coalition must control Afghanistan’s cities, where institution-building can take place and where the population is more neutral or even favorable to the coalition. The Afghan army and, in certain cases, small militias must protect cities, towns and the roads linking them. Fewer casualties and the improvement of the Afghan security forces — Afghanization — will allow the coalition to focus more resources in the north, where the situation is becoming extremely unstable. Stabilizing the country will allow the coalition to focus on al-Qaeda, the enemy that attacked the United States on Sept. 11.

He provides a similar, but more in-depth argument, in this paper.

But how about I posit the same failure as the Soviets? A weak partner in the form of the Afghan government, a dysfunctional local army and police, a loss of goodwill, untrustworthy potential militia clients, and insurgents that are increasingly able to strike the cities and roads. Will those Soviet concentric circle around Kabul be recreated? Can they?

Getting back to the bigger picture, who is influencing the current debate (in a diffuse intellectual manner)? As far as pushing for the strategies in the title of this blog entry, it sounds like Rory Stewart when I hear about how the cities and the north need to be prioritized. He’s been saying that for a while. But he also complains that no one in government listens to him. He may be wrong about being ignored. His ideas are being considered, even if he is not the source. And since Gilles Dorronsoro came to Washington the views that he has expressed above have become much more prevalent. But more likely, one should look to the September Senate testimony of John Nagl to get a small glimpse of what is being told to the big people upstairs.

It seems some of the current proposals being floated are essentially a return to the Rumsfeld days of counter-terrorism mated with the late Soviet strategy that allowed the government in Kabul to survive in a form that never did extend its authority from its more secure areas. So the Soviet strategy actually stabilized/stalemated the situation for a few years. I accept that. Of course, when it attempted to extend central authority with its unsuccessful try to take over of Rashid Dostum’s militia the civil war got fully started. Is this a move towards the least worst option? Or just a bad option?

Are “we” better at counter-terrorism in Afghanistan? Probably, since it was so terrible back in the Rumsfeld years. But it is still bad. And can “we” do a counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan that cedes an enemy’s favorite territory? Does that strategy essentially open up a “highway”  straight from Pakistan to the “Urban shooting/bombing galleries”? Will we see an endless stream of attacks against coalition forces and the Afghan government as they hunker down in their urban fortresses and attempt to run the gauntlet of the main roads? So yes, more debate is needed. I suppose that is happening behind closed doors as I write. We should find out in a couple of weeks what the president’s decision is.

It took several years to determine that Rumsfeld’s Light Footprint strategy was a failure. It is in a similar time frame that the Soviet’s “Cities, Roads and the North” focus was a failure (after it was inherited). There won’t likely be such a long time frame in the present case.

Is this obsessive analogizing with the past? Maybe. Afghanistan is not condemned to follow the fate of its 1979-2001 trajectory. Foreign forces are not the Anglo-Afghan expeditionary force. As the title of Kalinovsky’s article reads, “Afghanistan is the new Afghanistan.”

So what do I think? I’m on board with Bernard Finel’s comments. I think his points are good enough to warrant a repeat:

But while you’re consolidating government control inside the ink spots, they are consolidating insurgent control in their “ink spots.” Why assume our ink spots will spread, but theirs will shrink?

And once you have moved on, why can’t the insurgents resume operations in their ink spots? And how do you deal with the massive legitimacy loss from the inital abandonment?

[...]

If that is the case, isn’t it obvious that the choice isn’t between well-crafted COIN and imperfect (due to intel and logistical limitations) CT, but between a genuinely half-assed COIN campaign and an imperfect CT approach? Which is why I worry that we are stacking ill-considered assumptions about “rolling COIN” and ink spots on top of the already heroic assumptions embedded in 3-24.

I am really try to understand all of this… but I just don’t get it. What am I missing?

I concur. More debate is needed. More information is needed.

According to sources, Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership directed “a large sum of money” to Jalaluddin Haqqani to recruit 3,000 fighters for the Kabul front. However, within two months the combined affect of death and desertion left Haqqani with only 300 men.

According to Ahmed Rashid, Haqqani’s inability to personal direct the fighters on the front lines and conflicts between southern commanders and eastern troops combined to degrade this eastern Pashtun force. Personally, I find this in line with one analyst’s (I really forget who) analogy with Lebanon’s civil war militias as being supreme “defenders” of their own turf and terrible “invaders” of others. Also notable here is the Taliban leadership’s desire to take over command from a competent commander in favor of Kandaharis. But most important is Ahmed Rashid’s point that for the first time, the Taliban is suffering a crisis in recruitment and a “manpower shortage.”

Jalaludin Haqqani, with beard and turban gone wild:

Of course, you know I’m talking about 1997, right? The info above is from page 60 of Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban. Has there been a rush in the last year to find background on Haqqani? Yes, absolutely. Is there much material? Absolutely not. The old sources are littered with Massoud and Hekmatyar. As far as new and open sources, hopefully there is something in here worthwhile:

‘Loya Paktia’s insurgency: (i) the haqqani network as an autonomous entity in the taliban Universe [Thomas Ruttig] (ii) Roots of the insurgency in the Southeast [Sébastien Trives]‘ in Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field. Edited by Antonio Giustozzi. London: Hurst & Co./ New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

As I just returned from fieldwork, I’m a little behind on the reading and book ordering. The book has positive reviews from William Maley, David B. Edwards and Gilles Dorronsoro. So I should probably get on this book (in its entirety).

The new photo header above is cropped from a photo of a wanted poster that I took in the departure section of Dushanbe International Airport:

I couldn’t resist taking a pic. Even if I knew taking a flash pic at 3am in a medium security area could result in a lengthy chat with your friendly local militsia. A closer look at the poster, in particular the guy 4th from the left on top, resulted in another pic:

For those of you who aren’t Cyrillically inclined, that is Mahmud Khudoyberdiev (I prefer Khudoberdiev). Why was I interested in his profile on a wanted poster? Well, as… uh… “Kayumars” explains, he’s likely been dead for a while, despite the rather entertaining rumors.  The basic rumor, stripped of crazy details, is that he is alive and well in Uzbekistan. The government of Tajikistan seems to concur, and issued an international arrest warrant for Mahmud-Aka.

WANTED:

“They looked for clients, not partners.”

Indiana University professor Nazif Shahrani visited the Australian National University about 10 days ago (while I was in Tajikistan) and gave a lecture on Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. Here’s the info and a link to the MP3 of the lecture:

Professor M. Nazif Shahrani, “President Obama’s ‘New’ Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategy: Why it is Unlikely to Work.”
Lecture at Centre for Arab & Islamic Studies (The Middle East & Central Asia) at the Australian National University. Link to MP3 of lecture (approx. 1 hour).

The Australian National University (my current home) and Indiana University (my old home) have created a partnership, the Pan-Asian Institute (no website yet). But you can find some info here and here. So in addition to language and study exchanges, there should be more of this sort of thing going on at these two universities.

If you have limited time and don’t have an hour to listen to the lecture, you can jump in just before the halfway point when professor Shahrani starts to talk about Bonn. The lecture before this is more for a general audience. And it is essentially a critique that most readers would be very familiar with, whether they like it or not (something close to a Noam Chomsky lecture, but from someone who is actually very knowledgeable about Afghanistan). After this point there is a discussion of policy, counter insurgency, centralized governance, community defense, the “tribalized” international community, Pakistan, Obama, etc.. If you think it is a standard antiwar lecture, it is most definitely not.

As for previous lectures, there is audio for David Kilcullen’s lecture, but unfortunately not for Barnett Rubin’s. There is however, a summary of his lecture in our bulletin (PDF).

So, unless this is a desperate bargaining tactic, Abdullah has pulled out of the runoff election. BBC says:

Abdullah Abdullah had set out conditions he wanted to be met for the contest to be considered fair. But Mr Karzai rejected his demand that election officials who presided over the first round should be dismissed.

Earlier, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said a pull-out would not invalidate the legitimacy of the vote.

Well, that’s wishful thinking on the part of Secretary Clinton. After the first round, there was no way that this process was going to have much legitimacy.

As for Abdullah, the withdrawal from the run off election is probably the “smart move” on his part. Why accept a coalition or power sharing offer in a hyper-centralized state where you could ( and would) be easily be marginalized? And why contest a second round if you will just lose to the same machine?

Abdullah out and about:

It’s now a permanent situation of coalition governments and their forces having an Afghan government with an clear lack of popular international and domestic legitimacy as a partner. What was once a refrain from the anti-war crowd is now reality: the presidency lacks legitimacy (through a lengthy process of deligitimization that has peaked most recently today). But they’re still wrong that Karzai is a puppet. How many times now has Karzai gone against the wishes of his “masters?” Clearly, this “disobedient puppet” has strings that leads back to himself. I bet the US government wishes he actually was a puppet.

More on Abdullah’s runoff election boycott at WaPO.

Uh-oh!

It’s that time of year again:

Afghanistan in 2009: A Survey of the Afghan People

The findings from The Asia Foundation’s fifth public opinion poll in Afghanistan, Afghanistan in 2009: A Survey of the Afghan People, which covers all 34 of Afghanistan’s provinces. A democracy assessment survey. PDF (4MB)

Go on now, find something in there that suits your agenda and hi-light it. If you like something, it’s scientific fact. If not, it’s a wretched excuse for a survey in a country where no poll could ever be as accurate as your personal opinion. There’s something for everybody.

Key findings also available in Dari and Pashto.