Biden as VP and the NATO Supply Line

Back here I wrote about how Biden was being tipped as Obama's VP and what implications this may have for Pakistan. Now that Biden's candidacy has been announced, several other sources have picked up on the story. For example, see here and here.

Also of interest have been recent posts by Peter Marton over at [My] State Failure Blog regarding the logistics issue for NATO forces in Afghanistan. With recent attempts by the Taliban to disrupt the flow of supplies to NATO forces that move through Pakistan, there had been talk of opening a second longer and more expensive supply route through Central Asia. But as Mr Marton points out the recent Georgian war seems to have put a end to that idea, which makes talk of a surge in Afghanistan problematic.

What this has also done, of course, is strengthened Pakistan's hand and in particular that block within the military that argues that Pakistan can take a tougher line against Indian influence in Afghanistan, in resisting American demands to clamp down on militants, and continue to sponsor Taliban groups who will continue to bleed NATO forces dry until their coalition falls apart and they pull out, when they will become the instrument of extending Pakistani influence over Afghanistan again.

Increasingly though, Pakistan's civilian government looks like it doesn't like this plan.

Yet More Updates

Some interesting articles that serve to follow up on some of my previous posts:

The United States says it will release $200 million in emergency aid to alleviate food shortages in Africa and other parts of the world. While I hope this is a useful step, the cynic (realist?) in me wonders if this may not be another disaster in the making like the one where food aid arrived in a drought-stricken country a year late, and only served to bankrupt local farmers.

The Ghosts of Alexander blog has an interesting post called The Afghan Individual as a Unit of Analysis, which takes to task the intellectually lazy tendency amongst journalists and academics to "talks of groups in Afghanistan as if they were a coherent unit with a single will".

On a similar note, the folks over at the Kings of War blog, take aim at silly statements like this:

"Muslim countries are not like other countries. In as much as occupying troops are a much bigger theological, psychological problem for Arab countries than somewhere like Japan and Germany. And if you don't understand that about Islam, then you really aren't judging and you really haven't learned from the last four or five years."

Quite apart from the lazy, interchangable use of Muslim and Arab, one wonders if what the reporter in question is trying to suggest is that other racial/religious (same thing, no?) groups have much less of a problem being occupied by foreign troops than Arab/Muslims (same thing, no?)

The money quote from the blog: "Whenever I hear talk that smacks of cultural determinism, I reach for my revolver!"

I had also previously written about Obama's attempts to improve his image in Israel. The Rootless Cosmopolitan has an excellent article entitled "Obama and the Jewish Vote".

Barnett Rubin at 'Informed Comment: Global Affairs' provides the text to the policy speech of the ANP's Amir Haider Khan Hoti, the new Chief Minister of NWFP. Its worth reading, and as a policy statement, seems to me to be nuanced and sounding all the right notes. Lets hope the NWFP government has the ability and wherewithal to implement it.

Finally, I leave you with this excellent guest post by Alastair Cooke at the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog about Iraq and the U.S. faith in violence:

Although there are different ideas about how and when to use it, there is, I think, a consensus in Washington on the idea that by applying its overwhelming advantage in military force, the U.S. can do good in the world. It can make the world a better place through the transformative impact of violence, in the way that the violence of the hero in a Hollywood movie “cleanses” the world of incorrigible evil.

UAE forces in Afghanistan

It comes as a surprise to me, but if it will help with the reconstruction of the country then its for the best. Apparently, UAE forces have been operating in Afghanistan for several years now, which is unusual for an Islamic country.

Another interesting article is this one about the Taliban's relationship with mobile phone operators in Afghanistan by Barnett Rubin.

The Mysteries of the 'Muslim Mind'

For those who wish to unlock the mysteries of the 'Muslim Mind' I refer you to one of the best articles I have read in a long, long time. It is by Barnett Rubin and can be found here at the Informed Comment Global Affairs blog. Here is the money quote:

"Recently when a reporter who was gearing up for his first trip to the region by reading books on theology and political ideology asked me how it was possible for Hanafi Muslims like the Taliban to ally with Wahhabis like al-Qaida -- was it because the Deobandi school was closer to Wahhabism? I replied (with a pinch of exaggeration) that this had nothing to do with anything, and to understand the Taliban he would be better off looking into the price of bread.

Outside of Afghanistan people want to know if Deobandis are a type of Hanafis that are closer to Wahhabis, but inside Afghanistan all people think about is the price of bread."

This is so true. To some observers (including myself), it had become patently obvious that the PML-Q was going to be trounced in the elections (as long as they were unrigged) simply because of the wheat crisis in the country. After seeing lines of over 1000 people, mostly women, waiting for days outside government utility stores in the hope of being able to buy wheat, the mixture of despair and anger felt by the poor was all too palpable. And even when the PML-Q tried to blame the wheat shortage on the PPP and the unrest following Bhutto's assassination, the charge simply would not stick as the shortages dragged on and on, and their own government's role in manipulating wheat production figures and wheat smuggling became apparent.

To the average schmoe in Afghanistan/Pakistan etc., the issues of Jihad, Sharia, Palestine etc. really don't matter. They just want bread. Take, for an example, our cook. Over the last couple of weeks he would ask for updates about the political situation. Has the new Prime Minister been selected? When will the new Prime Minister be selected? Why is it taking so long for the Prime Minister to be selected? Yesterday his patience was wearing thin. With no Prime Minister yet, he commented, who are we going to complain to about the high price of wheat and food?

The NRO, the Afghan war, Sharia, Kashmir, Iraq, corruption, etc. None of that is what counts. Quiet simply, what matters is the price of bread.

Edit: And of course not long after I wrote this post I came across this article in today's papers about the bread shortage in Egypt and President Mubarak's attempts to combat it.

Interesting Blog on Afghanistan

On a slightly different note, here is an interesting new blog on Afghanistan. Some of the articles such as this one about local power structures in Afghanistan and the way in which NATO forces engage with them.

The War on Terror in Afghanistan

Just as a little aside. The A-10's GAU 8/A 'Avenger' gatling gun has to be the most fearsome weapon on the modern battlefield. Listen to the sound of it around 4 minutes into this video clip of Afghan and Dutch soldiers battling the Taliban in Uruzgan. It sounds like some kind of mythical beast. Frightening.

Then again I can't imagine these kinds of engagements are going to like, you know, win the war on terror.

Meanwhile, Back in Afar Land...

This whole lal masjid drama has been completely distracting me from other matters. Quiet apart from the fact that I should be working on my dissertation, there have been a couple of things I had wanted to blog about:

Recently I read an article by Priya Satia called "The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia" (American Historical Review Feb 2006) which apart from its interesting main thesis sparked some ideas about what Afghanistan means as a landscape of Jihad and spiritual redemption for the ISI and military men who became increasingly involved with covert operations there through the 80s and 90s. If I were ever to write an article on this, I might easily call it "The Defense of Inhumanity: Jihad and the Pakistani Idea of Afghanistan". I'm sure that more than one ISI officer in Afghanistan has seen himself as a sort of Lawrence of Arabia, living out the dream of a pure, manly life while helping a tribal people free themselves from the shackles of oppressive foreign rule.

But more on that some other time. Maybe.

The other interesting thing I've recently read is a policy and analysis report prepared by two media experts at the American propaganda unit Radio Liberty, entitled "Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas" and because its an American article it must of course have a subtitle which is "How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide Are Using the Media." You can download it here. Some interesting information there on the different insurgent groups, their use of media, and their discussions on strategies, aims and so forth.

Also, I now find myself trying to read for my dissertation, reading Mark Mazower's 'Dark Continent', and desperate to read my newly acquired collection of essays by Philip Curtin on 'The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex' which is about the institution of slave plantations - from their origins to their decline with the end of slavery in the Americas. (Note: By the late nineteenth century keeping slaves was so unprofitable that plantation owners were freeing them in droves even before the final abolition laws came into place throughout the Americas). All this, and I am spending most of my time reading blogs about Maulana Auntie!

Speaking of blogs, I've come across an interesting blog called 'Not the Whole Truth'. Given that the humanities and social sciences have generally been bulldozed into a ditch by the "useful" disciplines devoted to the deification of capital, its always encouraging to come across people in Pakistan with a genuine desire to grapple with basic questions about culture, identity and political theory. Its going up on my blogroll!

IZ

Losing Afghanistan... Redux

A few days ago, I wrote a post about how the opportunity for NATO and the world at large to do something truly useful for Afghanistan was slipping away due to a combination of mismanaged aid and development efforts and a badly conceived military campaign.

Two days after my post, the Washington Post informs us of a NATO air assault that kills over 100 villagers in Afghanistan.

"More than 100 people have been killed. But they weren't Taliban. The Taliban were far away from there," said Wali Khan, a member of parliament who represents the area. "The people are already unhappy with the government. But these kinds of killings of civilians will cause people to revolt against the government."

Why? Why? Why? The War on Terror is such a pointless, stupid, purposeless and most important to understand, counter-productive war!

IZ

On Nation-Building: Bad News From Afghanistan

Unlike Iraq, there are still some reasons to hope that all is not yet lost for those who might wish to help bring about some kind of peace and stability to Afghanistan. Unfortunately there are less reasons for hope now than they were last year, which were less than the year before.

Afghanistan was always an interesting case for nation-building. The Taliban government was basically a collection of notables from the Kandahar region who had bought the loyalty of regional tribal leaders and warlords throughout much of the country. Those who had rejected their offers, mostly ethnic and sectarian minority groups who had fought in the Soviet war and had been part of the post-communist coalition government, the Taliban waged a brutal war of extermination against. Even here, most of their successes were dependent on Pakistani military know-how and funding.

When the Americans began their war on the Taliban, the victory was won, for the most part due to the same regional tribal leaders and warlords being bribed to join the Northern Alliance. There are plenty of recorded instances of local "Taliban" forces turning on the Pakistani and Jihadist volunteers in their camp - often massacring them - after the local commander had cut a deal with the NA.

The fact of the matter is that most Afghans were weary of war, weary of fighting and the prolonged dissolution of their country. They were happy to side with anyone who would promise them safety and security and a decent shot at bettering their lives. When the Taliban government fell and the Northern Alliance formed the nucleus of a new Afghan government, one would have assumed that it wouldn't have been too difficult to convince the populace that the future lay with the new government.

As if turned out, the assumption was overly optimistic. Unsatisfied with the short, victorious 'war' in Afghanistan, the American government turned to its new crusade in Iraq. Afghanistan became the "forgotten war". Huge amounts of aid to help rebuild the country were promised by the world, but only a fraction was delivered. Of that, far too much is wasted on vanity projects and unproductive expenditure. Its interesting to read the following in this BBC article:

Most international officials, aid workers and consultants in Afghanistan live a hermetically sealed life - advised not to step outside by armed security guards, and often working at very high salaries on very short-term contracts.

So too much of the money earmarked for aid to Afghanistan actually goes straight back to donor countries.

The Chief of Staff at the Afghan Counter-Narcotics Ministry, Abbie Aryan, condemned the culture of "champagne and caviar consultants" who come to Afghanistan and "deliver nothing".

There is still no internationally agreed strategy on how to tackle the drugs problem.

Britain plays a lead role in trying to stop the cultivation of opium poppies, and Mr Aryan says that large amounts of British money have been wasted on things that the Afghans do not need....

Rather than responding to Afghan concerns, and helping to fund an eradication coordination unit, when the Counter Narcotics Ministry wanted to set one up, the British government is instead funding a project for aerial photography that will cost more than $10m.

The Director of Survey and Monitoring at the ministry, Engineer Mohammad Ibrahim Azhar, told the BBC that when the project was first proposed, the Minister Habibullah Qaderi asked the British why they could not use a local plane, or at least provide equipment that would still be there when the project finished.

Instead the contract is with a British firm, with two British engineers running it in Kabul.

In his Samuel Johnson Prize-winning book, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City", Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote about how reconstruction in Iraq was a joke. A way to provide astronomical salaries and impressive resumes to young college Republicans and Republican party interns, with little to show for it at the end. By the time the insurgency had become a full-blown insurrection and reconstruction was wound down, the hopes for normal Iraqis that their lives would materially return to the standards that existed in the pre-war, sanction-hit Saddam era, let alone improve on it, had disappeared except for some areas in the Kurdish north. Given that Afghanistan was a multi-national operation with full NATO, UN and Aid agency involvement, things were better managed than in Iraq - but not by a huge margin.

But it certainly was a lost opportunity. Conditions were ideal to make a real impact felt on the ground in the everyday lives of people. But as the years slipped by, conditions deteriorated. The Taliban resurgence, fanned by Taliban sympathisers in Pakistan saw an attempt at insurgency in the mould of Iraq. There was a growing loss of sympathy with the foreign armies, as the civilian casualties mounted, and the Afghan government as farmers turned to poppy cultivation, and the authorities sought to curb it. With the establishment of bases in Waziristan and the recent huge influx of cash and expertise bought by Iraqi Jihadists and bankrolled by Saudi millionaires, the Taliban was in a position to start convincing an increasing number of people that the future lay with them, and not an aloof, murderous and possibly soon-to-leave American military.

Given that NATO has killed more Afghan civilians this year than the Taliban (and that's not including the civilians NATO has killed in Pakistan), how much longer can the good-will be sustained?

One also gets the feeling that the whole exercise of "nation-building" needs to be examined carefully. Most of the major aid agencies have accumulated vast reservoirs of experience and wisdom on techniques that are, or are not effective. But Aid Agencies only account for a fraction of the massive sums devoted by foreign governments and International donor organisations such as the IMF etc. These often have their own priorities and constituencies that need to be appeased when it comes to signing off on big sums of money.

But more than that, I wonder if ideology also comes into play. States and political elites often have ideological views on how a country develops, what causes this, what are its needs and how the process works. This is apart from views on what institutions a modern state has. Would funding an incipient health care system for Afghanistan be high on a list of priorities of a country that does not believe in universal healthcare, for example?

One gets the feeling that the institutional knowledge and understanding of a country like the United States is so limited that it is particularly unsuited to the task of nation-building. Can it wise up?

IZ

Rebuilding Afghanistan

The BBC has a very nice series of photographs up by Peter Biro of the International Rescue Committee of ordinary Afghans, showing how many are working to rebuild their lives. The commentary attached is also enlightening. Well worth checking out.

IZ

Looking Like Osama Doesn't Pay

I feel sorry for this guy. Imagine people trying to sell you to the US government because you resemble someone else.

IZ