Warlords arm Afghans in the north
Posted: October 3, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan, Atta Mohammed Noor, Balkh, Election, Juma Khan Hamdard, Karzai, Marshal Qasim Fahim, Taliban Leave a commentMAZAR-E-SHARIF // Gunrunning here is a lucrative trade. The price of a Kalashnikov has quadrupled in parts of northern Afghanistan, driven up by the possibility of civil unrest as officials struggle to produce a result for August’s presidential election.
“The weapons business is good right now,” said Gen Abdul Malek, a local warlord who fought briefly with the Taliban before double-crossing them and executing 2,000 of their followers. “Where it was once $150 for an AK-47 it has gone up to $600,” he said. “Where it was five Afghanis” [about 10 cents] “for a bullet it is now 30.” Mazar-e-Sharif, the cosmopolitan city that straddles international trading routes, shows little sign of the troubles that have swept northern Afghanistan this summer. But its open spaces and gentle hum belie the political and ethnic tensions threatening to divide the previously peaceful region.
Residents say rival warlords are squaring up, exploiting the political deadlock for personal gain at the same time as the Taliban makes rapid inroads across the north. “They exploit the misfortunes of people, using – the name of their tribe to incite violence and make money,” a local journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, said. “People are saying ‘Kill the Pashtuns’. The leader of the Pashtuns is saying ‘Kill the Tajiks’.”
The trouble started when the powerful governor of Balkh province, Atta Mohammed Noor, fell out with President Hamid Karzai after the latter overlooked him as his vice-presidential running mate. Instead, Mr Karzai chose one of Mr Atta’s bitterest personal rivals, the warlord Marshal Qasim Fahim. Mr Atta threw his weight behind Mr Karzai’s main challenger, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, campaigning energetically for him and festooning Mazar-e-Sharif with posters of a smiling Mr Abdullah. Billboards endorsing the president were defaced or torn down.
But now with Mr Karzai expected to win the election, possibly in one round, Mr Atta looks vulnerable. Old enemies have taken note. Trying to usurp him is Juma Khan Hamdard, a Karzai ally and governor of Paktia province in the east. Mr Atta and Mr Hamdard go back a long way: they fought with different factions during the civil war and later, as governor of a neighbouring province, Mr Hamdard was held responsible for the deaths of 12 people after his Pashtun-centric policies provoked riots.
The two men sit on different sides of the ethnic split: Mr Atta is a Tajik; Mr Hamdard belongs to the Pashtun ethnic group. Both have reputedly used ethnic prejudice to stir up their followers at times, and Mr Hamdard has even accused Mr Atta of having local Pashtun leaders assassinated. Mr Hamdard’s spokesman denied suggestions that he was preying on ethnic insecurities. “Afghanistan is a house for all Afghans: Tajiks, Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks. And if you see the story of Balkh, it will tell you all Afghan tribes live together. Whoever tells you [otherwise] – it’s completely wrong,” he said.
Locals disagree. “As long as you have warlords in the government how can you have peace in the country?” said one. Mr Atta, meanwhile, has struck back at Mr Hamdard’s attempts to undermine his authority. In a blistering speech he accused Mr Hamdard, in league with the ministry of the interior, of distributing weapons in order to destabilise the north. “Twenty-five commanders were given weapons by Juma Khan Hamdard in Charbolak, Chintral and Balkh districts. For each commander there were between five and 25 AK-47s, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and motorbikes,” he said. At the same time Mr Atta defended the right of his own supporters to “peaceful demonstrations” against vote-rigging.
Some say that Mr Hamdard is a pawn in the plot, spurred on by government ministers unhappy with Mr Atta’s defiance. The powerful interior minister, Hanif Atmar, is rumoured to be behind the campaign to discredit him. But either way, the fragmentation of the north is down to the central government’s failure to impose itself. “The situation is declining faster and faster in the north,” political analyst Haroun Mir said. “People can’t rely on the Afghan security forces to provide protection. The absence of government authority [is creating the] tension.”
Into the political vacuum have stepped the Taliban. Swathes of the countryside and sections of main highways have become impassable over the summer and previously safe Nato supply lines are under threat. The scale of the problem was highlighted when the German military called in an air strike that killed 30 civilians – the kind of incident associated with seemingly more volatile parts of the country. And then on Thursday Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan warned that Islamist militancy was spreading north into Central Asia. Although some insurgents may have come from the Taliban’s strongholds in the south and east, most are local.
“The Taliban is a bunch of different groups using the same brand name,” a security analyst explained. “The Taliban is essentially using a federal model. The Quetta Shura [the supreme Taliban council led by Mullah Omar in Pakistan’s Quetta] lets them do their own thing which, by the way is where the government fails by being so centralised and ships in a few high-value assets Uzbeks, Chechens and so on.”
The map of Taliban activity in the north roughly reflects the location of the Pashtun communities there. Kunduz province, where they have effectively opened a northern front against the German soldiers stationed there, has a number of districts with Pashtun majorities. Balkh too has Pashtun communities. “I see the calm before the storm,” Gen Malek warned. “There will be violence and instability. There will be disagreements between the tribes.”
Some observers struck a more cautious note, suggesting that while some districts might harbour insurgents, trouble would only occur on a large scale if international forces began targeting their leaders. “Then you have a lot of little guys scrambling for power. That would lead to chaos,” the security analyst said. Meanwhile if Mr Atta is forced out of office he is unlikely to be out of power. During his five years as governor of Balkh he has consolidated up to 60 per cent of the province’s business interests – particularly construction companies. Even if Mr Hamdard wins the governorship he covets, Mr Atta will informally continue to run things.
Afghans criticize UN’s strong hand in their election
Posted: October 2, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan, Election, Kai Eide, Karzai, Peter Gabraith Leave a commentSeveral analysts and opposition figures in Afghanistan say the UN’s decision to fire Peter Galbraith for urging a harder line on election fraud affirms popular fears that it is the international community calling the shots on who wins.
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
Before their country’s fraud-riddled election in August, some Afghans complained it was the international community that would decide the result. With the United Nations having fired a top diplomat for urging a tougher stand against vote-rigging, a move made public Wednesday, they say they now have proof.
Several Afghan analysts and opposition figures criticized the decision to sack Peter Galbraith, the UN’s No. 2 person in Afghanistan, for accusing his boss, Kai Eide, of endorsing a decision by the Independent Election Commission to allow fraudulent ballots to be counted – a move he said gave the election toPresident Hamid Karzai.
“I think it will further undermine the credibility of the election,” says Haroun Mir, head of the Afghanistan Center for Research and Policy Studies in Kabul. “The majority of Afghans were already saying the final decision would be decided by the international community.” Read the rest of this entry »
Afghan election aftermath to be tackled by UN troubleshooter
Posted: September 19, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan, Carlos Valenzuela, Election, Election Complaints Commission, Fraud, Karzai, UN Leave a commentThe United Nations is flying one of its top election experts into Kabul to help break Afghanistan’s political deadlock, as preparations get underway for a possible second round of voting.
Julius Cavendish In Kabul and Nick Meo
The arrival of Carlos Valenzuela in Kabul this weekend would be the most visible sign yet of increasingly desperate efforts by the international community to bring the drawn-out and contentious aftermath of last month’s election to a tidy end.
The UN hopes that he will be able to find a solution that makes it appear that foreigners are not influencing the result too much.
Mr Valenzuela has been given the job of ensuring a final certified result from the vote on August 20 is announced in time for a second round to take place if necessary. Read the rest of this entry »
Democracy or disaster?
Posted: August 22, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan, Election, Fraud, Karzai, Taliban Leave a commentAFGHANISTAN: IT was aimed at giving the nation a common voice but Afghanistan’s election, riddled with corruption and violence, may have only added to the country’s ethnic and political tensions
AFTER weeks on the campaign trail, Afghan politics is suddenly quiet as president Hamid Karzai and his closest rival Dr Abdullah Abdullah wait for the result of Thursday’s presidential election.
Spokesmen for both candidates declared victory on Friday before bowing to pressure from the country’s Independent Election Commission to maintain a dignified silence.
“It is not the job of the campaign managers to announce the election results,” said Zekria Barakzai, a spokesman for the IEC, who estimated national turnout at 40-50%.
US envoy Richard Holbrooke met both candidates to ask them not to incite their followers. There had been fears their rhetoric might stoke violence and split the country along ethnic lines.
Karzai belongs to the Pashtun majority and derives much of his support from Pashtun voters in the south of the country, where turnout was lowest. Analysts fear that allegations of fraud among his supporters will prompt Abdullah, who is half Pashtun and half Tajik, and has his support base in the north to protest against an unfavourable result, sparking violent clashes.
Another possibility is that high turnout in northern Afghanistan and low turnout in the south, where voters carried Karzai to victory five years ago, may force the race to a second round. Karzai has said in the worst-case scenario this may lead to a civil war.
“We’re in a period where the outcome is unclear … Everyone said that they would respect the process,” Holbrooke said.
The British ambassador to Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, said that the two candidates had responded with a “responsible attitude”.
International election observers also urged caution, saying it was too early to say who had won and whether fraud had affected the outcome. Violence, particularly in the south, made the vote hard to analyse.
The IEC will start to publish preliminary results on Tuesday. But election monitors have already criticised it for failing to release results from individual polling stations as they come in.
“I can’t think of an election that was this opaque, where no-one seems to have a good sense of how many people voted, whether they felt restricted or not in their ability to vote, what the breakdown between men and women was, what the support of various candidates was,” said Glenn Cowan, a principal with Democracy International. “All that information tends to act as a pressure release. You’re not getting that here.”
If Karzai receives the 50.1% of the vote he needs to win in round one, the depressed turnout in the Pashtun belt across the south and east Afghanistan, where he garners most support, may actually boost his legitimacy by showcasing him as a leader able to appeal to voters countrywide.
Some polling stations remained closed amid insurgent intimidation and violence. Residents of parts of Helmand, Kandahar, Wardak, Ghazni, Logar, and eastern Herat had little or no opportunity to vote. In Helmand, where thousands of British troops fought a month-long operation to provide security allowing 80,000 people to vote, just 150 were reported to have cast their ballots.
Gun-battles between militants and police raged all day in several districts in the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s heartland. Insurgents attacked the provincial governor’s palace at 3.30am and kept up a barrage of rockets, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades until after dark.
Police said they fought gun battles with the insurgents, killing several. About a dozen roadside bombs were destroyed in controlled explosions.
The Taliban targeted Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and a powerful figure in southern Afghanistan. Two rockets fizzed overhead as he voted. Another fell short of his house, blowing a young girl’s head off and wounding three members of her family. The Taliban fired more than 200 rockets across the province in total.
A few defiant Kandaharis did cast their ballots, mainly for the incumbent, Hamid Karzai.
“We must make our country and now is the time,” said one voter, squatting by a puddle and trying to scrub away the indelible ink that election officials had stained his finger with. Although the ink was intended to prevent people voting twice, it also identified those who had ignored a Taliban boycott of the election.
“They will kill me,” he said, asking not to be named.
Exiting the white tent where he had just voted, another man, Mohammad Younis, recalled that the last time he had cast a ballot, in 2004, it was with a spirit of optimism.
This time a rocket exploded nearby.
“You see our situation,” he said.
By early afternoon, the explosions and the baking desert heat had driven almost everyone off the streets. Polling stations were deserted save for a few election staff. When polls closed at 4pm, 1838 men had voted at what officials said was the city’s busiest polling centre. The IEC had estimated 6000 would turn out to cast their votes. “It’s been a quiet day,” said Sediqullah, the registrar at another polling station in central Kandahar City. Only 387 people had voted there.
The numbers at female-only polling stations were even lower.
The deputy president of the provincial council said that besides security being “very, very bad,” minor irregularities in voting were being reported in Kandahar City. “First bring security, then elections,” said Toorjan Dastagir, a stocky shopkeeper who refused to visit the polling station barely a hundred yards from his store. “All night there were rockets.”
The insurgents hanged two voters in Kandahar and cut the ink-stained fingers off two others. Rumours that militants would cut off voters’ ink-stained fingers had spread before the vote. A Taliban spokesman had said militants would not carry out such attacks, but the Taliban remains a loose confederacy of individual commanders who act on their own initiative.
Overall, though, the level of violence was less than had been feared. The UN, American and Afghan officials hailed the election a success, not least because the Taliban failed to stage any of the “spectacular” attacks they had promised. The Afghan government said at least 26 people were killed in 135 incidents countrywide. US President Barack Obama called it an “important step forward”.
Meanwhile, campaign managers for presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani have reported ballot-box stuffing by local commanders loyal to the Karzai family. This has been vociferously denied. Election monitors said turnout levels would give an indication of how much fraud had taken place; early indications are that a suspiciously large number of ballots were cast in places savaged by fighting.
In Kandahar one man also told the Sunday Herald that votes were being sold for $20 a time. Later, I saw people being admitted into polling stations after they had officially closed. The Election Complaints Commission has so far received 100 formal complaints about irregularities, including “allegations of ballot-stuffing in Kandahar”. European Union observers had difficulty getting to polling stations in southern Kandahar because of rocket attacks.
Nader Nadery of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan said his group saw widespread problems of election officials pressuring people to vote for certain candidates. In Mazar-e-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, a fistfight broke out when a Karzai supporter began distributing campaign literature to people queuing to vote. In Balkh, three election workers were fired because they were campaigning for Abdullah during the election.
Election monitors saw voters carrying whole boxes of voting cards to polling sites, Nadery said. There were widespread reports of underage voters. In Kandahar, I found one 15-year old girl who had not only voted but was working as an election observer.
And yesterday, a long-shot presidential candidate displayed torn and mangled ballot papers that he said had been cast for him and tossed away by local election workers who support Karzai.
Mirwais Yasini said his supporters had found them ditched outside Spin Boldak city in southern Kandahar province. The ballots bore the stamp of the Independent Election Commission, which is applied only after they are used for voting.
“Thousands of them were burned,” he said. Spin Boldak is where campaign staff of Ashraf Ghani also alleged large-scale fraud was orchestrated by Karzai supporters.
Election observers were split in their opinions of the poll: some said low turnout reflected how dreadful security in southern Afghanistan has become. Others said just holding an election was a success. The ballot took place in a country at war, with little history of democracy, deep ethnic splits and endemic corruption.
The National Democratic Institute said it saw orderly voting, but added that the vote “involved serious flaws that must be addressed in order to build greater confidence in the integrity of future elections.”
The fact that members of the IEC were appointed by Karzai suggested a degree of bias, it said.
Democracy International reported that although violence and intimidation disenfranchised voters in large parts of the country, in more secure areas Afghans were able to cast their votes. The IEC was able to administer the elections effectively enough to prevent questions of legitimacy arising on this front, it said, but the lack of a voter list created plenty of opportunities for fraud. Around 17 million Afghans were registered to vote, although it is unclear how many hold duplicate cards.
United Nations Special Representative Kai Eide recently referred to the Afghan poll as “the most complicated elections anywhere in the world”.
After the events of last week few would question his assessment.
Taleban threats and attacks take toll on polls as voters stay away
Posted: August 21, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Afghanistan, Election, Kandahar, Taliban Leave a commentJeremy Page and Tom Coghlan in Kabul and Julius Cavendish in Kandahar
The credibility of Afghanistan’s presidential election hangs in the balance today after Taleban threats and attacks severely depleted voter turnout, especially in the southern province of Helmand, and observers reported widespread electoral fraud.
The Times has learnt that turnout in Helmand was as low as eight per cent and fewer than 150 people cast ballots in the district where British forces launched Operation Panther’s Claw in June to allow 80,000 more people to vote.
UN, Nato, American and Afghan officials hailed the election as a success last night, saying the Taleban had failed to disrupt a poll seen as a test of President Karazai’s popularity and international efforts to build democracy. But evidence from observers, electoral officials and polling stations visited by The Times suggests that turnout was so low, and electoral violations so rampant, that many Afghans will doubt the election’s credibility.
In Helmand, where British troops have been deployed since 2006, only about 50,000 people cast ballots out of an estimated 620,000 registered voters, according to the local election chief.
Panther’s Claw aimed to push back the Taleban and allow people to vote in the area around Nad e-Ali, Helmand’s most populous district with 107,500 residents. Brigadier Tim Radford, commander of British forces in Helmand, said last month the operation had allowed 80,000 more Afghans to vote.
But fewer than 150 people actually cast their ballots in Nad e-Ali out of about 48,000 registered voters, according to Engineer Abdul Hadee, the local head of the Independent Election Commission.
“The number we hoped to get to vote — it has not happened,” he told The Times.
Haji Ahmad Shah Khan, a tribal elder in Nad e-Ali, was one of many Afghans scared off by the Taleban’s warnings to attack polling stations and cut off voters’ index fingers, which were marked with indelible ink.
“We couldn’t come out of our house. The Taleban are patrolling the area,” he said. “Nobody could vote.”
Mullah Ghulam Mohamamd Akhund, a Taleban commander in the district, said: “Everything was fine. There were no polling centres and no voting. We didn’t face any problems.”
Engineer Hadee said there was a similarly low turnout in most of Helmand’s 13 districts despite the recent efforts of British troops, 13 of whom have been killed this month. No votes at all were cast in Nawa and Garmsir districts, which had 85,000 registered voters between them. In Nawzad, which has a population of 46,300, the vote was cancelled because there were no presidential ballot papers.
The poor turnout is troubling for President Karzai, as well as for British forces, because most people in Helmand are from the Pashtun ethnic majority from which he hails and derives most of his support.
His aides worry that low turnout across the Pashtun-dominated south could mean that he fails to win the outright majority needed for a first-round victory. That would force him into a second round run-off in early October with his main rival, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, who is half Pashtun and half Tajik.
“One round will be in the interest of the nation,” Mr Karzai said yesterday as he cast his vote.
Early results from near Lashkar Gar, Helmand’s capital, gave an idea of people’s affiliations in the south. At a polling station at Kareyz School, about two miles south of Lashkar Gah, there were 2,418 votes cast, of which 2,400 went to Karzai, and 18 to Dr Abdullah, according to a local councillor.
Many observers, analysts and diplomats fear that Mr Karzai’s allies may try to rig the vote to compensate for the poor turnout in the south.
Although Helmand appeared to be the worst affected province, turnout was also low in many other provinces with large Pashtun populations. “This is Karzai country but they really failed to get the vote out today,” said Tom Fairbank, an observer for Democracy International in the eastern city of Jalalabad, which voted overwhelmingly for Mr Karzai in 2004.
“The interesting thing now is to see how many people they will say voted here when they release the results.”
Observers also reported a very low turnout in the southern city of Kandahar, where the Taleban fired several rockets, one of which killed a young girl.
The biggest attack of the day was on the northern city of Baghlan, which militants stormed in the morning, shutting down all its polling stations. Between eight and 22 militants were killed in the ensuing battle, according to local officials.
In Kabul, Afghan forces killed two more militants who took over a building in the east of the city.
“The kind of spectacular attacks that we were warned about have not happened,” said Kai Eide, the UN envoy to Afghanistan.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato chief, said: “Seen from a security point of view the election has been a success.” Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, said: “So far every prediction of disaster turned out to be wrong.”
The view from Helmand was less upbeat. Abdul Ahad Helmandwal, a local councillor from Nad e-Ali, said he went to his local mosque at lunchtime and asked 40 elders who they were voting for
“They said, ‘are you crazy? My life is much more important than the presidential election’. Among all those forty I was the only one to vote.”
Kandahar voters live in fear as Taleban tightens grip before election
Posted: August 20, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Afghanistan, Election, Kandahar, Taliban Leave a commentSquatting on the floor of a traditional Afghan house the chubby cleric shrugs off yet another Taleban death threat in the run-up to today’s presidential election. This one, delivered by telephone the previous night, warned Maulavi Hekmatullah Hekmati that he would be dead within a week.
Mr Hekmati knows that the threat is real: he often denounces the insurgents on local radio and enough of his fellow mullahs have been murdered for him to live under armed guard. For him, however, as for so many others in Kandahar, the threat of assassination has become almost routine as this southern city falls deeper into the hands of the Taleban.
The city is the heart of Afghanistan’s ethnic Pashtun majority, which rallied behind President Karzai at the election in 2004. This year, however, the Taleban have been steadily infiltrating the city and waging a campaign of intimidation designed to disrupt the poll. Graffiti, posters and “night letters” tacked to mosque walls warn people not to vote. The chatter of gunfire is commonplace.
Dozens of government employees, clerics and activists have been killed, including a prominent female politician, Sitara Achakzai, who was shot by the Taleban in April.
Ahmad Wali Karzai, the chairman of the provincial council and President Karzai’s half-brother, admitted that political violence was part of life in Kandahar. “This terrorising people is always in the air, people breathe it,” he told The Times inside his heavily fortified compound. “There will be attacks. The fear is there.”
Western officials and many locals say that Mr Wali Karzai is partly responsible because he is an alleged ringleader of the province’s powerful drug trade — a charge that he denies.
The fear, for many, is that the Taleban are taking over Kandahar — although to what extent it is difficult to gauge. Some say that a recent drop in suicide attacks means they already control the city; others say that the insurgents are trying to minimise civilian casualties by carrying out fewer bombings while continuing targeted killings.
For others police corruption is the main problem. Ghafar Shah was driving to the bazaar when he was stopped by three police officers, beaten unconscious, abducted and kept in chains in a house outside the city. “I didn’t think I’d live,” he said. He was rescued and his captors were jailed, but others have been held for ransoms of as much as $1 million (£600,000).
President Karzai hopes that Kandaharis will defy such risks to back him again today — but even those brave enough to defy the Taleban have little faith in the electoral process. “In the previous election there was fraud and in this election there will be, I’m sure,” Haji Mohammad Hussein, a local man said. “The country is corrupted. The power is with gunmen.”
Seeking hearts and minds with the ‘Viceroy of Helmandshire’
Posted: May 29, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Afghanistan, hearts and minds, Helmand, Lashkar Gah, PRT Leave a commentAs thousands of US troops start arriving in southern Afghanistan this summer to try to dislodge the Taleban from their strongholds, a host of British civil servants are on hand to fill the political vaccuum.
Amid the rose bushes and machinegun towers of the British military base in Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s provincial capital, are the British mandarins who talk of their work as a giant experiment in governance and security.
Leading them is Hugh Powell, a Foreign Office official whose father served as Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser and whose uncle was Tony Blair’s chief of staff. Mr Powell has been tipped as a future aide to David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader and a fellow Old Etonian.
“What we’re doing here is cutting-edge experimental,” Mr Powell toldThe Times. “I don’t think it’s been done on this scale anywhere else before.” The aim is to provide “good enough governance structures” protected by “good enough security apparatus”, he said.
At Mr Powell’s disposal are about 135 military and civilian personnel and 28 locals, living among a small army of mercenaries, interpreters, soldiers and contractors. The team is the largest of 26 provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) across Afghanistan.
First set up by the Americans after the 2001 invasion, PRTs were designed to gather intelligence outside Kabul and handle development projects to win hearts and minds. Water towers and wells were typical examples. The idea was that building things for people would make them like you more than they feared your enemies.
But there has been no shortage of critics of PRTs in general and the Helmand PRT in particular. Sceptics have dubbed Mr Powell “the Viceroy of Helmandshire” because of his fiefdom’s cosy British conviviality and dislocation from the dilapidated provincial capital in which it sits.
Staff can relax on rugs and cushions on newly laid decking as they watch a Friday night film under the stars. Fragrant flowerbeds hem a wooden pavilion nicknamed “the bus stop”. There is even a beach hut.
On the other side of the perimeter’s blast blocks and concertina wire, men till the fields for a few dollars a day and live in fear of the Taleban, local warlords and criminal gangs.
An internal assessment by the Department for International Development, which sponsors Helmand PRT’s current experiment, found that a previous attempt to foster good governance ended in 2007 with “little evidence of tangible benefit” despite costing taxpayers millions of pounds.
The department said that “significant progress and developments” had been made since then.
Aid agencies claim that PRTs are blurring the distinction between the military and civilians in a country whose population is already suspicious of foreign soldiers.
Mr Powell said that without armed vehicles and bodyguards, “we would be targets” for the insurgents. As it is, his staff venture forth dozens of times each week to visit towns and villages along the Helmand River.
“People almost have to cut us some slack,” Mr Powell said inside one of the white-washed bungalows that dot the base. “It’s experimental, it’s new, there aren’t SOPs (standard operating procedures) for this. It will be, you know, a bit bumpy, but given all that, I’m pretty confident that we can make it work.”
The Helmand PRT now concentrates on what he called the “intangibles”, such as governance and the rule of law. Fundamentally, Mr Powell said, there had been a shift away from “the classic fix-a-mosque’s-roof type thing” to bigger infrastructure projects, which will persuade Afghans that central government will outlast the Taleban.
The central plank is harnessing the country’s rich history of village politics. Under the new “Afghan social outreach programme”, the Government is trying to devolve power to village level. A pilot scheme is running in Helmand.
With guidance from the PRT’s governance unit, local elders are being encouraged to become community council members, taking portfolios for justice or development or security. The idea is to build community responsibility and with it the confidence and security to resist Taleban intimidation. Elders from one nearby district even claim to have forced the insurgents to retreat.
US troop surge in Afghanistan escalates war with Taleban
Posted: May 29, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: 10th Mountain Division, Afghanistan, Chak, Highway 1, NATO, Surge, Wardak Leave a commentSayed Abad
Rocket-propelled grenades streaked through the fading light and exploded behind the US convoy patrolling in eastern Afghanistan. Muzzle flashes flared in the gloom as Taleban insurgents opened up with heavy machineguns and AK47s. Delta company was caught in an ambush.
Foul-mouthed soldiers swung their weapons towards a complex of mud-walled buildings 800 yards away. “Get some!” roared the gunner of an M19 grenade launcher. The thud of return fire from the Americans’ vehicle-mounted weapons began.
Soldiers inside their Humvees opened bullet-proof windows and slid their rifles through. Those on the right side of the convoy scrambled out and brought their weapons to bear on the sparks flashing in the distance. Red tracer flew towards the buildings.
“Three o’clock,” someone shouted. Grey smoke trails lingered in the air where the rocket-propelled grenades had exploded. Under orders to “shoot conservative”, combat veterans tried to calm adrenalin-pumped novices. “Take your time,” one shouted. “One burst every ten seconds.”
The slew of hot shell casings from the gunners’ turrets that had cascaded into the vehicles began to ease. A foot patrol cut around the insurgents’ flank as darkness fell, running hard through wheatfields, ducking every 50 yards. No one spoke. Everyone sucked in air.
Afghan National Police went with them as they pushed through the mud compounds. Breaking down doors by torchlight they found terrified women and children inside who said that they knew nothing. Some shielded their dignity by facing walls. The only man there of fighting age was blind.
Attack helicopters and F15 jets growled somewhere in the skies above and confirmation came through of two kills. The rest of the attackers had vanished. “They’re so much lighter than us,” 3rd Platoon’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Adam Novak, said. “They break faster.”
Part of the first ripple in the US troop surge to Afghanistan, Delta company and its sister units are securing a 67-mile stretch of the Kabul to Kandahar highway, the country’s main north-south road. Sixty per cent of Afghanistan’s population live within 30 miles (50km) of one of the country’s main highways, collectively known as the “ring road”.
“The single biggest measure the Afghan people have in their mind of whether or not there is security is their ability to travel with freedom,” Lieutenant-General Jim Dutton, Nato’s deputy commander in Afghanistan, told The Times. Reclaiming the ring road is a key plank of US and Nato strategy.
Delta company’s 3rd platoon had set out that morning for Chak district, a Taleban stronghold 40 miles southwest of Kabul. The American military says that until recently Taleban and foreign fighters walked the streets of Chak with impunity.
From a deep system of mountain valleys, insurgents have been able to threaten the highway and impose their own form of governance on the local population, creating a public relations disaster for President Karzai’s Government.
Only a few hours into the mission, in a district called Sayed Abad, a soldier drove a 33-ton armoured vehicle off a narrow mountain road. It tilted precipitously towards a 50-foot drop. Attempts to drive it on to firmer ground collapsed more of the road.
Lieutenant Novak radioed for a recovery vehicle and gave a wry grin. “This just increased our chances of an ambush,” he said. Minutes later the insurgents opened fire.
One bullet skimmed so close to Private James Radovic, 20, from San Diego, that it popped the pressure inside his ear. Another passed between two soldiers’ heads. More rounds zinged off rocks and Humvees.
The echo in the valley made it hard to tell where the fire was coming from. Unaware that they were being attacked from two directions, several soldiers crouched in open view of the insurgents. The attackers melted away as quickly as they had arrived.
“Four months of bulls**t for five minutes of fun,” Private Nick Benitez said. “We might be here a while ‘cos of that truck being down,” Private Andrew Jones said. “They’re probably doing a little intel and come back later.”
The mission to Chak by 3rd Platoon came two weeks after a patrol by a sister unit in the area. On that occasion US troops say that they fought insurgents for six hours, killing at least 12. To their surprise, the militants fought on even after heavily armed Apache gunships arrived to tilt the battle in the Americans’ favour. “They want ownership” of the area, Lieutenant Novak told The Times. “Their big focus is trying to break American will.”
Nine hours after it began going over the edge, the armoured vehicle was recovered and drove out of the gully it had eventually been lowered into. The vehicle had escaped with nothing more than a broken headlamp and a flat tyre.
‘If you have a problem, the Taliban solves it. In the government offices there is only corruption and bribery’
Posted: January 3, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Afghanistan, NATO, Surge, Taliban, Wardak Leave a commentAFGHANISTAN: Losing the battle for Afghan hearts and minds.
THEY fled in the dead of night, taking what belongings they could, and telling no-one they were leaving for fear of ambush.
Hakimi and his family did not quit the badlands of the south, though, nor the hostile reaches of eastern Afghanistan. They came from Wardak province, less than an hour’s drive from the capital.
But just 30 miles from Kabul, it is Taliban country. Over the past year, the militants have established a stronghold in Wardak, which borders the capital to the south and west. Nine months ago, one of the province’s two hospitals, a German-run clinic, shut down after staff there also received death threats.
The UN evacuated its humanitarian staff from all but one of Wardak’s eight districts in September, citing security concerns. Roshanak Wardak, a member of parliament for the province, has said there are areas she is “100% sure no government worker can go to”.
Not without reason. The head of the attorney-general’s office in one Wardak district was kidnapped and killed by the Taliban three months ago. Days later, Afghan army, police and coalition forces said they had killed or wounded around 60 insurgents in a two-day battle that raged close to the Afghan capital. The number of attacks by Taliban-linked militants in Wardak has increased by 58% since 2007, according to security analyst Sami Kovanen in Kabul.
As it reasserts control over large swathes of countryside, the Taliban has been installing a shadow government to answer civilian needs. In the absence of effective local governance, the militants have been arresting criminals, providing courts, dispensing justice, running prisons and organising public executions – all within an hour’s drive of Kabul.
Hakimi’s fears were borne out just weeks after his family’s escape, when his cousin Naim was hanged by the Taliban for joining the Afghan National Army (ANA). His body swung from a tree for two days with a sign on his chest warning that whoever cut him down would suffer the same fate.
“My cousin was hanging three kilometres from the police district building,” said Hakimi. “But they were not able to retrieve his body.” Eventually, aid workers from the Afghan Red Crescent Society defied the ban and brought the body in.
A series of interviews with people from Wardak told a similar story.
“The police control their own buildings and maybe the 10 metres surrounding them,” said 40-year-old Habibullah Noori, who runs a minibus service between Wardak and Kabul. “There may be police checkpoints but there are also lots of Taliban checkpoints.”
News agency AP reported several days ago that checkpoint police in Wardak sometimes wear traditional robes so they can pass themselves off as civilians at the first sign of trouble. And whereas the government often turns a blind eye to crime – one interviewee said that “the other name for police is robbers” – the Taliban not only fails to tolerate it, but offers swift justice. Hakimi explained that the Taliban likes open and shut cases so its members can concentrate on fighting. “Every village has a Taliban representative and if anything happens, people go to him to say, We have this problem ‘. He doesn’t want to spend much time on it – so decisions are quick.” They can take a little as 24 hours.
But Noori, the minibus driver, said the Taliban’s system is better than the government’s. “If you have a problem the Taliban solves it,” he said. “In the government offices there is only corruption and bribery.
“Last year, the Taliban did not have 80, 90 or 100% control,” he added. “It was a mess. There were robbers, killers, everything. Now, you could walk around with 10kg of gold on your head and no-one would touch you. You can walk around at night without fear.”
As an example of the rough justice meted out, he cited a robbery in late summer when eight trucks of wheat disappeared. The Taliban investigated, found the trucks and returned them to their owners. Militants shot the leader of the robbers in the head, and let the others go with severe beatings and after extracting promises that there would be no repeat offence. Other Taliban punishments include parading criminals with their faces daubed black or amputating the hands of robbers. But cases aren’t limited to theft and murder. Far more frequently, aggrieved parties will seek arbitration of a property dispute – the most common cause of friction between Afghans, according to interviewees.
The procedure, should you have trouble of some sort, is to go to the nearest mosque and find the local Taliban representative. “He will say, Come back tomorrow at 10 o’clock and we will have the man who has done something’ – and he will be there,” Noori told me. “If the problem is small, a mullah will solve it. If it’s bigger, it will be a judge trained more extensively in Sharia law.”
Meanwhile, an uneasy detente is said to exist between the Taliban in Wardak and the local police, with both sides realising that full-scale confrontation is to neither’s advantage.
“If they create problems for us, we can create problems for them,” said 22-year-old Taliban foot soldier Spin Ghel. The failure of the police to drive 3km to retrieve Naim’s hanging corpse would appear to bear out his point. But Ghel, who wore a leather jacket over his salwar kameez and seemed to have joined the Taliban more out of boredom or frustration than for any ideological reason, claimed the relationship went deeper than that.
“They exchanged powerful commanders for that Italian journalist who was kidnapped,” he said, referring to the abduction in 2007 of Daniele Mastrogiacomo, who was released in exchange for Taliban prisoners. Whatever the extent of the alleged collusion, with a salary of just $65 a month it is hard to see why any police trooper would risk his life to take on the Taliban’s protection racket.
A key part of the Taliban’s success in Wardak is its network of informants. Gulbuddin, another young Taliban fighter, said there were around 70 spies in Kabul on the Taliban’s payroll, providing information about convoy movements, individuals visiting the province, and their families. At roadblocks, which can vary from a handful of militants waving down traffic to as many as 40, the insurgents have the registration numbers of approaching vehicles and descriptions of the passengers they carry.
“When my cousin was arrested, making a visit home, there were 40 men who came to get him,” said Hakimi. “All private taxis to Wardak leave from one specific location. That’s why it’s simple for them to know who is coming. They monitor everyone coming and going. If you’re wearing beautiful, nice, expensive clothing they are suspicious. They think you must be working for the government or UN. If you’re wearing dirty clothes, have a beard, long hair, turban, they think that’s fine.”
How far the Taliban’s services reach is unclear, but they are far from comprehensive. “The Taliban are very poor,” said Noori. “They can’t afford to provide healthcare – most of the time they are asking people to feed them.” Although in some places the Taliban is reported to extort a 10% tax from Afghans at the barrel of a gun, shadow governance of this sort has yet to reach Wardak.
Gulbuddin seemed less than enthusiastic about many of his duties, but reeled them off: searching ANA, aid or government workers, and arresting robbers. “We have district chiefs,” he said, “and we await their orders to see who we should hang. With most of the foreigners we arrest, we have to wait for orders from the Taliban in Pakistan.”
On the subject of prisons, he said the nearest to Kabul was an hour’s drive away. “The prisons are different – they can be residential houses or they can be caves that double as Taliban bases,” he explained, smiling. “Once people complained that maybe the coalition would bomb the houses we were using and kill them so now we try to use abandoned mud houses no-one knows about. We are always moving.”
Gulbuddin smiled a lot, but most of all when he was discussing ambushes on convoys – his chief occupation. Afghanistan’s ring road, the country’s main artery around which the densest population centres are located, runs straight through Wardak and is virtually impassable to Western and government forces. But so vital is control of this road that the US and Nato have made winning it back one of their top priorities for 2009.
“Most of the time, we attack on convoys,” said Gulbuddin. “For example, every time Afghan or coalition forces leave their bases to go somewhere, we have spies who alert our commanders. We gather on the front line with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), PKM heavy machine guns, and AK-47s as a third resort.”
Four 10-men units set up diagonally opposite each other at the site of the planned ambush, and good cover and escape routes are critical considerations when choosing the site, “especially when battles can last several hours,” said Gulbuddin. The first two units will wait for the convoy to pass before opening fire on the vehicles bringing up the rear. As the convoy accelerates forward the remaining fighters will start shooting at the van.
So precarious is the balance of the fight on Kabul’s doorstep that the “vast majority” of the first wave of US reinforcements to Afghanistan – the 3rd Mountain Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division – will be sent to Wardak and neighbouring Logar province, according to a US army spokeswoman. Outfits such as the UK’s 3rd Commando Brigade, deployed in Helmand province in the volatile south and taking heavy casualties, will have to wait for back-up. Military commanders expect an initial spike in fighting before the extra troops start to quell the violence.
“You will increase the level of incidents and violence when you first put troops into an area, that’s to be expected and indeed in some ways welcomed because that’s the purpose of going there in the first place,” Nato’s deputy commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Jim Dutton, said recently. Wardak locals said that until now foreign troops and ANA patrols had sometimes entered their villages – but never stayed for long. They interpreted this as a precautionary measure against the possibility of a Taliban attack.
“Sometimes they come and talk to previous commanders of the mujahidin, distributing sweets to children for five or 10 minutes. But that’s it,” said Noori.
A spokesman for the coalition forces said: “Help is on its way. The arrival of the 3rd Brigade will certainly help boost the number of forces in the area. The locals will probably see a lot more soldiers.”
“We want the government to take control,” said Noori. “But otherwise they should leave it to the Taliban. We civilians always end up trapped in the middle.”
Demons of war that haunt the Afghan people
Posted: December 27, 2008 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Afghanistan, cannibalism, djinns, Kabul, mental illness Leave a commentAFGHANISTAN: Years of conflict take toll, with 68% of population thought to have mental problems
POLICE found the girl’s body wrapped in a bag and dumped in one of the open sewage trenches that line Kabul’s roads.
No one knows for sure what happened in the previous 90 minutes.
But the police report states the four-year-old girl had been stolen from a home in one of the Afghan capital’s less salubrious neighbourhoods, after her grandmother failed to humour an intrusive beggar with rice and oil. The girl’s hands had been cut off. Her throat had been slit. And the flesh on her arms, legs and chest had been eaten.
Few people seem to care what motivated the prime suspect, Jabakhel.
“She had a psychological problem,” shrugged General Ali Shah Paktiawal, Kabul’s police chief. Anyway, he pointed out, crime was crime.
“No-one understands what kind of illness this is,” said the head of the branch of the attorney-general’s office dealing with the case. But he said he had seen an equally grisly incident at his last posting in one of the provinces. “It seems to be a kind of illness affecting women,” he concluded.
For some Afghan tribes, custom dictates that the death of a child will exorcise djinns – evil spirits – and though the full details of what happened to four-year-old Haifa may never be known, her murder is an extreme example of a pervasive problem in Afghanistan: mental illness.
In the wake of the 2001 US-led invasion, the new Afghan government identified mental health as one of its top five priorities. Later, the World Health Organisation reported that: “Due to the long period of conflict, over two million Afghans are affected by mental health problems, with high cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and severe anxiety, particularly among women.”
More recent studies paint a far bleaker picture. Dutch humanitarian organisation Health Net Organisation (HNO) estimates that a staggering 68% of Afghanistan’s population of 33 million suffer some kind of mental condition. Women and children are particularly at risk, HNO reported last month. Only Nepal has a greater proportion of children with mental health problems.
HNO said the main reasons for the mental problems affecting children in Afghanistan are war, poverty and domestic violence.
The majority of sufferers have mild conditions. Traditionally, mentally disturbed people have visited the shrines of spiritual leaders, been locked in cells, or given talismans by mullahs. At the Mia Ali sanctuary in eastern Afghanistan, inmates are chained to a tree for a month as a form of spiritual cure. Most people believe that illnesses come from God – and that what the Lord giveth, the Lord can take away.
But at nearby Jalalabad public hospital, the head of the mental ward, Ahmad Zahir Allahyar, agreed with the findings of the HNO report. “War is the main cause for developing this kind of disease. Most of them have histories of losing members of their families,” he said.
For those with severe mental health problems, the number of hospitals catering to them is slowly increasing. Aliawat Hospital falls under the auspices of Kabul Medical University. As well as caring for patients with neuro-vascular diseases, a team of two psychiatrists and 10 trainees treats people with schizophrenia, psychosis, dementia, anxiety and depression.
Dr Hidayat Danish marched down the white-tiled corridors to a ward where Sharifa, a 20-year-old woman, chewed her lips and played with a blue headscarf. She looked terrified and was consumed by visions of “floods, rivers and clean pure waters”, she said. She had not slept for five days.
“Initially we thought she was suffering from anxiety,” said Danish, “but ended up having to treat her with anti-psychotic drugs. It’s unclear what prompted the onset of psychosis-other than 30 years of war and domestic violence.”
But there is widespread confusion about mental ailments, and a cultural inability to understand or articulate the problems. Sharifa still believes her hallucinations are the product of an infectious disease. And while drugs may help treat some mental health problems, they are powerless to change the circumstances that drive people insane in the first place.
For some, the only cure appears to be death. At Marastoon, an asylum on a windswept plain west of Kabul, men and women eke out sedated lives without hope of recovery. The female doctor running the clinic said: “Those who can’t get better they send to us. Most of the patients are unrecoverable. We are just struggling to keep them calm.”
Kairun Nisa, whose name means “the best of women”, says she is from far, far away. Her family is also far away. Furthest away is her husband, who died in a rocket attack.
Nasrin saw one of her brothers burn to death in a fire. Another brother was killed fighting. An arranged marriage was the final straw and she went “completely mad” according to one of her caretakers.
In sight of the compound is a patch of broken stones and tumbleweed – a cemetery for those inmates who never manage to exorcise their djinns.
julius cavendish 