Taliban attack UN Kabul guesthouse in attempt to upend Afghan runoff
Posted: October 28, 2009 Filed under: Afghanistan | Tags: Afghanistan, Bekhtar, Election, suicide bombing, Taliban, UN Leave a commentGunmen stormed a Kabul guesthouse popular with UN workers Wednesday in what the Taliban called the first of more attacks ahead of Afghanistan’s Nov. 7 runoff election.
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
Taliban gunmen stormed a private guesthouse in the Afghan capital, Kabul, in a bloody predawn attack Wednesday that killed six United Nations staff and signaled a clear intent to disrupt the upcoming presidential runoff.
The United States embassy in Kabul confirmed that at least one of the dead was an American.
The raid, which appeared to be coordinated with rocket attacks on the presidential palace and the luxury Serena Hotel popular with foreigners, was the worst attack the UN has faced in Afghanistan and, like assaults on aid workers elsewhere could prompt some to leave the country.
The Taliban said the attack was the start of a campaign to wreck a runoff vote scheduled for Nov. 7.
Before dawn three militants disguised as police and wearing suicide vests sealed off the road outside the Bekhtar Guesthouse in central Kabul before shooting their way past a security guard. Once inside, they threw grenades and, by some accounts, dragged guests from their beds before killing them. At least one detonated his vest before security forces recaptured the building following a two-hour siege.
Eyewitnesses said that some terrified guests fled over the roof of a next-door building; others were injured jumping from balconies as flames engulfed part of the building. Twelve people were killed in total, with nine more said to be in serious condition.
Attack could scare off aid workers
Kai Eide, the UN head of mission in Afghanistan, said the attack would not deter the organization from its mission but that there would be a review of security measures. A truck bombing of the UN headquarters in Bagdad in 2003 killed 22 people and prompted the organization to pull out of Iraq for several years. Although UN workers have occasionally been targeted in Afghanistan before, Wednesday’s attack had the highest death toll so far.
The attack could have a heavy impact on aid agencies in the country, with security analysts warning that some may pack up altogether while others will definitely scale back their operations. Aid workers due to arrive in the country to help with the second round of voting have been advised to delay their flights.
“I think there’s going to be a bit of an exodus,” says one analyst who asked not to be named.
Aid workers are softer targets than the coalition bases, embassies and government ministries that the Taliban has concentrate its attacks on in the capital up til now.
President Hamid Karzai ordered an urgent overhaul of security around international aid institutions.
Deadliest month since 2001
The attack came as the loss of eight more American soldiers on Tuesday brought total troop casualties this month to 54, making October the deadliest month of the war for US forces since it began in 2001. The casualty rate has shot up sharply since July when thousands of additional US troops were deployed to some of the most volatile parts of the country.
Seven soldiers fell victim to a cluster of roadside bombs in southern Afghanistan, while an eighth was killed in an explosion in another part of the country. Improvised explosive devices, the Taliban’s weapon of choice, are the largest single killer of foreign forces in the country. (Read here about how US troops are trying to counter the IED threat in Afghanistan.)
The rising number of casualties, the high-profile resignation of a highly regarded US Foreign Service officer, and the growing tensions over next week’s Afghan election runoff will intensify pressure on Barack Obama as he edges towards a crucial decision on whether to commit thousands more troops to Afghanistan.
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.
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.”
‘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.”
julius cavendish 