With reference to the current situation there I supposed my main angle into the current situation is through my brother. My brother was in the British army. He served in Helmund. He was actually one of the first British soldiers into Helmund in the spring of 2006. He is in the Scots Guards. He took part in operations as part of 16 assault brigade in April – May and over the summer of 2006.
His experience is fascinating to me. He was extermely keen to go to Afghanistan with the army. In fact he stayed in the army for an extra year so that he could go to Afghanistan because he felt Afghanistan was somewhere where he could do some good. He had also served in Iraq and was not too happy with how we had done things in Iraq and with the results. He wanted to go to Afghanistan because he felt he could do something good.
However his experience in Helmund, the way that the Helmund operation essentially feel apart led him to resigning his commission in disjust at how we had messed things up in Helmund. So following his trajectory about optimism as to what we could do to the point when he resigned because of his unhappiness about what we actually had done, was fascinating.
By accident he provided my principle route into the current situation. What I learned from him about his experience in Helmund is basically two things. First of all that we have too much confidence about what could be achieved by military force. There has been a total misunderstanding of the utility of force and its capacity to do things apart from anything else.
He was particularly unhappy that when we went into Helmund we said that we would be different from the Americans – we wouldn’t be so trigger happy, we wouldn’t kill people but then we ended up doing almost exactly the same.
He was the first British soldier in Singin 06. That was when the British forces were asked by the local governor to occupy Singin because it was supposed to be a taleban stronghold. And the British trying to be helpful in a rather naieve way said, sure we will do that. When they went into sSngin in the spring of 06 it was a modest but productive and perfectly nice Afghan town. It is on the Helmund road, with orchards and a livestock market and so on.
A few months later, because we had been trying to protect soldiers in the governors house by firing 30mm high explosives rounds a day, we had destroyed Singin and there could be no more insane strategy in trying to win friends and influence people.
Obviously when you kill one Afghan towns person you have ten more taleban. It is because we messed things up in this way he quit the army. That is really my angle into the current situation and perhaps on that note I will pass over to Robin.
Robin Yasin-Kassab: Coalition strategy in Afghanistan – is it destined for success or for failure? I must say at the start I thought I was going to be fighting the British establishment and I misunderstood my audience. So probably everything I am going to say would be redundant. My reservation before I start is that I don’t know – Allahu alam – there are so many imponderables and different factors in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the whole region that its really impossible to predict exactly what is going to happen. So I will restrict myself to what is obvious. The coalition strategy is not going to work.
Also I don’t know Afghanistan. I have not been there, I have been to Iran and I have lived in Pakistan for a year when I worked for a Pakistani newspaper called The News. I was working for The News when Benazir Bhutto was made prime minister for the second time. So that was the period after the Russians before the taleban, a terrible period in Afghanistan when the different so-called mujahideen were fighting each other and destroying the country.
At that time Bhutto was backing up the taleban with Saudi and American help. I don’t have time to talk about Pakistan. When America asks a country to build a set of people up and make alliances with them and then something happens and there is a 180 degree turn and all those people you were asked to build alliances with and facilitate things for you now have to kill. That is not going to work. It may seem like sensible policy when you are in Washington or London but it is not sensible policy when you are in Islamabad or Kabul.
First of all let me just talk about what NATO’s aims were, or are, in Afghanistan. The declared aim in 2001 was to get Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and to stop them from ever coming back and to stop there being a safe haven for Al Qaeda in the future.
Secondly added on to this I think for propaganda reasons there were all these vagues ideas of a civilising mission: these people don’t treat women well so we should show them how to treat women. They don’t respect education and we should teach them about education and democracy and so on. I think that is rather insulting and silly for obvious reasons.
Another aim, maybe the key reason why forces are there is geo strategy and resources. That is a very crucial part of the world, espeically at the moment because China is becoming a power to be reckoned with. Russia is up there, Iran is on the other side. The Caspian Sea is full of oil and gas resources which have not been fully exploited. The West hopes to get a pipeline going. When the taleban were in power the Americans had some taleban people over to Texas where they were talking to them about the pipeline and still they are talking to the Karzai poeople about the pipeline so there is some continuity in the policy.
I think some countries in NATO are involved because they want to prove their loyalty to America or because they want to show that they have weight. They want to demonstrate that they are important countries that contribute to international efforts. That is rather short-sighted when we look at how much weight America has lost due to its adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem to be clever for other Western power to tie themselves to these policies.
NATO is trying to pullout without enabling the taleban to claim victory. Unfortunately that is hopeless because even if NATO stays for 100 years and then leaves some taleban person will pop up and say look we defeated America. Just as Al Qaeda and the Afghans think they defeated Russia and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is not true. There were many other factors. But you can’t stop people claiming victory if they want to claim victory.
So since 2001 we have had years of of general failure to establish a political resolution or to reconstruct or rebuild infrastructure in a comprehensive way. Obviously we haven’t liberated women but in those years, particularly since 2005, there has been a growing resistance to the NATO presence.
Let me talk briefly about the Mcchrystal Plan, Obama’s strategy to improve things. The first element of that is a troop surge. The next one is to cut down on civilian casualties. Of course that is a good idea but it isn’t going to really work. We saw that last week in Marjah. If you are going to use first world weaponry against third world fighters it is inevitable that you are going to kill lots of civilians. You are not facing tanks and war planes. You are facing farm houses and people who can’t really be easily distinguished from civilians. You are going to kill civilians and every time you kill civilians you are recruiting for the resistance because the cousins and uncles and fathers of the dead people are going to want revenge.
Next, they want to bring more troops onto the streets and have the troops be more sensitive to local culture and local feelings. Again that is a good idea. However I think the effect of that can only be cosmetic. At the end of the day these people are foreign troops and you can’t get beyond that. Even if they are giving sweets to children they are still foreign troops.
I was thinking about this on the train coming down here. Britain and America have so much in common. We watch the same television programmes, we eat the same junk food and so on and so forth. If there were American soldiers setting up check points on the roads in Britain, British people would shoot at them. Yet alone if Afghans came thousands of miles to do it. Again that seems obvious to me.
To train and expand the police and the army. It is not going to work unless you have local people interacting with local people. Again it seems like a move forward but I am very doubtful that it is going to make a significant change. I read that less than one in ten police recruits can read and write which is a lower literacy rate than the general Afghan population. There is a huge dessertion rate. It is very easy for the taleban and other resistance groups to infiltrate the police and the army and people know that the police and the army are backed by NATO – even if you don’t see the NATO people they know that they are backed by them and they know that NATO is going to go at some point.
Another one is liaising with moderate taleban. It seems like a good idea. Probably if I was them I would be trying to do something like that. I don’t think that can go very far. A few people may agree to come over to the Karzai side. In the West I think the degree to which people work for the taleban is exaggerated. It is ideological, nationalistic, religious and it is to do with local issues as well.
There is also talk of capturing and holding towns in the south. They are now talking of taking Kandahar later this year and having a big presence there. The taleban is not a first world conventional army with tanks and planes and they are not stupid. So if they see people with tanks and planes and big guns coming towards them they will melt away and they will wait. And they will strike when they have an opportunity as any guerrilla army does.
So unless the NATO forces stay in these towns indefinitely for decades and set up their own political or a quasi political system etc and an economy and the rest of it I don’t see how that is going to work other than in the short term.
Some people are optimistic about the Mcchrystal Plan, Gordon Brown for example. And here is the comedy quote for the evening. Gordon Brown says : “There can only be one winner, democracy and the strong Afghan state”. I don’t think he believes that. There can only be one winner. This talk of inevitablity. Marxists used to talk like that. The historical inevitability of the dictatorship of proletariat.
And of course Muslims and Christians talk like that. It is a religious thing but not based on real religion. It is a religious idea. There is only one thing that can happen. We have grown used to this religious talk from Western leaders, supposedly anti-religious Western leaders. They don’t realise they are being religious. The neo cons with this idea that you will roll into Baghdad and they will greet you with flowers and in five minutes give them an internet cafe and there will be a Western-style democracy and they will love Israel. It is ridiculous.
I recommend very highly a book by the philosopher John Grey called Black Mass. In this book he talks about all the political movements in the West from the start of the 20th century and onwards or before that which are really substitues for religion and are based on religious thinking. But beware of that as it makes them very dangerous: Marxism, facism, neo liberalism, neo conservatism. In the Arab world you can talk about Baathism. They are a substitute for religion and they are not very useful when talking about the pragmatic acts on the ground.
Obviously what we call democarcy cannot be exported – it is impossible. Neither can a strong Afghan state. That is not something foreigners can give to the Afghans. Only a strong, national Afghan movement can build a strong Afghan state.
While I am talking about illusions let me talk about the surge idea. There is this misconception by some people in the West that what calmed down the civil war in Iraq from its apolyptical levels in 2006 – 2007 was the surge. Actually if you look at what happened Bush sending more soldiers was entirely irrevelant. What happened was internal dynamics. Basically what happened was a civil war began and it was started by the occupation, directly and indirectly. Once it had begun it was fought out between the Sunnis and the Shia – tragically for the Sunnis and Shias and Arabs and Muslims everywhere. When the Sunnis realised the Shia had won, for reasons of self preservation, groups which had been fighting the Americans then aliged themselves with the Americans. That is what happened. The story in Iraq is not over. We don’t know how it is going to end but there may be a lot more tragedy. But the idea that Bush pulls Iraq together at the last minute with a surge is another fantasy and it is being repeated now with Afghanistan.
The strengths of the resistance. First let me talk about how the taleban are changing. A few months ago they came out with a code of conduct and it is very interesting because in some respects the Mcchrystal plan seems to mirror the taleban code of conduct. Let me quote from the code of conduct: the utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties. That is the taleban saying that. Another quote: the mujahideen have to behave well and show proper treatment to the nation. They must avoid discrimination based on tribal roots, language or geographical background”.
So it is rather like the Mcchrystal plan. It shows that the taleban are on a learning curve. They made themselves very unpopular last time by dealing badly with minority groups in Afghanistan for sectarian or ethnic reasons. They made a mistake and some of them realised they made a mistake and they are making some efforts to address that.
There is lots of evidence that the taleban are rethinking their more unpopular policies. In Musa Qala they rescinded their ban on music and on films and on shaving. They use pop music in their propaganda. The lap top is as popular tool as the kalishkanov.
I have a friend, a British person who helps run a charity in Afghanistan called Afghan schools in Nuristan. At the moment there is a taleban presence with the taleban more or less in control Here the schools are open, including girls schools. Hundreds of girls are being educated and nobody has touched the schools. Why? One reason is that the taleban is changing and it realises that it alienates people by these policies.
Another reason I think is because these Afghan schools were a local initiative and then there were some British people who had been visiting the area for years and have nothing to do with the miiltary or the British government and were friends of Afghanistan and the Afghan people and knew the country and spoke the language. It was an Afghan initiative and the British people who knew the place helped. That kind of project can certainly work and it is very different from going in and trying to impose something.
The taleban are also expanding their courts, their judiciary, throughout the country and even thinjgs like clinics. In many areas this is recognised as a contrast to the very corrupt legal system under Karzai. So I think it is better to call them the neo taleban or the new taleban. It is a changing or evolving movement. It is still not a movement that I personally like or agree with. I am not an Afghan and it is not my business. It is not an enemy that can easily be written off.
Of course fighting the NATO occupation is not just the taleban. There is also Hikmatayr’s Hizbi Islami. The taleban and the Hizbi Islami had a battle the other day in which lots of people were killed so they are not natural allies.
The taleban support base is amongst the Pashtuns. That does not mean that every Pashtun is a taleban. Karzai is also a Pashtun. But there are also marginalised Hazari in Ghazni who have joined the neo taleban. Matthew Hove an American official who resigned described the phenomenon they were facing as valleyism. He said it is not even nationalism. It is valleyism. The people in this valley may not have anything to do with the people in the next valley but for whatever reason they don’t want the foreigners there. This kind of valleyism is impossible to deal with. You are not going to win.
The resistance in Afghanistan has local and not transnational aims. Therefore it is quite easy to deal with. One of their aims is to reverse the perceived disempowernment of the Pashtuns. The new army for example is disporportionately made up of minority groups like the Tajiks and the Uzbeks.
The Karzai regime does have a suport base but it is very unpopular in many places. Karzai’s re-election recently was a lot less free and fair than Ahmedinjad’s re-election in Iran. We hear a great deal of fuss in the West about the terrible afronts to democracy in Iran. It was actually a pretty fair election from what I can see. I don’t support the Iranian regime on everything but it seemed like a pretty free and fair election unlike Karzai’s election. We didn’t hear about that.
The third one is again to remove foreign inteference. Here is the most important point I will make tonight. In 2005 NATO decided to expand its presence across the country. From 2001 – 2005 they had basically been in Kaubl and they allowed the Afghans they had made alliances with to do their own thing.
In 2005 there was a mini surge. A new set of soldiers came in and they decided to spread out. Now look what happened. In 2005 in Afghanistan there were nine suicide attacks. In 2006 there were 97 suicide attacks. That’s what happened when they had a little surge. The idea that you are going to deal with the increased resistance by pouring in more troops seems to me against all logic.
Removing foreign interference is where it becomes a global issue, a Muslim issue. All across the Muslim world, even amongst people who are not religious and certainly amongst people who are not Islamist and would not like to live in an Islamist state, almost everybody has this feeling now that the Muslim world has been trying to get rid of foreigners from the West for 200 years or longer in some parts and that is enough.
Even if foreign forces went into a country with the best of intentions – and I don’t believe they went into Afghanisatn with the best of intentions – and if it wasn’t run by the military it was run by experts who appreciated the culture, it still wouldn’t work. Muslims want to try and sort things out themselves. They don’t want outsiders doing it for them. Sadly during the past 200 years when outsiders have tried to sort things out for them it has made it worse.
Some people think that if we give the Afghans more internet lines and phone lines they will love the West. It is the opposite. The more educated they become, the more mobile they become, the more connected with other people they become, the more they will connect the British or American soldier standing on the corner with Palestine, Kahmir, Iraq, Somalia etc.
The Afghan communities have to work it out themselves. I am not saying it is going to be peace and joy the moment NATO leaves but NATO is not going to solve anthing. It is going to lose more money, more soldiers and create more hatred across the Muslim world generally for the West which is not healthy for the West or the East. The Afghans themselves have to decide how they want to be governned and they have to fight it out among themselves.
Finally the safe haven myth. The security problem for the West is not the taleban it is Al Qaeda. The taleban lost power because they houses Al Qaeda. and they know that. They would still be in power if they hadn’t hosted Al Qaeda. The links between the taleban and Al Qaeda are not natural and deeply rooted.
I think it would be quite easily to prevail on a taleban government to keep Al Qaeda out in the future. The Americans are still going to have their war ships and their spies in the area and as soon as an camp is set up they would bomb it as they did in 2001.
Finally a base in Afghanistan is not important for Al Qaeda. It is good for making propaganda films and for having men jump through hoops of fire and so on. But September 11th was planned in Hamburg. I don’t see anyone talking about bombing Hamburg. There was a terrorist plot in this country when the terrorists met on an adventure holiday in Wales. Nobody is talking about occupying Wales.
Rory Stewart wrote a good article in the London Review of Books. He said that maybe 30 years of intense investment in Afghanistan would bring Afghanistan’s economy and society perhaps to a Pakistani level. And Pakistan is a country which the West perceives as a problem. And we don’t have 30 years.
Afghanistan knows that the Karzai regime and its institutions rely on NATO and that NATO will leave whether its in a year or 20 years. Obama says that the troops will start withdrawing in 2011 which is tomorrow. The Dutch contingent is already gone. For political reasons the coalition in Holland fell to bits and they pulled their troops out. In Britain over 50 percent of the people have supported a troop pullout for some time.
China is rising, Turkey is becoming much more assertive and independent. Countries like India and Brazil are rising. The map of the world is changing and we are wasting our time in the West. In Pakistan a disaster is unfolding because of the contradictions in policy – kill the taleban, back the taleban. Over 700 people have been killed in 44 drone attacks in Pakistan in 2009. Over 50 percent of those were civilians.
Now Pakistanis are attacking Pakistanis. This is considered by the people of the North West Frontier Province to be an attack by the Punjabis against the Patans or the Pushtuns because the government is dominated by the Punjabis, the unbelieving people in the government working on American orders in return for government money. It is a disaster for Pakistan. Pakistan is a much more important than Afghanistan.
So for all of those reasons I think it won’t work but Allahu Alam.
Chairman: I look at it from a broader perspective and I feel that the battle during the past 30 years has been between CIA and PIA. PIA stands for Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. All three countries have been destroyed for whatever values they want to persue. NATO is just a fig leaf in Iraq. In Afghanistan I tell the Canadians they have replaced the fig leaf with the maple leaf. This is basically and American adventure or mis adventure. They have decided to quit the area and I think we will see wisdom both in America and Afghanistan.
