Umm...I know we're meant to be 'protecting the people' and living with them etc, but last time I checked it wasn't a very good idea to leave your bibles lying around in the office of the District Chief of Arghandab... [This photo taken by yours truly a week or two ago on a visit to see the District Chief.]
And seriously...a camouflage bible?
]]>"Three judges of the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal ruled on Wednesday that the level of "indiscriminate violence" was not enough to permit Afghans to claim general humanitarian protection in the United Kingdom. Hundreds of asylum-seekers a year are returned to Afghanistan if they have not convinced a court they are in fear of persecution or that their lives are in danger. The ruling on Wednesday prevents them from arguing that the country is a dangerous place."
The headline ran, "Immigration judges: 'Afghanistan is not in a state of war'". I didn't really know what to do with the article except to formally and publicly invite the three judges who sat on the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal to stay with me down in Kandahar and take a look for themselves… Come have a stroll with me in the local market… Lovely place… and no war at all...
]]>It was perhaps twenty minutes after the call to prayer had sounded and we were breaking the fast, sitting on the floor around a plastic sheet with plates of rice and meat, when I was knocked sideways to the ground.
It takes a split second till you realize what happened; the shock-wave had blown out the windows, sending the glass flying like shrapnel into the room. It was a miracle that no one was injured.
Our glass is double glazing, and glass kept on raining down the facade landing on our terrace, shattering into thousands of tiny pieces. There have been bomb blasts before that shook the ground, but nothing like this. I heard gunfire on the streets for several minutes, and I moved to the back rooms of the apartment with my friends. No pretty pictures this time, but I doubt I could have held the camera steady those first few minutes anyway.
Soon after the gunshots stopped, we walked out onto the terrace, glass crunching under our sandals and watched as police cars and ambulances rushed past towards the blast side. The air was filled with dust and a few blocks down I could the flashing lights and cars gathering. Quite soon after, a fire burst out, with flames and black smoke billowing into the sky - firefighters passed by.
The blast site was near to Sharjah Bakery, a shop I visit most days for soda and sweets. Just across the street is a wedding salon, and the NDS/intelligence services office is close by along with a private security company and a construction company. A friend called and said it might have been a bomb factory that blew up. Some 40 minutes later reports came in that it was a car bomb. Casualties kept arriving at Mirwais hospital for hours after the explosion. People were being dug out of the collapsed building. This morning the toll had risen to 43 dead and 65 injured.
My desk is littered with pieces of plaster that have fallen off from the ceiling and the window frames sit next to the wall.
30 minutes after the blast a convoy of foreign troops drove by, the unmistakable sound of their heavy vehicles roaring through the streets, followed by more ambulances.
Smoke kept on rising into the sky hours later, even though the firefighters seemed to have managed to put out the fires. Helicopters were flying overhead through the night sky.
Sitting in the now windowless living room last night talking with my Afghan friends, one turns to me and says: “There are those Afghans who migrated to the west who say they miss Afghanistan!” He bursts out into laughter. “This is what they are missing!” Another shakes his head: “Fuck Kandahar. Fuck Afghanistan.”
Around 11:00pm people were being evacuated from the Continental guesthouse. The police chief was talking about another 4 possible suicide bombers who were still at large in the city and heated discussion broke out in my apartment as to whether or not we should stay or move to another building further away from the Continental guesthouse and the main roads.
In the end we stayed. The idea that a truck bomb would drive into our building and explode seemed unrealistic at the time.
Now the next morning, the air is filled with the sound of people cleaning up broken glass on the street. The shopkeepers just opposite our building have all lost their glass windowfronts. I can see the blast sight; some buildings are missing, and the ones adjacent to the center of the explosion seem derelict, without windows or frames, just the empty carcasses left standing.
The area around the Shah Jahan Restaurant is a popular area, with many people spending their evenings on the little green grass strip in the middle of the road. Half an hour ago I drove to the blast site, and the destruction leaves little doubt that this has been Kandahar’s biggest bomb so far: entire buildings were annihilated and squares of mud huts flattened.
Sharjah Bakery is gone, the construction company reduced to a pile of bricks across the street from it. The restaurant itself collapsed, burying everyone inside underneath it.
Another friend called in and said he believed that the district chief of Khakrez was at the restaurant along with a number of government officials, but nothing is confirmed yet.
Emotions were running high yesterday, and security forces in town were quick to pull the trigger. Standing outside on the terrace waiting to being put through to CBC Radio for an interview, someone started firing his AK47, and a bullet whizzed past me, hitting the door and reaching as far as our living room.
A moment later CBC was on the phone:
“Tell us what is happening right now.”
“I’ve just been shot at...”
I did the interview anyway, even though I guess I must have been a little freaked out at the time, given the amount of swearwords I used.
In the end, though, no one is surprised. This is not a turning point or the start of something; it’s what has been happening all along for the past few years in Kandahar. Violence has been on the rise, and there is no security for the people of southern Afghanistan.
[This piece was written by Felix Kuehn.]
]]>
Just press play on the Houndbite bar above. Felix will be updating his blog and reposting here tomorrow morning when he wakes up and when he can conjure up some electricity...
]]>I'm sitting in Dubai at the moment so can't claim to be the man on the ground for tonight's bombing in Kandahar City. That dubious honour goes to Felix Kuehn (@felixkuehn on Twitter and www.felixkuehn.com for his blog). I just spoke to him over the phone and he added some details to the mix:
- Explosion happened at around the time people had sat down to break the fast.
- Various people reporting a single-sourced claim that there were 5 car bombs that went off, but I don't know how this information is being confirmed.
- People at the hospital are saying 35+ died in the bombings, but it seems that there are many still trapped underneath the rubble of buildings destroyed.
- The New York Times advances the thesis that the bombs targeted foreigners in Kandahar because they detonated close to UN buildings etc, although I'm not fully convinced. There are easier ways to target foreign institutions/organisations in Kandahar.
Felix told me that the district chief of Khakrez (one of Kandahar's districts) had been having dinner and meeting with some of his colleagues at the Shandiz 'restaurant' near to the centre of the bombing, so it's possible they were targeted.
Other news outlets have been republishing comments by provincial council member Hajji Agha Lalai implying that a Japanese construction company was targeted in the bombing. I don't think that's enough of an excuse for such a huge explosion. Again, I've written on this blog often over the past year and posted photos of huge blast clouds, but Felix tells me that this explosion was at least twice as powerful as any of the ones we've seen so far.
Most of the windows in central Kandahar were blown out. Our double-glazed panes were blown open and some were even blown out of their frames. There seems to have been a fair amount of gunfire after the explosion, and some of those bullets even struck our balcony close to where Felix was standing giving an interview over the phone to CBC News.
Felix also tells me that Canadian troops came to the Continental Guesthouse (pictured above) and evacuated the foreigners who were staying there. There's no power in Kandahar City at the moment (in all likelihood unconnected to tonight's bombing) but tomorrow morning Felix will be posting his account as well as photos showing the damage.
In case you're wondering whether the bomb has anything to do with the recent elections, or the posting of preliminary results, it probably is more or less unrelated. The Taliban aren't threatened by the elections, and the 'international community's' turning a blind eye to the massive fraud perpetrated has only further delegitimised the Karzai government in the minds of ordinary Afghans down south. Tonight's bombing is merely another step in the continuing disintegration of Kandahar; nothing more, nothing less.
It’s the middle of summer down here in Kandahar, with temperatures peeking around 50 degree celsius by noon. In the run up to Afghanistan’s second presidential and provincial council elections foreign troops stepped up their efforts, launching multiple operations to prepare the ground for voters.
British casualties passed the 200 mark, with friends from London writing to me asking what is happening down south. There is a growing belief that a surge and COIN is the answer, and that pouring more troops in now will allow them to withdraw sooner in the long-term. Some commentators even suggested that this could happen in the next one to two years -- an unlikely scenario to say the least.
These elections are a milestone in the western ‘Afghanistan’ project. There’s a definite need for this to happen; there’s a definite need for good news. The south is in the midst of an ever accelerating downward spiral of violence and disintegration: take last year’s numbers of casualties, attacks and bombs, as well as foreign troops; double it and you are close to what Kandahar is like these days.
The city itself is in deep crisis. Just the other day a friend named multiple city districts he can not go to anymore due to security concerns. If you are known in the city, you carry a gun.
The Afghan government has sent in reinforcements to secure the city. On my flight from Kabul last week I shared the plane with some 40 ANP. New soldiers and policemen in Kandahar means scared kids with guns, which in turn translates into more gun fights and more problems. During the two nights before the election the air was filled with spurts of AK and PK gunfire, at times lasting for over an hour, maybe because the insurgents are stepping up or because the police are edgy and trigger happy.
The day before the elections Alex forced me onto twitter and posted an introduction resulting in 40+ followers, one of which send me a tweet at 7.30am saying: “@felixkuehn Wake up. It's a big day.” Indeed it was, and by the time I was back from the first round of visits to various election polling stations I saw his message.
The stations opened at 7am, with the governor casting the first vote of the day just a couple of minutes before the elections officially started. It’s a two minute drive from where I live to the election centre at Ahmed Shah Baba High School; at least it only takes 2 minutes on election day. All the roads were deserted, the city closed. Cars needed special permits to be on the street, shops were closed and there were double the usual number of ANA and ANP-manned security checkpoints throughout the city.
I took a picture of the governor. He didn’t look happy walking to the station; he hardly ever looks happy you have to admit, but than again, who would be happy running Kandahar...
He cast his vote at one of the 20 polling rooms amidst a battle among the who is who of Kandahari journalists. NYT’s Timur Shah, Hewaad television and Al Jazeera were swarming around him, and of course Soraya Nelson of NPR, just back from two weeks embedded in Helmand, was holding her ground, moving ninja-like through the crowd in her orange garments. When we entered the school grounds about quarter to seven, flashing our media cards from the election monitoring commission, we were greeted by a few friends, the election ‘observers’, all wearing Karzai caps and buttons.
We stuck around at Ahmad Shah Baba for an hour or so. At no point during that time did more people come to vote other than election staff and journalists hanging around waiting for them.
The caravan of journalists then poured into their cars heading for the next polling station -- which was closed, so we drove to the next one. Zahir Shahi High School is a few hundred meters down the street from the police headquarters and had 8 polling stations open. When we arrived there was a small queue of around 8-10 people outside, but inside the corridors were full, giving an impression that lots of people would show up to cast their votes here. In the end the total number that came was around 1800 (1717 votes at 3.15pm with hardly anyone around); this being Kandahar’s most central polling station, a very meager outcome.
At Zahir Shah High School, however, we met Mr. Zakaria who was there to cast his vote. “I am not afraid. I am here to vote,” or something pretty close to that were his words. After his finger was stained and his card invalidated, he took the two voting cards and walked towards the cardboard voting stations with one in each hand. 30 seconds later he appeared again a voting paper in each hand, shrugging his shoulders, and asking the room what he actually had to do with them now. Several people rushed to help and a minute later, Mr. Zakaria disappeared again. Another man went over while he was standing behind the cardboard shield but was soon asked by the staff to stand back. Mr. Zakaria dropped the ballots into the boxes and and strolled away.
We walked around the corner to go the the women’s polling station. There were a few dozen there at the time, even though half of them were probably election staff. We went into one of the polling station rooms, and found ourselves in the middle of a drama: the ballot boxes weren’t sealed before the voting had started.
In the end, one of the ladies in the room sealed the boxes and stuffed the 14 ballots into them again, and we were sent on our way.
We spent lunch at our computers, quickly learning that the supposedly indelible ink could be removed with bleach. The news was tearing through Kandahar by 1pm. Everyone was on the phone, letting people know that you could remove the ink and vote again. Close to everyone I know down here has 2-3 voter registration cards to his name. I can not be sure how many people cast a second or even third vote, but I know it happened.
After lunch we drove out to Mirwais Mina just west of Kandahar city. Mirwais Mina sees open fighting on the street as well as IED attacks on a regular basis these days. The school we went to, however, is best known for the acid attacks against a number of schoolgirls earlier this year.
In the polling station for men we were escorted to one of the offices as soon as we entered the compound. Ustaz Abdul Halim was sitting in the middle of the room, smoking. Ustaz is the last of the Kandahari dinosaurs of the Soviet Jihad, and Mirwais Mina is his capital. He still has a base out there, and remains pretty influential to say the least. He was the security advisor to the last governor, and a few days ago I saw him on the stage of Karzai’s rally in the stadium. Ustaz seemed to be in high spirits, though, and after a brief chat we walked up the alley to the girls’ school.
At that polling center 94 women had cast their votes at 3.05pm.
With barely an hour left we drove to Shkarpur Darwaza Station, counting 274 votes, and hurried back to Ahmad Shah Baba High School where the day had started. We went to 16 out of the 20 stations at Ahmad Shah Baba, counting 1007 votes, while rockets hit a few hundred meters away from the school causing the ANP and ANA to hastily run towards the gate and number of people to move towards the back of the compound.
We stuck around, watching them seal the ballot boxes and then open them again under supervision, counting the votes. A journalist came in saying that the BBC had announced that the stations would be open for an hour longer, but people were already counting.
There are about 60 polling stations in Kandahar city and about 260 in the entire province. If I average what I saw on election day (and remember that two of those were the biggest in Kandahar province), and I use only the male polling stations, the most accessible etc. then I arrive at a participation rate of roughly 170,000 people or 17% for the whole province.
But, let’s be real: this is Kandahar. In the 2005 Wolesi Jirga elections roughly a quarter of all registered voters were female. I can’t recall the exact percentage but that number has grown in this year’s registrations, a miracle in itself down here in Afghanistan’s conservative heartland. So at least a quarter of the polling stations are for female voters, leaving 195 male voting stations. Let’s see where that leaves us - at roughly 13%.
In Kandahar we have 1.08 million registered voters. Out of those votes cast in the city we have a number of people who voted twice or maybe three times. In Spin Boldak, General Raziq took all the ballot boxes into his house, and rumour has it that the outcome for the presidential election in Boldak is 100% in favour of Karzai. People are talking about a 60% turnout by now. Based on what I saw and heard, a realistic estimate for the province is somewhere between 6-8%. As I told a friend who might be in the election complaints commission, and therefore a very busy man soon: “down here in Kandahar there was no election.”
But who are we kidding? It’s a milestone achievement. And in the end we will learn that at least 50-60% of the people voted, some 500,000 to 600,000 people. This was the second independent, free, fair and democratic elections in Afghanistan.
Karzai and Abdullah have both already declared their victory.
These elections were at best a sham, but in reality it was pure satire - no wait - actually it’s a divine comedy, and the foreigners are really just visiting the seven circles of hell.
[This post is by Felix Kuehn, my colleague down in Kandahar. It was originally posted over on his blog at www.felixkuehn.com.]
]]>So it finally happened. The election that we've been waiting for and looking forward to at least since last winter took place today all over the country. I'll refrain from writing anything about the rest of the country. There are plenty of places to get a good sense of what happened. Make sure to check out www.aliveinafghanistan.org and the various people who've been tweeting news all day from the ground around the country. I'll just be talking about the things in Kandahar that I saw and was able to confirm from here on the ground.
There weren't so many foreign journalists down here and most are unlikely to publish detailed accounts of what happened and the things that they saw; NPR decided not to run a piece on the election down here judging that "one piece from Kabul was enough."
Violence
Things were a lot calmer than anyone would have hoped for, I'm glad to report. Not the mass waves of suicide bombers or IEDs lining the road. In fact the casualty count was quite low: Kandahar's police chief told me at close of business yesterday that 2 children and one adult had been killed during the day and that two others had been injured. The man who died was probably the first casualty of the day, a military commander called Dost Mohammad and who was out running in a field when a rocket struck close-by and he was hit by the shrapnel.
Pajhwok was reporting in the morning that at least 6 IEDs had been removed from the roads in Kandahar City. An ANA commander who spoke to us on condition of anonymity said that 16 or 17 rockets hit the city during the course of the elections. During the night there were not rockets or attacks it seems, apart from the story I just heard from a policeman here at the airport that 5 armed men managed to get onto KAF airfield last night. They were searching all night, apparently.
In Kandahar it seems the Afghan government's imposition of a ban on any negative coverage of the election during voting hours wasn't upheld much, if at all. I spoke to a photojournalist yesterday who said he was actually given a police escort to one of the sites where a rocket hit.
The rockets, starting at 6.30am local time, were probably responsible for some people deciding not to go out and vote, but I don't think it had an overwhelming effect in this respect. Most people had decided either way a long time ago, and in any case - as I'll come to later - apathy was particularly intense for this election.
My personal experience was a lot like what it's usually like in Kandahar. There were some isolated incidents -- a couple of rockets landed quite close to us near the end of the day -- but on the whole it was quite easy relaxed day. Some police manning crossroads in town were a bit edgy and conducted searches of cars at gunpoint, but for the most part the police were somewhat laid back; at quite a few voting stations my colleagues and I were allowed in without body searches or ID checks.
Turnout
I imagine this will be quite an important issue in the coming weeks, perhaps more so than allegations of fraud and vote-rigging. I visited almost a dozen voting stations in different parts of Kandahar City, including two female-only locations, and nowhere was there intense activity. We made sure to get to the big locations in the city centre as well as smaller places in the west and east of town.
During the morning there were people on the streets walking around town to get to polling centres, but it was far from an enthusiastic turnout. Everyone I spoke to who was present at the previous elections in Kandahar noted the big difference in numbers of voters. "At this large station we had several thousand people waiting to vote at any one time - there were that many people," one told me.
Near the end of the day we travelled to a selection of voting stations to take figures for how many people had voted in each location at the various voting booths. In the interests of full disclosure, here are the numbers I collected:
-- Mirwais Mina Girl's School (3.05pm)
35
18
18
23
TOTAL: 94
-- Zahir Shahi High School - (3.15pm)
210
140
314
292
255
238
142
126
TOTAL: 1717
-- Shkarpur Darwaza Station - (3.30pm)
42
62
59
51
60
TOTAL: 274
-- Ahmad Shah Baba High School - (3.50pm)
356
135
67
40
28
33
14
45
26
19
9
6
60
64
41
64
(missing 4 stations that we didn't count)
PARTIAL TOTAL: 1007
There are several things to note from these numbers. Firstly, turnout was EXTREMELY low. Zahir Shahi High School and Ahmad Shah Baba High School are arguably the two biggest voting stations in Kandahar City, where in previous elections large numbers of people were seen. Neither location saw more than 2000 voters by the end of the day. Obviously, there is a possibility that some of these locations saw lots more voters after we left, but it is highly implausible, and in fact we were present at Ahmad Shah Baba high school at the 4pm cutoff time and there was no last-minute surge.
There was, though, a bit of confusion as to whether voting had been extended for an hour or not. The school I was at started locking vote boxes and counting votes at 4pm. A man who came in and said that BBC had just announced a one hour extension was ignored and as far as I know no more votes were cast past the 4pm mark.
In all the stations that we visited, there were far more election staff than voters -- with the exception of Zahir Shahi high school that we visited in the morning where there were several hundred voters lining up to vote. In Mirwais Mina Girls School, there were a lot of girls staffing the polling locations, but hardly any voters to be seen. In fact it seems that most of the vote numbers that we noted (above) were probably from election officials themselves.
So what do these numbers mean, and what can we deduce further from them? In Kandahar province as a whole, there were around 250 or 260 voting stations open. In the city there were around 50 open and receiving voters. Even if we assume that they were all as well-visited as Ahmad Shah Baba High School or Zahir Shahi High School (a preposterous assumption) then this is still a really low number.
If I take an average of the voting stations that I visited, we have perhaps 600 votes per voting centre (which itself is illusionary since almost no women came out to vote and since hardly any of the centres I visited had 600 people vote there). There were an estimated 1,080,000 registered voters according to IEC officials yesterday and so Kandahar potentially saw 160,000 voters out on the streets. I think this is an almost completely optimistic figure, assuming more people were out on the streets than my eyes saw.
There still is little information on voting in the districts aside from some stories from Spin Boldak (see below), but anecdotal accounts suggest that hardly anyone voted in the districts as well. All this indicates a turnout of less than 15%, probably in reality somewhere approaching 7 or 8%.
One further point: since the last vaguely useful census of Afghanistan and the south was decades ago, it's very difficult to get a sense of demographics and how many people are living where etc. But given the figure of 1,080,000 total registered voters, I'm amused to take a look at the Afghan government's own Central Statistics Office document on population statistics for the period 2008-9. I don't really buy the numbers they state in the booklet, but they state that Kandahar has 1,057,500 total residents (352,200 urban and 705,300 rural). Get your head around that one...
Fraud/Improper Practices
I'll admit that I'm not as familar with Afghanistan's actual written voting and election law as I ought to be, but these are some things that I thought seemed pretty 'off'. The first thing that I saw when I went to watch the governor, Torialai Weesa, cast the first vote of the day was the large number of Karzai 'observers' present . This was repeated at all the other centres I visited, and apparently it was quite uniform all over the country. These young men were recruited to watch and report instances of voter fraud, but in reality these functioned as campaigners for the incumbent, handing out badges and baseball caps to those who came. I heard from a number of people during the day that there were 6000 of these observers for Kandahar province alone, although one person warned me that there were fewer as some didn't come out to take up their duties that day.
I noticed a fair number of FEFA observers, particularly around the end of the day, in Kandahar City. They were busy taking figures for how many voters were recorded as having voted in each station. I look forward to their report on voting irregularities.
Around noon, the news that the supposedly indelible ink could be washed off from fingers with domestic bleach started to hit the streets in Kandahar. This was good and bad. On the one hand, a lot of people who were scared of voting for fear that they would be identified by the Taliban by the ink-stain on their fingers suddenly realised that they could go and vote. I personally witnessed one group of people who were due to travel to Arghestan (district of Kandahar) the next day for a funeral who had decided not to vote for this reason; when it became clear that the ink wasn't permanent, they all got up and voted.
On the other hand, it meant that lots of people came out and voted twice or more. I personally witnessed this. I don't think there was too much of this, though, and certainly not enough to sway the vote significantly in one or the other direction. I believe it was a problem in other parts of the country, too. If you're wondering how people managed to get multiple voter cards, please refer to previous blog posts that I've made, as well as the numerous media accounts of corruption in the registration system, where officials of the election commission and various other power brokers work together to manipulate the system.
From the start of the day, it was noted that the voter cards were not being properly invalidated with the card-puncher. Again, this was a problem all over the country. At subsequent voting stations that I visited, staff had taken differing initiatives to correct this - some cut the corners off the cards, others cut a triangle in the bottom right corner, and so on.
From what I observed during the counting of votes, there seemed to be some confusion as to how this was meant to work. I was based at Ahmad Shah Baba High School and some of the voting rooms were counted very fast, others took much longer. The difference was of course in the numbers of votes that each room had taken, but also in individual styles -- some people would check everything two or three times, and others would just do it once. Occasionally observers working for the Karzai would come in and shout at some of the election people to do things differently, especially if they were taking a long time over the vote count. I imagine over Kandahar province as a whole there was a lot of variation in how the vote count went.
Women's voting centres were interesting to visit. The first that I saw, Kaka Said Ahmad High School in the centre of the city, had some women voting (perhaps several dozen) early in the morning. In one room that we entered, however, the two boxes were open and women were in the process of handling the vote papers. When we asked the head of the voting centre what was going on (boxes were supposed to be locked and closed) she said that some women had come very early in the morning (before the official opening time) and asked, hands trembling out of fear, to vote quickly.
Later on in the morning an irregularity was noticed, though, since one box had 13 votes inside and the other had 14. They were in the process of dealing with this when I entered with my colleague and some journalists from the local Hewaad television station.
In another women's voting station (Mirwais Meena Girls School), we were kept waiting outside the locked main gate for around 10 minutes before finally being allowed in (a policeman outside gave us a hand opening the gate). When inside, there were hardly any voters (under a dozen in the whole building) but lots of election workers and other girls. Again, I'm not sure if this was an irregularity, but my guess is that women's polling stations, especially ones in the districts, were easy places for fraud to occur.
I overheard several conversations between provincial candidates or their representatives and people working/observing at voting centres -- they didn't realise I speak Pashtu -- during which sums of money were promised in exchange for votes to be cast in their favour. In this manner, at one station 1000 votes were thus sold for $400.
I heard stories of this kind of trade in votes throughout the day, and in fact the 'warm bazaar' had been open for several months. Earlier in the year it was possible to buy voting cards for $1 a card (they were sold in booklets of 100 usually). By the time the day before the election arrived, they were being sold (in some instances) for $5-10 per card.
The Afghan friends I was travelling around with that day called one of the voting stations for which I gave numbers above (Shkarpur Darwaza) ahead of our arrival. "Don't come! Don't come!" our friends were requested. "We're about to start stuffing the ballot boxes and we don't need foreigners here messing up our work." That was one of the election officials of the station talking on the phone. Needless to say, we went there and took note of how many voters they had on their lists.
Spin Boldak is an interesting case, although, since I didn't manage to get down there myself and I haven't yet heard from people who did, I suspect we'll never get to the bottom of what happened there. In the months prior to the election, I heard numerous accounts of how General Razziq's men -- Razziq is a local border police commander, well-respected in southern Afghanistan -- were preventing any non-Karzai supporters from campaigning in town. "If anyone puts up pictures of the opposition presidential candidates, like we did a few days ago with 1000 pictures of Ashraf Ghani, they're all gone and taken down by the next day," one campaigners told me.
So not really a free and fair environment. As the election day progressed, I started hearing reports that Razziq was influencing the voting. At 4pm when voting stopped, I received several credible reports that Razziq had sent his men round to every polling station in Spin Boldak and collected all the ballot boxes. He then reportedly took them to his house - 'to keep them safe and secure' - and prevented election observers from entering. The boxes were stuffed overnight, many claimed.
Again, I have no way of confirming any of this, but I can certainly imagine it happening. Today just before stepping onto the plane I heard from a friend down in Spin Boldak that there weren't necessarily extra votes cast but that all votes that weren't for Karzai were invalidated (i.e. multiple candidates were selected or some such trick), thus giving Karzai a 100% taking down in Boldak.
These reports all seem pretty blatant and in the open to be wholly true, but given that so many people know about these events I imagine that Spin Boldak will be one of the most highly contested voting districts.
Local Kandahari Perspectives
The saddest thing about all that I described above was watching the faces of my friends -- particularly Kandahar's youth -- as they found out what was going on. A great sense of disappointment darkened most of my conversations during the last few hours of polling and during the evening and next day.
People focused on some of the details, especially the non-indelible ink that had been promoted with such fanfare by the United Nations earlier that year. People frequently blamed "the foreigners" for mismanaging things and allowing so much fraud and deception to take place. Admittedly these days conspiracy theories about the invisible hand of 'the foreigners' are omnipresent in southern Afghanistan, but "the farce of this year's election" (as one friend put it) struck a nerve among those people who did want to vote, who did want a change, who didn't have a direct stake in anyone's campaign.
I remember I sat at my desk in the evening waiting for some of the foreign instutitions, embassies etc to make a comment worthy of the day. Instead, we got Kai Eide, the UN special representative, offering his 'congratulations'. Slowly more internationals started voicing their happiness at how the election had gone. Most seemed to take a deep breath that there wasn't more violent incidents around the country and that, at least in the public eye, the elections had passed more or less as planned. A pity that the wishes of ordinary Afghans for a free and fair election were not heard...
Most of my friends down in Kandahar voiced concern at how the voting was being managed, with campaigners and observers inside polling centres. The threat of violence was not the major factor in determining the low turnout, as I see it. Rather, apathy among voters meant that only a very small number came out to exercise their right.
There had been such a huge buildup to the elections, in both Afghan and foreign media, that perhaps the only reaction to the day was inevitable disappointment. Maybe the day could never have fulfilled all our expectations and hopes. There was a sense that the election could possibly have been a moment where a change or a shift could have changed the trajectory of Afghanistan - I remember watching Afghans around the time Obama was elected and wonder how many of them had hoped Afghanistan could also have its own Obama moment.
For many in Kandahar, and, I imagine, in the districts as well, the provincial council elections were also very important. From what friends of mine said to me yesterday, people seemed prepared to tolerate more 'dirty business' for the provincial council than for the presidential voting. The voting was more of an approximation, they said, and offered a chance to shift the power balance in the province a little.
Nevertheless, watching the low turnout but knowing that the next days would see the 'Independent' Electoral Commission announce large numbers of voters was enough to make the staunchest optimist just a little bit despondent.
Predictions and Conclusions
It's too late for me to predict -- as I was going to do -- that Karzai will announce his victory; he already did. In the coming days a highly dubious turnout will be announced by Karzai and the IEC. When the final results come out, Karzai will have won, and will have captured over 50% of the votes. Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah will go into overdrive for a while, but slowly deals will start to be made behind the scenes.
After several weeks of confusion, the foreign community will cave in (it pretty much already has done so) and validate the results. This will, in turn, lead to further disillusionment with the foreign community. To a certain extent, especially in Kandahar and the south, the damage is already done. Even if the internationals were to have a change of heart and get serious, they're already being blamed for the failure of this election. But of course there won't be any serious outcries by the major voices of the international effort because too much is riding on this election passing, and passing without incident.
So we'll pick up the pieces and stumble onwards. The change that people had hoped for didn't happen. It was denied them. And despite all the hope and expectation of some kind of shift, we'll just continue forward down the same path we were going before, just now without something ahead of us to light the way forward.
With only four days to go before the elections, I thought it might be useful to comment on how the opposition candidates' rallies went this past week. Myself and my colleague were graced with the presence of a good half dozen members of the international press corps this week, and in all likeliness you'll read several pieces from Kandahar in the next few days. I've just seen Jon Boone did one for the Observer which isn't that bad. Give it a read.
Wednesday the 12th was Abdullah's day in town. The old Communist governor of Kandahar, Noor ul-Haq Ulumi, who was responsible for buying off the mujahedeen in greater Kandahar at the end of the anti-Soviet war had come down a few days earlier to meet elders and prepare for the rally. He chose an empty patch of land next to his house as the site for the rally, and people began to arrive there early in the morning.
All over the city that morning, Abdullah's posters and billboards had been restrung and reposted as if to pretend that they all hadn't been defaced and dirtied by his opponents. There were surprisingly few security checks at the rally, something I've heard from many others about previous rallies he did elsewhere, and an attempt on his life seemed a very real possibility.
In the hours before Abdullah himself showed up, there was the traditional <I>atan</I> dancing, and a small group chosen out of the hundreds of women gathered there practiced their "Abdullah Abdullah" chants. The presence of women/girls was interesting, and much noted by the largely uneducated crowd that had come (read: been summoned) to the rally. It was not a common feature at political rallies down south, for obvious reasons, and the only reason people could come up with was that Ulumi "was a Communist and the Communists used to do this all the time."
People also speculated (Abdullah was several hours late; there was plenty of time for chit-chat) as to where the girls had come from. In all likelihood they were Farsi-speaking girls, born in Iran but returned in the past few years to Kandahar where their families had moved back. Most of this small but influential community of young girls -- Farsi-speakers make up a significant proportion of Kandahar's school-going girls -- are literate, often quite well-educated, so they at least understood that they were at a political rally, what it was for etc.
The police officer in charge of security at the rally made an announcement on the loudspeaker system: "If anyone brought any weapons in with them, please hand them in to us. If we find them on you later, we won't be so pleasant about it." Great, I thought, they're not even pretending to have security precautions in place.
It was really, really, really hot, even under the makeshift tents, but finally Abdullah came.
[Conversation from the crowd:
A: Which one's Abdullah?
B: He's the one with the turban.
A: That one? He doesn't look like I thought he would.]
Ulumi had put together a premier list of speakers, all of whom attested to Abdullah's Pashtun-ness, his Kandahari roots, and his suitability for the post. The problem was, nobody was really listening to the speeches, too concerned with fanning themselves and wondering when it would all be over and lunch would start.
Ezat Wasefi, former governor of Farah, spoke, as did Hajji Obaidullah and Ulumi himself. All of the speeches were reactive in tone, spending more time criticising Karzai (in all the colours of the rainbow) and responding to criticisms that Abdullah wasn't a real Pashtun. "He's from Kandahar, he's a Pashtun, I know his family and I saw him here in the past," said one, as if that was going to overwrite all the bad feeling in the city at Abdullah's attempt to "be Pashtun."
In the end, I left early, bored by Abdullah and his fake rally, bored by the utterly dead crowd.
Ashraf Ghani (in Kandahar more commonly identified by the last part of his name, 'Ahmadzai') was more interesting. Determined not to make the same mistake of turning up hours before the rally as with Abdullah, this time I arrived late, presumably missing a few of the speeches, and had to fight my way up several flights of stairs, through at least five full body pat-downs and a visibly edgy security guard at the entrance to the main salon upstairs.
In the main salon itself there was space for around 1500, but many more had turned up so Ahmadzai's supporters spilled out onto the road, shouting to be allowed in.
Last week saw one major newspaper suggest that Abdullah was 'the Afghan Obama' on account of his mixed ethnicity; to my mind, though, the support base of Ahmadzai and its strong contingent of the young and the educated is more reminiscent of an Obama campaign. Indeed, most of the people who managed to get into the speech hall were under 30 years old. In Kandahar, where educational opportunities are few and cultural stigma works against the educated class, Ahmadzai seems to represent a change that people could actually visualise.
Once again, though, the speeches that I caught were mainly focused on criticising Karzai and the fruits of his administration:
- administrative corruption
- "guns and democracy don't go together"
- Karzai's government as a 'millionaire's club'
- etc
Ahmadzai's speech itself was much more forceful than I would have imagined, with a rasp in his voice and the face of a serious man. I imagine his high educated style of Pashtu worked against him a little, but he made up for his deficiencies in speech with a good burst of Kandahari and Pashtun pride.
His more populist positions always drew a cheer and clapping from the crowd, and he even got in a good deal of criticism of foreign forces (on the drug problem: "If the foreigners are so weak that they can't even stop drugs from going into their own countries, then why do they claim to be so powerful after all?")
He took pains to stress that he understood Kandahar, and the problems of the people. "I spent many years studying in America, but remember this: I also drank water from the village well."
He spent a good ten or fifteen minutes explaining some of the things he planned to do if he were to win: creating jobs, houses, improving security, economic plans etc. At least that was an improvement on Abdullah.
Almost as soon as he arrived, he was gone again, on his way to Farah for a six o'clock meeting there.
In the end, the rallies of Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani said less about what might happen on election day -- I think we all have a pretty good idea about that -- but revealed more about the aspirations of Kandahar's young generation. Very little is written about this large section of society, but a repeat of the Karzai regime is not going to do much for them. The best they can hope for is to earn enough money to get out -- to Kabul, to India, anywhere else. Aside from that small possibility, their future looks bleak.
[UPDATE: Karzai supporters held a rally for him today in Kandahar Football Stadium and it's worth a few comments:]
Presumably conceived in reaction to the two big rallies for Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, Ahmed Wali Karzai (the president's half-brother) put on a huge rally held in Kandahar's football stadium today. As you can see in the video above, there were lots of people there, far more than were present at Ashraf Ghani or Abdullah's rallies.
People came from all over the city, again and as for the previous rallies for the excitement of 'something' happening in town, but also because all government departments were closed for today and officials requested to attend the rally. All schools were also closed, and buses present to take girls, boys and teachers to the stadium. A rumour went round that teachers' salaries would be paid at the stadium -- teachers in Kandahar haven't been paid for a couple of months -- but I was unable to confirm this. It was a good demonstration of the power that the state still has: who says Karzai has to use his incumbent powers to win the election, eh?
We initially heard that Karzai himself was coming to the rally, but once we arrived were told this wasn't the case. Lots of women were present, a mix of schoolgirls and others, again more than had turned out for Abdullah, but they sat in a separate place far from the larger men-only stage area.
As for the esteemed and respected guests, it was an impressive gathering. A glance round the stage and those seated nearby revealed a who's who of Kandahar: tribal elders, mujahedeen commanders, government officials, youth leaders and so on. Almost all of the speakers referred to this in their speeches: "Look around you," Ahmed Wali said. "The other candidates brought one or two people from Kandahar as their friends from Kabul. We have everyone here to support us. There isn't a well-known figure perhaps who isn't here."
It was a highly impressive display of power, but fake nonetheless.
Afghanmal, provincial council member, noted how all the opposition candidates had come to Kandahar and said that they were Pashtuns, that they were originally Kandaharis, that they had Kandahari friends, uncles and mothers, but that Karzai was the real deal.
Hajji Karim Khan, speaking second, warned people that if they didn't vote that maybe Karzai would get more votes from Herat or Mazar and that would be shameful for the people of Kandahar when he was reelected... not the strongest endorsement...
Khalid Pashtun spoke and told people they needed to be realistic in their expectations of the regime. 100% success isn't possible, he said.
Ahmed Wali himself took pains to stress how much his half-brother was working for the country. "Have you ever heard that Karzai took a holiday? Have you ever heard that he went for a picnic in someone's garden as is our habit? No! He works for the country from eight in the morning until seven at night."
He also called on the Taliban to stop destroying the country. If Pashtuns don't stop fighting, he said, development money currently earmarked for Kandahar will be allocated to other provinces. And the foreigners and their money won't be here forever, he warned.
Responding to allegations of fraud: "People say that I'm buying up voting cards. Look at all these people gathered here! Why should I need to buy cards?"
None of the other speakers said anything especially interesting, and the rally passed without incident. I think it's clear from all of this how Kandahar will vote when we get to Thursday...
For outsiders, Kandahar was never really somewhere you could fall in love with. You know the kind of thing I mean: places people went to honeymoon, places with a certain ineluctable quality to them... Back in the seventies, when Kandahar was a popular stopover city on the hippy trail to Kabul and India, one such traveller even described it as 'a gentle oasis'.
These days, Kandahar is the city of nobody's dreams.
Pace Farnaza Fassihi, living in Kandahar is like being under virtual house arrest. Most days I stay at home, travel somewhere only when I have something specific to do there - a meeting, something I want to see - and am forced to enjoy Kandahar at a distance. True, I'm lucky enough to have a great balcony view over the town and all the way down to where the desert starts.
This also isn't to say I don't get out at all. Arghandab is a regular stop for a picnic or a swim on the weekends, and within the city most travel is more or less going to be ok. Nevertheless, caution pays dividends (as stencilled letters on one taxi here informed me); the two big risks for foreigners in the city are kidnapping and being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a bomb goes off.
This happens increasingly often. Those who follow my twitter postings - an easier way to get news out when there isn't enough information to justify a full blog post - will have noticed the upward trend this past year in pictures of post-explosion clouds of debris, or holes in the ground where IEDs were laid.
Occasionally a troupe of journalists make their way into the city, but only for three or four days, and almost always working on a specific story; no more time to leisurely get to know Kandahar, no time for picnics...
When did it turn sour? 2006 was probably the turning point for the province, with all out battles in the districts and all sorts of mess within the city. To the average observer abroad, Kandahar must seem rather stable. Reports from the city describing the atmosphere and downward spiral are scarce to be found, and generally it takes the death of a foreign soldier or at least a dozen Afghan casualties to qualify for a Kandahar dateline.
I compile a list of violent incidents in the greater Kandahar area from open source and local sources each day. A year ago, that list would hardly ever exceed one page. Nowadays, it's not unusual to reach three pages: a list of bombs, murders, executions, attacks and threats. It's enough work keeping up with all of that, but then there's all the personal stories of how people get through their days.
It's nearly impossible to get a decent sense of what's going on in the districts. The international media stick exclusively (with some reason, albeit qualified) to embeds to get a sense of southern Afghanistan. I heard rumours the other day that a well-known American journalist is thinking of repeating the success of a book that he wrote reporting in Baghdad: this time he's doing one on Kandahar, though this time exclusively from time spent doing embeds...
Local journalism - despite the best efforts of a dedicated group - is reactive for the most part, responding to some bomb blast or assassination rather than actively generating content or a sense of what it means live in Kandahar.
In fact, the only way to get a sense of life in the districts is to step into the shoes - albeit briefly - of those that live there. You want to find out how safe the roads are between the city and the districts: step into a taxi and run the gauntlet for yourself. I'll be writing more about my attempts to get a sense of what's going on in the western district of Maiwand in the coming weeks, but this is the kind of thing that you have to submit yourself to if you really want to get an accurate handle on what is going on and how things are for people living there.
I've always advocated that journalists ought to be writing more about Kandahar, and writing more from outside military bases or press conferences. Despite the danger, southern Afghanistan is an incredibly important locus of what's going on in the country right now -- with the elections, with the Taliban, with Pakistan, with the US military, with NATO forces -- and it seems morally indefensible to my mind not to be paying close attention to all these causes and effects jumbling up against each other.
The population in the city and the outer villages brace themselves against all these manifestations of violence. A common saying these days upon parting company is, ‘I’ll see you soon, if we’re still alive.’ Educated Kandaharis are scared; many leave for Kabul, or abroad if they are lucky (or rich) enough to have visas for foreign travel.
Tribal elders remain mute, or also depart for Kabul. The elders or religious figures of authority (mullahs and so on) in the districts are forced to tread a firmly non-committal line, not annoying NATO, not annoying the Afghan government, not annoying the Taliban, not annoying the drug dealers...
Election gossip is all the rage these days, even in some of the worse-off districts. The posters of provincial council candidates are all over town, and 'the bazaar is warm' (as the local saying goes) for the (illegal) purchase and exchange of voter cards. As one prominent local figure put it to me yesterday: "The election has to happen, one way or another. The foreigners have spent so much money in our country already. They're paying another $130 million for this round of elections. What would they say if we couldn't at least give them some elections?"
So the elections will take place. It's a good opportunity to shuffle the cards and jiggle the networks of power all over the country, but nobody -- at least not anybody living here -- has any illusion that these elections will be free or fair.
[Apologies for the tone of today's post, but it's difficult to be optimistic when the situation is so bad.]
"In the January 20, 1980, issue of the Village Voice, the left-wing writer Alexander Cockburn employed such a rationale to justify the Soviet invasion of the month before: 'We all have to go one day, but pray God let it not be over Afghanistan. An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers … I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan.'"
No comment.
]]>By now Bruce Riedel is pretty well-known, so I’ll spare you the CV: intimately involved in US foreign affairs in this general area (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Central Asia etc) he helped run one of the reviews of Afghan policy that Obama requested at the beginning of the year. Nowadays he’s still quite active; writing, advising and so on. He’s also the author of In Search of Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future (pub. Brookings, 2008).
I put together some thoughts on his book, and some final thoughts on a recent essay he wrote for CTC Sentinel, the journal of the ‘Combating Terrorism Center’ at West Point. Occasionally I’ll quote from the book and respond to things that he says.
General Comments
In Search of Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future was published in late 2008 and offers an outline of the author’s views on the threat posed by ‘Al Qaeda’ in the past, as well as possible ways to engage with the situation and “how to defeat al Qaeda”. A short book, it is presumably intended for as wide an audience as possible, and as such it is not rigourously sourced, nor is the writing style academic in any sense.
It begins with an recap of the basic facts of the 9-11 attack, covering all the traditional details of the plot as well as outlining some of the conclusions that he wants to explore in the rest of the book. The following four chapters are structured around four character he believes to be central to the story of al Qaeda, each representing a separate strand of that narrative: “The Thinker: Zawahiri”; “The Knight: Osama”; “The Host: Mullah Omar”; and “The Stranger: Zarqawi”. He ends the books with some thoughts on the current threat as well as his plan for ‘defeating al Qaeda.’
The most puzzling feature of this structure - out of which he explains his conception of al Qaeda - is the inclusion of Mullah Omar as a fundamental feature (a full one quarter of the narrative) of al Qaeda. The author of these comments has not read an account of al Qaeda to date which makes a claim as bold as this for the role that Mullah Omar played. Nor have I heard any claims that Mullah Omar was involved (to whatever level - Reidel is frustratingly unclear) in the planning or strategic decisions that lead to 9-11. This in itself is not evidence to support a claim, but I have been engaged in Afghanistan and in research on the issues relating to jihadism and Islamism for at least eight years and had not previously heard this claim.
Another basic weakness of In Search of Al Qaeda is the poor evidence supplied in support of his claims. Bold and new allegations are not backed up by credible sources (or, in some cases, any sources) and the reader must simply trust Reidel. The Katmandu airplane hijacking, for instance, is presented on page 69 as the “dress rehearsal” for 9/11 but this relationship is not properly documented. Similarly, there is some discussion of US attempts to negotiate directly with the Taliban over the issue of Osama, but the account is skewed, failing to represent the numerous initiatives taken in Pakistan between staff at the US Embassy and the Taliban’s embassy there. The details of the UNOCAL/Bridas oil pipeline negotiations - and how they fit in with US policy in the region - are not mentioned at all in the book. This is a big gap.
- “Bin Laden personally handled other essential elements of the [9-11] plot as well, bringing on board the Taliban [...] and its leader, Mullah Omar. In his interrogation, KSM suggests the Taliban were uninformed about the Manhattan raid until the last moment and even pressed bin Laden not to attack American targets. However, other evidence strongly suggests Mullah Omar was well inside the loop much earlier and a partner in the overall plan, if not the details.” (p.6)
Riedel makes the claim that the relationship with Mullah Omar and the Taliban was a crucial element of the 9-11 plot. He offers evidence from KSM’s interrogation (and does so later) to suggest that the Taliban found out at the last moment. Parts of KSM’s interrogation, however, have been shown to have been conducted using torture, water-boarding and other techniques and statements like the one above should be handled with extreme caution. Similarly, other crucial sources which he cites (“other evidence”) are presumably classified (or non-existent) and the reader is simply expected to take his word on this and trust him. There is no accessible evidence given here to support this claim.
- “For the Taliban leadership, the critical prerequisite to an attack on the United States was another al Qaeda plot in which they had a vital interest, the murder of Massoud. [...] In her memoirs, the widow of the team leader has given an extensive account of the family’s visit to Kandahar, where they stayed at the bin Laden home to prepare and train for the attack on Massoud.” (p.6)
One of the key aspects of the 9-11 plot that Riedel emphasises in the introductory chapter as well as in the chapter specifically relating to Mullah Omar is that the murder of Massoud was some sort of trade-off between Mullah Omar and bin Laden, through which Mullah Omar would grant his approval/acquiescence for the 9-11 operation if Osama could kill Massoud. Riedel offers no evidence to support this claim (no statements by Mullah Omar, no anecdotal evidence etc) and merely inserts a story about the suicide bombers who killed Massoud, stating that they “stayed at the bin Laden home [in Kandahar]” while they were preparing, as if simply by being in Kandahar staying at bin Laden’s home this automatically implies the links to the Taliban (and even complicity, perhaps).
In particular Riedel fails to address the relationship between Osama and Massoud. After Osama started to spend more time on the frontlines, he soon aligned himself with Hekmatyar, a fierce opponent of Massoud. Indeed Osama’s beliefs about Massoud most likely played a key role in the break of his relationship with his former mentor Abdullah Azzam, who by the late eighties regarded Massoud as the only option for Afghanistan’s future. Abdullah Anas recalled how he brought steadily increasing sums of money to Massoud, and how Osama was opposed to the idea. Azzam himself made several trips into the Panjshir to visit Massoud himself.
In all likeliness, it was the influence of Zawahiri and Hekmatyar who shaped Osama’s opinion about Massoud. Furthermore Massoud, like many other mujahedeen, and in contrast to Hekmatyar, had a by far more nationalist agenda.
- “The connection is also hinted at in the memoirs of Pakistan’s military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who says Mullah Omar was aware of the plot against America in 2000 and was initially not pleased with the idea of taking on the United States so directly. In time, however, probably after being briefed on the plot to kill his rival in the north, Omar apparently came around. In any case, as Musharraf notes, he did nothing to stop bin Laden once he learned of the plan.” (p.7)
Riedel offers Musharraf’s autobiography as a source for his claim of the Taliban’s involvement in 9-11. Not mentioning or suggesting any of the host of valid reasons for Musharraf to be biased in his relating of this part of the story, he simply drops this in as an external ‘source’. Again, no evidence is offered, and allegations are presented as facts.
- “The life of Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, provides further insight into al Qaeda. Omar is a very secretive man; only a handful of non-Muslims have ever met him. He avoids the press and interviews. He is probably only semiliterate and writes very little. But he created the first and only jihadist state in the Muslim world and was a partner in the attacks of 9/11.” (p.11)
The problem here is one of definitions. Nowhere in the book does Reidel define what he means by his various uses of the terms “terrorist” (which is used throughout the book with dizzying regularity), “jihadist”, and “fundamentalist”. They are used more as moral colour rather than as precise terms with (potentially) precise meanings. In this extract, “jihadist state” presumably implies a place where the functions of the state are focused towards the purpose of “jihad” - presumably of the international kind.
This is not the picture that emerges of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan during the late 1990s. Granted, there were training camps and other groups used Afghanistan’s territory as a haven from which to conduct their operations. The extent to which the Taliban’s intelligence services knew about these activities, however, is open to question. One extensive and detailed account of the day-to-day routine of these training camps (Omar Nasiri’s Inside the Jihad) offers evidence to suggest that trainees and Taliban in the same area had next to no contact, and that there was even considerably enmity between the two groups.
- “By now extremely fundamentalist, Osama hated Shia as any Wahhabi would and detested secular revolutionaries, yet seemed willing to mix with all these elements while in Sudan.” (p.49-50)
I include this simply as an example of the weak (and undefined) use of terminology throughout the book. For the evidence and arguments that Reidel makes to be taken seriously, this needs to be far more rigourously applied.
- “[Khalid Sheikh Mohammad] is a consummate terror planner, inventing diabolical plots incessantly until his capture [...]” (p.59)
Similarly, this kind of language does not advance any argument, instead seeking to provoke an emotional response from the reader. This kind of language and method is evident throughout the book.
- “As for bin Laden, he was their guest. They could not hand him over, nor would they. In truth, he was too valuable to them and especially to their leader, Mullah Omar, to give up.” (p.62)
Once again, opinion is presented as evidence. The reader is expected to trust Reidel, to trust his experience and his knowledge of the subject. This knowledge and experience does not come across in the sections in which Reidel discusses Afghanistan. His conception of the Taliban is murky, blurs boundaries between the Taliban and al Qaeda, and fails to demonstrate a grasp of the historical and cultural origins of the Taliban movement.
- “The Taliban recruited heavily among the madrassas in Pakistan, especially in the border region. Over time, Pakistan became increasingly tied to the Taliban. [...] Meanwhile the Taliban were developing another patron, Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization, which became in effect a state within the state. Mullah Omar was drawn steadily closer to bin Laden as the two collaborated.” (p.64-5)
This statement belies the fact that the author is not familiar with Kandahari culture. Projecting a western mentality onto Mullah Omar, Reidel assumes that the Taliban had a specific policy to ‘develop another patron’, whereas there is no evidence to support this claim, neither in the book, nor available in the now-steadily-increasing wealth of anecdotal source materials on the early years of the Taliban.
- “Not a major Islamist ideologue or a writer, Omar seemed to find in bin Laden as well as in Zawahiri the intellectual complement to his life of action. They provided the narrative that justified the Taliban’s cruel and oppressive rule and government.” (p.67)
This is an argument that sounds plausible on paper (simply in the phrasing) but has no component evidence in reality and hard facts. The idea that Mullah Omar and bin Laden complemented each other -- the implication here is that Osama to Mullah Omar is a little like the role of Zawahiri to bin Laden. Moreover, there is scant evidence to suggest that the ideology of the Taliban - in as much as there was one - was informed in any significant way by the ideology of bin Laden.
Conclusion
If there’s anything that this examination of Riedel necessitates, it’s more precision and evidence-based research of the topic at hand. There is still very little information on the Taliban’s side of the 9-11 equation. My colleague and I have spent the last month or so reviewing all the sources on the matter and the available public-domain evidence for what was going on among the Taliban prior to 9-11 is negligible. Even when eyewitness accounts seem to exist - some of the tales in Kathy Gannon’s I is for Infidel, for example - there is no way of verifying everything; soon there is no way of distinguishing reliable from false, such as the well-known story of how Osama married Mullah Omar’s daughter, and Mullah Omar married Osama’s daughter (no truth in the claim, by the way).
In his recent CTC Sentinel article, Riedel gives us another example of the kind of sloppy scholarship that we should be wary of:
“Much of the hardest fighting in the current war has been conducted by non-American troops. The British in Helmand Province, the Canadians in Kandahar and the Dutch and Australians in Oruzgan have been fighting for the last several years in the heartland of the Taliban’s Pashtun belt. They have taken considerable casualties in the process. Indeed, for much of the last five years the principal battle against the al-Qa`ida enemy that attacked the United States in 2001 has been fought by American allies, while the United States’ primary focus has been on a secondary al-Qa`ida target in Iraq.” (pp. 2-3)
The line between so-called ‘al-Qaida’ forces and those of the Taliban is hereby blurred, something I’ve been noticing a lot recently as coverage of Pakistan has increased. Even one of my favourite quick-look news sites (NewsNow Afghanistan) has been taken over by this confusion: most of the articles about ‘Taliban’ incidents from Pakistan end up in the Afghan section as if there’s no difference.
Of course, careful and patient scholarship is difficult to conduct in current circumstances. Southern Afghanistan is not the easiest place to live or work, but the dangers of not fully understanding the things being manipulated is a sure-fire path to failure, whatever our goals.
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First is fireworks from a wedding ceremony in southern Kandahar City this evening. There've been fireworks for the past 3 days, which has been quite nice in the evenings. Don't think that this is a common occurrence. I've only seen fireworks one other time in the past year or two in Kandahar.
And this one which is part of a 45-minute interview I did with the deputy head of the provincial council about the attack on the provincial council just over a week ago. In this very short extract he starts explaining how his bodyguard died while struggling to stop a suicide bomber.
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Tribal elders in Kandahar like to explain how they're waiting to see what will happen before committing themselves to any particular 'side'. Well, we've all been waiting to hear from President Obama on his grand plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan - or the latest neologism, 'Af-Pax'. Two days ago, finally, we heard.
In the words of a colleague, it's "more of the same thing - much much more." There was very little of the so-called radical change that myself and other commentators had been hoping for. Of course there must be things that came out of the 'grand strategic review' that weren't said (and that won't be said), but I'm guessing that they weren't mentioned because people might not be so receptive...
Speaking of problems, I read these two reports (here and here) this morning about problems with the Awakening Councils in Iraq. Remember this is the strategy that they want to start implementing in Afghanistan (and have started doing so in Wardak province under the watchful eyes of the Ministry of the Interior...).
On an unrelated note, I went to see someone from Kandahar's Ulemaa Shura (or 'Council of Religious Clergy'). Hajji Mahmoud (picture above) is a member of the shura and helps write articles for their monthly magazine, Islami Diwa. It all sounds a little dull, I know, but he was a lovely guy, and pretty world-wise, too. He had served as an MP in the parliament in Kabul during the 1970s (when King Zahir Shah ruled the country) and remembers the various manoeuvres that Afghanistan conducted during the Second World War in order to stay neutral and independent of the fighting going on all round.
We sat on a mat in the grass outside his house, drinking green tea while he reminisced. It wasn't all pleasant memories, though. By his count 24 members of the 150-strong Ulemaa Shura have been assassinated in Kandahar since 2001. Four of those were from 2009 alone. These include the recent murder of Mawlawi Mohammad Rasoul (killed outside the Qadiri Mosque in Kandahar City), Qari Ahmadullah (killed in his home on March 1st 2009), Mawlawi Abdul Qayyum (shot dead outside the Red Mosque in Kandahar City), and - most famously - Mawlawi Fayyaz, the first president of the ulemaa council and son of Mawlawi Darab Akhundzada.
They are targeted because they offer a legitimate opposition to the radical mobilisations and motivations offered by ‘the Taliban’ to young madrassa students and jobless villagers. This is not to suggest that the ‘insurgency’ is primarily motivated by ideology -- there are a variety of influences but ideology or religious motivation is not at the top of the list.
Ulemaa council members are actively and deliberately provocative in this respect. They write articles, make pronouncements and issue statements arguing against suicide bombing, for example, saying that it is an illegitimate form of jihad and so on. The articles published in their magazine are calculated to be provocative in this way.
When I get up in the morning I always cast my eye over the latest commentary on Afghanistan. My latest favourite is one entitled, "The Winnable War" by David Brooks, full of little gems:
"the Afghan people want what we want"
and
"I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here"
Now I don't know who he spoke to or where he visited, but this article felt like it was written about a different country. Or maybe Disneyland?
Speaking of strange things, I ordered some food from a local restaurant for lunch and found a little reminder of England in the packaging:
And even stranger, my colleague went out to Sperwan (in Panjwayi district) to see what was going on there and he found an Afghan wearing a "Royal Mail" jacket. An actual jacket that your local postman in England wears. And how did it end up in Panjwayi?
]]>I am amazed.wrote my friend. Now all this is nothing new. We all know that there are next to no foreign correspondents in southern Afghanistan (or the north, for that matter). They're mostly to be found in the capital. The rights and wrongs of that are worth being covered in a separate blog post, and indeed I've written about it before, as has Josh Foust of Registan.net who noted the double-standard at play in the way we cover the Afghan War.