927. That’s the number of soldiers who have died in Afghanistan according to Washingtonpost.com- Fallen Heroes Project as of today. That’s almost 1000. Every life lost impacts a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, or even a son or daughter. And according to the powers that be we can expect a surge of casulties to increase as our planned troop levels increase. Not too appealing. Every American knows why we are there. And I have a plan to get us out or at least keep our troops out of the crosshairs.

Now to win in Afghanistan we need to set  clear goals . I was under the impression that we went to Afghanistan to kill Osama Bin Laden and drive out the Taliban who were harboring him.  Eight years later and we have no trace or intelligence that leads us to believe we know where he is at. Is he in the Swat Valley? Maybe he is and maybe he’s not. America had our chance to kill him at Tora Bora and the powers that be were either too incompetent or were not interested in letting America’s Boogie Man get taken out of the picture for any myriad of reasons.

Vice President Joe Biden likes to throw out some bizarre mathematics when he says “we have $1 invested in Pakistan for every $30 we have invested in Afghanistan”.   Mr.VP would like to see that number reversed. With reasons that range from that’s where Al-Qaeda is or that Pakistan is the country with nukes and that endangers America more than Afghanistan. Well Joe your wrong. Afghanistan needs that much because they have nothing. Zilch. Zero. Pakistan is getting more than enough money. They have an economy. They can even afford nuclear weapons. You know those pointy things that demolish a city. Yeah, they have them and fighter planes. So excuse me if I don’t think that we should have to buy them billions of dollars of weapons and equipment so the Afghans can beat back the Taliban with prayer rugs. According to Joe Biden’s philosophy we should give all the college funding money to rich white kids. Why? Because their the ones who go to college. We need to build up Afghanistan period. Pakistan is playing us. I’m not saying that they haven’t done a good job in the War on Terror. They caught Khalid-Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, and other Al-Qaeda cronies. Back during the Cold War nations knew that if you went to America and told them you had Communists in your country and needed help the money would pour in. That is the same situation with Pakistan. They will do just enough to make us happy but not enough to destroy the problem because big money is to tied to their struggle with Al-Qaeda. Once AQ is done, so is the gravy train.We must continue funding Afghanistan.

Every talking head on television loves to come on the screen and sprout off “Afghanistan is ruled by warlords”. And? That is a bonus. A country ruled by lords of war. Because we are fighting a war. The game is to get the “warlords” to fight our enemy. Basically in a nutshell what we need to do is give these “warlords” an incentive to keep their territory free from Taliban and Al-Qaeda. How? Real simple. There is an old Afghan saying,” you can’t  buy an Afghan. You can only rent him”. Now what we need to do is make these warlords rich by having them deliver peace. We need to have our CIA/Military figure out who has muscle in that country. Who can protect civilians and keep peace and quiet. Who are the political and military Alpha-males. Once we identify these people we need to make them this offer. If you can get roads paved and built in your area we will give you x amount of dollars. For every school and clinic that opens and does not get destroyed or harmed. We will give you x amount of dollars. For every IED or soldier that gets harmed in your territory you will forfeit a percentage of your monthly income that you generated by the roads, schools, and clinics.  For every Al-Qaeda you capture or kill you will be rewarded.  You can get more bees with honey.

Buy up the poppy crop. We are continously told that the poppy crop is funding the insurgency or the Taliban/Al-Qaeda. Ok. We know the farmers are going to grow the poppies. We have to accept that. In return we buy up the crop so that our enemies can’t use it for funding. Once we have it we then destroy it. Now the farmers have a customer in us and not an adversary. And the Taliban will have to find another way to make money.

Finally use Americans as the backup for the Warlords.  If the Warlords are having problems with Taliban and Al-Qaeda they can ask for help and it will not hurt their financial bottom line. We need to know where and who the insurgents are then we can destroy them. To have our soldiers playing Kabul Policeman is ridiculous. Afghans need to learn to protect their country. We have bought them enough time. Now we are there to help. But to drive from town to town and get blown up by I.E.D.’s is only going to lose the war. We need to make progress every day and every hour. Progress is a semblence of normalcy.

These are just some ideas that I feel could help. Afghanistan is an empire killer. But America does not fall into the trap that other countries have in the past. We do not want to own Afghanistan. We want them to be able, so that when we leave, they can beat back the Taliban. Without a Taliban then there is possibly no free hand for Al-Qaeda to build camps and re-start up the process that was before America came. No Taliban in Afghanistan. No Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And then when we look at Afghanistan we can see cleary that  we have won.

An overview of long-standing relationships and the unspoken incentives — arms, drugs, security, construction, logistics, etc — that play into prolonging  the Afghanistan conflict.

HAMED WARDAK – NCL HOLDINGS, AACP, ETC.

• National Construction & Logistics (NCL Holdings) was set up in Virginia in 2007 by then 31 year-old Hamed Wardak – son of the current “hard-drinking, under-achieving” Afghan defense minister. The CIA has a seat at NCL’s table through a high-profile 30-year covert-op veteran, Milton (Milt) Bearden — former Pakistan station chief, ‘86-89.
• Wardak, “one of the Afghan American community’s most avaricious scoundrels” is a Pashtun who graduated Georgetown in ‘97 under the watch of late neocon Jeane Kirkpatrick. As a post-grad, Wardak was sent to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In later years, he would become involved with the neocon American Enterprise Institute think-tank.
• After 9/11, Wardak — through the Karzai bros Qayyum and Mahmoud — co-founded the deeply suspicious Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce (AACC) with Don Ritter and DynCorp’s John Gastright.
  
• Wardak also joined and briefly managed (‘04-05) Technologists Inc, an Afghan security firm founded by Aziz Azimi, which received funding from USAID, US DOD and the Afghan Defense Ministry.
• In ‘02/03 Wardak — who worked for Merrill Lynch — was Afghan Finance Minister’s envoy to the US.
• In ‘07 Wardak set up “Sacrificers For Peace” (Fedayeen-e-Sol) which claims to be a “non-violent multi-ethnic reform movement” opposed to the Taliban; and was also a founding member of CUSAP – Campaign for US – Afghanistan Partnership — see their 2009 policy paper (pdf)

Sibel Edmond’s Nov-9 article ‘In the Name of a General, his Son, a Spook & the Godmother of Neocon‘ is essential reading.

[The above is a blog excerpt]

The following is an excerpt of an article found on the official Taliban website “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”:

Obama’s new strategy, the result of the same mentality that wants to continue the occupation of Afghanistan by military means, will add to the anarchy prevailing in the country. In fact, Americans are responsible for the chaotic situation. They handed over power to notorious warlords, venal officials and mafia-linked governors;

The warlords usurp government and people’s lands and buildings. Shirpur, located to the north-east of the Kabul city, is a good example on hand. Once a property of the Ministry of Defense, now it is a posh area usurped by the warlords who have built luxurious houses there. Many drug-smugglers who had been sentenced to prison by court have been released by decrees of the President [Hamid Karzai].

General Khudaidad, Minister of the Narcotic Campaign of the Kabul Administration has acknowledged in a press conference that US military officers had a hand in drug trafficking. Abdul Jabbar Sabit, former attorney-general of the Kabul Administration, says he was not able to lay his hand on some notorious governors involved in drug-trafficking and bribery because they were protected by high-ups in the government.

There are hundreds of private unregistered militias in Afghanistan under the name of security guards who carry heroin in official vehicles. These militias have links with warlords who have hold over high government positions. They carry out their criminal activities with impunity.

American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, many times has referred to Afghanistan as a Mafia State but she did not say that the Mafia State was their handiwork. Independent analysts around the world believe that USA wants to keep a corrupt government installed in Kabul because this will provide a justification to maintain American military presence in the country.

Previously Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other administration officials had been pressing to clean up the rampant corruption and cut Afghan President Karzai’s ties to local warlords, some of whom traffic in opium.

Clinton is now attempting to erase the doubts about Karzai’s  legitimacy raised by his fraud-tainted re-election. In a recent interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Clinton said that Karzai had demonstrated “good faith” and added: “Well, there are warlords and there are warlords.”

“Based on a certification of accountability and transparency,” Clinton said on Face the Nation, there are “certain ministries … American money will not be going to.”

A senior U.S. defense official told McClatchy that the administration, which remains skeptical of Karzai, will “work around him”

A statement on the Maguindanao Massacre

The arrest, and maybe the conviction, of Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr. might be a major development towards attaining justice for the 34 members of media and 23 other victims of the most barbaric massacre in the history of journalism.

But this is not enough.

Justice means the arrest and punishment of all those involved. Nobody – from the mastermind to the lowly bata-bata – should be able to get away with a crime so grave.

The massacre did not just take away at least 57 lives in a cruel and heartless manner. The slaughter defiled the core principles our democracy – the concept of free and fair elections and that of a free press.

Justice should lead towards the conduct of freer and fairer elections. Justice should further result in the healthy respect for members of the Fourth Estate and the role they play in making our democratic system work for everybody.

But the criminal warlords did not rise to such an extreme position of power and abuse without powerful coddlers for mutual benefit. Warlords, in fact, had been historically with us since the birth of our flawed democracy. They are part and parcel of our imperfect political system rooted in centuries of feudal relationships and violence.

The 57 are not only victims of the Ampatuans’ desire to maintain their warlord status in Maguindanao. They are victims of the worst case of violence of traditional politics in its extreme form. Justice, therefore, should be the first step in changing the historical socio-economic and political conditions that produced criminal warlords like the Ampatuans.

Fourty-six bodies and still counting. The recent political killings on the southern Philippines takes the cake from all the clan vendettas or “rido” in the country. Political warlords claiming impunity are like demigods shedding blood on their clamor for more power. Indeed, power corrupts. The sad part about this incident is that justice will be far from being served considering how connected these hobnobs are. When will this hatred and greed end? Spare the innocent ones. Tama na.

ASIN=BALITA
Translation Here

I don’t know what kind of people are those who perpetrated the senseless killing of women and innocent victims. I don’t know if those people who killed journalists whose only reason to be there was to inform the public have hearts and soul? They could do things more than what the devil could do; rape and kill women just to sow fear and send a message to their political rivals–don’t go against us.

Politics, political rivalry nothing else is the reason behind the Maguindanao Massacre according to media practitioners, political analysts, law enforcers, and ordinary citizens. Why?

A portion from abs-cbnNEWS.com report yesterday has this to say:

Buluan vice mayor Ismael “Toto” Mangudadatu told ANC that his wife, Jenn, his sister, and some relatives were on their way to file a certificate of candidacy on his behalf when a group of about 100 armed men abducted them.

Mangudadatu, who is running for governor of Maguindanao, said some 15 media men who went to cover the event were also seized.

The Mangudadatus believe the abduction was politically motivated. Madaser “Toy” Mangudadato, a member of regional legislative assembly of ARMM, told ANC that they sent their female relatives to file the certificate of candidacy for “Toto” in the hope that their political rivals would not harm them.

Toy said they were warned that if Toto will personally file his candidacy, he will be hurt

Meanwhile president Arroyo declared a state of emergency in Maguindanao and Sultan Kudarat to prevent further blood-shed. “There is an urgent need to prevent and suppress the occurrence of several other incidents of lawless violence,” according to Press Secretary Cerge Remonde. This (indefinite state of emergency) will give the military and police adequate powers of arrest and detention for peace and justice.

On the other hand senators who have been very critical to this administration expressed concern of possible whitewash on the massacre as those suspected to have to have masterminded the crime are closest allies of the president. So they dare the president to go after her political allies the Ampatuans. But Malacanang however assured the public that there’s going to be no sacred cow to be spared in the investigation. All of the suspected perpetrators will be brought to justice to answer for their crime.

As of this writing, 24 more bodies have been recovered by the authorities in the area and that the massacre toll already rose to 46.

The entire nation is watching, the world is observing us, the president has no other prerogative but to arrests the perpetrators including those political leaders suspected of masterminding it. At this time when president Arroyo’s acceptability rating is plunging down to the lowest, her resolve perhaps to run after these ruthless killers and lock them behind bars may help in any way reverse public’s negative perception of her administration.

Perhaps before her term ends, at least the public will be aware that the president has done one great thing in her country in the dispensation of justice for those senselessly killed.

Two alleged Congolese militia leaders plead not guilty to war crimes and crimes against humanity in The Hague…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: ocean city. The blog is also related to: second city.

Undoubtedly, the slaughter of more than 40 people in Mangudadatus’ convoy, which tripped into the deadly lair of Ampatuan’s private army, deserves the highest condemnation. Call the brutal murder as grisly, barbaric, gruesome, heartless. But spare the adjective “senseless.” The context surrounding the election-related violence says much about how feudal strains persist in Philippine elections.

It was a certainly massacre unparalleled in recent years, but paralleled in one way or another by historic and similarly bloody events which insulated Maguindanao from Spanish occupation.  The Ampatuan clan represents the modern-day sultan who’s trapped in the Maguindanao sultanate’s golden days of feudal reign. Being one of the earliest bastions of civilization in the country, the southern province of Maguindanao bears the beginnings of feudalism in the country. It can be imagined as the cradle of wide-scale farming which was enforced by sheer warlordism and extended through clan wars. Colonizers failed to conquer the sultanate and appropriate the rich feudal setup in the province.

Yet the recent massacre was not done in a similar drive for feudal expansion. It was a desperate act of a feudal clan to remain relevant in a bourgeois election. It was an urge for blood rooted in their historical drive for political exclusivity and made explosive by their insecurity in a dynamic political exercise. Elections always pose the prospect of winning and the risk of losing, but apparently, the latter is unacceptable to those with a feudal thinking. Winning is done with an iron fist. It is done without any tact or subtlety like “Hello  Garci” (which, in no coincidence, delivered a command vote for Arroyo in Maguindanao).

But it was not history to be blamed, nor their ancestors to bear the condemnation. Feudalism is too grand a suspect to be despised. While deep-seated strains feudalism lays the context of the killing, the perpetrators stand out as despicable facts of the case.

Amid condemnation and loathing heaped on Ampatuans, the problem, however, is that justice and the rule of law may be too foreign to them. They may not even have the concept of a victim and criminal. What they only know, or perhaps assume, is that they still have the loyalty of the residents of Maguindanao – even if the entire province becomes a killing field.

Arroyo’s close political alliance with Ampatuans may prove to be a hurdle in seeking justice for the victims. Political favors granted in the past are just too sweet. In fact, Arroyo partly owes her runaway presidency to Ampatuans’ loyalty. So far, the alliance is kept intact by the Malacañang with the imposition of a  state of emergency, which is actually a blanket move that presumes suspects are yet to be named, even as the Ampatuan clan has an obvious link to the crime. Also, the declaration is a defensive move of the Palace, which makes Arroyo no different from Ampatuans.

What’s with the insane rumor mongering being internalized by the upper echelons of our intelligence community? Via the Long War Journal, this is absolute, 100% fiction:

Members of a Tajik military unit that turned against the government a decade ago have have joined the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and al Qaeda. An unknown number of fighters who were loyal to rebel leader Mahmud Khudoyberdiyev joined the regional and global terror groups and have been fighting the Tajik government, the deputy chief of the Tajik National Security Committee said at a regional forum held earlier this month.

Right. And I have solid information that Abu Muqawama disappeared from the blogosphere today in order to join Cirque du Soleil and the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.

It continues:

Khudoyberdiyev was a colonel in the Defense Ministry and led a brigade of troops. He led an unsuccessful uprising in 1997 and took control of a northern city in 1998 before fleeing to neighboring Uzbekistan. It is “unclear” if Khudoyberdiyev himself has joined al Qaeda, a senior US intelligence official told The Long War Journal.

OK, I just read this and I’m really busy so I’m just gonna write this out stream of consciousness style… I’ve been studying the history of conflict and politics surrounding Mahmud Khudoberdiev for about five years now. I focused on the man as much as could be allowed by the secondary sources until I went to Tajikistan. I haven’t shared my research with anyone and I’ve only written about him publicly twice. Once at Registan under a pseudonym and just recently here when I saw him in the airport in Dushanbe.

The above info relayed to LWJ is comically false. He is dead. D-E-A-D. He has been so since 2001 when Nezavisimaia Gazeta reported that Col. Sergei Zvarygin put a bullet in his head in Uzbekistan. Not a peep from the man since, which is not surprising as bullets in your head reduces your ability to speak according to 9 out of 10 head-shot specialists.

I know, I know. The government of Tajikistan put out an interpol arrest warrant for him. I think that has to do with the usual UZ-TAJ wrangling that covers all sorts of bitter personal and political disagreements that at times descend into ludicrous mutual accusations of perfidy. The best I can guess is that the government in Tajikistan either started believing the rumors or they just want to create a bargaining card. Sure, it’s possible that his death was faked or that the reports of his death are false. But really, he has not been heard of since then. Except for those ridiculous rumors that put him in charge of the Andijon massacre. And sorry, I lived in his hometown. They haven’t heard from him. His family is still there. So Mahmud-Aka, call home.

And (sarcasm warning) I’m pretty shaken that I lived in an Al Qaeda hotbed without knowing it. I mean really, his men joined AQ? Bugger me! I’m starting to think that all those local cab drivers that passed on blind corners were actually AQ operatives trying to kill me by suicide taxi (end sarcasm). Anyways, his men were Lakay/Loqay loyalists. They fought against the Islamists. They did not join AQ or the IMU. Nobody who fought as an ally of the Popular Front went on to join the IMU or AQ or the Taliban or anything. A few guys from the UTO did, yes. Those would be the enemies of Khudoberdiev. But some guys who supposedly lived as guests of the government of Uzbekistan since 1998 suddenly decided to join Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan?

Anyways, did you know that Khudoberdiev was an Afgantsy? That means he is a Soviet veteran of the Soviet-Afghan War. And he was an officer. So, he was politically correct, as they say. Anyways, some back ground from my longer Registan article:

After serving in Afghanistan as an officer, and significantly as a Central Asian nationality, Khudoberdiev returned to the Tajik SSR to wind down his career in the Turkistan Military District and later to an office as the Deputy Military Commander of the Qurghonteppa Oblast. But after independence the Tajik Civil War reached Qurghonteppa and Khudoberdiev was drawn in to the conflict. It is at this point that ethnicity, or the uncertainty thereof, becomes important. During the Soviet era the communists created kolkhozes (collective farms) that were quite often based on ethnicity or a local solidarity group, also known as an avlod. In Qurghonteppa, many collective farms were comprised of Gharmi Tajiks who had been deported there from their home region east of Dushanbe. Intentionally or not, these collective farms were put into competition for resources with ethnic Uzbek and Uzbek-Lakay (sic) farms. Additionally, ethnic Lakay from the area were sent out of their home region. Amazingly, there was even a Lakay revolt in the 1960s that was resolved with both force and concessions by the Soviets. In the 1990s both sides took the opportunity provided by civil war to attack each other, with local Gharmis siding with the United Tajik Opposition and Uzbeks/Lakays siding with the Popular Front.

Khudoberdiev is often identified as an Uzbek and his thrashing of the UTO forces in Qurghonteppa is noted. But is he really an Uzbek? He was actually an ethnic Lakay, an Uzbek-speaking group that, for many of its members, maintains a separate identity (in the last census about 1% of the population of Tajikistan claimed to be Lakay). “Uzbek” or not, what is significant is that he became to be viewed as a protector of ethnic Uzbeks in the Qurghonteppa region. His involvement began when he rounded up several tanks and formed a mobile armoured unit. One account relates that the UTO attempted to recruit him, and when he tried to maintain neutrality his house was burned and his relatives massacred (I call this the “Braveheart” version).

By late 1992 the Uzbek population in Qurghonteppa was granted autonomy. However, as part of the power consolidation process, the Kulobis who dominated the Popular Front turned on their allies and attempted to disarm the Lakays and Uzbeks in Qurghonteppa. A new region, Khatlon, was created with Qurghonteppe as a part of it in order to lessen the Uzbek/Lakay influence. In response, Khudoberdiev faced off with/rebelled against the Kulobi-dominated government several times before taking refuge in Uzbekistan, a country whose government gave him significant support. Not content to retire in Uzbekistan, Khudoberdiev mounted an invasion of the northern Sughd region in 1998. This time the government called on their former UTO enemies for support and a combined force repelled Khudoberdiev back into Uzbekistan. Of course Uzbekistan denied any involvement, as if a mobile armoured infantry unit can just hang out in Uzbekistan without the government noticing.

Anyways, if you want to make a wanted poster of the man, no worries. I’ve got that covered. I photographed his poster in Tajikistan (the translation is nothing interesting):

It’s dead. But some people refused to accept it. The idea, discarded after the Rumsfeldian use of militias “went South,” was again dug up in late 2007. But one year ago many people pieced together the obvious fact that it was still dead. The consolation at the time for advocates seems to have been the Pashtun Tribal Militia “Hazaras with guns” in one district in Wardak. Weak soup, for sure.

Every time I hear the idea brought up I would just shrug, sure that it would go nowhere. But in the last couple of days two prominent publications have been talking about…yeah, tribal militias. First up, from WaPo:

While military officers wait for President Obama to conclude his agonizingly slow review of Afghanistan policy, they’ve been reading a paper by an Army Special Forces operative arguing that the only hope for success in that country is to work with tribal leaders.

This tribal approach has widespread support, in principle. The problem is that, in practice, the United States has often moved in the opposite direction in recent years. Rather than supporting tribal leaders, American policies have sometimes had the effect of undermining their ability to stand up to the Taliban.

The paper by Maj. Jim Gant, “One Tribe at a Time,” has been spinning around the Internet for a month. It contends that in an Afghanistan that has never had a strong central government, “nothing else will work” than a decentralized, bottom-up approach. “We must support the tribal system because it is the single, unchanging political, social and cultural reality in Afghan society,” he insists.

Funny thing, anthropologists and area studies scholars are in universal disagreement with that last sentence. The idea of some primordialist tribal society – with political, social and cultural significance – that has gone unchanged will get you laughed out of any grad level seminar on ethnicity, nationalism, identity, etc… And I’m am not taking about some crack head post-modernists, just in case you think his is where I’m heading.

The article in WaPo continues:

But will this tribal strategy work? The United States thought so in 2003 and 2004, when Gant and many others were sent out with small teams to chase al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents. Back then, I’m told, the Special Forces teams had more than 5,000 tribal fighters under arms.

But U.S. officials began to worry that by arming the tribes, they were encouraging Afghanistan’s old curse of warlordism. So after Hamid Karzai’s election as president in 2004, they focused instead on developing Afghanistan’s national army and police. They persuaded the Tajik tribal militia known as the Northern Alliance, a key ally against al-Qaeda, to lay down its weapons.

“Tajik tribal militia”? Seriously? I’m at a loss for words. Actually, I’m not. It’s just appallingly clear that many people have no idea how to use “tribe” and “tribal” in a correct or even consistent manner. But that’s beside the point.

A couple of days ago there was a rather sensationalist article in the NYT. Wherein it was written:

American and Afghan officials have begun helping a number of anti-Taliban militias that have independently taken up arms against insurgents in several parts of Afghanistan, prompting hopes of a large-scale tribal rebellion against the Taliban.

The emergence of the militias, which took some leaders in Kabul by surprise, has so encouraged the American and Afghan officials that they are planning to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

The American and Afghan officials say they are hoping the plan, called the Community Defense Initiative, will bring together thousands of gunmen to protect their neighborhoods from Taliban insurgents. Already there are hundreds of Afghans who are acting on their own against the Taliban, officials say.

Well, hooray for the NYT running US military PAO gibberish. They also relay Afghan government propaganda:

“What we are talking about is a local, spontaneous and indigenous response to the Taliban,” said Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister. “The Afghans are saying, ‘We are willing and determined and capable to defend our country; just give us the resources.’ ”

“Victory is at hand! Just give us some money and some goodies.” Yeah right.

It continues:

In the Pashtun-dominated areas of the south and east, the anti-Taliban militias are being led by elders from local tribes. The Pashtun militias represent a reassertion of the country’s age-old tribal system, which binds villages and regions under the leadership of groups of elders.

The tribal networks have been alternately decimated and co-opted by Taliban insurgents. Local tribal leaders, while still powerful, cannot count on the allegiance of all of their tribes’ members.

OK, “decimated” and “co-opted”…..but “still powerful.” That makes perfect sense in the not-at-all sense. And funny thing that the NYT drinks the same primordialist kool-aid that WaPo does. Seriously, go out and try to find the “tribal leadership.” You will find that there is no clear, stable leadership. Things are in flux, and always have been. Especially since 1979. You will end up with a bunch of squabbling locals trying to call in air strikes on their rivals. Anyways, the article was savaged over at Free Range International [where you will also find that there is some serious disagreement over which local leader to go with].

The NYT goes on:

…Kunduz. In that city, several armed groups, led by ethnic Uzbek commanders as well as Pashtuns, are confronting the Taliban.

“In Kunduz, after they defeated the Taliban in their villages, they became the power and they took money and taxes from the people,” Mr. Atmar, the interior minister, said. “This is not legal, and this is warlordism.”

Colonel Kolenda said, “In the long run, that is destabilizing.”

Really? They were interested in more than just valiantly defending their communities? I’m so shocked.

Also, in the Guardian:

US special forces are supporting anti-Taliban militias in at least 14 areas of Afghanistan as part of a secretive programme that experts warn could fuel long-term instability in the country. The Community Defence Initiative (CDI) is enthusiastically backed by Stanley McChrystal, the US general commanding Nato forces in Afghanistan, but details about the programme have been held back from non-US alliance members who are likely to strongly protest. [...]

The US has shared few details of its plans with its allies. The programme is controlled by a newly created special forces group that reports directly to McChrystal as head of US forces in the country, but which sits outside the authority of the International Security Assistance Force, the Nato mission in Afghanistan.

As per the details, who knows. It’s the Guardian. But anyways, the CDI exists. And a “special forces group that reports directly to McChrystal”? Sounds familiar.

Back to the paper written by Major Gant, I won’t spend much time on it as I’m satisfied with Judah Grunstein’s criticisms over at the Small Wars Journal. I agree with what he says. All I want to add is that I’m astonished that SF participated in putting the nail in the coffin of some state-supported localized human cleansing:

The highland people had taken and were using some land that belonged to the lowland people. The Malik told me the land had been given to his tribe by the “King Of Afghanistan” many, many years ago and that he would show me the papers. I told him he didn’t need to show me any papers. His word was enough.

I made the decision to support him. “Malik, I am with you. My men and I will go with you and speak with the highlanders again. If they do not turn the land back over to you, we will fight with you against them.” With that, a relationship was born. [...]

Without going into further detail, suffice it to say that the dispute with the highlanders was resolved.

Well, congratulations! You have just participated in ethnic/sectarian/tribal cleansing! But hey, if Zahir Shah’s uncles saw fit in the 1950s to give your friends other people’s land, then fair game: “pack up your belongings and run to the hills, run for your lives! We have a piece of paper that says so (plus the ability of our American SF friends to rain down punishment from above). And yes, you may take your women with you. We’re in a charitable mood today.”

It’s also nice to know that SF were given the freedom to decide on their own whether or not to engage in ethnic cleansing without having to consult those REMF pansies at Bagram or CENTCOM [that's sarcasm]. If I was in that group of “displaced” Kohistanis, whoever the hell they were (Safis? Pashai speakers?), I would join the Taliban or Hizb post-haste. I bet their young men are killing Americans right now. Brilliant, just brilliant. Your strategy for pushing your buddy’s local rivals into the insurgency was flawless!

But please don’t let this anecdote draw away attention from how bad Gant’s paper is when considered in its entirety. The blind embedded, hyper-localized “adopted son” mentality he shows should be a warning to all. Anthropologists do their best to not “join the tribe.” So should soldiers. No bonus points for serving and protecting your country, sorry.

So why do these ideas go nowhere? Why has a broader tribal strategy been consistently rejected? Because the military leadership has made inquiries on the subject. The result? One of the more recent answers:

‘My Cousin’s Enemy is My Friend: A Study of Pashtun “Tribes” in Afghanistan’, Afghanistan Research Reachback Center White Paper. TRADOC G2 Human Terrain System. United States Army. Fort Leavenworth, KS. September 2009. Download PDF.

Anyways, I didn’t leak this. Captain’s Journal dug it up from scribd a couple of weeks ago. And it says “Unclassified.” So I’m OK.

For every amateurish pontification on the power of the “tribes” and their potential for routing the Taliban, there is a pro-level smack down. Doubt the source above? Perhaps you’ve got some great ideas based on the folks in the hills out east? Check this out:

Susanne Schmeidl and Masood Karokhail. 2009. ‘The Role of Non-State Actors in ‘Community-based Policing’: An Exploration of the Arbakai (Tribal Police) in South-Eastern Afghanistan’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 30, No. 2.

From the abstract:

…the community-based policing structure in south-eastern Afghanistan (arbakai) is explored in this article. We conclude that it is important to understand the context-specificity of ANSA before promoting overarching policies such as advocating a transferability of the arbakai outside their unique cultural and regional context. We also caution against the use ANSA beyond their capacities, such as for counter-insurgency purposes…

Email me if you want a copy for collaborative research purposes as per copyright warning *giggle*.

Can’t stop mumbling ”Al Anbar… Awakening….. Sons of whatever…”? Read this:

Carter Malkasian and Jerry Meyerle. 2009.  ‘How is Afghanistan Different from Al Anbar?’, CNA Report. February 2009. PDF.

But again, you should really read the report from Ft. Leavenworth (Download PDF).

It’s desperation time. Will a policy that was rejected last year rise from the dead? Or will someone buy the snake oil and start trotting out the tribal militia strategy at a national level under a disguised non-tribal name in all of its Weekend at Bernie’s glory? Maybe: the tribal militia strategy is dead, long live the tribal militia strategy. And all hail its court vizier, the Community Defense Initiative!

posted November 17, 2009 10:56 am

www.tomdispatch.com

It’s now a commonplace of the Afghan War. Western leaders in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington, as well as on flying visits to Kabul or even Kandahar, excoriate Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the “corruption” of his government. In return for their ongoing support, they repeatedly demand that he take significant action to “step up efforts to root out crime and corruption,” that he, in fact, “arrest and prosecute corrupt officials.”

Can there be any question that there is a plethora of corrupt officials to arrest? The president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, reportedly on the CIA payroll, is also, as it’s politely put in the press, a “suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade.” Ahmad Rateb Popal, the president’s cousin and another figure long linked to the drug trade, runs a local security company protecting American supply convoys that, according to Aram Roston of the Nation magazine, is involved in an industry-wide protection scam, using American Army money to pay off the Taliban not to attack. In addition, American arms and ammunition are clearly ending up in Taliban hands. The recent presidential election was a spectacle of fraud; the Afghan Army, despite years of training, may hardly exist (as Ann Jones reported for this site in September); the ill-paid, ill-trained Afghan police are known to operate on the principle of corruption; and a surprisingly small percentage of foreign reconstruction funds actually makes it out of the pockets of big private contractors and western specialists, as well as security firms, and into Afghan hands.

And then, of course, there’s Kabul’s “Obama market.” (In the period when the Soviets ruled Kabul, it was the “Brezhnev market” in honor of the Russian leader, and decades later the “Bush market.”) This “notorious bazaar” is “full of chow and supplies bought or stolen from the vast U.S. military bases,” according to Jay Price of the McClatchy newspapers, who calls the name “a modest counterweight to [Obama's] Nobel Peace Prize.” His description includes the following: “One shop offered an expensive military-issue sleeping bag, tactical goggles like those used by U.S. troops and a stack of plastic footlockers, including one stenciled ‘Campbell G Co. 10th Mtn Div.’ Another had a sophisticated ‘red-dot’ optical rifle sight of a kind often used by soldiers and contractors.”

In other words, from the American, European, and Japanese reconstruction boondoggle to the presidential palace, from the U.S. and Afghan military to street-level, the country is a klepto-state. As number 179, it misses by only one place taking the rock-bottom spot in Transparency International’s latest global corruption index. Of course, what else could be expected in a situation in which the nation’s main source of funds is either narcotics — the country now accounts for a staggering 92% of global opium production — or foreign aid? To demand that President Karzai takes “steps” to “root out crime and corruption” is, under the circumstances, an absurdity, no matter how many special task forces to investigate graft he forms under Western pressure. It’s like asking him — to mix metaphors — either to put a gun to his head or drink the sea. Consider it a measure of Afghan realities today that you can hardly read a piece about the country in the Western press without the word “corruption” lurking somewhere in it, and yet the reporting on how that system of corruption actually works has generally been thin indeed.

Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee, just back from Kabul and author of Halliburton’s Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War, offers a rare, eye-opening inside look at how the system of nepotism and corruption — involving the country’s old “warlords” from the days of the post-Soviet civil war and its new corporate “reconstruction” raiders — actually works. Make no mistake, this is not a system amenable to “reform.” Tom

Paying Off the Warlords

Anatomy of an Afghan Culture of Corruption
By Pratap ChatterjeeKabul, Afghanistan — Every morning, dozens of trucks laden with diesel from Turkmenistan lumber out of the northern Afghan border town of Hairaton on a two-day trek across the Hindu Kush down to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. Among the dozens of businesses dispatching these trucks are two extremely well connected companies — Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid — that helped to swell the election coffers of President Hamid Karzai as well as the family business of his running mate, the country’s new vice president, warlord Mohammed Qasim Fahim.

Some of the trucks are on their way to two power stations in the northern part of the capital: a recently refurbished, if inefficient, plant that has served Kabul for a little more than a quarter of a century, and a brand new facility scheduled for completion next year and built with money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Afghan political analysts observe that Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid are striking examples of the multimillion-dollar business conglomerates, financed by American as well as Afghan tax dollars and connected to powerful political figures, that have, since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, emerged as part of a pervasive culture of corruption here. Nasrullah Stanikzai, a professor of law and political science at Kabul University, says of the companies in the pocket of the vice-president: “Everybody knows who is Ghazanfar. Everybody knows who is Zahid Walid. The [government elite] directly or indirectly have companies, licenses, and sign contracts. But corruption is not confined just to the Afghans. The international community bears a share of this blame.”

Indeed, the tale of the “reconstruction” of Kabul’s electricity supply is a classic story of how foreign aid has often served to line the pockets of both international contractors from the donor countries and the local political elite. Unfortunately, these aid-financed projects also generally fail — as the Kabul diesel plants appear destined to — because of a lack of planning and the hard cash to keep them operating.

The Rise of a Power Broker

Abdul Hasin and his brother, the vice-president, offer a perfect exemplar of the new business elite. The two men are half-brothers, born to the two wives of a well-respected religious cleric from the village of Marz in the Panjshir valley north of Kabul.

In the early 1980s, Fahim, the older brother, joined the mujahedeen forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud in the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In 1992, three years after the Soviet army withdrew in defeat, Fahim was appointed head of intelligence in Afghanistan by the new president Burhanuddin Rabbani in the midst of a fierce and destructive civil war among the victors. When the Taliban took control of the country a few years later, Fahim became the intelligence chief for the Northern Alliance, also led by Massoud, which controlled less than a third of the country. On September 9, 2001, two days before the World Trade Center was attacked, Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda operatives and Fahim took control of the Northern Alliance, which the U.S. would soon finance and support in its “invasion” of Afghanistan.

A number of popular accounts of that invasion, such as Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War, suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency directly gave Northern Alliance warlords like Fahim millions of dollars in cold, hard cash to help fight the Taliban in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. “I can take Kabul, I can take Kunduz if you break the [Taliban front] line for me. My guys are ready,” Woodward quotes Fahim telling a CIA agent named Gary after pocketing a million dollars in $100 bills.

Once the Taliban was defeated, Fahim was invited to become vice president in the transitional government led by Hamid Karzai, a position he held for two years. It was at this juncture that Fahim’s brothers, notably Abdul Hasin, started to build a business empire — and not long after, good fortune began to rain down on the family in the form of lucrative “reconstruction” contracts.

In January 2002, while Fahim took whirlwind tours of Washington and London, meeting General Tommy Franks, who had commanded U.S. forces during the invasion, and taking the salute from the Coldstream Guards, his younger brother was putting together a business plan. Soon thereafter, Zahid Walid, a company named after Abdul Hasin’s older sons, not so surprisingly won a series of lucrative contracts to pour concrete for a NATO base as well as portions of the U.S. embassy being rebuilt in Kabul and that city’s airport, which was in a state of disrepair.

On a plot of land in downtown Kabul reportedly “seized” for a song by Fahim, Abdul Hasin also financed the construction of a high-rise building dubbed “Goldpoint,” which now houses dozens of jewelry shops. Soon, the company was importing Russian gas, and not long after that, Abdul Hasin set up the Gas Group, a company which ran a plant in the industrial suburb of Tarakhil that marketed bottled gas to households and small businesses.

In the winter of 2006, Zahid Walid won a $12 million dollar contract from the Afghan ministry of energy and water to supply fuel to the old diesel plant in northwest Kabul, according to data published on the website of the government’s central procurement agency, Afghanistan Reconstruction and Development Services. In the summer of 2007, the company won another $40 million diesel-supply contract, and last winter it took on a third contract worth $22 million.

On October 19th, I visited Zahid Walid’s heavily guarded headquarters in the wealthy Kabul neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, not far from the even more heavily fortified U.S. embassy. There, Ramin Seddiqui, the managing director of the company’s diesel-import business, filled me in on another exclusive contract the company had secured from the Afghan government only days before for an additional $17 million. Zahid Walid is now to supply diesel fuel to the new 100 megawatt diesel power plant being built by Black & Veatch, a Kansas construction company, with money from USAID.

Most senior Afghan government officials and political figures are loath to discuss how Zahid Walid has won all these contracts — at least publicly. On a recent visit to the Ministry of Commerce, I asked Noor Mohammed Wafa, the general director of oil products and liquid gas, about them. He promptly claimed that he had never even heard of the company. He then shot a glance at my Afghan assistant and said in Dari: “That’s Marshal Fahim’s company, isn’t it?” When I asked whether the rules were different for powerful political figures — as everyone in Kabul knows is the case — Wafa politely denied any suggestion of favoritism in the awarding of import licenses.

In fact, dozens of people assured me in private on my most recent visit to Kabul that favoritism and corruption are the essence of the Karzai government the U.S. has helped “reconstruct” over the last eight years.

A White Elephant Power Plant in Kabul

While Zahid Walid has won close to $100 million in diesel contracts from the Afghan government in these years, there is hard evidence that the money for this once-needed fuel is now essentially being squandered. Earlier this year, KEC, an Indian company, completed the first of two high voltage power lines from neighboring Central Asian countries that will bring cheap and reliable electricity into the capital.

The initial 220 kilovolt power line from Uzbekistan — a $35 million project — follows the same path as Zahid Walid’s diesel trucks over the Hindu Kush. The comparison, however, ends there. True, the Indian engineers who constructed it had to survive the brutal snows in the Salang pass, but they are now done. On the other hand, the truckers continue to take the treacherous daily drive through the tunnel that connects northern Afghanistan to the south, bringing Turkmen diesel to Kabul at 22 cents a kilowatt hour. Meanwhile, the Uzbek electricity, traveling effortlessly through KEC’s transmission lines, costs the Afghan taxpayer a mere six cents a kilowatt hour.

To add insult to injury, much of the diesel is meant for the USAID power plant at Tarakhil that has become a symbol of the sort of massive and widespread reconstruction waste and abuse that has gone on in this country for years. The plant, built by Black & Veatch, is now projected to cost $300 million, three times the price of similar plants in neighboring Pakistan. In addition, it will only be capable of supplying one-third of the power the Uzbek power line can deliver far less expensively. Nor will the Uzbek line be the only source of cheap electricity. KEC’s engineers have broken ground on a second power line — this one from Tajikistan — that will supply 300 megawatts of electricity to Kabul, three times what the Tarakhil plant will produce at a bargain basement construction cost of $28 million.

“At full capacity, we burn 600,000 liters a day,” Jack Currie, the Scottish manager of the Tarakhil plant told me as I toured it in late October. “And just how much will that cost the Afghan taxpayer?” I asked. “Well,” replied Currie, “you can assume a dollar a liter of diesel.” I quickly calculated and arrived at an annual total of $219 million per year, not including the plant’s maintenance costs (estimated at another $60 million a year). Currie looked astonished when I mentioned the figure.

I took these numbers to Mohammed Khan, a member of the Afghan parliament and chair of its energy committee. “Will you approve the funds for this diesel power plant?” I asked. The soft-spoken Khan, a trained electrical engineer who worked for many years in the Kabul Electricity Department, answered simply: “No. Not unless we have an emergency.”

So why build a power plant that, in terms of kilowatt hours made available, costs 26 times as much as the Indian-built power line? Anwar-ul-Haq Ahadi, Afghan’s former finance minister, recalls the process. The idea, he says, originally came from then-U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann, who dreamed it up in April 2007 shortly before he left the country. He apparently envisioned it as a strategic alternative to the Uzbek power line. After all, at that time the repressive Uzbek regime had denied Washington the use of what was seen as a key military base in Central Asia, Karshi-Khanabad, and so functionally kicked U.S. troops out of the country. Naturally, then, it was also seen as an unreliable political partner for the U.S.-backed regime of Hamid Karzai.

Following up, USAID officials told the Karzai government that they could build a diesel plant in Kabul in just over two years for $120 million. It would, the ambassador indicated, be functional just in time for the 2009 elections, allowing Karzai to claim that he had provided power to the electricity-starved capital. The Afghan president readily agreed to the plan, instructing anxious officials at the ministry of finance to approve the scheme in early 2007. He even agreed to put $20 million of Afghan funds into the project — after being assured that the U.S. would pay for the rest.

Over the next two years, while Indian engineers raced the Americans to provide power to Kabul (ultimately winning handily), the ministry of energy and water was having a hard time keeping the lights on during Kabul’s harsh winters. And while the city waited for these promised sources of power to come on line, the new political-business elite, with its specially set up companies like Zahid Walid, was winning government-issued contracts to supply diesel to the old Kabul power plant — and making money hand over fist.

Zahid Walid was hardly the only politically well-connected business to clean up: Ghazanfar, a company from Mazar-i-Sharif, also won $17 million in diesel-supply contracts in the winter of 2006-2007, and then an astonishing $78 million in new contracts for 2008-early 2009. Not surprisingly, Ghazanfar turns out to be run by a family that is very close to President Karzai. (One sister, Hosn Banu Ghazanfar, is the women’s minister and a brother is a member of parliament.)

In March 2009, the Ghazanfars opened a new bank in the capital, plastering the city with giant billboard advertisements featuring a cascade of gold coins. Less than six months later, the bank wrote out a two million dollar interest-free loan to Karzai for his election campaign, paying back the favors his government had done for them over the previous three years.

Afghanistan as a Patronage Machine

This week, Mohammed Qasim Fahim will be sworn in as the next vice-president of the new government of Afghanistan. Under an agreement with USAID, this new government is required to spend Afghan money to buy yet more diesel for the Tarakhil power plant, which in turn will put money exclusively and directly into the vice president’s brother’s pocket.

Hamid Jalil, the aid coordinator for the Ministry of Finance, points out that wasting money on unnecessary projects like Tarakhil has helped to hobble Afghanistan’s progress in the last eight years. “The donor projects undermine the legitimacy of the government and do not allow us to build capacity,” he says, adding in the weary tone you often hear in Kabul today, “corruption is everywhere in post-conflict countries like ours.”

Former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani summed up the whole profitably corrupt system that has run Afghanistan into a cul-de-sac this way. “It’s not crazy, it’s absurd,” he says. “Crazy is when you don’t know what you’re doing. Absurd is when you don’t provide a sense of ownership and a sense of sustainability.”

Pratap Chatterjee is an investigative journalist and senior editor at CorpWatch. He is the author of Halliburton’s Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War (Nation Books, 2009) and Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004).

Dr Ali Safi contributed research and reporting for this article. A video story by Chatterjee related to this one can be seen at Britain’s Channel 4 News

[Note: The cartoon illustration in this piece, which can be enlarged with the click of a mouse, comes from Josh Brown's ongoing weekly series "Life During Wartime."]

Copyright 2009 Pratap Chatterjee

I was in a shared taxi in southern Tajikistan when I saw a billboard with an unfamiliar face on it. I squinted at the modified Cyrillic and caught the name. The name was very familiar.

I wanted to get out and take a picture. But…there are some people who don’t appreciate him. Some see him as a monster. As a war criminal. However, there are  those who see him as a savior, a hero.

The last thing I wanted to do was ask the taxi driver to stop in front of a mural of a man who may have killed his relatives. Of course, alternately the taxi driver might be quite fond of the man on the billboard.

So…the man defended his home turf and the fighters from down the road never made it into his area of control. But where did he get the bad side of his reputation from? Not from being a strong defender.

I haven’t done my field interviews with the relevant people yet and I’m in the process of translating some sources. So the best I can do right now is piece it together from secondary sources (no, not TIME mag). My adviser wrote:

In mid-June 1992 he was in charge of a 10-strong self defence unit of a sovkhoz near Qurghonteppa. His 65-year old father was arrested by the opposition at the city bazaar. Saidov immediately took 40 Gharmi peasants hostage and entered negotiations concerning his father’s release, which he was ultimately promised. Having set the hostages free, he discovered his father’s burnt and savagely mutilated corpse two days later. Saidov gathered his male family members, classmates and co-workers, and went to Kulob, where the now 200-strong formation was provided with arms.

What is clear is that for the next year or so the man cut a wide swath not only through his enemy, but through the population that he saw as supporting them.

But one day, the top commander of the front this man was aligned with came to pay him a visit. They disagreed on something and, like the tough guys they were, dispatched each other, taking a few of their bodyguards with them.

And that’s that.

However, if you are looking for some people with official hero status then you are in luck. Because down the road in KT is this helpful billboard:

At the top it reads “Qahramononi Tojikiston” or “Qahramanan-i Tajikistan” [Heroes of Tajikistan]. It says the same thing under the 2 guys on the left and the 3 on the right: “by declaration of the President these guys are heroes and whatnot, etc…” Under the distinguished looking gentleman left over…well, that’s the President. He gave in to the insistence of the legislature that they be allowed to declare him as a hero of Tajikistan.

There are so many in Afghanistan. My personal favorite is the one that involves trained tigers being dropped from American planes into villages to eat the people:

“We heard that foreigners are releasing them at night from planes to eat people. We heard that usually the tiger cats attack the throat and drink all the blood,” said Mohammed Saber, also from Saidkhail.

Air delivery? But wouldn’t the fall kill the cats?

“They fly really low,” said Koko Gul, 20, of nearby Monara village, holding his hands a foot from the ground, “and they just drop the cats onto the ground.”

Fazul Rahim, 28, of Said- khail, said he knew a man who caught a pisho palang in a net. It had some kind of foreign stamp on its rump, he claimed.

“And some American came and he wanted to buy it for $5,000, but my friend wouldn’t sell it,” Rahim said.

He refused $5,000 for a cat?

“Yes. He said, ‘Right now, they’re paying $5,000, but maybe later they’ll pay more,’ ” Rahim recounted.

Right. OK. These people are about as nutty as some of the people in my hometown. Every country has village idiots.

But how about the rumor that maintains that the US is directly funding and supporting the Taliban? And what crazy people to think this. Seriously? I mean just because the US has given hundreds of millions to a country that supported the Taliban from 1994-2001? And just because the US continued to give money to the country whose military continues to provide support to the Taliban? And just because the US pays the Taliban? Oh, yeah. About that. Um….those payments are, like, totally indirect and stuff. Silly Afghans and your conspiracy theories! Move along…move along…nothing to see here.

How much are they getting? This Guardian article finds a source who will offer a figure:

“It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials admits. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10% of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts – hundreds of millions of dollars – consists of payments to insurgents.

Of course, this is old news. Free Range Int’l has been talking about this. Afghans and expats talk about it. This has probably been going on for years.

So the conflict is profitable. To who? To foreign contractors. To corrupt Afghan officials. To Afghan businessmen. To warlords. To insurgents. To the Taliban.

But…will the insurgents kill the goose that lays golden eggs? What if it gets to the point that there is a perverse incentive for a large percentage insurgents to want a continued foreign presence? What do I think? I don’t even know anymore. Perhaps this may just be wishful thinking. The Taliban has, in the past, reigned in the crappiest of their commanders or purged them. I think the leadership can, when the time comes, revert back to a formidable organization with a sufficient degree of control over their field commanders, even the ones that are corrupt and criminal in their motivations.

Let the conspiracy theories begin continue. In fact, I think I see a tiger right now.

The shipping firm Host Nation Trucking keeps the US military efforts alive in Afghanistan. “We supply everything the army needs to survive here. We bring them their toilet paper, their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles.”

The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: “The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money.” That is something everyone seems to agree on.

Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan American Army Services. Hanna explained the security realities quite simply: “You are paying the people in the local areas–some are warlords, some are politicians in the police force–to move your trucks through.”

The security firms don’t really protect convoys of American military goods, because they simply can’t; they need the Taliban’s cooperation.

To underline the point: One company operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister’s son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai’s cousins, for protection.

Wir übernehmen diesen Artikel, da wir es für außerordentlich wichtig halten, dass endlich Transparenz in die geradezu monströsen Machenschaften (nicht nur) im Afghanistankrieg gebracht wird. Mit jedem neuen Detail sollte klarer werden, worum es den dahinter stehenden Mächten geht und dass wir uns dagegen wehren müssen, dass es vorgeblich „auch in unserem Namen“ immer so weitergeht!

Afghanische Warlords stehen jährlich mit Hunderten von Millionen-Dollar-Margen auf NATO-Gehaltslisten

Von petrapez

Mit diesem Geld inszenieren sie unter anderem Anschläge, damit ihre privaten Milizen gemietet werden um die Sicherheit der ISAF zu gewährleisten, meldete The Asia Times unter Berufung auf einen Bericht des Zentrums für Internationale Zusammenarbeit an der New York University (NYU), der im September veröffentlicht wurde.

In diesem Bericht vom 9. September, verfasst von Jake Sherman und Victoria DiDomenico, werden einige Beispiele für die Inanspruchnahme von privaten Milizen durch diverse Kriegsherren genannt. (1),(2)

In der Provinz Uruzgan haben sowohl US-amerikanische und australische Spezialeinheiten Kontrakte mit einer 2000 Mann starken privaten Armee von Oberst Matiullah Khan abgeschlossen. Die sollen dort für die Sicherheit der NATO-Basen sorgen. Die Konvois auf der Hauptstrasse von Kandahar nach Tarin Kowt, wo mehr als 1.000 australische Soldaten im Camp Holland stationiert sind, werden von ihnen beschützt. Matiullah Khan ist jetzt Polizeichef in der Provinz Uruzgan, offenbar bekam er seine private Armee von seinem Onkel, Jan Mohammad Khan.

Khan erhält 340.000 US-Dollar pro Monat – fast 4,1 Millionen pro Jahr – dafür, dass immer zwei Konvois von Kandahar nach Tarin Kowt jeden Monat diese Strecke sicher passieren dürfen.

Die Australian Defence Force behauptet, dass Khan auch von dem afghanischen Innenministerium bezahlt wurde, um die Sicherheit auf den wichtigsten Routen der Provinz Uruzgan zu bieten. Das australische Militär lehnte es ab, australische Zahlungen an Khan zu bestätigen oder zu leugnen. Dieser Fall wurde im Detail im April 2008 von zwei Reportern, Mark Dodd und Jeremy Kelly, für The Australian berichtet.

Mike Blanchfield und Andrew Mayeda vom CanWest News Service’s berichteten im November 2007, dass das kanadische Militär eine “Allgemeine Gulalai” gemietet hatte, um die Sicherheit für eine nicht genannte Forward Operating Base zu bieten. Gulalai ist ein Kriegsherr im südlichen Afghanistan.

Die Recherchen der gleichen Journalisten ergaben, dass Oberst Haji Toorjan, ein lokaler Kriegsherr und mit dem Gouverneur von Kandahar, einem grossem Kriegsherrn, Gul Agha Sherzai, verbündet ist und engagiert wurde, um die Sicherheit für Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar-Stadt zu gewährleisten, wenn sich dort das kanadische Provinz- und Aufbau-Team befindet.

Blanchfield und Mayeda stellten fest, dass das kanadische Militär 29 Verträge im Wert von 1,14 Millionen Dollar abgeschlossen hatte mit dem Unternehmen “Sherzai”, von dem es heißt , es sei stark involviert mit dem ehemaligen Gouverneur von Kandahar, der jetzt der Gouverneur der Provinz Nangarhar ist und der Besitzer des Sicherheitsunternehmens wäre.

Die kanadischen Militärs weigerten sich zu bestätigen, ob Gul Agha Sherzai tatsächlich der Eigentümer ist.

In dem NYU Bericht steht weiterhin, dass in der Provinz Badakhshan General Nazri Mahmed, ein Kriegsherr, einen Vertrag hat, um die Sicherheit für das deutsche Aufbau-Team zu sichern. Nazri Mahmed soll “die Kontrolle über einen signifikanten Anteil an der lukrativen Opium-Industrie der Provinz haben”.

Der Bericht teilt insgesamt mit, dass die US-und NATO-Kontingente Hunderte von Millionen Dollar jährlich für Verträge mit afghanischen Sicherheits-Anbietern ausgeben, von denen sich die meisten lokalen Machthaber Menschenrechtsverletzungen schuldig gemacht haben.

Neben Ahmed Wali Karzai nennt er Hashmat Karzai, einen anderen Bruder von Präsident Karzai, und Hamid Wardak, der Sohn des Verteidigungsministers Rahim Wardak ist, alle sind mächtige Figuren, die private Sicherheitsdienst-Unternehmen kontrollieren, die Aufträge im Bereich der Sicherheit ohne Registrierung bei der Regierung bekommen haben.

Zwei anonyme Quellen der Vereinten Nationen, die in dem Bericht zitiert werden, gehen davon aus, dass 1.000 bis 1.500 nicht registrierte bewaffnete Sicherheitsgruppen eingesetzt, ausgebildet, bewaffnet und von der ISAF und “Koalitionstruppen” für Sicherheitsdienste eingesetzt wurden. Von den 120.000 individuell bewaffneten Personen sind nach Schätzungen der UN-Quellen zufolge nicht weniger als etwa 5000 Angehörige der privaten Milizen in Afghanistan.

Den meisten afghanischen Kriegsherren wird häufig vorgeworfen, dass Diebstahl und Gewalt gegen Zivilisten ohne Rechenschaftspflicht erfolgen, Hauptgrund sind die Kontrollen ihrer privaten Sicherheitsarmeen.

Sherman erinnert daran, dass während seiner Arbeit für die Vereinten Nationen im Norden Afghanistans örtliche Polizei eingestellt wurde, um ein World Food Program Lager in Badakhshan zu schützen. Nach einem Raketenangriff auf das Lager wurde durch eine Untersuchung sehr schnell die Tatsache aufgedeckt, dass die Polizei den Angriff auf die Vereinten Nationen selbst durchgeführt hatte. Damit wollten sie Druck ausüben, dass mehr Wachen gemietet werden.

Heute erschoss ein afghanischer Polizist fünf Soldaten der Allierten Truppen an einem Checkpoint. Die Opfer sind drei Grenadier Guards und zwei von der Royal Military Police. Hier handelt es sich bei dem Täter zwar nicht um einen Angehörigen der privaten Sicherheitskräfte, aber auch die afghanische Polizei wird mit Geldern der westlichen Länder ausgebildet und mit Waffen ausgerüstet. In beiden Fällen kann man davon ausgehen, dass nicht wenige dabei sind, die den westlichen Truppen gegenüber feindlich eingestellt sind. (3)

Es ist nicht bekannt, ob der Täter ein Mitglied der Taliban ist oder von den Aufständischen zu der Tat gezwungen wurde, hieß es. Der Todesschütze konnte unerkannt fliehen. Der Name des Ortes des Checkpoint wurde nicht genannt und auch nicht erwähnt, ob es sich dabei um einen britischen oder afghanischen Kontrollpunkt handelte.

Berichte über die Situation in Afghanistan zeigen, dass die Lage immer hoffnungsloser wird. Die “Aufständischen” erobern eine Provinz nach der anderen, die Warlords würden sich gegenseitig Terrain streitig machen, die Korruption blüht, Recht und Ordnung bleiben auf der Strecke. Ohne das Geld westlicher Länder könnte so mancher Kriegsherr seine expandierenden Ambitionen gar nicht durchführen.

So wird das auch bleiben, zumal mit der jüngsten Anerkennung Hamid Karzais durch die Wahlkommission seine Legitimation von vielen Afghanen bezweifelt wird und eine stabile Regierungszeit in weiter Ferne liegt.

Denn so lange die Warlords, Gebietsfürsten und Distriktgouverneure mit jährlichen Millionenbeträgen auf der Gehaltsliste der CIA und der NATO stehen, haben sie noch weniger Interesse an friedlichen Verhältnissen in der Region. Je mehr Krieg und Terror, umso besser – ansonsten würden diese hohen Einnahmen für sie wegfallen. Das Geld bekommen diese Führer dafür, dass sie private Sicherheitstruppen mieten, um die jeweiligen Basen der westlichen Alliierten sowie die Transportwege vor terroristischen Überfällen zu schützen. Diese Kuh gilt es mit allen Mitteln zu melken.

Somit ist durchaus der Beweis erbracht, dass die NATO den Krieg in Afghanistan doppelt finanziert – nicht nur die eigenen Truppen sondern auch die der Gegenseite gleich mit. Auf das der Krieg nicht zum Erliegen gebracht wird!

Welcher Provinz-Warlord könnte nicht in Versuchung kommen und lässt schnell mal ein Attentat inszenieren, dass dann immer die über die Grenze gekommenen Aufständischen waren? Seine Sicherheitskräfte brauchen schließlich Arbeit, Lohn und Brot. Ohne Gefahr gibt es kein Geld – eine einfache Rechnung und ein fataler Teufelskreis. Die Ansicht der USA, dass, wenn man den Kriegsherren kein Geld mehr für ihre Dienste zur Verfügung stellt, dann eine Eskalation der Lage erfolge, kann man unterschiedlich bewerten. So wie jetzt die Lage in Afghanistan ist, hat diese bisherige Strategie nach acht Jahren keinen Erfolg für den ISAF- Einsatz gebracht und die meisten Anschläge erst hervorgerufen.

Alle gefallenen Soldaten, einschließlich der deutschen Opfer, sowie die Toten und Verletzten der afghanischen Zivilbevölkerung oder der Hilfsorganisationen, sie alle sind gestorben in dem grausamen korrupten Machtspielen der Westmächte und den Führungskräften in Afghanistan.

Stellungnahmen der Bundesregierung, der Parteien und Medien zu dem Bericht des Zentrums für internationale Zusammenarbeit an der New York University waren bis heute in Deutschland nicht festzustellen. Nur der britische Guardian berichtete am 16.September über den Bericht der New Yorker Universität. (4)

“Nichts Neues im Westen vom Mittleren Osten” ist wie immer die Devise.

Artikel zum Thema

02.11.2009 Pakistan: Laut Polizei-Inspekteur US-Söldner, Indien, Israel und Afghanistan hinter Attentat von Peshawar
01.11.2009 Steht Blackwater hinter dem jüngsten Bombenanschlag von Peshawar?
31.10.2009 Afghanistan: Isaf sah Mord an UNO-Mitarbeitern stundenlang tatenlos zu
28.10.2009 NYT: Karzais Bruder organisiert als CIA-Agent Todesschwadronen aus altem “Taliban”-Hauptquartier
22.10.2009 Besatzungsmächte bezahlen “Taliban”: der Gespenster-Krieg entlarvt sich.
24.08.2009 CIA und Blackwater: Puzzleteile Dick Cheneys geheimer Attentats-Armee
12.10.2009 Hoher Beamter des pakistanischen ISI in Neu-Delhi tot aufgefunden
12.10.2009 Auf Schwarzmärkten in Afghanistan und Pakistan handelt man Bundeswehrpistolen
11.10.2009 Kriegsmaschinerie drückt gegen Obamas Afghanistan-Pakistan-Strategie
10.10.2009 US-Aussenministerin Hillary Clinton sucht Zusammenarbeit mit den Taliban
22.09.2009 Pakistan: US-Botschaft bewaffnete Söldnertruppe
20.09.2009 General Petraeus baut sich eigenen Geheimdienst in Afghanistan/Pakistan auf
05.08.2009 “Christlicher Kreuzfahrer” Blackwater-Chef Prince des Mordes und Waffenschmuggels in den Irak beschuldigt
05.12.2008 Fälschten Regierungsfraktionen die Unterschriften von Abgeordneten unter zurückgezogenes Söldner-Gesetz?
01.09.2008 Blackwater Preparing to Deploy Into Areas Affected by Hurricane Gustav
20.07.2008 Afghanistan: Wer waren die “ausländischen Truppen”?

Quellen:
(1) http://www.cic.nyu.edu/afghanistan/pubcost_sherman_vididom.pdf
(2) http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ31Df01.html
(3) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6499391/Five-British-soldiers-shot-dead-by-rogue-Afghanistan-policeman.html
(4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/16/nato-forces-afghan-militias

According to sources, Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership directed “a large sum of money” to Jalaluddin Haqqani to recruit 3,000 fighters for the Kabul front. However, within two months the combined affect of death and desertion left Haqqani with only 300 men.

According to Ahmed Rashid, Haqqani’s inability to personal direct the fighters on the front lines and conflicts between southern commanders and eastern troops combined to degrade this eastern Pashtun force. Personally, I find this in line with one analyst’s (I really forget who) analogy with Lebanon’s civil war militias as being supreme “defenders” of their own turf and terrible “invaders” of others. Also notable here is the Taliban leadership’s desire to take over command from a competent commander in favor of Kandaharis. But most important is Ahmed Rashid’s point that for the first time, the Taliban is suffering a crisis in recruitment and a “manpower shortage.”

Jalaludin Haqqani, with beard and turban gone wild:

Of course, you know I’m talking about 1997, right? The info above is from page 60 of Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban. Has there been a rush in the last year to find background on Haqqani? Yes, absolutely. Is there much material? Absolutely not. The old sources are littered with Massoud and Hekmatyar. As far as new and open sources, hopefully there is something in here worthwhile:

‘Loya Paktia’s insurgency: (i) the haqqani network as an autonomous entity in the taliban Universe [Thomas Ruttig] (ii) Roots of the insurgency in the Southeast [Sébastien Trives]‘ in Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field. Edited by Antonio Giustozzi. London: Hurst & Co./ New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

As I just returned from fieldwork, I’m a little behind on the reading and book ordering. The book has positive reviews from William Maley, David B. Edwards and Gilles Dorronsoro. So I should probably get on this book (in its entirety).