Peddlers in Mazar-e-Sharif, Balkh province, North Afghanistan. Concern is being expressed in Afghanistan about the country’s future after Western disengagement. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Dec 11 2014 (IPS)

The U.S./NATO International Security Assistance Force Joint Command lowered its flag for the last time in Afghanistan on Dec. 8, after 13 years. The ISAF mission officially ends on Dec. 31, and will be replaced on Jan. 1, 2015 by “Resolute Support”, a new, narrow-mandate mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan National Security Forces.

However, despite U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s recently pledged continuing assistance for years to come,here in Kabul many fear that donor interest in the country may now start waning and that Afghanistan will likely drop out of the spotlight because history has already shown that, when troops pull out of a country, funds tend to follow.

“We are very concerned about the Western financial disengagement. The country is still fragile, thus we believe that the international community should be committed over the whole ‘Transformation Decade’, spanning from 2015 to 2024, until the country is able to stand on its own,” Mir Ahmad Joyenda, a leading civil society actor and Deputy Director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), told IPS.“We are very concerned about the Western financial disengagement. The country is still fragile, thus we believe that the international community should be committed over the whole 'Transformation Decade’, spanning from 2015 to 2024, until the country is able to stand on its own” – Mir Ahmad Joyenda, Deputy Director of Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit

Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) increased more than four-fold between 2003 and 2012, but economic growth was largely driven by international investments and aid.

Since the U.S.-led military intervention of 2001, Afghanistan has been the focus of large international aid and security investments, being the world’s leading recipient of development assistance since 2007, Lydia Poole notes in Afghanistan Beyond 2014. Aid and the Transformation Decade, a briefing paper prepared for the Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) programme which provides data and analysis on humanitarian financing and related aid flows.

According to data collected by the author, “the country received 50.7 billion dollars in official development assistance (ODA) between 2002 and 2012, including 6.7 billion dollars in humanitarian assistance”, and ODA “has steadily increased from 1.1 billion dollars in 2002 to 6.2 billion in 2012.”

On Dec. 4, delegations from 59 countries and several international organisations gathered for the ‘London Conference on Afghanistan’, co-hosted by the governments of the United Kingdom and Afghanistan, to reaffirm donor humanitarian and development commitments to the war-torn country.

The London Conference served as a follow up to the Tokyo Conference on Afghanistan in 2012, where the international community pledged 16 billion dollars to support Afghanistan’s civilian development financing needs through 2015, based on an agreement known as the Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework (TMAF).

In London, the international community reaffirmed its Tokyo commitment and the vague willingness to “support, through 2017, at or near the levels of the past decade”.

However, the London Conference “produced no new pledges of increased aid, so the drop in domestic revenues to 8.7 percent of gross domestic product, down from a peak of 11.6 percent in 2011, leaves Afghanistan with a severe and growing fiscal gap”, John F. Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, remarked in a meeting at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

With the imminent withdrawal of NATO troops, the Afghan economy is already under strain, “We estimate that growth has fallen sharply to 1.5 percent in 2014 from an average of 9 percent during the previous decade”, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Managing Director of the World Bank, stated on Dec. 4 in London.

Furthermore, many indicators from the 2015 Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs Overview Report of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) show that there is still a considerable humanitarian emergency: “1.2 million children are acutely malnourished; approximately 2.2 million Afghans are considered very severely food insecure; food insecurity affects nearly 8 million people with an additional 2.4 million classified as severe, and 3.1 million are moderately food insecure.”

Despite the many risks associated with Western disengagement, Joyenda prefers to emphasise the opportunities, advocating a fundamental shift of attitude: “The international community should use this opportunity to have a rebalancing of priorities: ‘less money for security and weapons, more money for civilian cooperation and reconstruction’,” he told IPS.

Since 2011, the primary focus of international expenditure in Afghanistan has been overwhelmingly security. When international troop levels were at their peak at 132,000 in 2011, “spending on the two international military operations – the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) – reached 129 billion dollars, compared with 6.8 billion dollars in ODA, of which 768 million dollars was humanitarian assistance”, writes Poole.

“We also need a proper alignment of funds with the State’s economic planning,” Nargis Nehan, Executive Director and founder of Equality for Peace and Democracy, a non-governmental organisation advocating equal rights for all Afghan citizens, told IPS.

According to Nehan, “the international community made the State a less legitimate actor through the creation of parallel structures. Millions of dollars for example have been directed to development and humanitarian projects via the Provincial Reconstruction Teams”, which consisted of a mix of military, development and civilian components, conflating development/humanitarian aid with the agendas of foreign political and security actors.

“The political framework was never adequate,” Thomas Ruttig, co-director and co-founder of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network, told IPS. “Over the past few years the international community was busier – at least at the government level – with preparing the withdrawal and designing a positive narrative, rather than with the Afghans left behind.”

“Afghanistan has been a rentier-State for one hundred and fifty years, and will be dependent on external support for quite a while. In this phase we have to lighten the country’s donor dependency, we cannot just walk away. We have the political responsibility to keep to our commitments,” he noted.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

A worker for the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) of Afghanistan carries a box of votes. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS

By Giuliano Battiston
LAKSHKARGAH, Afghanistan, Jun 20 2014 (IPS)

With protests erupting Thursday over alleged voter fraud during Afghanistan’s first-ever democratic transfer of power, and presidential hopeful Abdullah Abdullah announcing his intention to boycott the electoral process, ordinary Afghans are beginning to despair that they will ever start to feel a sense of normalcy in their country, ravaged by years of civil war.

According to provisional data seven million people – roughly 60 percent of the electorate – came out to cast their votes on Saturday Jun. 14, standing as testament to the fact that scores of Afghans wish to participate in a democratic political process.

“Our country is economically very weak and [Ashraf] Ghani is the right man to solve our problems.” -- Said Faizalahq, a shopkeeper in Lashkargah, Afghanistan
Ignoring threats that the Taliban would cut off voters’ hands and fingers, millions queued at thousands of ballot boxes around the country to choose a successor for out-going President Hamid Karzai, banned by the constitution from seeking yet another mandate after 13 years in power.

The race is close, with former foreign minister and leader of the predominantly Tajik Jamiat-e-Islami Party, Abdullah Abdullah, pulling in 45 percent of the vote during the first round of elections, partly owing to his fierce and vocal opposition to the Taliban.

But Ashraf Ghani, a popular Pashtun politician who served as finance minister and chancellor of Kabul University, won many hearts in the run-up to the election due to his strong economic platform.

Some commentators believe that Abdullah’s denouncement of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), and his allegations that massive ballot box stuffing could swing the final results in Ghani’s favour, are a response to the latter’s growing popularity.

Abdullah, meanwhile, has refuted such claims, standing by his belief that over a million votes were fraudulently cast. Indeed, the Transparent Election Foundation for Afghanistan, an independent group whose 9,000 observers monitored the voting, says the IEC’s projection appears too high, adding that six million voters is a more realistic projection.

But while political wrangling has stolen the spotlight for the time being, thousands of Afghans continue to hold out hope that when the results are announced on Jul. 22, the chosen candidate can get down to the real businesses of mending the ailing country.

Economic recovery before political reform?

Hailing from the Helmand province in the ‘Pashtun belt’ of southern Afghanistan, 60-year-old Haji Mohammad Asif tells IPS he voted for Ghani in the hopes that he will “improve the economy and make the country independent from external sources.”

Asif is a member of a local tribal ‘shura’, a council comprised of 8,300 families who live in Lashkargah, capital of the Helmand Province, but whose roots are in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar, Nuristan, Laghman and Kunar.

The head of the council, 35-year-old Mohammad Asif Mohammadi, told IPS, “We collectively decided to vote for Ghani; he has skills and high education, he is honest, he was not involved in past crimes. He will bring peace to the country.”

Although they number only a few thousand, this council represents a popular current in Afghanistan, which favours Ghani’s promise of economic stability over Abdullah’s pledge to bring political security.

By way of explaining their loyalties, other Ghani supporters called IPS’ attention to the two candidates’ seemingly opposite personal histories: while Ghani was teaching economics at the Maryland-based Johns Hopkins University, Abdullah, a trained doctor, was providing medical aid to the anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters in the Panjshir Valley in north-central Afghanistan.

And in 1992, following the collapse of the pro-Soviet government headed by then-president Mohammad Najibullah, Abdullah became the spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense in the newly established Islamic State of Afghanistan, while Ghani was busy planning structural adjustment programmes at the World Bank.

“Our country is economically very weak and Ghani is the right man to solve our problems,” a shopkeeper named Said Faizalahq told IPS outside a school in Lashkargah, one of 683 makeshift polling stations that were erected across Helmand, according to the IEC.

Nearly 90 percent of Afghanistan’s state revenue comes from international donors, who have already reduced their financial support substantially, due to the partial withdrawal of foreign troops.

According to the latest forecast by the World Bank, economic growth plummeted in 2013 to an estimated 3.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) from 14.4 percent in 2012, possibly as a result of investors’ concerns about the security situation in the country.

“After a decade of strong revenue growth, domestic revenues declined to 9.5 percent of GDP in 2013, from 10.3 percent in 2012 and a peak of 11.6 percent in 2011,” the document stated. “Economic growth is projected to remain weak at 3.2 percent in 2014 due to heightened uncertainty and lower agriculture output.”

A bleak outlook, but one that Ghani has promised to rectify by consolidating the economy and utilising the country’s vast, untapped mineral resources, an asset considered to be worth up to three trillion dollars.

His five-year economic plan promises to focus on agriculture, the construction of a railway network, a reduction in taxes and a pledge to boost the country’s local carpet industry.

Abdullah, meanwhile, appeals to those voters who wish to see Afghanistan’s main opposition groups (AOGs) defeated once and for all. He has also criticised Karzai’s administration for he calls its “accommodating approach” to the political situation, insisting that peace-talks cannot go ahead until the AOGs collectively renounce violence.

This position has won Abdullah support among those who see no future for Afghanistan – economic or otherwise – without a definitive end to militarism and violence, which the last 13 years have proved to be nothing but destructive.

“If we establish a new, accountable and effective government, we are going to bring peace to the country, because one of the main conflict-drivers is corruption and [a lack of] ccountability,” Abdul Salam Zahid, director of Radio Lashkargah, told IPS.

The only issue the candidates appear to be agreed upon is the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) that promises to keep U.S. troops in the country after 2014. Karzai’s refusal to sign the accord strained relationships between Afghanistan and the U.S. and endangered funding flows by international donors aimed at strengthening domestic security forces and propping up crucial reconstruction programmes.

Karzai’s move found favour among many Afghans who see national sovereignty as a point of pride after years of living through a foreign occupation.

Exiting a polling station on Jun. 14, 63-year-old Abdul Rah­man told IPS, “We should be able to defend ourselves without the help of foreign countries. I do not trust the Americans. This is the reason I reject the [BSA].”

But his desire for immediate independence will be frustrated, no matter the outcome of the election, as both candidates have vowed to make the signing of the BSA a priority should they be elected to office at the end of July.

(END)

Young voters in Jalalabad show off the ink on their fingers as a mark that they voted. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Apr 17 2014 (IPS)

The Afghanistan presidential election is turning out to be a tale of two narratives. The more positive and democratic one could be winning the day.

By one narrative, Afghans voted in numbers and with fairness as never before. The second is the older and possibly weakening one of corruption and threats.

For the moment, many Afghans are proud just that they voted, and that going by official figures, they did so in large numbers. Seven million voted in the presidential elections, a big jump from the 2009 turnout.“When the final results will be announced, there might be some complaints, nothing more."

The turnout was 58 percent of an estimated 12 million eligible voters, marking a 20 percent increase over the 5.6 million votes in the election in 2009.

“We’ve sent a clear message with our vote: Afghan people want radical change, it has to be positive, and it’s going to be made by ourselves,” professor of international criminal law Wahidullah Amiri tells IPS.

Amiri teaches at Nangarhar University. Founded in 1963, this is the second largest university in the country, with around 8,000 students, including 1,200 female students, enrolled in 13 faculties. The campus is spread over 160 hectares in Daroonta, a village 10 km from Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan.

The enthusiasm here over the polling, which went far better than expected, is evident: “The turnout was beyond any expectations,” Prof. Abdul Nabi Basirat, who heads the department of international relations at the political science facultym tells IPS. “The international community did not expect that, we Afghans did not expect it, and even I did not.

“It’s a landmark, showing that Afghans are taking charge of their own future, selecting the successor to [outgoing president Hamid] Karzai. We bravely confronted the Taliban threats without the help of NATO or other external players.”

The Afghan government deployed more than 350,000 soldiers and policemen to protect the vote, with the International Security Assistance Force playing only a marginal role, much smaller than in 2009. The Taliban did not manage to carry out a single large-scale assault in any major city.

“Substantially, the Taliban failed to disrupt the election process,” the dean of the political science faculty at Nangarhar University, Naqibullah Saqeb, tells IPS. “Their failure is a success for the Afghan government. Many were saying it would have been challenging, if not impossible, for the government to run the elections, due to its weakness and due to Taliban strength. We have done it.”

The Taliban movement – deeply divided over this year’s election – claimed to have carried out “nearly 1088 attacks” nationwide at “polling centres and the vehicles and convoys carrying votes, election material and ballot boxes.”

The Afghan interior minister announced the ministry had counted 690 security incidents. The figures do not match, but they still indicate that the Taliban are far from being a spent force, depicting the emergence of two different electoral narratives.

One narrative took place in Afghanistan’s cities and urban areas, which enjoy relative security and a higher turnout, and the other in the insecure rural areas, especially in the volatile south-east of the country, with very different patterns of voter participation.

Koshal Jawad belongs to one of the areas contested between the government and the Taliban. “I wanted to vote, but I couldn’t,” Jawad, a student of political science planning to present his final dissertation in two months, tells IPS.

“I live in Haska Mena [also called Dih Bala] district, bordering Pakistan. In the past 12 months it has become unsafe. We now have hundreds of Taliban there, mainly Pakistani people. They did not allow us to vote: they stopped the cars, and checked the fingers, to see if anyone had a finger dipped in ink, which shows you’d voted.”

“Nobody really knows how many voters there are, how many of them hold a voter card, or how many of the ballots cast will turn out to have really been linked to voters,” writes Martine Van Bijlert, co-director of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network.

In the more insecure areas, elections were neither transparent nor accountable, says Van Bijlert. “Alongside a robust, genuine and determined vote, there are indications of significant irregularities: old patterns of intimidation, ballot-stuffing, and ‘ghost polling stations’ in remote and insecure areas.”

The Independent Election Commission (IEC) is verifying all the ballot boxes received from about 6,400 polling centres and 20,000 polling stations across 34 provinces. The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) has registered more than 3,000 complaints, and the independent Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan has registered 10,000 cases of alleged irregularities.

“Fraud is still part of the electoral process, this is clear,” says Amiri. “But to such a limited extent in comparison to 2009 that it will not affect the overall legitimacy of the process to Afghan eyes.”

Preliminary results are expected Apr. 24, with the final result due on May 14, but many believe no candidate will win more than 50 percent of the vote. That could lead to a runoff between the two leading candidates, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, an academic and former World Bank official and former minister of finance, and Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister and a prominent leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

The first results covering 10 percent of the overall vote give Abdullah Abdullah 41.9 percent and Ashraf Ghani 37.6 percent.

Meanwhile, campaign officials have been carrying out their own counts, claiming victory for their candidates.

“It’s part of the game. Politics is competition, where one player wins and the other loses. Usually losers are not eager to admit they are losers, so everyone claims to be the winner,” Muhtarama Amin, a member of the Nangarhar provincial council, tells IPS.

“When the final results will be announced, there might be some complaints, nothing more,” she says. “We are a maturing political system: any candidate knows that massive fraud would undermine his legitimacy, leading soon to the collapse of his government.”

Local party workers on the campaign trail in Mazar-e-Sharif. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan, Apr 4 2014 (IPS)

“If Abdullah will become president, the will of [the] Afghan people will be respected. Otherwise – especially if Zalmai Rassoul will be indicated as the winner – a new conflict will start and our country will become more insecure.” The remark by Abdullah Abdullah supporter Qazi Sadullah Abu Aman is typical of the uncertainties and accusations rising as election day draws close on Saturday.

Sitting in his two-storey house in Faizabad, the largest city in the northeastern Badakhshan province, Abu Aman says only a massive fraud in favour of Rassoul, the presidential candidate backed by outgoing President Hamid Karzai, can stop former foreign minister and prominent Tajik leader Abdullah winning."The Independent Election Commission is independent only in name. It knows the ways here, but does not act.” -- Dr Anisgul Akhgar, director of the Relation & Cooperation Women Organisation

Abu Aman is one of the most authoritative figures in the province, as former head of the Provincial Peace Council, the government institution that runs the peace process with armed opposition groups, and a former member of the Afghan Upper House (Meshrano Jirga).

Abu Aman is a member of Jamiat-e-Islami, the predominately Tajik Islamist political party founded in the 1970s by Burhanuddin Rabbani. This was one of the major Afghan mujahedeen parties that fought the Soviet occupation in the eighties. He is also a candidate for election to the council of Badakhshan, one of the 34 Afghan provinces whose representatives will be elected Apr. 5, simultaneously with a new president to succeed Karzai.

“People will vote for him [Abdullah Abdullah] because he was a mujahed [religious fighter] who bravely fought the Soviets, and because he understands the problems of ordinary people. He is the right man to replace Karzai, whose government is corrupt and was unable to provide a better life for Afghans,” Abu Aman tells IPS.

Karzai, he says, has “activated the governmental machine to help Rassoul.”

Just a few hundred metres from Abu Aman’s house is the provincial office for Rassoul’s campaign. The office is headed by Basiri Khaled, a former mujahed with huge appeal.

He admits that Abdullah is a strong competitor: “He is known by everybody, kids and old men – and when you go to the bazaar you buy the product you already know. This is true. But Zalmai Rassoul has more chances to win, due to his programmes: he has promised to build schools, hospitals, roads, and to create new jobs through the mineral sector.”

In 2009, Khaled had coordinated Abdullah’s campaign; now he is running Rasoul’s. He sees no incoherence here, and says he still is a member of the Jamiat-e-Islami: “I’m a Jamiati since I was a kid,” he tells IPS. “I was a strong commander, the first to push away the Soviets from Badakhshan. I have fought together with commandant Masoud [the iconic leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, killed in September 2011, whose portraits overlook the main buildings here]. Nobody can expel me from the party.”

As evidence of the strength of his preferred candidate, Khaled says “thousands of people took part in his rally here in Faizabad.”

That may not mean much. “All candidates spend a lot of money to bring a huge number of people to their gatherings,” says Samiullah Saihwn, who works for the local radio Bayan-e-Shamal. “They gave money to the local commanders, and to community and village leaders to ensure broader participation. So it’s hard to understand who really will get the votes.”

On Mar. 31, Saihwn chaired a debate with some of the provincial council candidates. Promoted by the Badakhshan Civil Society Forum (BCSF), the debate was vibrant and frank. Many of the 250 or so people gathered at the Setara-e-Shar wedding hall in the city fired some very blunt questions.

“We had organised something similar in the earlier elections,” BCSF director Saifuddin Sais tells IPS. “But this was the first debate in town for the 2014 elections. We also have promoted debates and seminars in five rural districts, reaching more than 1,000 people and explaining to them the electoral process and their rights.”

Despite the awareness programmes by the BCSF, the gap between Faizabad and the rural areas remains huge.

“In Faizabad people somehow know their political rights, they know they can choose whoever they want, but in districts they have no information, no idea of what is going on,” says Saihwn. “They just follow what a local mullah, a commander or a power broker tells them. Ability is not a criterion.”

Dr Anisgul Akhgar, director of the Relation & Cooperation Women Organisation (RCWO), agrees. “Here in the city I perceive a great will to vote. Here anyone is free to select any of the candidates. But in rural districts local power brokers collect voter cards or indicate the people who have to be voted for.”

She fears that the election may therefore be unfair. “No effective measures have been taken to prevent fraud and rigging. The Independent Election Commission [the institution that should manage all the electoral process] is independent only in name. It knows the ways here, but does not act.”

Despite such apprehensions, Akhgar, a women’s rights activist since the days of the Taliban regime, will vote. “I will use my constitutional rights and I am encouraging all the women I know to do the same,” she tells IPS.

Zofanoon Hassam, head of the provincial Women Affairs Department, is also trying to encourage women’s participation.

“Through our awareness programmes we have spoken with more than 2,000 women. We have a registration centre here at our main office, and many women got their electoral cards here. According to our estimate, around 78,000 women in Faizabad – 44 percent of the total number – got it. We are particularly proud of this.”

The road to equal inclusion of women in politics is still long and difficult. “In many areas women are told who to vote for by their husbands. It’s a bad habits like this we are trying to dismiss. But more time is needed,” Hassam tells IPS.

Young girls prepare to sing a song in support of presidential candidate Gul Agha Sherzai in Kunduz city in North Afghanistan. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Apr 2 2014 (IPS)

Ethnicities will come to the fore in the Afghan elections due Saturday this week, even though it appears that the young are beginning to break away from such loyalties.

On Apr. 5, around 12 million voters will have the chance to elect a new president to replace President Hamid Karzai, constitutionally barred from a third mandate."What is more important is that the people – particularly the civil society – have pushed the candidates to present articulated platforms.” -- Aziz Rafiee, director of the Afghan Civil Society Forum Organisation

Officially opened on Feb. 2, the race remains open and it’s still hard to predict who will get the chair at the Arg, the presidential palace in Kabul where Karzai has been since 2001 – just after the overthrow of the Taliban regime.

The political and economic power Karzai has accumulated is likely to be inherited by his replacement – whatever the ethnicity.

Pashtuns form the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, about 40 to 60 percent, followed by Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks. Precise numbers are disputed, and ethnicities often overlap.

There are three in the lead among the eight candidates: Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, an academic and former World Bank official and former minister of finance; Abdullah Abdullah, former foreign minister and a prominent leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and Karzai’s main rival in the disputed 2009 elections; and Zalmai Rassoul, national security adviser to President Karzai for eight years and foreign minister 2010-2013. He is seen as the contender backed by the outgoing president.

Many promises are being made – reconstructing the fragile economy, relaunching the peace process with armed opposition groups, and bringing security to the war-torn country – but the contenders seem to focus above all on ethnicity.

“The candidates are relying on ethnic, linguistic, or religious affiliation, because they do not have any political source of legitimacy,” Hamidullah Zazai, managing director of Mediothek Afghanistan, an organisation promoting pluralism in the media, tells IPS.

“One contender says ‘I’m the Tajik representative, you Tajik people should vote for me’, another says ‘I’m the Pashtun representative, you Pashtun people should vote for me’. The ethnic appeal occludes what is more important: programmes, ideas, plans for our future, which are still uncertain.”

Aziz Rafiee, director of the Afghan Civil Society Forum Organisation, tells IPS “there are five important factors in the voting process: ethnicity, regional location, language, branch of religion and political affiliation. Amongst these five dividing and sometimes overlapping lines, ethnicity is still considered the most important by many voters.”

To ensure broader constituencies, candidates have drawn the political chessboard also along ethnic lines: Zalmai Rassoul, considered a weak candidate without the support of Karzai’s pervasive power system, has chosen as his running mate the Tajik Ahmad Zia Massoud, brother of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was the iconic commander of the Northern Alliance before he was killed in 2001. For second vice-president he has proposed Habiba Sarabi, a Hazara, former governor of Bamiyan province.

Rassoul does not speak Pashtu fluently and is not regarded by many Afghans as a “real Pashtun”. He enthusiastically announced the support of both Qayum Karzai, President Karzai’s elder brother (with a huge constituency in Pashtun-dominated south Afghanistan), and Nader Naeem, son of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan from 1933 until 1973.

Abdullah is a mixed Tajik and Pashtun, but he is seen as a Tajik due to his prominent role within the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. “By choosing for vice-president the Pashtun Mohammad Khan, he made an interesting choice,” Fabrizio Foschini, researcher with the Afghanistan Analysts Network, tells IPS. “Mohammad Khan is a member of the political branch of the Hezb-e-Islami party, and thanks to him Abdullah can compensate his weakness in the south-south east of the country.”

However, according to Foschini, Abdullah’s real strength is his second vice-presidential candidate, Mohammed Mohaqeq, a Hazara who could secure a large number of votes in the central areas.

Some believe that Abdullah is losing ground while Ahmadzai is gaining. “Ghani [Ahmadzai] had a stroke of genius selecting for vice-president General [Abdul Rashid] Dostum,” says Foschini. “While the Hazara and Tajik vote is highly fragmented, the Uzbek vote will go almost completely to Dostum. Prior to Ghani’s choice, nobody would ever have guessed that an Uzbek might aspire to the second chair.”

To be accepted as running mate, the Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum – a powerful northern warlord in the 1990s and founder of the Jombesh party, National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan – “was asked by Ghani to apologise for his past crimes, and this is something revolutionary,” Mir Ahmad Joyenda, former parliamentarian and now deputy director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an NGO based in Kabul, tells IPS.

Joyenda say ethnicities still play a role in the Afghan political landscape but believes that things are changing. “In the past 12 years we have seen changes, mostly in the main cities. There are people – especially the young – who are interested in voting for a candidate offering effective programmes.”

Rafiee of the Afghan Civil Society Forum Organisation agrees. “We can say that Afghans are acting more politically compared to the 2005 and 2009 elections. People will not vote 100 percent along ethnic lines. What is more important is that the people – particularly the civil society – have pushed the candidates to present articulated platforms.”

The next Afghan president will be elected mostly on the ethnic balance of the vote “but ethnic/religious walls are going to be slowly demolished,” says Zazai of Mediothek Afghanistan.

A view of Bamiyan from a surviving Buddhist cave. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Mar 16 2014 (IPS)

As Afghanistan heads for presidential elections Apr. 5, people are asking if the country’s massive legacy of human rights violations will be swept under the carpet yet again by the new government.

Civil society activists in Bamiyan city – capital of the central province by the same name where the Taliban in 2001 destroyed two ancient Buddha statues – seem particularly interested in what the presidential candidates have to say about “transitional justice”.“The past cannot be removed. It is never too late to deal with it.” -- Ali Wardak, an Afghan professor

The term refers to the set of judicial and non-judicial measures, including criminal prosecution, truth commissions and institutional reforms, which a country implements to redress past human rights abuses, according to the International Centre for Transitional Justice.

“Justice is necessary to achieve peace,” Ismail Zaki, regional coordinator of the Civil Society Human Rights Network (CSHRN), told IPS here.

“Without justice, peace is not a real, strong, stable peace. I would say that justice – which also means accountability for past crimes – is even more important than peace,” he said.

Any peace process, in order to be effective, must enable acknowledgement of past crimes, says Said Hussein Shah Hussainy, monitoring and investigating unit assistant at the local branch of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).

Both Zaki and Hussainy say it is important to revise and implement the government’s 2005 Action Plan for Peace, Reconciliation and Justice aimed at redressing past human rights abuses in Afghanistan.

Adopted by President Hamid Karzai, and supported by the international community, the Action Plan envisaged five activities, including truth-seeking, reconciliation and accountability measures.

But to date it has largely not been implemented, say researchers Niamatullah Ibrahimi and Emily Winterbotham in “Caught Between Past and Present”, a study based on interactions with the victims of three massacres in Afghanistan.

“The favoured strategy of both the Afghan government and the international community for addressing legacies of past and present human rights violations and war crimes in Afghanistan has been to sweep them under the carpet,” writes Sari Kouvo, co-founder and co-director of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network, in a paper titled “A Plan Without Action”, published in July 2012.

The international NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) had sent a questionnaire on key human rights challenges in Afghanistan to all 11 candidates in the Apr. 5 presidential race. The few who responded seemed willing to change the course on transitional justice – at least on paper. Their replies were released Feb. 9.

Abdullah Abdullah, one of the leading contenders and head of the National Coalition of Afghanistan, told HRW that “transitional justice is one of the most important discourses in our society.”

But he had a word of caution too. In order to avoid “political misuse and the strengthening of a spirit of vengeance,” he said, “it is necessary to create the appropriate cultural, moral and legal backdrop through which the discussion of transitional justice can be had.”

Apart from him, only three other candidates – Qutbuddin Helal, Daoud Sultanzoy and Qayum Karzai – chose to answer the HRW questionnaire. Later, however, Qayum Karzai, elder brother of President Hamid Karzai, dropped out of the presidential race in favour of another candidate.

Even Helal, linked to the radical, Islamist party Hezb-e-Islami, told HRW that “punishment and accountability for human rights violators is important.” He argued for prosecution “in case credible evidence exists so that they become a lesson for others.”

Civil society activists, however, worry that calls for transitional justice might exacerbate conflict if not properly handled.

“Before working on transitional justice, there needs to be a legitimate and respected government in full control of the country,” Ali Jan Fahim, a member of CSHRN in Bamiyan told IPS.

“Only then, when the warlords are no longer in power, will it be possible to work on it. If we were to do it before that, they would kill us, or at least they would create more instability,” he said.

Amir Sharif, sociology lecturer at Bamiyan University, told IPS, “Today the criminals and their supporters are in government, they have power. We should focus more on national unity.

“We will be able to discuss a special court – either national or international – only further down the road when there is a strong, functioning, central government accepted by most of the population.”

Zaki of CSHRN said, “Before dealing with the issue of transitional justice, time is required. The time is not ripe yet. We need to let the idea take shape in people’s mind. We need to work on it carefully.”

Citing internal power dynamics, a culture of impunity and the international community’s lack of will, some say that transitional justice is impracticable.

“I doubt if it will happen in future. The criminals are more powerful now than before, and those who have suffered abuse do not have any means to demand justice,” Gholam Hussein, director of the NGO Shuhada, told IPS.

Ali Wardak, an Afghan professor who teaches at the Centre for Criminology of the University of Glamorgan in Britain, holds a different view.

“The AIHRC survey, ‘A Call for Justice’, showed that the Afghan population wants justice and accountability and we know that without justice there cannot be lasting peace,” he told IPS.

“The past cannot be removed. It is never too late to deal with it.”

Afghans want justice before they see a new President in Kabul. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Jan 7 2014 (IPS)

Will we get justice? That is the question many Afghans are asking as their war-ravaged country heads for presidential polls in April. For, the list of candidates includes several warlords who have been accused of heinous crimes and who are yet to be brought to justice.

“The upcoming presidential election is crucial in determining whether Afghanistan will have a future as a rights-respecting country or whether abuses and impunity will continue,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

According to the international body, those in the presidential race include “former military and militia commanders implicated in serious rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.”“America and the international community provided power to the wrong people, to those who committed the worst crimes."

HRW posed 17 questions on the country’s most pressing human rights issues to 11 presidential candidates. The questionnaire was publicly endorsed by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) at a meeting in Kabul in December that called upon the government to implement transitional justice and hold those responsible for rights violations and war crimes accountable.

Some members of the Upper House of the Afghan Parliament have called for removing the names of war criminals from the list of presidential candidates.

According to the local news agency Pajhwok, Balqis Roshan, a woman senator from Farah province, said: “The nation’s blood is dropping from the beards and neckties of some people on the list. They should not be running.”

But many other senators fiercely opposed the proposal, and called it a conspiracy against the democratic process.

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was overthrown in 2001, and elections were held in 2004, bringing President Hamid Karzai to power. For most Afghans, however, past crimes remain a big issue.

In Afghanistan, 90 percent of the population consider themselves victims of war; they’ve suffered abuse and atrocities, either directly or indirectly. “How can we achieve peace without taking this into account?” asked Aziz Rafiee, executive director of the Afghan Civil Society Forum Organisation.

“If justice is sacrificed simply for the sake of a ceasefire, it will not be real peace. It will be a very, very fragile peace,” he told IPS.

A 2005 survey by AIHRC, based on in-depth interviews and focus groups with thousands of people, showed that 94 percent of people consider justice for past crimes either “very important” (75.9 percent) or “important” (18.5 percent).

These findings as well as those emerging from more recent opinion polls show that the majority of Afghanistan’s 30 million people not only want accountability for human rights violations and war crimes but also consider justice a necessary condition for peace.

Hundreds of people had gathered in central Kabul for a demonstration organised by the Social Association of Afghan Justice Seekers (SAAJS) to mark National Victims Day, a day after International Human Rights Day Dec. 10.

They criticised the Afghan government as well as the international community for lack of commitment to promoting accountability for past and present crimes. They cited the November 2013 Report on Preliminary Examination Activities, where the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s office found that “war crimes and crimes against humanity were and continue to be committed in Afghanistan.”

Raz Mohammad Dalili, a well-known civil society activist and director of Sanayee Development Organisation, says the cause of violence in Afghanistan is injustice, rooted in a culture of impunity and lack of ways for citizens to make their demands heard.

“If I commit a crime today and nobody stops me, how can I even consider accusing someone for past crimes? In the last 12 years, many crimes have been committed, but many of those who committed them are in power and in key positions.

“We know who they are – they are the so-called warlords, but how can we bring them to justice?”

Most Afghans believe that ignoring the cries for justice would increase the causes of insecurity, conflict and violence, he said, but very few think the government or the international community will actually live up to their expectations.

Naim Nazari, executive coordinator of the Civil Society and Human Rights Network, told IPS, “The problem is criminals have important positions in the government and in institutions. The international community did not and does not have the political will to implement a process through which to prosecute them.”

The common view here is that after the Taliban’s fall, the international community opted to seek short-term stability by backing political and military leaders with a shady past instead of promoting a genuine social reconciliation process based on people’s expectations and demands for justice.

“America and the international community provided power to the wrong people, to those who committed the worst crimes,” said Mir Ahmad Joyenda, former parliamentarian and now deputy director for communication and advocacy at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an independent research organisation based in Kabul.

“The Afghan people’s demand for justice was underestimated while the power and consensus of warlords was overestimated,” Joyenda told IPS.

“In 2003, Lakhdar Brahimi (at that time the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan) had warned that justice should not be sacrificed for peace. Today we have neither peace nor justice. The international community is guilty of having supported criminals and warlords,” he said.

A street in Jalalabad. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Dec 18 2013 (IPS)

Afghanistan’s 30 million people are deeply divided over whether President Hamid Karzai should sign the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with Washington that will allow U.S. military operations to continue in the conflict-ravaged country after NATO forces leave in 2014.

Some believe the BSA is important for stability in Afghanistan, others say it could invite further trouble from insurgents. Yet others believe signing the pact would antagonise countries like Pakistan and Iran.

“We are a weak country, militarily, economically and politically. That’s why we need the agreement. We have to make a very pragmatic choice: accept the Americans here or face a very uncertain future with no country willing to help us,” Hedayatullah Amam, a businessman in his 50s, told IPS.“Karzai is just playing a political game to present himself as a man protecting national sovereignty, but that will be over soon."

The U.S. wants to sign the pact soon as possible, but President Karzai wants to wait it out till the next presidential elections in April 2014. However, many in Afghanistan see it as mere posturing on his part.

“Karzai will sign the agreement for sure,” said Amam who was travelling in a shared taxi from capital Kabul to Jalalabad, 120 km away.

“He is just playing a political game to present himself as a man protecting national sovereignty, but that will be over soon. I predict he will approve the agreement within one month, maximum two.”

After the Taliban was dislodged from Kabul in 2001, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was mandated by the U.N, Security Council to assist the Afghan government, fight insurgency and support the growth of Afghan security forces.

The BSA – endorsed by the Loya Jirga, a consultative assembly of elders and representatives from 34 provinces – provided for the possibility of U.S. troops staying on after the ISAF mission was completed by end 2014 and using at least nine military bases, including the strategic Bagram air base outside Kabul.

“The U.S. is the strongest country in the world,” said Asadullah Larawi, regional officer at the Civil Society Development Centre. “A partnership with America would prevent our neighbours from interfering. Our government has to make them understand that the bases are not a danger to them,” he told IPS.

According to NATO, there are 84,000 international soldiers present in Afghanistan today, 60,000 of them from the U.S. If the BSA comes into place, 8,000 to 15,000 foreign soldiers could stay on after 2014.

Afghanistan’s own security forces are relatively new. Created in 2002, its army now has 200,000 personnel and its air force has around 6,800 personnel. The Afghan National Police has 50,500 personnel and the districts are manned by 24,200 local policemen.

President Karzai is facing increasing pressure after he unexpectedly decided to postpone the approval of the BSA.

On Dec. 3, at the start of a two-day NATO foreign ministerial meeting in Brussels, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen made it clear that NATO commitment would disappear without the approval of the BSA.

After National Security Advisor Susan Rice visited Kabul Nov. 25, the White House too released a statement saying, “The lack of a signed BSA would jeopardise NATO and other nations’ pledges of assistance made at the Chicago and Tokyo conferences in 2012.”

Kate Clark, researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network of Kabul, believes the U.S. message was unequivocal.

Clark wrote: “Sign soon or risk the ‘zero option’, which, according to the statement, would include no U.S. troops, no NATO troops, no ‘enabling’ of Afghan security forces and the disappearance of billions of dollars of aid – not just the salaries of the police and army but also the civilian assistance that had been pledged at Tokyo.” In July 2012, international donors pledged in Tokyo to give Afghanistan 16 billion dollars in civilian aid over four years.

But many Afghans think the BSA will corrode Afghanistan’s already fragile sovereignty.

Naqibullah ‘Saqib’, head of the political science faculty at Nangarhar University, said, “Once the agreement is approved, countries like Iran and Pakistan can easily create bigger problems than the current ones. Russia could also do so.”

The fears are not unfounded. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani recently said his country opposes the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Baz Mohammad Abid, a well-known journalist here who works for Radio Mashaal, the local branch of Radio Free Europe, says that continuing to have U.S. bases in the country will have an adverse impact.

“Whether we like it or not, the Americans will keep some bases. Despite the reluctance of President Karzai to sign, the Afghan government has already basically agreed to it.

“But the agreement will be detrimental for us because our neighbours will be extremely vexed and will try to expel the Americans from the region by arming insurgents. I believe they should not stay,” Abid told IPS.

Some point out that the presence of international troops has not stopped neighbours from interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs.

Wahidullah Danish of the Civil Society Development Centre said, “Who is to say that the American military bases will deter the neighbours? There are many foreign armies in Afghanistan today, but there is still a lot of interference,” he said.

“American military bases are unacceptable to our neighbours and to insurgents who could even launch another jihad against foreigners,” he said. “Instead of hosting American bases, we should strengthen our own army with more weapons and training.”

Sept. 29 demonstration in Kabul for missing persons. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Oct 19 2013 (IPS)

“My relatives and I tried many times, again and again, to find out what happened to my father. I searched constantly for 35 years, without success. Just a few days ago, I found out from the ‘death list’ that my father had been executed.”

Mirways Yameen is among the thousands of Afghans who gathered for condolence ceremonies in Kabul in late September to commemorate their loved ones, whose names were included on a list released Sept. 18 by the Netherlands’ national prosecutor’s office.

The list, dating from the late 1970s, was obtained by the International Crimes Unit of the Netherlands National Police in the course of a war crimes investigation of torture and killings.

It includes 4,875 names of people detained and killed in 1978 and 1979, during the first 20 months of the communist regime that came to power following the April 1978 coup d’etat organised by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, both from the Khalq (People’s) faction of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).

The list is meticulously filled out, giving names, professions, places of birth and “crimes” committed by teachers, mullahs, students, intellectuals, civil servants: people considered counter-revolutionary by the newly empowered regime. The dead are listed in chronological and alphabetical order.

“My father is number 2,419,” Yameen told IPS. “He was a teacher, accused of being a Maoist. He was living in a village in Laghman province when he was captured and thrown in a local jail. After two days, he was transferred to a prison in Kabul for two days. The third day, he was executed together with 120 other people.”

Yameen said that for the first time in his life, he had decided to take part in a protest march. Organised on Sept. 29 by social activists and victims’ relatives, it ended with a moving candlelight ceremony behind the Darul Aman, the palace built in the early 1920s by King Amanullah Khan.

“We do not belong to any political party,” said Habib Rahiab, one of the organisers of the demonstration. “We are just demanding truth and justice, as we haven’t come to terms with the death of our loved ones,” he told IPS.

“I am trying to obtain truth and justice not only for my relatives, but for all the men and women killed or disappeared over the past 35 years,” said Rahiab, a prominent lawyer who won the Human Rights Watch Annual Award for Monitoring Human Rights, in 2004.

As Kate Clark, a member of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network, pointed out, the 4,875 names listed are “only a fraction of the total number who were forcibly disappeared during this period or killed in subsequent phases of the war.”

All governments “since the 1978 coup and many armed groups have practiced torture. Most have carried out summary executions and massacres and indiscriminate bombing or indeed the deliberate targeting of civilians,” Clark said.

For Hamidullah Zazai, managing director of Mediothek Afghanistan – an Afghan-German NGO committed to peace and media pluralism – the release of the list was an important step to open up such an important issue to public debate. But it also risks justifying a “selective engagement” with the country’s bloody past, he said.

“It is definitely useful to shed light on the crimes of the communist regime, but those crimes are part of a broader picture,” Zazai told IPS. “We need to consider all the crimes and all the human rights abuses committed over the past four decades.”

“The worst perhaps happened during the period of mujahideen rule (1992-1996): the mujahideen killed and raped, destroyed the country and our national values. They should face prosecution, but there’s no political will to do that now,” he added.

Those who should answer to serious allegations of war crimes include many key figures in the government of Hamid Karzai, prominent political leaders and some of the candidates running in the Apr. 5, 2014 presidential elections.

One of them is General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a powerful northern warlord in the 1990s, the founder of the Jombesh party (National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan), and the Uzbek community’s main political figure.

The day after registering as running-mate to Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai in the presidential elections, Dostum published a letter on his Facebook page, where he apologises “to all who have suffered on both sides of the wars,” suggests a reconciliation process, and says he hopes the elections will be “a new page in our country’s politics in which war is not the solution for differences”.

Due to the cruelty of his guerrilla warfare methods during the Afghan civil war, the apology of this commander who claims to be “the initiator of a new era” has met with suspicion and pragmatism, here in Kabul. “But it is also the first small step on a path which no other Afghan leader has taken before,” writes Clark, with the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

Coupled with the recent release of the “death list”, Dostum’s apology – even if hypocritical – could be a good chance for human rights activists to put the controversial issue of how to deal with the human rights crimes of the past on the Afghan political agenda, in a country where so many were committed.

Malim Said Agha, Dagrwal Khan Agha and his sons with a picture of Asadullah killed in a NATO strike. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
SARACHA, Afghanistan , Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

The dusty cemetery in Saracha village hosts three new graves: small hills of soil shielding the bodies of Sahebullah, Wasihullah and Amanullah, three of the five boys and young men killed by an ISAF-NATO airstrike on late Friday, Oct. 4.

According to the firsts ISAF-NATO reports, the five were “enemy forces”, “insurgents”, killed with a “precision strike”. According to the white banner overlooking their graves, they are “martyrs”: innocent people killed by error.

Wasihullah and Amanullah were brothers. They used to live in a house not far from the cemetery in Saracha village in the district of Beshud at the door of Jalalabad, the main city in the eastern province of Nangarhar. Their father, Qasim Hazrat Khan, shows IPS the place where they were killed, just behind his house.“Give us the pilots of the two helicopters. We will handle them according to our culture, to the Holy Quran and to what the Hadith prescribes. Then, we will give them back to the U.S., saying ‘we are very sorry’, as they did with us.”

Amanullah was about 21 years old (civil registries here are not common), and had a wife and three daughters. Khan produces a card showing that Amanullah was working for the Afghan government forces since March this year.

His brother Wasihullah was 10 years old, a student in fifth class in Samarkheel’s high school, not far from Saracha. Friday evening they were with Sahebullah, 14, who “was an apprentice in a metalworkers shop in Jalalabad,” his brother Nader Shah, 35, told IPS.

Asadullah Delsos and Gul Nabi were the other two boys with them. Asadullah, “a 14-year-old boy, was still waiting to have his first whiskers,” said Khan. Gul Nabi “was a 15-year-old boy, whose family comes from Pachir in Khogyani district. He worked as a carpenter in Kabul, but he used to come here whenever his parents needed his help.”

Khan said the five boys were sitting in the open space behind his house “after they went hunting for birds with badì (air guns).” Around 10 pm he heard “the first of three long-lasting shooting-sequences. When it stopped, I reached the roof and saw at least two helicopters and, far from here, some planes without pilots.”

When the shooting started again, he waited inside the house until he heard someone screaming: “Brother, your kids have been killed.”

He came out and tried to reach them, he said, “but the American soldiers told me to keep away.” The bodies were carried to the main Jalalabad hospital “only at 1.40 am,” said Nader Shah. “We were able to have them back in our hands after 2.30 am.”

Early Saturday morning Asadullah’s father Dagarwal Khan Agha, a logistics officer in the city jail, received a call. He had thought his son was sleeping in his parents’ house in Saracha. “They said I had to go to the hospital. Once there, I was told my son was in the morgue.”

The elder brother of Dagarwal Khan Agha, Malim Said Agha, still cannot understand “how those young boys could be confused with insurgents. They were just kids. The Americans killed innocent people. This was confirmed by the Afghan authorities,” he told IPS.

Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, spokesperson for the governor of Nangarhar province, told IPS by phone: “The Nangarhar deputy governor, Mohammed Hanif Gardiwal, sent an envoy to Beshud, together with an envoy sent by President Hamid Karzai: their inquiry states the five boys had no links with insurgency.”

ISAF-NATO have not yet publicly admitted the airstrike was an error. Contacted by IPS, Lieutenant-Colonel Will Griffin, chief of the press desk at the headquarters of ISAF Public Affairs, said “the incident is still under investigation. It would be inappropriate to comment at this time.”

According to the victims’ families, ISAF-NATO representatives acknowledged the mistake privately. “One of the foreign commanders of the Jalalabad airfield invited me to his office on Tuesday Oct. 8. He accepted the error and apologised for it. The same happened the day after at the governor’s palace,” Khan told IPS.

The meeting on Wednesday Oct. 9 was confirmed to IPS by Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, spokesperson for the governor of Nangarhar. Former Nangarhar governor Gul Agha Sherzai (he resigned a couple of weeks ago to run for the next presidential elections), his deputy Mohammed Hanif Gardiwal, several representatives of the Afghan security forces, including Colonel Sahib Khan, head of security in Beshud district and General Abdul Rahman from Kabul, a representative of the interior ministry, took part in the meeting.

In addition there were some tribal leaders, the relatives of the five killed boys and “two foreign envoys”, whose name is not known. “The two Americans apologised, admitting they have killed innocent people,” Agha told IPS.

“In front of all the participants they said they made an error,” said Khan. Abdulzai said “the Americans offered their apology in front of the victims’ families and Nangarhar’s authorities.”

All the victims’ relatives this IPS correspondent met said they had received some offers from the “foreign envoys” as a form of ‘compensation’.

“The Americans said they would help us, now and in future,” said Agha. “They did not offer any amount of money, but when we left the palace we found some cars with sacks of food. We all agreed to refuse that offer: we are poor but we do not sell our own blood.”

“Our request is clear,” Khan told IPS. “Give us the pilots of the two helicopters. We will handle them according to our culture, to the Holy Quran and to what the Hadith prescribes. Then, we will give them back to the U.S., saying ‘we are very sorry’, as they did with us.”

“Over the past years the Americans have killed many innocent people, also children and women,” said Agha. “They just say ‘we apologise’. It’s time for them to be accountable for their wrong actions.”

Bombed-out ruins in Afghanistan. Credit: Anand Gopal/IPS

By Giuliano Battiston
HERAT, Afghanistan, Sep 10 2013 (IPS)

The threat to the stability of the Hamid Karzai government in Afghanistan arises not so much from outside as from within. And the one thing that is eating into its edifice is the malaise called corruption.

“Corruption is undermining what little legitimacy the government has left,” Qader Rahimi, head of the western branch of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, tells IPS. “The people do not trust the government. They do not believe that it works for the good of all.”

The international community, he says, has so far concentrated its fight against Al-Qaeda and terrorism. But it’s time it turned its focus on corruption, “our biggest enemy,” he adds.

The available statistics do little to counter his pessimism. According to a joint survey conducted by the Afghan High Office of Oversight and Anti-corruption (HOOAC) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), half of Afghan citizens paid a bribe in 2012 while requesting a public service.

The survey, titled Corruption in Afghanistan: Recent Patterns and Trends, was released in February. It put the total cost of such corruption at 3.9 billion dollars.

With just over a year left for the NATO-led forces to disengage with Afghanistan and bring the transition process to an end, there is serious introspection within the country over what the international community and the Afghan government have achieved since 2001, when the war against terror began. Many Afghans are still trying to figure out why they should be still in a war that is counting its 12th year and becoming more and more destructive.

According to the latest mid-year report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict released by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the country saw a 23 percent rise in the number of civilian casualties over the first six months of 2013.

And one of the factors Afghans see as fostering the conflict and encouraging anti-government mobilisation either directly or indirectly is the lack of confidence and trust in the government.

“There is an enormous communication gap between the people and the government,” says Abdul Khaliq Stanikzai, regional manager for Sanayee Development Organisation, a non-governmental body. “People do not have the mechanisms and instruments to make their voices heard and to influence government choices,” he tells IPS.

This, according to him, has created a high level of mutual distrust.

The lack of confidence in the government is only growing, due to the gap between expectations and actual achievement in terms of economic development, guaranteed rights, functioning institutions and, above all, social justice and equality.

“Initially, after the removal of the Taliban regime, people were hoping for a transparent and equal government. Now, no one expects anything from the government,” says Asif Karimi, project coordinator in Kabul for The Liaison Office, an Afghan organisation focusing on communitarian peace-building. Most people, he tells IPS, are neutral, wanting neither the government nor the Taliban.

Mirwais Ayobi, lecturer in law and political science at the University of Herat, thinks that trust in the Taliban is growing. “If you ask the Taliban to solve a dispute,” he tells IPS, “they focus on reconciliation instead of demanding money.”

He considers corruption in the political and administrative systems an enormous challenge, because it is eroding the citizens’ trust.

Afghanistan was placed third in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2012, after Somalia and North Korea.

The average size of the bribes, according to the HOOAC-UNODC survey, varies from sector to sector.

“Bribes tend to be larger in the justice sector,” it notes, “where the average bribe paid to both prosecutors and judges is more than 300 dollars.” The amounts given to local authorities and customs officials, at 200-odd dollars, are smaller. Bribes paid to other officials range from 100-150 dollars, it found.

Many consider the problem to be structural. Among them is Rahman Salahi, former head of the Herat Professionals Shura, an independent, non-political organisation in Afghanistan’s western province comprising associations of lawyers, economists, teachers, engineers and others advocating a more active engagement of the local civil society with the country’s reconstruction.

“Until a few years ago we had what was basically a socialist economic system, based on the mould left by the Soviet occupation,” Salahi tells IPS. “When the international community came, we adopted a free trade system lacking adequate institutional structures for oversight and policy guidelines.”

For Antonio Giustozzi, visiting professor at the Department of War Studies in King’s College, London, and a specialist on Afghanistan, “The quantity of aid earmarked for the country, as well as the mechanisms for its distribution and assignment, exceeded the society’s overall absorption capacity and the institutions’ capacity to manage it.”

The mismatch between the wide flood of aid and the narrow absorption capacity gave raise to corruption, says Giustozzi, something which he thinks is now “totally entrenched within the political system.”

Apart from these structural reasons, the international community too is seen to have fostered a culture of impunity in the country through the empowerment of the so-called warlords.

“International (bodies) gave political power and money to warlords, to those who have committed crimes, to those who killed thousands of innocent people, to those who are involved in the corruption system,” says Sayed Ikram Afzali, head of Advocacy and Communication for Integrity Watch Afghanistan, a civil society organisation.
“People had hoped things would change, that they would get justice and equality after the Taliban was defeated,” he tells IPS. But that did not happen.

There is still hope, though, he feels. “The warlords do not have strong roots among the people, they deny them social justice. They have hijacked the State. The time has come to free the State from these people.”

What happens after 2014? That is the question people on Afghanistan’s streets are asking as the deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops draws near.

Diplomatic talks are just about recovering from the freeze they went into following the brazen manner in which the Taliban opened its office in Doha in June.

As of now, the country is divided over the question of American troops staying on beyond 2014. There are those who see the prolonged presence of American soldiers as “a necessary evil” to protect their nation against interference from neighbouring countries, prevent new internal clashes and to guarantee international commitment.

“If they leave completely, our country will risk a new domestic clash,” Khalilullah Hekmati, head of the NGO Better Afghanistan based in the northern city Mazar-e-Sharif, told IPS. “The American military bases and soldiers can ensure stability. We had a horrible war in the past, we don’t want to go back to that time.”

There are others who firmly believe that the continuing foreign military presence will destabilise the country further, provoking major external interference and corroding the already precarious sovereignty of the country.

For Asif Samin, a well-known poet in the eastern city Jalalabad, the very presence of foreign soldiers on Afghan soil is the reason for all the conflict. “The issue is very simple,” he told IPS. “The foreign – mostly American – troops are in Afghanistan, and this fact generates and fuels the insurgency. The only way to reach peace is a complete and immediate withdrawal.”

There are currently about 90,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, including 66,000 Americans. About half the remaining U.S. soldiers will return home by early 2014.

The Pentagon itself has so far expressed its reluctance to discuss the “zero option” – the idea of withdrawing all American troops from Afghanistan in 2014 – mooted by U.S. deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes in January this year.

Both James B. Cunningham, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, and General Martin Dempsey, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, have clearly dismissed the possibility.

What the U.S. hopes for instead is progress on the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA), which was envisaged under the Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement between the two countries to supersede the existing Status of Forces Agreement.

The agreement provided for the possibility of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, and committed the United States to support Afghanistan’s social and economic development, security, institutions and regional cooperation.

Addressing Americans on May 1 last year from the Bagram air base, about 40 kilometres north of the capital Kabul, U.S. President Barack Obama had expressed satisfaction with the signing of a “historic agreement between the United States and Afghanistan that defines a new kind of relationship between our countries,” a future in which “war ends, and a new chapter begins.”

Soon after, U.S. emissaries reached Kabul to discuss the terms under which U.S. troops would operate after the end of 2014, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)-led International Security Assistance Force would be replaced by “Resolute Support”, the new mission to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces.

This is where things have been stuck for some time. Turmoil continues in the country, the U.S. military is counting its 12th year without any definitive idea about its future, and talks on BSA have been in a limbo.

It was precisely to jumpstart stalled dialogue that Dempsey was in Afghanistan in late July, urging the government to agree to an October deadline for the BSA. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai assured him that he was ready in principle to let American troops stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

It is a prospect that has brought relief to Sher Alam Amlawal, a professor of law and political science at the private Ariana University in Jalalabad.

“Our geographical location and our history teach us that we need some kind of assistance,” he told IPS. “If the foreigners abandon us, Iran and Pakistan will not let us live in peace. They should know that, in case of an attack, there would be an international reaction.”

What Amlawal advocates is “indirect support by the United States, without any interference and any ground presence.”

History, however, has very different lessons for Bilgees Attaye, head of the Developing and Education Organisation for Women in Maimana, the capital of Faryab province near the border with Turkmenistan. “History should teach us: when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, many countries began to plot against them from our soil. What is going to happen if the Americans stay longer?

“By accepting American soldiers, we obtain the help of a strong country, but we provoke many regional hostilities,” she told IPS.

For Mawlawi Ruhal Ahmad Rohani, head of the Department for Hajj and former leader of the Shura-e-Ulema (the Council of the Religious), this is precisely where the risks lie. Rohani, who is based in the western Afghanistan city Farah, told IPS: “Following a 2014 withdrawal, there are two major risks: a new internal war and further interferences by our most ‘bulky’ neighbours, Iran and Pakistan. I believe the second risk is the most challenging.”

On the eastern side, in Nangarhar province of which Jalalabad is the capital, another view is on offer. Aziz Rahman Saddiqi, president of the Nangarhar Association for Solving Community Problems, told IPS: “The presence of foreign troops is the pretext the Taliban uses to justify the war. When they say they don’t want any foreign soldiers here, people in rural areas agree. Once the Americans leave, there will be no reason to fight, and the Taliban will automatically lose their support.”

Young Afghan posing in front of one of the graffiti works of artist Reza Amiri. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS

By Giuliano Battiston
JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Jul 8 2013 (IPS)

While United States President Barack Obama and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai scramble to solidify a peace process ahead of the 2014 withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, fears that the Taliban will use the drawdown to seize power hang like a dark cloud over civil society.

Although NATO handed over the reins to the 352,000-strong Afghan security force on Jun. 18, signaling the end of 12 years of international military presence on Afghan soil that began with the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, unanswered questions mingle with smoke from militant attacks that show no sign of abating.

Even before the power transfer ceremony was complete, a car bomb exploded near the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) offices in western Kabul, killing three and wounding 20.

Unsurprisingly, the Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, which raised the ire of civilians and activists keeping a close eye on peace talks and the possible inclusion of Taliban representatives in a post-2014 government.“The fact is that they want (total) power for themselves. And we cannot accept that.” -- Asadullah Larawi, regional officer for the Civil Society Development Center

The militants’ new head office in the Gulf emirate of Qatar seems to suggest that the group has already laid its plans for the soon-to-be independent country, placing itself in a central role as future negotiator and national representative. But the 35 million people who have lived for years under the Taliban’s boot might need some convincing.

In Jalalabad, capital of the eastern Nangarhar Province, which sits at the junction of the Kabul and Kunar rivers not far from the border with Pakistan, no one troubles to lower their voice when expressing scepticism about ongoing negotiations, or when criticising the lack of transparency surrounding future plans, none of which have been made public.

This city is hardened after years of war and still shocked by the May 29 attack on the local offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that left one guard dead and three staff members injured, and served as a stark reminder that peace is a long way off.

Hambullah Arbab, artist and regional coordinator of the Youth in Action Association, told IPS that the peace process is failing as a result of incorrect assumptions and methods.

He said that conflicts in Afghanistan are traditionally settled through “jirga” and “shura” (local councils), the idea being that there is a need for neutral third parties to arbitrate any dispute between warring sides.

In the current peace process, however, this role has been assigned to the High Peace Council (HPC). It is a body that the Taliban sees as “illegitimate”, having been created by Karzai in 2010 and chaired by former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami, a party that has a long and conflicted history with the Taliban.

Others fear that the armed group, accustomed to violence, coercion and terror tactics, will be unable to surrender itself to the democratic process or the will of the country’s 35 million people.

“Whoever honestly wants peace can be part of the government,” Ezatullah Zawab, founder and chief editor of the bi-monthly cultural magazine Meena, told IPS, adding that civil society is open to welcoming the Taliban on the condition that the militants stay true to their word of using peaceful means to achieve their goals.

Since late April, Karzai has extended numerous invitations to the Taliban leadership to participate in the upcoming presidential election that is scheduled for Apr. 15, 2014. This will test the waters of public opinion, and allow the Afghan people – not foreign forces or armed groups – to determine the country’s future.

Mohammed Anwar Sultani, a former professor at Nangarhar University and a respected elder in Jalalabad, believes that in the unlikely event that the Taliban fields candidates, few Afghans will be inclined to vote for them.

“The Taliban have already had their chance to rule the country, and they failed,” he said, referring to the period between 1996 and 2001 when, under the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban exercised total control from their seat of power in the southern city of Kandahar, and in central Kabul.

Having risen to power amid clashes between warring mujahideen groups and waves of brutal rapes throughout the country, the majority Pashtun Taliban portrayed themselves as the saviours of the Afghan people and the guarantors of safety.

“We were convinced they were a bird bringing peace,” Sultani told IPS. It was not until Sultani, like scores of others, witnessed their brutal and coercive regime that he realised he had been misguided, and grew suspicious of the militants.

He is not alone; suspicion is widespread, as is confusion about exactly who and what constitutes the Taliban.

Jalalabad regional officer for the Civil Society Development Center (CSDC) Asadullah Larawi firmly believes that the country should reject “foreign elements”, referring to allegations that the Afghan Taliban is backed by, and takes its orders from, Pakistan’s intelligence service.

Still, he strongly endorses the idea of dialogue with the Afghan Taliban if they are willing to accept the achievements of the last decade, like “freedom of speech, freedom of the media, human rights and women’s rights.”

“The fact is that they want (total) power for themselves,” Larawi told IPS. “And we cannot accept that.”

The country’s constitution also offers some middle ground between continued militarism and total political control in the Taliban’s hands.

While the debate rages on in cities across Afghanistan, the U.S. should not consider itself out of the line of fire just yet.

“If the Americans really wanted peace, they would easily find a way to achieve it,” said Baz Mohammad Abid, a journalist at Radio Mashaal, the local branch of Radio Free Europe. “The fact is, they have different goals in mind – they want to maintain a long presence in Central Asia to stop Chinese economic and political growth.”

Tragically, while the Afghan war “is not our war, but a war of foreigners”, the consequences of an ineffective peace process has been paid almost entirely by Afghans, with a 24-percent rise in the number of civilians killed and injured in the first half of 2013 compared to the same time period in 2012, according to Ján Kubiš, the United Nations secretary-general’s special representative in Afghanistan.

Visitors to Sound Central, Central Asia's Modern Music Festival, held at the French Cultural Centre in Kabul. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, May 9 2013 (IPS)

Another kind of war, less explosive than bombs and more subtle than night raids, is taking place in the Central Asian country of Afghanistan: a war of cultural influence. Its means are financial sponsorships and other support for cultural and artistic events.

Last summer, when the Queen’s Palace of the Bagh-e-Babur (the Garden of Babur) housed the Afghan branch of Documenta 13, many in Kabul asked themselves what role art and culture play in a war-torn country. They stated that artistic products could help justify the military occupation or reflect an image of Afghanistan far from its unstable and chaotic reality.

“Culture has become an essential tool to influence the perception about Afghanistan,” Aman Mojaddedi, an American artist of Afghan descent who with the Italian curator Andrea Viliani managed the Afghan section of Documenta 13, told IPS last July.

Mojaddedi pointed to France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States as countries that “are investing more and more money in the cultural field”. Their support “is aimed at demonstrating that the international presence in Afghanistan has been successful and that Afghans now do live normally”, he added."Culture has become an essential tool to influence the perception about Afghanistan."
--Aman Mojaddedi

“There’s no doubt, it’s a sort of manipulation,” he said.

Some disagree. Zabi Siddiq, a teenager whose family comes from the Panjshjr Valley, did not consider himself manipulated. “I am interested in new forms of arts, as they show that a better future is possible, even in a country like Afghanistan,” he told IPS.

Siddiq is among hundreds of young Afghans who attended the third “Sound Central“, Central Asia’s Modern Music Festival, held at Kabul’s French Cultural Centre from Apr. 30 to May 4.

The festival began several years ago, when Trevis Beard, a photojournalist and the founder and primary organiser of Sound Central, and his friends “felt unsatisfied with the music and cultural landscapes” in Kabul. “In 2011, we [held] the first big modern music event in Kabul. It lasted one day, hosting eight rock bands,” he described to IPS.

Since then, the festival has grown, along with the number of its sponsorships. The largest and most generous sponsor is the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, but many other embassies and international public donors are involved, with few private ones.

The third edition of Sound Central hosted a range of events, from rock and heavy-metal concerts and rap performances to a photo exhibition and a show from Parwaz, a puppet theatre ensemble.

The audience was mainly comprised of expatriates – many of them journalists, photographers and employees of non-governmental organisations – and young Afghan boys wearing t-shirts, jeans and colourful sneakers.

In one open space covered with a purple tent, artists produced works of graffiti. One of them, Reza Amiri, about 20 years old, began to create graffiti a year ago, after participating in a workshop at Kabul University. He claimed to be a follower of Shamsia Hassani, a 24-year-old girl acclaimed by international media as the first serious female graffiti artist in Afghanistan.

Amiri realised he loved this new form of art because “through it you can address hot topics in a direct and effective way”, he said, showing a work depicting a female face next to the words “let me breathe”. “It shows the search for freedom of the Afghan women,” Amiri explained to IPS.

Twenty-seven-year-old Folad Anzurgar has pursued a more orthodox style of art. An oil painter, he told IPS that he enjoys subjects expressing the pain of war, “the beauty of peace” and “the Afghan traditional way of life”. “Things like graffiti and rock-music are for the youngest people and cannot replace our cultural heritage, which is much more rooted,” he noted.

Indeed, in Afghanistan, especially in rural areas where 75 percent of the population still lives, many believe that contemporary artists are introducing external values into local culture. Many have never heard of rock music.

Sulyman Qardash is the singer and leader of the rock band Kabul Dreams. “We now have a lot of followers within the country, as well as [outside],” he told IPS. Most of the band’s followers are from Kabul, and while Qardash has played in Turkey, Iran, India and Uzbekistan, within his own country, he has never played outside the capital city.

“It is undeniable that with our festival we introduce new cultural items,” said Beard. “But we do that without any imposition,” he explained to IPS. “We just provide Afghans a new platform they can choose to use.” Still, he is aware that in a war-torn country, such work has many implications and inevitably becomes part of the battle for “winning the hearts and minds” of Afghans and internationals.

“Despite the money we get from international donors, we are completely free of any political influence,” Beard added.

Mojaddedi approached the issue of traditional and modern culture in a more nuanced manner, underscoring the mutual enrichment of every cultural exchange. “Any culture is hybrid, and hybridisation is…in every place at every time,” he told IPS. “New tendencies are also creating the opposite effect here, with some Afghan artists trying to preserve their own, more specific culture.”

The push and pull of this hybridisation is an old story. As Gilles Dorronsoro, a prominent expert on Afghanistan, wrote in a recent paper, both the Soviets several decades ago and the West today “attempt to impose a social model of modernisation that is not acceptable to the local population, apart from the urbanised elites”.

A meeting of the local shura (council) at Zarshay village in Kesht Valley in Faryab province. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Sep 7 2012 (IPS)

More than a decade after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan is still in the midst of an irregular war. Talking peace is difficult because no one quite knows who to talk to.

The efforts gain significance coming ahead of the UN General Assembly meeting Sep. 14 on promoting a culture of peace. As officials talk, more ground-level efforts are being led by civil society groups.

New efforts have been made by officials to talk to anti-government groups, driven by the 2014 transition date when responsibility for security will be transferred fully to Afghan authorities, and when most of the international forces are due to leave Afghanistan.

Many social activists in Kabul see such efforts as unproductive. “I am not optimistic about peace,” Sima Samar, who heads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) tells IPS. “There is a negative competition on the negotiation issue, with too many players trying to fulfill their own specific agenda, and no clear mechanism regarding who should talk with whom, about what, for which purpose.

“Personally, I believe we are going to lose our time, unless we clearly specify the mechanisms through which we want to bring peace in the country and we clearly understand who are our enemies and who are our friends. Furthermore, we must address the conflict not only as a political issue, but also as a social one. Otherwise, we risk to get a short-time deal, but not a real, lasting reconciliation process.”

“The rhetorical clamour over talks about talks has led to a number of desperate and dangerous moves on the part of the Afghan government and its international allies to bring purported insurgent leaders to the negotiating table,” Robert Templer, the International Crisis Group’s Asia programme director, said in March while presenting the Crisis Group report ‘Talking About Talks: Towards a Political Settlement in Afghanistan’.

Analysts say there is an international side to these move marked by attempts by regional and international powers to obtain political ‘sovereignty’ over Afghanistan, and an internal one related to the legacy of the war, which is still contributing to instability.

“As for the external factor, by which I mean the interference of regional powers like Pakistan, Iran, the U.S. and others, I believe the Afghan war has already become their own war,” Mohammed Saeed Niazi, director of the Civil Society and Development Centre at Kabul tells IPS.

“As for the internal factor, we need social peace, rather than a political agreement. During the past decades the culture of war has deeply entered into our mindset. We need to bring peace into ourselves, into our families, our groups and local communities. The lack of mutual trust eroded social bonds, and we need to recover that trust and those bonds.”

Several Afghan organisations are now focusing more on peace-building projects at the local level. “If you want peace and reconciliation, you have to start by mobilising the local communities, by making them proactive and inclined to take part in the construction of a shared future,” Idrees Zaman, managing director of the Centre for Peace and Unity (CPAU), a non-governmental and non-profit organisation tells IPS.

“In our field researches we noted a link between local and national conflicts: the local ones are usually instrumentalised and politicised, and slowly become a source for wider and more radical conflict. That’s why we organise peace education curricula in the school and peace-building projects in the local communities.”

There are other organisations working to plant seeds of peace through social tools. “The insurgents claim the ability to solve and mediate conflicts, and whenever they obtain the trust of the people, inevitably there is a shift of power and authority to them, with negative consequences,” Asif Karimi, project manager at The Liaison Office (TLO), a Kabul based organisation tells IPS. “But once the local communities become able to solve their own problems without relying on external authorities, automatically they eliminate opportunities for the insurgents to strengthen their power.

“This way, you can not only mitigate present conflicts, but also reduce the chances for future political conflict. This is our aim in dealing with the local communities.” TLO works in four main areas of activity: research, peace-building, justice and livelihoods.

Raz Mohammed Dalili, director general of Sanayee Development Organisation (SDO), one of the oldest Afghan NGOs established in 1990, tells IPS that “we have decided to focus on the communitarian peace-building, rather than directly addressing the political issues, because we have experienced that when peace agreements are signed only by politicians, commanders and diplomats, without a consultative and transparent process, it does not last long. It causes further victims and abuses, and creates new reasons for fighting again and again.”

The group has promoted peace curricula for every school class. “We have just started a conflict-resolution project in the madrasas, the religious schools, in order to work with the Islamic young scholars that until now have been isolated and sidelined,” Dalili says.

“I am convinced that peace education is an antibiotic for the society. Today we are in need of this medicine whose main ingredient is the inclination to listen to the people: one of the sources of the conflict is the huge gap between the government and the people, and the source of that gap is the lack of listening, the lack of tools for mutual communication. Hopefully, we are filling this gap.”

Ali Wardak, an Afghan associate professor of criminology at the University of Glamorgan in the UK who is frequently in his native country for research, says cultural and social tools can be used also for dealing with the Taliban.

“The Afghan people who fight are people who have suffered, who have been marginalised or who have relevant complaints but no channels to be listened to. The war radicalised them. The Taliban can be ‘reformed’. It takes a long time for a reformation process to be completed, maybe 20 years, but it’s now time for changing the strategy.”

The apparently normal life in a Kabul bazaar is on artificial life support. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Jul 16 2012 (IPS)

It is customary to focus on the amount of money the international community offers Afghanistan: the higher the sum and the longer the commitment, the lower the risk of further destabilisation. And so the 16 billion dollars pledged by the donors for the next four years at the Tokyo conference earlier this month has been widely welcomed. But such aid may not be quite the virtue it seems.

The message of strong support at Tokyo for Afghanistan’s economic development aimed to reassure Afghan people and others who are concerned that the money needs of the Afghan state cannot be met by domestic revenues.

This financing gap, “according to the World Bank, is likely to be 25 percent of GDP by 2021/22 and may be even higher in some of the intervening years,” Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), writes in a recent comment.

Last December, at the international conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Masood Ahmad, director of the Middle East and Central Asia branch of the International Monetary Fund, estimated that “the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan (from 2014) will reduce annual GDP growth by 2-3 percentage points or more per year,” and that “fiscal sustainability is a distant goal.”

Such evaluations lead to the idea that the more the international community commits to Afghanistan, the better it is for that country. But, Afghanistan scholar Antonio Giustozzi tells IPS that reduction of foreign aid could be positive “because it brings the level of expenditure more in line with what realistically can be absorbed by Afghan society.”

The May 2012 World Bank report argues that “a decline to a more ‘normal’ level of aid will present not only risks, but also opportunities for Afghanistan to transition to a more stable, self-reliant, and sustainable economy.”

Away from the cautious language of the World Bank, Antonio Giustozzi says that both the Afghan society and the Afghan state have over the years become embedded “in a form of patronage that creates dependency but does not stimulate development.”

The therapy now must be gradual detoxification, he says, and the level of aid should “decline, but slightly.” The World Bank report says “donors need to reduce future aid flows gradually to avoid major disruptions.”

The Afghan government, Giustozzi says, can begin to find ways “to spend less but spend better.” President Hamid Karzai could then be forced to carry out governance reforms and tackle corruption, as prescribed by the Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework.

But the “paradigm shift” heralded in an annex to the communiqué released following the Tokyo conference about a cleaner government is a hopeless claim, Giustozzi says. “Corruption is not just a bit of sand in the machine, it is systemic. Politics is very much built on the system of corruption and patronage.”

A leaked diplomatic cable from the U.S. embassy in Kabul at the end of 2009 warned that initiatives that call on the Afghan government to bring major corrupt figures to justice “contain a serious dilemma: they would include some of Karzai’s closest relatives and allies and require the prosecution of people on whom we often rely for assistance and/or support.”

In Tokyo, the international community renewed its call to the Afghan government for transparency. Some Afghans would point out that the international community itself is at fault for subordinating long-term state-building to the goal of short-term political survival for the government, and for relying too long on the very people who are now in the way of a transparent and reliable institutional framework.

While only nominally aimed at institution-building, the key tools of international assistance were guided by short-term considerations and by political expediency, and “have proved to be very blunt,” Martine van Bijlert, co-director and co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network writes in the introduction to ‘Snapshots of an Intervention. The Unlearned Lessons of Afghanistan’s Decade of Assistance’.

The plan ‘Toward Self-Reliance’ promoted by the international community and endorsed by the Afghan government is grounded in a similar oxymoron: the call for the Afghan state to get back its sovereignty and ownership is made by those who are preventing it from happening.

The presence of foreign armies and of the international community “is one of the major elements that prevents the State, the political system, the ruling elite, from gaining full legitimacy,” Antonio Giustozzi tells IPS. “Not necessarily because the foreigners pre-empt that, but because any government that relies on external support to stay in power does not have legitimacy.”

Security forces conducting a night raid in Afghanistan. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
HERAT, Afghanistan, Jul 7 2012 (IPS)

Afghanistan’s international donors will gather on Sunday in Tokyo for a conference at which they are expected to pledge economic aid, and ensure their assistance level will be maintained after withdrawal of ISAF-NATO troops, in 2014. But Afghan people and civil society groups working in the country say much of the aid is being directed the wrong way.

Donors are expected to promise 3.9 billion dollars in annual economic and development support at least through 2017, going by what Afghan President Hamid Karzai said some days ago. Head of the Afghan Central Bank, Noorullah Delawari, says Afghanistan needs about six to seven billion dollars annually in economic aid.

The international community has often made firm commitments for financial, development and security assistance for Afghanistan beyond 2014, but civil society activists have several concerns.

“The international community has done its best here, but has failed, because it tried to apply a strategy elaborated elsewhere, by people without any specific knowledge of the country,” Soraya Pakzad, founder of Voice of Women Organisation in Herat, about 640km west of capital Kabul, told IPS.

“Tokyo could give donors and international players the last chance to revise their strategy, which has to be focused on economic development and social inclusion in order to be useful, rather than only on the military sector, as it was for the last 11 years,” she added.

Abdul Khaliq Stanikzai, regional coordinator for Sanayee Development Organisation told IPS that the marginal level of development aid, as compared with the volume of funds for military activities, “clearly shows the priorities accorded to the political-military objectives over those of reconstruction, while the modest amount of money assigned to humanitarian activities was too dependent on the NATO’s aim to ‘win the Afghan hearts and minds’.”

Over the past years, many NGO workers and independent researchers have criticised the securitisation of humanitarian aid, as seen in its geographical distribution, reflecting the political and military objectives of donor countries rather than the needs of the Afghan population.

The growing securitisation of aid and the focus on the military sector “has negatively affected the agenda pursued by the international community in Afghanistan,” Stanikzai told IPS.

A detailed report by the independent group Development Initiatives confirms his ideas: of the 286.4 billion dollars invested in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2009 in aid, security and military sectors, a total of 242.9 billion dollars, 84.6 percent, was allocated to military operations in the country. Just 9.4 percent (26.7 billion dollars) was destined to development aid, and a modest 0.3 percent (0.8 billion dollars) went to multilateral peacekeeping (UNAMA, the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan and Eupol, the European Police Mission).

With the downsizing now of the foreign forces, the international community must open a new chapter in its strategy on Afghanistan, civil society organisation members say.

The European Network of NGOs in Afghanistan (ENNA) is trying to promote a common call to the European governments that starting from the beginning of the withdrawal, for each euro saved from the military budget 30 cents be re-allocated to cooperation projects meant to promote social and economic progress.

“We still need military support at a national level to fight terrorism and anti-government insurgents, but we mostly need to address the main, structural roots of the conflict that are linked to the lack of economic opportunity for the people,” Daoud Saba, Governor of Herat province told IPS.

“And we also need to improve our institutional mechanisms to answer citizens’ claims and needs. This means that for the Afghan government it would be better to directly control much of the funds.”

So far, allocation of funds has mostly been decided by international donors, with a low involvement of local partners and interlocutors. “The Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan estimates that 77 percent of aid channeled to the country up to mid-2009 was directed bilaterally to projects, with little or no involvement from the government itself,” writes Lydia Poole, author of the Development Initiatives report.

Many Afghans continue to blame the international community for acting unilaterally. “It is time to give the Afghan government and society their sovereignty back, we have to prove our capabilities,” Abdul Qader Rahimi who heads the Herat branch of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission told IPS.

The call for foreign assistance to be routed through Afghan government entities rather than international organisations is a long-standing one, but donors are still reluctant to accept this demand due to corruption and a lack of transparency and accountability. Last year Transparency International ranked Afghanistan the third most corrupt country in the world.

“We too are really concerned that the Afghan government is too weak, corrupt and ineffective to use aid in a proper way,” Haziza Khairandish, West region Coordinator for the Civil Society and Human Rights Organisation told IPS. “There’s the real, concrete possibility that we will lose a great opportunity once again.”

But corruption is not a one-sided issue, civil society activists say. “Corruption is spread over the Afghan institutions, this is clear, but it is also common among the so-called international community,” Ahmad Kharimi, acting director of the High Office of Oversight and Anticorruption (HOOAC) in the West region of the country told IPS.

“The amount of money spent through Afghan channels is marginal compared to that passed through international organisations or directly disbursed by donors, and the latter is much more difficult to trace, check and monitor. We really are used to finding a lot of problems when we try to call donors to accountability: it is six months, for example, that we have been trying to get an appointment with the Italians to discuss some controversial issues. Until now we have not received any answers.”

The green economy’ could become a new, more respectable face for corporate capitalism. Credit: Crustmania/ CC by 2.0

By Giuliano Battiston
FLORENCE, May 28 2012 (IPS)

Though the current global economic and financial crises are undoubtedly devastating much of the world, they present the perfect opportunity for remodeling our economic system, according to participants at the ninth annual Terra Futura (Future Earth) exhibition of ‘good practices’ in social, economic and environmental sustainability held here from May 25-27.

“What, how, how much and for whom to produce? Those are the questions we urgently need to answer,” said Guido Viale, environmental economist and author of several books on ecological issues. “The crisis offers us a chance to ecologically reconvert the ways we produce and use goods and services, paving the way to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, to respect biodiversity and to create a safe, low-carbon economic system.”

The first step towards a healthier economy and a cleaner environment is “to find cost-effective ways to improve our energy infrastructure and to ‘decarbonise’ our energy supply,” said Monica Frassoni, president of the European Alliance to Save Energy (EU-ASE), which was established at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP16) in December 2010 and includes some of Europe’s leading multinational companies, along with a prominent cross-party group of European politicians.

“With no binding commitment to energy efficiency for 2020 and no verifiable energy saving targets for EU members, Europe risks (feeding) its addiction to fossil fuels,” Frassoni added.

As important as the need for an institutional framework and compulsory save-energy targets for key sectors of the European economy is the need for a radical change in lifestyle.

“The changes that are going to last will be those rooted in a changed mindset,” Karl-Ludwig Schibel, coordinator of the Italian branch of the Covenant of Mayors, explained.

Launched by the European Commission in 2008, after the adoption of the EU Climate and Energy Package, the Covenant of Mayors  is a European movement whose aim is to meet and exceed the EU’s 20 percent CO₂ reduction goal by 2020. “We strongly believe in the effectiveness of a bottom-up process, promoted by citizens, regional authorities and local administrators. It is here that the deepest mindset revolutions are going on,” said Schibel.

According to leading environmental activist Vandana Shiva, cultural awareness of our intrinsic and fragile bondage to the “lively earth” is the most important tool to promote justice, sustainability and a new economy.

“It’s time to abandon the centralised, fossilised, sclerotic model adopted (throughout) the industrial era and build a new model – a decentralised, democratic, horizontal model, where all ecosystems are respected and in which diversity is a value. It means we should fight the monocultures of the mind boosted by industrialism. It means (being) careful about old tricks hidden by new words, such as the ‘green economy’,” she added.

Shiva is certainly not alone in her vision for a healthier planetary future. Susan George, chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute, told IPS,  “I don’t like to use the word ‘green economy’, as it risks (becoming) a means through which global corporate capitalism makes profits, with a new, more respectable face.”

Twenty years after the first Earth Summit, the international community will gather once more in Rio de Janeiro from Jun. 20-22, for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. The Rio+20 conference will discuss the topic of the green economy, whose definition remains a matter of controversy.

George said, “Over the past years, I have proposed a Green New Deal, which means taking control over finance and investing in a social and green transition. The first step is to socialise, not nationalise, the banks, to include citizens and customers in their management and to lend (money) for small environmental initiatives.”

The so-called green economy, on the other hand, is something completely different. “I am pessimistic about Rio,” George told IPS. “For the big corporations it is only an excuse to say: ‘The U.N. is slow and ineffective, while we are effective and smart; so, give us all the money and we will invest it into the green economy’. But they just want to make new profits, so we must ask: a green economy for who, and run by whom?”

Barbara Unmüßig, president of the Heinrich Boll Stiftung, recently wrote in ‘The Green Economy: A New Magic Bullet?’, “Large sectors of global civil society only see (the green economy) as an extremely profitable business sector.”

She said that, in order to truly make a difference, the green economy model should also pay attention to issues of power and equity while shifting global policy emphasis away from free trade and growth.

(END)