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)

U.S. President Barack Obama announced Tuesday his intention to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.

In a statement from the White House Rose Garden, Obama said he expects to reduce U.S. troops levels from the roughly 32,000 which remain there now to 9,800 by the end of this year, and to cut that number by about half by the end of 2015.

After this year, U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan will be used only for training and counter-terrorism operations against Al Qaeda, he said.

The withdrawal plan will depend, however, on the signing of a pending Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) between Washington and the next president of Afghanistan, who is expected to take office by the end of the summer after presidential elections that are set to take place next month.

Without the BSA, according to senior administration officials who briefed reports, the U.S. would resort to the so-called “zero option” – or withdrawing all of its troops at the end of the year.

President Hamid Karzai, whose relations with Washington have become increasingly rocky during Obama’s tenure, has refused to sign the BSA, insisting that the decision be left to his successor. The two candidates in next month’s run-off election, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, have publicly supported the agreement.

In his statement, Obama, who will deliver a major foreign policy address at the U.S. Military Academy Wednesday, put the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the context of what he depicted as a larger transition in Washington’s global military strategy, including its ongoing struggle against radical Islamists linked to Al Qaeda.

“The bottom line is, it’s time to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “When I took office, we had nearly 180,000 troops in harm’s way.”

“By the end of this year, we will have less than 10,000. In addition to bringing our troops home, this new chapter in American foreign policy will allow us to redirect some of the resources saved by ending these wars to respond more nimbly to the changing threat of terrorism, while addressing a broader set of priorities around the globe,” he declared.

Obama was making an implicit reference to his administration’s promised “rebalancing” of U.S. strategic assets toward the Asia-Pacific region, as well as more recent concerns about Russian intentions toward its closest neighbours.

He also suggested that Washington will not leave Afghanistan having accomplished all of the objectives for which it first sent troops under George W. Bush in October 2001, in the weeks that followed the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
“I think Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them,” he said. “…We have to recognise that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it is not America’s responsibility to make it one. The future of Afghanistan must be decided by Afghans.”

Obama’s announcement came under immediate attack from neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks who have long insisted that Kabul will need more trainers to protect and stabilise the country after the end of 2014, the date on which the U.S. and other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries had previously agreed would mark the transfer of all combat responsibilities to Afghan government forces.

They were particularly angry about Obama’s promise to remove all U.S. troops by the end of 2016.

“The President came into office wanting to end the wars he inherited,” said Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte in a joint statement. “[He] appears to have learned nothing from the damage done by his previous withdrawal announcements in Afghanistan and his disastrous decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq.”

“Today’s announcement will embolden our enemies and discourage our partners in Afghanistan and the region. And regardless of anything the President says tomorrow at West Point, his decision on Afghanistan will fuel the growing perception worldwide that America is unreliable, distracted, and unwilling to lead,” the three senators insisted, in what has become a standard theme in Republican and neo-conservative attacks on Obama’s foreign policy.

“Putting aside the fact that [10,000] is the lowest number military advisors estimated was necessary to maintain training and some counter-terrorism capability in country over not just one year but several, the decision to halve and then zero out those forces by 2016 (sic) is a reminder not only of how seriously unserious this president on strategic matters can be but also how cynically partisan he is,” wrote Gary Schmitt, a national security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), in the neo-conservative ‘Weekly Standard’ blog.

Similar concerns were voided by Gen. David Barno (ret.), who led U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and currently a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank influential with the administration.

“While the number [of troops] for next year seems about right, the publicly announced speedy departure plan for those troops will now unquestionably sow doubt among American friends and Afghan supporters,” he noted.

“But here at home, the biggest and – for the President – the most important takeaway …will be the certainty that by the end of 2016, America’s longest war will truly be over. After 13 years and thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of billion dollars spent, and wholly inconclusive results, today’s speech marks the end. Few Americans will mourn this war’s passing,” he added.

Tuesday’s announcement also came on the eve of a key NATO meeting at which Washington will seek commitments from its allies to provide around 4,000 additional troops to operate alongside U.S. troops next year and about half that number through 2016, according to administration officials.

Those officials expressed confidence that Afghanistan’s own army and police were sufficiently strong to hold off any major military challenge by the Taliban, and pointed to their performance during the first round of the presidential and provincial elections in April as evidence of major progress in U.S. and NATO training efforts to date.

Continued training of Afghan forces, combined with preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing a presence in Afghanistan, will remain the two main foci of U.S. troops there once full responsibility for security is transferred to Afghan forces at the end of the year, they stressed.

They also emphasised that the recent developments across the Greater Middle East and North Africa required adjustments to Washington’s counter-terrorism strategy.

“[A]s we have seen Al Qaeda core [in Afghanistan and Pakistan] pushed back and we’ve seen regional affiliates seek to gain a foothold in different parts of the Middle East and North Africa, what makes sense is a strategy that is not designed for the threat that existed in 2001 or 2004,” one official told reporters in a conference call briefing before Obama’s appearance.

“We need a strategy for how it exists in 2014 and 2016, and that is going to involve far more partnership and support across the entire region and less of the type of presence that the United States had in Afghanistan over the last 13 years.”

Since 2008, militants in Pakistan have torched over 5,000 vehicles carrying NATO supplies to Afghanistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States is laying meticulous plans ahead of its 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it has clearly overlooked how its continued drones strikes on the tribal areas of neighbouring Pakistan will affect the much-anticipated pullout.

Last week, a group of militants belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) torched three containers stuffed with supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan, as they trundled along the stony mountain pass known as Torkham Road in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

The militants claimed the attack on the convoy of 12 containers was payback for the drone strike on May 29 that killed TTP Deputy Leader Waliur Rehman in North Waziristan province, one of seven zones comprising the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The incident last month brought the total number of drone strikes on the region to over 355 since 2005. But while the U.S. government has hitherto been happy to turn a blind eye to various forms of protest against its campaign of remote warfare – from civilian marches, to government statements – the burning of NATO-bound vehicles might signal a turning point in its controversial foreign policy.

Muhammad Mushtaq, an office-bearer of the NATO Suppliers Association – a local collective of drivers, cleaners and vehicle owners involved in the transport of supplies across the border – told IPS, “Since 2008, more than 5,000 NATO vehicles have been burnt down in Peshawar and the Khyber Agency, all of them en route to Afghanistan to replenish the forces engaged in a war against terrorism since 2002.”

In the process, he said, not only have roughly 10 million dollars worth of equipment and supplies been reduced to ashes, but more than 500 people, including drivers and cleaners, have lost their lives.

In December 2008, 160 NATO vehicles carrying Humvees destined for Afghanistan were burnt in a single attack near Peshawar, capital of the KP, Mushtaq said. The militants later paraded triumphantly amid billowing flames that blackened the sky.

Most of the vehicles heading to Afghanistan carry military equipment, food, and other logistical supplies for the roughly 100,000 foreign troops stationed there, Retired Major Anwar Khan, a security analyst, told IPS.

“This same route will also likely be used for the withdrawal of heavy military hardware as well as soldiers,” he said. Thus, if drone strikes continue, the U.S. risks leaving its main access and exit route vulnerable to attacks.

Khan says that the U.S. and its coalition partners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ must revisit their military strategy if they are determined to stick to the 2014 date. “Otherwise, the chances of their withdrawal and peace in Pakistan and Afghanistan will remain a dream.”

An eye for an eye 

When U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul in 2001, it signaled the beginning of a war that would drag on for over a decade.

Members of the deposed regime, along with their supporters, fled en masse into the mountains that form the rugged 1,200-kilometre-long border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, prompting the latter to throw in its lot with the U.S. in the hopes of preventing the militants from taking root in its own, volatile tribal zones.

But promises to destroy the Al Qaeda network charged with carrying out the bombing of the U.S.’s twin towers on Sep. 11, 2001, have failed to bear fruit, with many commentators observing that the militants are stronger than ever.

Last May, against the backdrop of rising costs, a mounting death toll and loud public opposition to the war, U.S. President Barack Obama signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, agreeing to withdraw forces by 2014 and hand over power to the locally elected government.

But experts like Pervez Jamal, professor of political science at the University of Peshawar, believe this plan will fall flat unless immediate measures are taken to appease the TTP.

As Khan pointed out, “The burning of vehicles has already made the war against terrorism more expensive for the U.S. and its allies.”

Currently, 70 percent of supplies for Western forces in landlocked Afghanistan come through Pakistan, where they arrive by ship at the Arabian Sea port of Karachi before travelling 3,000 kilometres to the Bagram Airfield in Kabul.

In November 2011, the Pakistan government ordered the closure of this supply route when U.S. forces attacked a Pakistani security post in FATA’s Mohmand Agency, killing 24 soldiers.

Deprived of a land route, the U.S. was forced to explore alternative, aerial routes through Russia and the former Soviet republics that border Afghanistan. During this time, the cost of transporting supplies went from 17 million dollars to 104 million dollars.

Unable to sustain these costs, the U.S. government issued an apology for the attack, and the supply route was re-opened in 2012, with the understanding that it would remain functional until 2015, to facilitate a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But this agreement is now in jeopardy.

The burning of supplies also spells danger for the 10,000 troops tasked with remaining on the ground to assist the 350,000 Afghan National Security Forces with the political transition.

The local security force currently lacks training and military equipment; without the promise of reinforcements, some experts say they will be no match for an attempted power grab by the militants.

Javed Hasham, an Afghan war analyst based in Peshawar, told IPS that the Taliban are capable of destroying convoys very easily. Torkham Road is an exposed mountain pass, with no security outposts along the way. The Taliban, familiar with the terrain, have hideouts in hills and houses that overlook the winding road.

Attacks on supply convoys had recorded a massive decrease over the past four months but have recently picked up again, keeping pace with increased drone strikes.

Hasham believes it unlikely that even the Pakistan government, which is loathe to support the Taliban, will not chastise the militants for these attacks, as it, too, sees the drone strikes as a severe encroachment on national sovereignty.

“The only way forward is for the U.S. to put its drone strikes on hold,” Hasham said.

USAID Administrator Andrew S. Natsios (centre) meets with then Afghan Interim Chairman Hamid Karzai and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2002. Credit: Cpl Matthew Roberson, USMC/USAID/public domain

By Thalif Deen
May 8 2013 (IPS)

When a Southeast Asian country was riddled with corruption in a bygone era, there were rumours that government officials routinely offered receipts every time they accepted a bribe.

Last week, Hamid Karzai, the embattled president of Afghanistan, admitted that he was no better: providing receipts to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which secretly bribed him with “bags of cash dropped off regularly at the presidential palace”."If the U.S. ever stood for good government and democracy, it does not any longer." -- Michael Ratner of the Centre for Constitutional Rights

The New York Times revealed that Karzai was on the CIA payroll, receiving millions of dollars in regular payments for the last decade.

The Afghan president told reporters the CIA money was “an easy source of petty cash” and part of a “slush fund” to pay off warlords and buy their loyalties in a country battling a violent insurgency.

“This is cash,” Karzai was quoted as saying, “It is the choice of the U.S. government.” He was not allowed to disclose the amounts of the CIA payments, he said.

While the United States preaches “good governance” to developing countries at the United Nations, says one African diplomat, “it has been doing the reverse in its own political backyard”.

And good governance not only includes multi-party democracy, rule of law and a free press but also transparent and corruption-free regimes.

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told IPS, “If the U.S. ever stood for good government and democracy, it does not any longer.”

The U.S. claims it wants democracies in the world, but the only way that democracy continues to exist in Afghanistan, and probably other countries, is because it pays elites, warlords and others to support the governments it installs, he added.

“That is not a democracy, it’s a kleptocracy,” said Ratner, who is president of the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).

Asked about U.S. double standards on corruption, James Paul, senior advisor at the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS, “It’s a very good topic and certainly worth pursuing.”

The Western powers, he said, are the world’s biggest corrupters, while wringing their hands about “good governance”.

“Remember the planeloads of cash flown into Baghdad to provide baksheesh for the U.S. occupation? In billions. They filled entire cargo planes with 100 dollar bills,” said Paul.

Under the U.S. Anticorruption and Good Governance Act of 2000 (IAGGA), the global fight against corruption remains a foreign policy priority for the United States government.

“Corruption threatens many of our national interests including ensuring security and stability, upholding the rule of law and core democratic values, advancing prosperity, and creating a level playing field for lawful business activity,” says IAGGA.

“Corrupt practices facilitate and contribute to the spread of organized crime and terrorism, undermine public trust in government, and destabilize entire communities and economies.”

Ratner said bribery also gives Karzai’s U.S. handlers, the CIA, control over him and the government.

“If they turn off the spigot flowing money, the Afghan government could fall,” he said, adding that it was a U.S.-installed government not a government of the Afghan people.

“The huge cash payments give the term ‘puppet government’ new meaning,” he argued.

As it is cash, Ratner pointed out, “We don’t really know where the money goes. How much goes into off-shore bank accounts? How much supports money laundering? How much to support those the U.S. might consider terrorists?”

Millions in unaccounted cash goes against every financial control the U.S. has imposed in its efforts to cut off funding to those on its bad guy lists, he noted.

It’s also remarkable, said Ratner, that these millions in cash payments have been revealed and Karzai acknowledges them. “I assume it’s all top secret, classified. Yet, no repercussions from spilling the beans.”

Remarkably and significantly, he said, there have been no efforts to turn off the spigot.

“The U.S. has sunk to a new low. The Romans probably paid off the Huns for a while; in the end, the empire fell,” he said.

The United States, which has had no qualms about bribing the Afghan government, has also signed and ratified the 2003 U.N. Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), the first global legally binding international treaty against bribery and corruption.

The treaty has been signed by 140 countries and ratified by 165. The United States signed it in December 2003 and ratified it in October 2006.

While the UNCAC remains the overarching global framework against corruption, the United States says it “encourages governments to establish shared approaches through regional instruments and multilateral fora”.

The U.S. government has also promoted joint approaches to deny financial and physical safe haven within the G8 industrial nations and many other fora, promote transparency and codes of conduct.

The United States has also done so within the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum, and in order to “foster integrity and justice sector reform” through the Good Governance for Development in Arab States (GfD) regional partnership.

The United States is also a sponsoring country in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which supports greater transparency in financial management in natural resource-rich developing countries.