The transfer case carrying the remains of Master Corporal Byron Greff, 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, rests in the cargo hold of a C-130 on Bagram Air Field as a Canadian bag pipe player bows his head in prayer during a ramp ceremony Oct. 31, 2011. Greff was killed in an Oct. 29 Taliban attack; he served as a NATO Training Mission adviser and instructor. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Kat Lynn Justen

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

NATO member countries like Canada will continue to be asked to shoulder the burden of a military mission stuck in Afghanistan because of the continued vulnerability of the Kabul-based government.

Although Ottawa has announced that the approximately 900 Canadian soldiers training the trainers within the Afghan security forces will return home next year, most experts expect that this contribution to the NATO will continue past that date."The dilemma lies in how to balance between a strong desire to get out of Afghanistan and an equally deep fear… of suffering an obvious and humiliating defeat." – King's College Professor Anatol Lieven

The speculation is that starting in 2014, the U.S. will withdraw most of its troops but leave behind about 9,000 for training and other assistance for the Afghan forces, said Graeme Smith, a Canadian and a Kabul-based analyst for the International Crisis Group. A former Globe and Mail foreign correspondent, he is the author of a forthcoming book, “The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan”.

“Americans haven’t clarified their commitment so other NATO countries are waiting [before announcing their contribution.] There will be pressure for Canada to have something [available],” Smith told IPS.

History repeating?

In 2011, Canada formally withdrew its force of 2,500 soldiers from combat in Kandahar province after 10 years of contributing to the U.S.-led NATO mission, but it cannot quite shake off its connection to a Kabul government that most experts agree would not survive a complete withdrawal of Western forces.

Afghan security and police forces reportedly rely a great deal on U.S. and NATO forces, especially for air power and logical support.

What keeps the U.S. in Afghanistan is the nightmare of history repeating itself, said Professor Anatol Lieven at King’s College in London. He is referring to the 1975 fall of Saigon and the defeat of the U.S.-supported South Vietnamese army to the superior North Vietnamese army, following the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and leaving behind a decade of fighting a bloody and controversial war on the ground.

“The dilemma lies in how to balance between a strong desire to get out of Afghanistan and an equally deep fear, especially on the part of the U.S. military, of suffering an obvious and humiliating defeat through the rapid collapse of the Kabul regime,” said Lieven.

The U.S. is ambivalent about a continued commitment because of its own budget challenges and difficulties with a suspicious Kabul government that balked when President Barack Obama’s administration sought recently to start talks with the Taliban insurgents, said Mark Sedra, president of the Security Governance Group and a political scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Subsidising security

Also, as the February 2013 Government Accountability Office report, “Afghanistan – Key Oversight Issues” points out, the U.S. and NATO countries are not providing sufficient funds to maintain the Afghan security forces over the long haul.

Afghanistan does not generate sufficient tax revenues to pay and maintain its security forces which now number 350,000 troops, and so it relies on the U.S. to fork over more than four billion dollars in subsidies annually, Sedra said.

At the same time, he continued, that outlay of money is probably not sufficient to pay for that amount of protection required to safeguard the Kabul government and the Afghan population.

“The reality is that the current size of the Afghan security forces is completely unsustainable. So unless you see those subsidies continue to roll in for an indefinite period, there is a high probability of [a] breakdown or even the collapse of the Afghan security forces,” he told IPS.

Among the potential scenarios painted by Sedra is a takeover by the Taliban Islamist insurgents – who ruled the country before 9/11– or new conflicts among the former Northern Alliance warlords who joined together to support the coming to power of the current government of Hamid Karzai in late 2001.

The major challenge for the Afghan security forces is not their fighting ability or pay level for individual soldiers, but the weakness of the logistical support and civilian administration of the defence ministry, said David Perry, a defence analyst with the Ottawa-based Conference of Defense Associations Institute and who has followed the training provided by Canada. He warns that it will take a “generation” for these issues to be resolved.

“All of the institutional stuff that you need to run [a military], supply lines as well as headquarters, planning function, that kind of stuff, [the Afghans] haven’t gone outside of the so-called mentoring stage. They need units that do administration. The ministry of defence needs to be more administratively competent,” he told IPS.

Another concern is that the costs of maintaining the Afghan security forces means that other programmes like health and education, in which NATO countries like Canada have invested considerable sums, may be sacrificed, said Canadian opposition MP Matthew Kellway, who is a defence procurement expert for his party, the New Democrats.

“Many countries, including Canada, went in at least nominally with the view to build up civil society institutions and government institutions in Afghanistan – education and health, and all those other kinds of issues. There is a huge question of how does the Afghan state support eduation, health and etc. and maintain its security forces independently,” Kellway told IPS.

The Canadian government invested in the range of 13 to 18 billion dollars, of which nine billion dollars went towards combat and the rest in development assistance for Afghanistan, according to internal government estimates and the public budget office in Ottawa.

The new Silk Road

So what will keep the U.S. and NATO inside Afghanistan despite the challenges? Michael Skinner, a York University University researcher and PhD candidate, argues that geo-political strategic planners in Washington have since the 1990s wanted their country to take advantage of Afghanistan both as a source of mineral wealth (especially in copper and iron) and its geographical position in the heart of the Eurasian continent.

Dubbed “the new Silk Road”, the strategy envisions investing billions in infrastructure development for highways, railways, electric lines and fibre optic cables across Afghanistan.

Future applications, says Skinner, include “transmitting electricity from Central Asia to Pakistan and India; transporting oil and gas from Iran and the Caspian basin to China, Pakistan, and India; laying fiber-optic cables from India to Russia and from China to Europe; improving road and rail connectivity from India to Russia and from China to Europe.”

Seeing the potential between 2001 and 2011, the Asian Development Bank invested 17 billion dollars in 7,000 kilometres in road and rail links across Central Asia, with all but six routes passing through Afghanistan.

“From my analysis, the concern for keeping the government in place is a greater concern about protecting Western investors than it is about governance in Afghanistan,” said Skinner.

Ultimately though, it will not be enough to have the Afghan security forces protect power lines and railway tracks from Taliban attacks for the benefit of investors, including ironically Chinese and Indian companies which will benefit if NATO stays in the country.

Preferable, Skinner told IPS, is for the West to come to some kind of peace agreement with the Taliban.

The uncertainty surrounding the future U.S. role puts a lot of this planning in doubt, said Sedra. “There is always a tendency to find where oil and natural resources factor in. But I am not so sure if in this case it will be a factor that is going to be enough to keep the United States and other NATO states to continue to invest their blood and treasure in Afghanistan.”

An Afghan soldier protects the palace of King Amanullah (1919-1929) that was partly destroyed in the 1992-1996 civil war. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

The prospects for a peace settlement and power-sharing in Afghanistan following the scheduled U.S.-led troop withdrawal in 2014 are grim, according to a report presented here Monday.

Washington is currently debating how it will structure this withdrawal, including an option to remove all its soldiers sooner than expected.“We can stay until 2014 or we can stay until 2024. Unless we’ve negotiated a political settlement, it won’t matter.” -- Bill Goodfellow of the Center for International Policy

In this context, a study group from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), a think tank here, has concluded that faulty diplomat efforts by the United States have failed to create the necessary circumstances for achieving a smooth political transition to an independent Afghan state.

The report details the findings of an extensive study on U.S. attempts to facilitate negotiations between the Taliban the Afghan national government. The ICSR analysts found that, thus far, those attempts have amounted to a “failure”; further, they express doubt that this failure can be reversed.

“Given the short time remaining before the end of the International Security Assistance Force combat mission in December 2014,” the report states, “there are few grounds for optimism that further talks might lead to a major political breakthrough.”

The difficulties involved in carrying out negotiations are many, both proponents and critics agree, and no talks are currently scheduled to take place.

The latest attempt to induce Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government to talk to the Taliban failed last month because of objections Karzai had over a sign placed by the Taliban outside of the headquarters it has established in Doha, Qatar.

Nevertheless, the report accuses Washington of making a number of strategic errors that have compounded problems facing negotiations.

For instance, it attributes “bad timing” to U.S. efforts to conduct the talks, saying that they came too late, leaving the process too little time to bear fruit.

“The timing for talks could not have been worse,” Ryan Evans, one of the ICSR authors, said at Monday’s presentation of the report. “[The U.S. is] not negotiating from a position of strength but rather a position of weakness, because we announced we were withdrawing troops before we announced talks were a matter of U.S. policy.”

He added: “Doing so, we took away the biggest stick, the biggest leverage we had as far as the Taliban was concerned: our troop presence in Afghanistan.”

Frederic Grare, director of the South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank here, also doubts that there will be substantial negotiations involving Karzai’s government and the Taliban prior to the U.S. withdrawal, noting similar problems with timing.

“The Taliban do not want to deal with Karzai because they view him as a U.S. puppet,” Grare told IPS. “And the closer you get to the date of withdrawal, the less of a chance there is you’ll get the Taliban to do what they don’t want to do.”

Too many voices

Meanwhile, the report accuses the United States of lacking one coherent voice when speaking to Afghans, and providing mixed and often contradictory indications of its intentions.

It notes that members of a wide range of U.S. government agencies, such as the Defence Department, State Department and the National Security Council, are pursuing varied agendas.

“[T]here have been too many actors involved in this process and so many different lines of communication with the Taliban that the cumulative effect has been chaos,” the report states. “Multiple channels have been operating in parallel, creating confusion, disjointed expectations from all parties, and contradictory messages.”

Meanwhile, the Taliban is also not as unified as would be ideal for conducting effective talks. But the United States has done itself a disservice by failing to operate with this in mind, the report states.

“We’ve approached the Taliban as if it were this strictly controlled hierarchical movement, and that we can negotiate with some people at the top and the rest of the group will fall into line,” Evans said, noting that this is not the case.

“People there fight for very local reasons and are often only casually connected to the leadership of the Taliban.”

Evans cites his own experiences in the country, as well as examples from recent history in which deals struck with Taliban leadership not been held up by lower-ranking members.

The ICSR warns that in addition to having a disparate structure, the Taliban is prone to using negotiations as a tactical move in a grander strategy.

“There may indeed be pragmatic Taliban who favour negotiation toward some sort of power-sharing deal,” the report states, “but there are also those who view negotiations as a means to an end or as ‘a way to reduce military pressure enabling them to conserve their strength and consolidate their authority in the areas of Afghanistan they currently control’.”

This last is a quote from a 2012 report in Foreign Policy magazine.

Meanwhile, Grare laments that other important voices have been left out of the talks. He believes that by pushing away other non-Taliban groups, Karzai left himself “isolated”.

This failure to involve other actors is one of the reasons, Grare believes, that talks “will lead nowhere.”

Work from one script

Still, other experts assert that the U.S. has no good option other than to push for substantial negotiations ahead of the 2014 planned withdrawal.

“We can stay until 2014 or we can stay until 2024,” Bill Goodfellow, a founder of the Center for International Policy, another think tank here, told IPS. “Unless we’ve negotiated a political settlement, it won’t matter.”

Goodfellow emphasises the importance of including all states and parties concerned, including Iran, a country with which Washington is currently at odds.

The ICSR report does lay out a series of recommendations, however, which it suggests could improve U.S. chances of achieving a peaceful power-sharing agreement via negotiations.

It advises the United States to “speak with one voice”, for instance, by reining in the various U.S. government messengers in Afghanistan. By “working from the same script” U.S. could ensure Afghans understand its position and purpose.

The report also suggests the United States make sure all key stakeholders are involved in the process, and that the needs of the majority of Afghan society are taken into consideration.

“Ignoring those fundamental needs and interests,” the report concludes, “not only increases the risk of civil war, it also destabilises the negotiation process itself.”

An Afghan soldier protects the palace of King Amanullah (1919-1929) that was partly destroyed in the 1992-1996 civil war. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Lal Aqa Sherin
KABUL, May 16 2013 (IPS)

Western fears of a civil war in Afghanistan are growing ahead of the scheduled pullout of international troops in 2014. However, experts here say the situation on the ground is not comparable to either 1988, when the Soviets withdrew from the country, or the mujahideen’s rise to power in 1992, which plunged the country into civil war.

Speaking to BBC’s Radio 4 last month, British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond described the future of Afghanistan as uncertain, echoing a British Parliamentary Defence Committee warning that the country could descend into civil war within a few years.

But locals who have been watching the situation closely do not share this bleak prognosis of the country’s future.

Retired Colonel Mohammad Sarwar Niazai, a military observer, says the situation is different to what it was in the early 1990s when the Soviets pulled out, leaving the communist government of Mohammed Najibullah without support and presenting seven jihadi parties, armed and aided by the United States, with the perfect opportunity to seize power.

This time around, “no one can get the government out forcibly,” Niazai told IPS, referring to the fact that the U.S. and its coalition partners in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have promised to stand by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government for the foreseeable future.

Recently retired ISAF Commander General John Allen, speaking in Washington on Mar. 25, said the U.S. and its allies would retain a presence in Afghanistan big enough to bolster Afghan forces after the withdrawal of international combat troops at the end of 2014.

Still, Kabul Regional Chief of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) Shamasullah Ahmadzai warned that the roughly 336,000-strong Afghan National Army, though highly motivated, is in serious need of the weapons and arms promised by western allies during talks about the pullout.

Strategic interests

As international media reports of “impending” or “inevitable” conflict continue to proliferate, experts here contend that Western countries with a vested interest in maintaining their military presence have conjured the bogey of civil war to justify continued engagement.

“Their…goal is to create fear in Afghanistan,” Ghulam Jailani Zwak, head of the Afghan Analytical and Advisory Centre, told IPS, adding that he sees “no substance” in the predictions of chaos after 2014.

“Over the last 11 years, Afghanistan has built up a functioning civil society and a strong parliament that has shown it can stand up to the executive,” he said referring to the fact that at the end of 2012, 11 ministers were issued summons to appear in parliament or face impeachment for failing to spend 50 percent of their annual budgets in the last financial year.

Abdul Ghafoor Lewal, head of the Regional Studies Centre, believes threats of civil war are a deliberate Western ploy to maintain a military presence here, particularly in the Bagram airfield, one of the largest U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, located in the Parwan province.

Western powers would like Afghans to believe that foreign troops are their “best bet for security,” Lewal told IPS. The government must be “wise, prudent and…protect itself from the machinations of the West,” he added.

Meanwhile, Major General Rahmatullah Raufi, former commander of Paktia Army Corps and erstwhile governor of the southern province of Kandahar, dismisses the fears of war, claiming Afghans are more united now than they were 11 years ago.

A clear example of this was seen at the third ministerial conference of the Istanbul Process, held in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, on Apr. 26.

Originally intended to foster regional cooperation in the so-called ‘heart of Asia’ – primarily between Afghanistan and its neighbours – this year’s high-level gathering delved into a host of social issues, from education to disaster management, to help strengthen the war-torn country’s economic stability.

The independent Afghanistan Analysts Network said the Afghan government’s participation made clear that it saw the regional initiative as crucial to securing its future after 2014.

Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul, who led the delegation, said Afghanistan was “determined to reclaim (its) rightful place” as an economic centre connecting South Asia, Central Asia, Euroasia and the Middle East.

Moreover, according to experts like Member of Parliament (MP) Habibullah Kalakani – a former jihadi commander who fought against the Soviets – Afghan civil society is no longer “pliant” to foreign interests.

Independent media and human rights organisations including the AIHRC, whose president Sima Samar won the Alternative Nobel Prize last year, are widely respected and have earned international recognition for their efforts to build a culture of peace here.

Kalakani also pointed to the increasing number of educated young Afghans who are perfectly positioned to help their country make a democratic transition.

According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), only 4,000 students submitted applications for university admission in 2004. In 2005 this number increased tenfold to 40,000, reached 52,000 in 2006 and finally passed the 120,000-mark in 2012.

Girls now occupy 25 percent of the seats in public universities, a numbers that is increasing annually, while 52 new private universities have popped up around the country.

Defence Ministry Deputy Spokesperson Siamak Herawi agreed that 2014 will be a “year of change” but insisted there was good reason to believe “the change will be positive not negative,” he told Killid, adding that, this time around, “Afghan hands” will help to build the country.

* Lal Aqa Shirin writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS.