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)

Afghan National Police guard the office of the Governor of Bamyan Province, Afghanistan. Credit: UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein

By Gareth Porter and Shah Noori
WASHINGTON/KABUL, Sep 20 2012 (IPS)

Sharply increased attacks on U.S. and other NATO personnel by Afghan security forces, reflecting both infiltration of and Taliban influence on those forces, appear to have outflanked the U.S.-NATO command’s strategy for maintaining control of the insurgency.

The Taliban-instigated “insider attacks”, which have already killed 51 NATO troops in 2012 – already 45 percent more than in all of 2011 – have created such distrust of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and national police that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has suspended joint operations by NATO forces with Afghan security units smaller than the 800-strong battalion of Kandak and vowed to limit them in the future.

ISAF had intended to carry out intensive partnering and advising of ANA and police units below battalion level through 2012 to get them ready to take responsibility for Afghan security. Now, however, that strategy appears to have been disrupted by the insider attacks, and Afghan military and civilian officials are seriously concerned.

Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta sought to minimise the crisis in U.S. war strategy Tuesday by calling the inside attacks on NATO troops the “last gasp” of a Taliban insurgency that has been “unable to regain any of the territory that they have lost.” The “last gasp” phrase recalls then Vice-President Dick Cheney’s infamous 2005 claim that the Iraqi insurgency was “in its last throes”.

But Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has no apparent personal stake in touting the existing strategy in Afghanistan, called the attacks “a very serious threat to the campaign” in an interview on Saturday.

“You can’t whitewash it,” said Dempsey. “We can’t convince ourselves that we just have to work harder to get through it. Something has to change.”

The ISAF command also tried to downplay the significance of the decision, portraying it as “temporary” and not unlike previous adjustments to high threat conditions. The ISAF press release vowed that it would “return to normal operations as soon as conditions warrant”.

But the Taliban have power over whether conditions return to a level that would allow resumption of the joint operations between NATO and Afghan forces, which have been touted as the key to preparing the ANA and the police to cope with the Taliban on their own. The Taliban have achieved a strategic coup by creating a high degree of U.S.-NATO fear and mistrust of the Afghan forces.

Even if some joint operations are resumed, moreover, they will be limited to those approved by regional commanders, according to the new policy. And White House spokesman Jay Carney appeared to contradict the ISAF “return to normal operations” language, telling reporters, “Most partnering and advising will now be at the battalion level and above.”

ISAF Commander Gen. John Allen has tried in the past to minimise the role of the Taliban in the insider killings, suggesting that as little as 10 percent of the Afghan soldiers and police who killed NATO troops were Taliban infiltrators. Most of the killers acted out of personal anger at their Western advisers, Allen argued.

But Allen also conceded that, in addition to Taliban infiltrators, some Afghan troops may have acted out of “radicalization or having become susceptible to extremist ideology.”

New evidence suggests that the Taliban had influenced a number of ANA and police who killed NATO personnel. Last month, the Taliban’s media arm released a video showing a Taliban commander in eastern Kunar province welcoming two ANA soldiers who they said had killed U.S. and Afghan troops earlier in the year. Based on the video, the Long War Journal judged that neither of the soldiers had been a Taliban infiltrator but had made the decision in response to Taliban urging.

Douglas Ollivant, who was senior counterinsurgency adviser to the U.S. commander of the regional command for eastern Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, told IPS the evidence indicates that most Afghan personnel who killed NATO troops and were not already Taliban when they joined the security forces had later become “de facto infiltrators”.

In the Afghan rural social context, the local Taliban and the Afghan troops and soldiers “all know each other”, Ollivant said. “It’s not like they are from two different planets.”

Lt. Col. Danny Davis, who traveled extensively across Afghanistan during his 2010-2011 tour of duty there, found evidence that the Taliban had indeed achieved influence over the Afghan security forces who were supposed to be helping U.S.-NATO forces root out the insurgents.

In a draft report he wrote earlier this year, which had circulated within the U.S. government and was leaked to Rolling Stone magazine, Davis wrote, “In almost every combat outpost I visited this year, the troopers reported to me they had intercepted radio or other traffic between the ANSF and the local Taliban making essentially mini-nonaggression deals with each other.”

In Zharay district of Kandahar province, Davis wrote, he found the Afghan security forces were “in league with the Taliban”.

Taliban spiritual and political leader Mullah Omar issued a statement Aug. 16 saying the Taliban had “cleverly infiltrated the ranks of the enemy according to the plan given them last year.” Omar also called on Afghan security personnel to “defect and joint the Taliban as matter of religious duty”.

For many months the U.S. has been putting intense pressure on the Afghan government to prevent such killings by “revetting” the personnel files of ANA and police personnel. Just last week, the government announced that it had removed “hundreds” of security forces from its ranks.

But there is very little the Afghan government can do to ensure against Afghan troops turning against NATO. “Vetting is virtually impossible in a place like Afghanistan,” former British commander Col. Richard Kemp told the Guardian.

There are no detailed files on the young recruits into the army and police. The only information on the vast majority of new recruits is a statement from village elders vouching for them.

Retired Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, senior fellow and director of communications at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, told IPS that U.S. officers in Afghanistan don’t believe the Afghan government’s efforts to identify potential Taliban infiltrators or sympathisers will slow the pace of insider killings. “They are all saying it isn’t going to have any effect,” said Shaffer.

The decision by ISAF to pull back from joint operations with smaller Afghan units is regarded by Afghan officials and observers as a major boost to the Taliban and a potentially serious blow to the already shaky ANA and police.

Retired ANA Gen Atiqullah Amarkhail acknowledged in an interview with IPS that insider attacks “have destroyed the NATO trust in the Afghan security forces”. The halt in joint operations with Afghan security forces will “really embolden and raise the morale of the Taliban”, he said. “The Taliban consider that they have achieved the goal they have been working for and are proud that they made coalition forces stop helping Afghan security forces.”

Amarkhail said he doesn’t believe the ANA will be able to conduct operations without the help of NATO forces, because of poor coordination among Afghan security forces and its lack of modern weapons.

“If the foreign forces do not support and leave the Afghan Army in the present condition, things will get worse,” said Amarkhail. He expressed the fear that the result could be that different elements within the ANA will “turn their guns on each other”.

Dawoud Ahmadi, spokesman for Helmand Province Governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal, also expressed the fear that the ANA in the province will not be able to operate effectively against the Taliban if ISAF halts joint operations with the ANA at lower unit levels.

The spokesman told IPS, “We have problems in Helmand province, especially in the North. If NATO doesn’t help in conducting operations at lower level, the Afghan security forces will face problems, because they are not yet ready to launch operations on their own in that part of the province.”

*Shah Noori reported from Kabul. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

While top officials in the Barack Obama administration insist that U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is working, the violent aftermath of last week’s apparently inadvertent burning of copies of the Quran at a military base is fuelling growing pessimism about the U.S. and NATO mission there.

Some three dozen Afghans were killed in anti-U.S. protests that drew tens of thousands of people into the streets in Kabul and other cities around the country following news of the incineration at Bagram Air Base and despite a series of apologies from U.S. commanders all the way up to President Obama himself.

Two U.S. military officers working at a supposedly secure site in Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry were also shot execution-style by an Afghan security official in apparent retaliation for the burnings in what was the latest of 36 “fratricidal” Afghan attacks on foreign troops in the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the past 14 months. That the assailant escaped suggested that he may have been supported by others in the ministry.

Their killings prompted ISAF commander U.S. Gen. John Allen to order all ISAF and U.S. staff working in Afghan ministries to leave their posts temporarily. Officials here said Tuesday they did not know when the order would be lifted.

On Monday, nine Afghans were killed when a car bomber detonated his vehicle at the entrance of an air base used by U.S. and ISAF forces in Jalalabad, a city in northeastern Afghanistan, which late last month celebrated the transfer of control over security from ISAF to Afghan national forces.

“It has been a truly grim week and one where these events raise questions about U.S. strategy and the value of continuing with the current approach to the war,” wrote Anthony Cordesman, a highly respected military and security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in a lengthy commentary released Monday under the dour title of “Afghanistan: The Death of a Strategy”.

He noted that the increasing unpopularity of U.S. and ISAF troops was just one factor – along with persistent government corruption and incompetence and Pakistan’s tolerance and support of Taliban sanctuaries – among several others that challenged the basic assumptions of the counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy the Obama administration adopted in 2009.

Cordesman concluded that it was “now clear that withdrawal timetables will continue to accelerate, cutbacks will continue to grow, and popular attention will continue to shift away from Afghanistan.”

Indeed, most analysts here predicted that the past week’s events are likely to hasten the withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign combat troops from Afghanistan through 2014, leaving only an as yet undetermined number of military and police advisers and trainers, according to NATO’s current timetable.

“The U.S. public has trouble understanding why the United States continues to sink blood and treasure into Afghanistan when the people we are trying to help are killing us,” Andrew Exum, a counterinsurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security, told the Los Angeles Times.

Washington, which currently has some 90,000 U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, is scheduled to reduce that number to 68,000 by this September.

The pace at which the remaining troops will be withdrawn has been a major source of contention both within the administration and between Republicans, who generally have favoured maintaining as many troops – and bases – in Afghanistan as long as possible, and most Democratic lawmakers who have repeatedly pressed for an accelerated withdrawal.

Nonetheless, the administration is standing firm, at least for now. “This is not an endless commitment that will take lives far into the future,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told unhappy Democrats during a Senate hearing Tuesday.

“(W)e have … made progress on the principal reason we were there – security. Because of our platform and our presence in Afghanistan, we’ve been able to target terrorists, particularly top Al-Qaeda operatives, including (Osama) bin Laden in their safe havens. And we have made progress in helping the Afghan people.”

Likewise, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told an audience here Tuesday that his forces will “continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Afghan partners. …We are in Afghanistan to build stability and security for the Afghan people, which is in the interest of our own security.”

But given the most recent events, particularly the “fratricidal”, or “green-on-blue”, attacks by Afghans on ISAF forces, Rasmussen’s determination is likely to be severely tested, especially when NATO chiefs meet again to discuss Afghanistan strategy in Chicago in May.

Indeed, it was the killing by an Afghan soldier last month of four French troops at a fortified base that prompted President Nicolas Sarkozy to decide to withdraw all of France’s nearly 4,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2013, a year before their scheduled departure. Last Friday, the German contingent also announced it had closed one of its military outposts in the face of anti-NATO demonstrations touched off by the book burning.

Just a few days before the Quran burning, another two U.S. soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier in eastern Nangahar province near the Pakistani border.

While U.S. and NATO officials have routinely described these attacks as “isolated” incidents, a classified report disclosed by the New York Times last month found that explanation “disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest”.

“Lethal altercations are clearly not rare or isolated,” according to the report, which was drafted last May by a U.S. command in eastern Afghanistan. “They reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern military history).”

The report found that the animosity of Afghan soldiers was fed by many factors, including traffic disruption caused by U.S. convoys; indiscriminate U.S. fire that causes civilian casualties, the use of flawed intelligence sources, U.S. road blocks, night raids, violation of female privacy during searches; past massacres by U.S. forces; rudeness, disrespect and arrogance in dealing with Afghan soldiers, and unnecessarily shooting animals.

For their part, U.S. troops complained of illicit drug use, “massive thievery”, incompetence, corruption, covert alliances with insurgents, laziness, and poor hygiene, among other criticisms, by their Afghan counterparts.

The report’s disclosure, as noted by tomdispatch.com, came during the same week that a videotape of four U.S. Marines casually urinating on the corpses of dead Afghans circulated on the Internet, another in an accumulating, decade-long series of incidents, including the bombing by U.S. warplanes earlier this month of eight young shepherds, ranging in age from six to 18, that have alienated Afghans from their western “allies”.

“If we are not able to restore trust between Afghan and coalition troops, then the strategy is unworkable,” John Nagl, another counter- insurgency specialist at the U.S. Naval Academy, told McClatchy newspapers this week.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

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