Afstan: Donors, Brits, US Marines, Italians, and winning

Donors--how much will things really change?

The people and villages of troubled Afghanistan will get substantial new aid – up to $16 billion – provided Kabul and President Hamid Karzai agree to greater United Nations oversight and clampdown measures on Afghan corruption and waste, world leaders said here Thursday...

Diplomats in Paris intimated that aid will be tied to Karzai's promises – affirmed here Thursday – to work in partnership with new UN special representative Kai Eide. The point was echoed most loudly in the hallways by Europeans, who trust Mr. Eide after his reform of operations in Kosovo. But US ambassador also termed Eide a needed "traffic cop" for aid...

Some 90 percent of the Afghan budget comes from donors [emphasis added] – though the country is in the bottom tenth on most transparency rankings.

"Karzai won't get new pledges without greater accounting for it," says Greg Sullivan, a US Department of State spokesman. "But they are in Paris with a 19-page fact sheet that is the best we've ever seen. The gaps in Afghanistan are huge. In Khost you can use a Blackberry, and in Helmund are the Taliban. So Paris is sort of a shareholders' meeting, where donors must be convinced. That's a philosophical change."..

To be sure, Afghan aid has brought serious improvements, say Afghans contacted for this report. New roads, currency, and schools are a few examples. The 300-mile drive from Kabul to Kandahar used to take 18 hours; today it takes six [emphasis added]. Afghans have stopped using the Pakistani and Iranian rupees and now trust the local Afghan currency. Three universities now operate, in Kabul, Khost, and Kandahar; girls go to schools in the south.

Karzai pointed out the scale of change since the fall of 2001: 1 radio station and 1 TV station have given way to 70 radio and 15 TV stations; 30 percent of the six million students are girls.

Still, as Eide points out, Kabul has no reliable electricity. Crises and solvable problems that villagers bitterly complain about to NATO contingents are often not reported or recognized. Poppy remains a huge cash crop.

Perhaps a main concern among ordinary Afghans is that the giant-sounding sums of aid pledges won't reach them – and will instead be siphoned off in Kabul or by NGOs. The state is still deeply riven by ethnic and tribal rivalry...

While $25 billion in nonmilitary aid has been proffered to Kabul over the past seven years, about $15 billion has been dispersed. Of this, as much as 30 or 40 percent was recouped by foreign corporations and salaries [emphasis added].

US director of foreign aid Henrietta Fore told reporters in Paris that much aid remains in the pipeline simply because the bidding process was so slow, and that aid was often not ready to be received. After Paris, however, Ms. Fore said more aid will "flow directly" through the government. "There's a sense that aid should be coming through the Afghan government, and as many ministries as possible," [emphasis added--while Canadian policy is going the other way, see end of this post] she said...

Brits--this sounds very familiar:

Britain's counter-insurgency campaign against the Taliban is shifting from one phase into another.

The war of pitched battles is all but over. The Taliban's leadership structures have been ravaged by covert British special forces raids; their ability to coordinate operations largely curtailed.

The insurgents have been pushed out of the fixed positions that they were able to hold in Garmser in the south of the province and Musa Qala in the north.

They take a bloody nose wherever they choose to stand and fight. They know they cannot win outright.

So instead the Taliban appear to have accepted that they must play the long game. The political will of governments in the face of public opposition to costly, distant wars is the Achilles Heel of Western democracies.

The technological knowhow of Taliban roadside bombs is improving and their numbers are up 34 per cent on last year, possibly thanks to help from Iran's government.

And steady attrition through roadside bombs and suicide bombs are the means that Taliban fighters will use to try to ensure that a steady flow of Nato body bags ultimately undermines the political will of Western countries to 'stay the course' [emphasis added].

The Taliban have been suppressed but they cannot be defeated entirely while they continue to operate out of safe havens in Pakistan; not unless the Afghan people decisively reject them and force them out. And not until there are viable Afghan government structures and security forces that the populous are prepared to put their faith in.

As British commanders are fond of saying, "the population is the prize."

There is little love for the Taliban amongst the majority of Helmandis. But equally there is little love for foreign troops on the part of a people that distrusts outsiders of any hue. And there is the complicating problem of the region's vast narcotics economy...

...if the first step is creating credible security forces, the Afghan army shows promise. In Kabul a huge US funded training programme is churning out trained soldiers at a rate of one battalion, 700-800 men, every week. The army is expected to reach around 70,000 men by the end of this year [emphasis added].

On the frontline in Helmand those soldiers, mentored by British and American soldiers, are being equipped not just with boots and helmets, but also with new flak jackets, M-16 rifles, helicopters, trucks and Humvee armoured cars.

Of course this could turn out to be another Western trained army with 'all the gear, but no idea'.

Shiny new battalions of South Vietnamese soldiers rolled out of US army training programmes with state of the art equipment in the early 1970s to crumble ignominiously in battle.

But the signs so far are that the Afghan National Army has the will to fight, and increasingly the skills. Three weeks ago Afghan National Army soldiers mentored by the Royal Irish Regiment conducted their own sweep operation through the dangerous 'Green Zone' south of the town of Sangin, establishing a new base in previously Taliban dominated territory and then beating back several Taliban attacks.

British officers and NCOs may have fretted over their failure to converse food, their refusal to carry adequate water and ammunition, and their unwillingness to train when back at base. But when the bullets flew the ANA fought back.

From two battalions of Afghan troops in the province in 2006 there are now seven [emphasis added]. And while British forces are rarely much more than tolerated, the Afghan National Army appears to command a degree of respect and even affection...

The irony is that perhaps the biggest single threat to the British mission in Afghanistan, is not the Taliban, the drug smugglers, corrupt Afghan politicians or the malign influence of other regional powers, but simply the will of the public in Western countries to keep supporting a distant war that has now killed 100 British soldiers and is likely to kill a great many more.

US Marines--who will replace them?

NATO allies have yet to come up with replacements for a key deployment of some 3,000 U.S. Marines due to leave Afghanistan later this year, alliance officials said after talks on Friday.

The Pentagon sent the Marines to Afghanistan ahead of an expected rise in violence this year, but the troops are scheduled to return home in November and the United States is not expected to offer to keep them there any longer.

"I have no complete indications yet about back-filling," NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a news conference after allied defense ministers met in Brussels, using the military term for replacing departing troops.

"I would like to see that we find a way of following up on their good work on the ground."

British Defense Minister Des Browne said the Marines had produced an "astonishing effect" in combating Taliban insurgents in the southern Helmand province [emphasis added] where Britain operates, and said Britain was involved in discussions about replacements.

"We don't intend to give up what we have created," he said of what he described as major losses suffered recently by the Taliban in one of their traditional heartlands.

France has agreed to send troops to Kapisa province northeast of Kabul around July in a move that is intended to free up U.S. forces there to go south.

However Browne said he understood those U.S. troops would go to Kandahar province [emphasis added], like Helmand in the south, and that such a redeployment was separate from efforts to replace the Marines [emphasis added].

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has seen its troop strength swell to some 52,000 in recent months but commanders say it is still under-resourced and struggles to hold areas captured from insurgents.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted that despite some progress made in the war, the casualty rate among allied forces in Afghanistan recently topped that in Iraq. He said he urged his European counterparts at the talks to make good on pledges made at a NATO summit in April to plug the ISAF shortfalls [emphasis added]...

Italians--this might help (as Norman Spector puts it "What your paper is not reporting this morning"; this is what our media did report with great glee):

...
During Thursday's news conference, Bush said [Italian PM] Berlusconi had assured him that Italy had removed "caveats" that restricted the use of Italian troops in the areas of Afghanistan with the heaviest fighting against the Taliban [emphasis added]. Italy's previous resistance to sending any of its 2,700 troops in Afghanistan to those areas has prompted complaints from NATO and the United States...

The future--"victory" is not hard to define, but to achieve:

The question that western donors to Afghanistan might have asked themselves at this week's Paris conference was an obvious one: why are we there? In the event it was easier to write the cheques. Winning in Afghanistan is perhaps the most consistent mantra of western security policy. As long, that is, as no one defines what is meant by winning...

Afghanistan is the good war - a conflict fought in self-defence and one, unlike Iraq, blessed from the outset by the international community. No dodgy intelligence here. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for the coming US presidential election promising to pull out US troops from Iraq. He wants a bigger effort in Afghanistan [emphasis added].

Mr Obama is not alone. I have given up counting how often in recent months I have heard politicians and policymakers, leftwing and rightwing, Americans and Europeans, say the west cannot afford to lose in Afghanistan [you don't here Canadian politicians, even in the government, saying that - MC]. I am still unsure as to what constitutes winning. So, I think, are they...

I find it curious that western military commanders cite the Taliban's increasing resort to suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices as evidence of impending victory. Another way of looking at the insurgents' shift in tactics is to say they are adept at adapting to circumstances. This week a suicide bomber took to 100 the toll of British fatalities in the conflict.

That said, things are better than they were. A year or so ago it seemed that vast tracts of the country might well slide back into the hands of Taliban fighters. Nato forces have now pushed them back from their strongholds and forced an effective military stalemate in the south.

The military points to other advances. France's willingness to commit more troops to Afghanistan and Italy's to lift the caveats on deployment of its forces have eased, for the time being, some of the tensions within Nato. Successful US strikes against al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan have greatly inhibited its offensive capabilities.

All this may be true, but in candid moments diplomats and military commanders will admit that these are tactical rather than strategic gains. The bigger picture is one of a government whose writ extends barely beyond Kabul, of competing warlords and high-level corruption, and of conflicting tribal loyalties.

The inadequacies of the west's security and development effort have been well documented. The military still lacks vital equipment as well as boots on the ground. Can it really be true that Europe has no more helicopters? Reconstruction projects are divided between legions of national and multilateral aid agencies; much of the funding goes to foreign consultants.

The latest spat between Washington and Islamabad - over the killing of Pakistani soldiers during hot pursuit operations against the Taliban - was a reminder that a coherent strategy also demands the co-operation of Afghanistan's neighbours...

A less ideological US administration might also accept that it is impossible to kill every Taliban fighter. Some will have to be won over. Europe in such circumstances might be shamed into contributing more troops to the vital task of building security.

All this, though, is irrelevant unless there is agreement on what constitutes winning. It should not be so hard. Afghanistan is not about to become a shiny new democracy. Any political system must pay its respects to history, geography and culture. The ambition should be for an Afghan government strong enough to defend the country's borders and to deny havens to terrorists, and sufficiently honest and pluralist to guarantee fundamental rights. That should be the aim of the international effort [emphasis added].

Sorry for the long post, but lots of good stuff.