A quick update

After a little over six months of writing this blog, I thought I should bring readers up to date on how it is going. First, the blog presently receives around 30 to 40 hits per day, with a total of around 2,700. Particularly successful were the blog on the Taliban cartoon, which has been picked up all over the place, and also the blog on TIME magazine, which sadly refuses to further acknowledge the fact that it printed a recycled and inaccurate story about General Dostum.

I have been asked to become an official France24 ‘Observer’, which means that my blog features on the France24 website. I have also been quoted by Asia Media Forum, which picked up the Taliban cartoon story. And the Russian website agentura.ru now runs a banner ad notifying its readers of my existence.

When I launched the blog, I decided to keep my identity private. However, as it is now becoming an open secret I have updated my personal information. Finally I would like to thank you all for reading this blog and making it worthwhile for me.

Growing opium poppies - but not in Afghanistan

My picture, taken today, shows large fields of opium poppies (papaver somniferum), which are the principal crop of southern Afghanistan and the source of 90 per cent of the world’s heroin. But this picture was not taken in Helmand, the main opium-growing region. It was not even taken in Afghanistan. What about Turkey or Burma? No. Give up?

The astonishing truth is that this picture was taken in Oxfordshire in the south of England. Faced with a growing shortage of morphine and codeine for medicine, the UK’s Home Office has granted the pharmaceutical company Macfarlan Smith, a world leader in the production of alkaloid opiates, a licence to harvest poppies in Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. Hundreds of acres are now under cultivation. The company then processes the poppies into pain-killing drugs for use by doctors all over the country.

Nor is Britain the only country that is experiencing a massive shortage of poppy-derived morphine. There are shortages in many parts of the world.

Why then are we destroying opium fields in Afghanistan? A good question, particularly as this week it is being reported that there is a growing recognition that Afghanistan’s counter-narcotic strategy is failing. Two weeks ago the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen told the US Senate that the international community was losing the battle against opium production in Afghanistan. Mullen said foreign forces in Afghanistan need to do more than simply fight Taliban militants who are paid by criminal groups to protect opium crops.

And last week it was announced that UN officials in Afghanistan are attempting to create a 'flood of drugs' in the country intended to destroy the value of opium and force poppy farmers to switch to legal crops such as wheat.

After the failure to destroy poppies in Afghanistan's volatile south, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says the answer is to stop the drugs from leaving the country in the first place. The have realised that manual eradication is inefficient and instead propose flooding the country with cheap opium. Last year the Afghan government succeeded in destroying only 3.5% of Afghanistan's 157,000 hectares of poppy because eradication teams were either attacked or bought off by local drug lords.

The ‘flooding’ option has clearly not been thought through and will probably result in thousands more opium/heroin addicts in Afghanistan.

What about encouraging poppy production in order to satisfy the world market for morphine? The Senlis Council proposed this strategy some time ago in its report Poppy for Medicine. Despite receiving backing from the European Parliament, nothing much more has happened. Perhaps it is an idea whose time has now come?

Taliban uses cartoon character to tell the news

UN special rapporteur on military crimes

Last week the Human Rights Council of the United Nations published a report by Philip Alston, its special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Alston’s subject was a mission he undertook to the United States earlier this year.

As with the Amnesty International report mentioned below, the report makes harrowing reading. Leaving aside Alston’s comments on the judicial system within the United States and at Guantanamo Bay, he takes the military and judicial authorities in America to task for their failures to protect human rights in Afghanistan or Iraq.

“It is noteworthy,” says Alston, “that ‘command responsibility,’ a basis for criminal liability recognized since the trials after World War II, is absent both from the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the War Crimes Act. It appears that no U.S. officer above the rank of major has ever been prosecuted for the wrongful actions of the personnel under his or her command. Instead, in some instances, commanders have exercised their discretion to lessen the punishment of subordinates for wrongful conduct that resulted in a custodial death.”

Alston says there has been a “zone of de facto impunity” for private contractors and civilian intelligence agents operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, not through a lack of law, but through an unwillingness of prosecutors to prosecute. He adds: “Prosecutors have also failed, even years after alleged wrongful deaths, to disclose the status of their investigations or the bases for decisions not to prosecute. One well-informed source succinctly described the situation: “The DOJ has been AWOL in response to these incidents.” “

He gives as an example the August 2002 shooting to death of Afghan national Mohammad Sayari. The army investigation into Sayari’s death recommended charges including conspiracy and murder against four members of a Special Forces unit. In fact, the commanding officer dropped all charges and issued only a written reprimand of a captain who had ordered his subordinates to destroy evidence.

The best way to end these abuses, says Alston, is to create a commission of inquiry tasked with carrying out independent, systematic and sustained investigation of policies and practices that lead to deaths and other abuses. He also recommends the appointment of a ‘Director of Military Prosecutions’ who would be independent of the chain of command.

The final section of Alston’s report deals with the legal basis for ‘targeted killings’ – in particular the use of missiles fired from drones that often kill innocent civilians.

Alston says he has asked on several occasions for details of the legal basis for these attacks. He says the US government has been evasive in its answer, telling him the answer lies outside his remit. The best he can ascertain is the fact that in September 2001 President Bush signed a ‘presidential finding’ pursuant to the authority of which the CIA developed the concept of “high-value targets” for whom “kill, capture or detain” orders could be issued in consultation with lawyers in DOJ, CIA, and the administration.

However, that leaves many questions, not least on whether or not it is legal to carry out such attacks in a country such as Pakistan with which the USA is not at war.

Alston’s report makes depressing reading. It shows that for all the talk about freedom and democracy, the US pays little heed to these values in the way it deals with the crimes and errors of an admitted tiny minority.

US Army tweets in Afghanistan

The US Army has decided to start using new media to keep the public informed of its activities in Afghanistan. As of this morning, you can now follow the latest developments on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Not sure what the policy is on Twitter. Former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General McKiernan's farewell speech in Kabul today gets four tweets, but no mention so far of the four US soldiers reported killed by IEDs in Wardak yesterday.

Could the Taliban be much worse?

If it were any other country, we would be calling for boycotts and protesting outside embassies across the world at the activities of President Karzai’s regime in Kabul. The publication of Amnesty International’s annual report on the country is both shocking and shameful.

Its summary is uncompromising: “Millions of people living in southern and eastern Afghanistan, terrorized by the Taleban, other insurgent groups and local militias ostensibly allied with the government, suffered insecurity that further restricted their already limited access to food, health care, and schooling. Indiscriminate attacks, abductions and the targeting of civilians reached unprecedented levels. The Taleban and other anti-government groups significantly expanded their attacks to cover more than a third of the country, including areas once considered relatively safe in the centre and the north. Increased military attacks between anti-government groups and US and NATO troops resulted in more than 2,000 civilian deaths. The government failed to maintain the rule of law or to provide basic services to millions of people even in areas under its control.”

The catalogue of human rights abuses is endless: a ministry of justice that refused to cooperate with the country’s human rights commission; trials for former Guantanamo prisoners that “failed to meet national or international fair trial standards”; failure to prosecute those responsible for human rights abuses; the state execution of 17 people in 2008 and the upholding of 131 death sentences; the lack of a systematic programme for assisting those injured by Afghan and international military forces; the decision by NATO and US forces to continue to hand over detainees to Afghanistan’s NDS intelligence service, which is known to perpetrate human rights violations including torture and arbitrary detention.

Then there is the intimidation, both by the government and the Taliban, of journalists, several of whom have been killed or injured. In one particular notorious incident, in September 2008, Ahmad Ghous Zalmai, a journalist and former spokesperson for the Attorney General, and Mullah Qari Mushtaq were each sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for publishing a Dari translation of the Qur’an without the Arabic text alongside.

There are other serious human rights abuses, including the killing of civilians, both by the Taliban and by Coalition and Afghan government forces. There is little oversight of private military contractors. Several hundred thousand people in Afghanistan are internal refugees. Many women and girls are denied the right to education.

Where does this leave us morally? Looking at it logically, in the name of democracy we are spending billions of dollars propping up a backward, repressive, religiously conservative government. Perhaps you can live with that, but do you really think that the Taliban could be much worse?

A snaphot of the war in Afghanistan

I make no apologies for recommending a book by my friend and former colleague Stephen Grey. Operation Snakebite: The explosive true story of an Afghan desert siege tells the story of the attempt by British and other forces to liberate the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala in Helmand Province in December 2007. It was to become the biggest operation conducted by the British in Afghanistan for more than a century.
He says the book is “neither an official nor a comprehensive or definitive account of the war in Afghanistan. It is an attempt to look in detail at one small snapshot of a modern counter-insurgency action through the eyes and ears of a few key individuals, both in command and on the front line.”
There is no end to military books on Afghanistan. Journalists, aid workers, former soldiers have all done their best to give a sense of what it is like to be a frontline soldier in this most inhospitable of wars. Most fail miserably, mainly because their writers have very little insight.
Stephen’s book is different. It describes events over just a few days and successfully combines a narrative of what happened and what it was like for the soldiers on the ground with a detailed and fascinating account of the power politics in Kabul and elsewhere that informed these events. He interviewed more than 200 people, from lowly private soldiers up to the chief of the General Staff and including diplomats, spies and everyone in between.
“I soon discovered the real story of the Battle of Musa Qala,” Stephen writes, “and the events leading up to it, had all the dimensions of a thriller – courage, love and betrayal, intrigues at the palace in Kabul, tension between friends, assassination and intelligence blunders and occasionally high farce.”
What also comes across is the picture of a very complex battlefield. In the same terrain, there are NATO soldiers from different countries, including Americans, then American soldiers who are not part of NATO, but are operating independently as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, as well as US Marines, British Royal Marines, special forces units from all of the above, CIA, MI6 and other intelligence operatives, Afghan National Army soldiers and many others.
If you want to know how the war in Afghanistan is being fought today and to understand something of what is meant by asymmetric warfare, I strongly urge you to read this book.