Excellent new blog on Afghanistan

An absolute must-read for anyone who wants to keep an eye on what is happening in the heart of Afghanistan's government is the newly-established Afghan blog, Dirty Politics. Amongst its stories:
- an amazing video clip showing how government ministers were selected at an informal meeting of Uzbek and Hazara politicians organised by prominent businessman Haji Ramazan and including General Abdul Rashid Dostum (passim), Haji Muhammad Muhaqiq, Speaker of the House Abdul Rauf Ibrahim and others;
- a video clip from Pakistan's Dunya TV in which former ISI director General Hamid Gul, in speaking of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, says (in Urdu) that both men defended Pakistan during the anti-Soviet war and stayed loyal to Pakistan until the US invasion of Afghanistan. "They are both as patriotic Pakistanis as I am," he adds.
Best story: that of a man arrested in Jalalabad  province yesterday for making fake government documentation, including fake documents identifying him as President Karzai. Abdul Wares faked President Karzai's signature for permits to allow the carrying of guns and to drive a  car with tinted windows. He also created counterfeit documents with the signatures of the Ministers of the Interior, Defence and Agriculture, Traffic Chief and Speaker of the Upper House.

Smelly stories about Iranian missiles

Was it a coincidence that the story about Iranian guided missiles in the hands of the Taliban that appeared everywhere yesterday happened to come while Iran's interior minister, Mustafa Mohammad Najjar, was in Kabul to emphasise his country's opposition to permanent foreign bases in Afghanistan?
Personally, I am sceptical of the claims of the Iranians supplying the Taliban with missiles. Why would the Taliban trust the Iranians? And why would the Iranians supply weapons that can so easily be traced back to them? The evidence that the 48 rockets were Iranian apparently comes down to the fact that they had green fuses. Where are the pics? And isn't it convenient that everyone involved in transporting them in three lorries in the remote south-west Nimruz region of the country was killed by special forces?
This is not the first time it has been reported that the Iranians are supplying weapons to the Taliban. In May 2007, reports appeared saying that Iran's Revolutionary Guards were supplying SA7 anti-aircraft missiles to the Taliban: "There is reporting that lead us to believe a number of agencies, that possibly include Iranian organisations, are significantly supporting the Taliban," a military intelligence source told The Daily Telegraph. Hardly a strong statement, but enough for media organisations to run lurid headlines.
Again the story resurfaced in March 2009 in the Sunday Times, when Michael Smith reported this time that the Iranians were supplying SA-14 Gremlin missiles. The evidence was "parts from two of them" discovered by special forces in western Afghanistan. The UK Ministry of Defence at the time said it was not aware of any threat from SA-14 missiles.
This is a story with a long and unflattering history. In July last year a leaked US cable claimed that Hezbe Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and an al-Qaeda leader called Dr Amin (oooh, scary) had flown from Iran to North Korea in 2005 to buy ground to air missiles. Iran, North Korea, al-Qaeda and a hated insurgent leader all in one story. How convenient! Not surprisingly, the story was later discredited and put down to a rogue source.
Another leaked cable that surfaced last summer was a 'threat report' - that's gossip to you or me - dating from 1 April 2007, that referred to reports that in 2006 Iran had bought seven anti-aircraft missiles from Algeria and that these had been transported across the Iranian border into Afghanistan. It mentioned previous reports that Iran had supplied the Taliban with MANPADs - hand-held anti-aircraft missiles - although the report added: "Despite the reporting, we have yet to see any of these alleged MANPADS actually being used."
Another leaked document did actually refer to a Chinook being fired at with a missile, but there is no evidence about where that missile came from or even if it was a missile. It could just have easily been one of those left over from the anti-Soviet jihad or one of the heavy machine guns favoured by the Taliban.
Another report appeared in October last year in the Washington Examiner claiming that Iran was training Taliban fighter to fire missiles. Yet again, there was no evidence beyond claims by an unnamed intelligence official.
There have been other stories suggesting that Iran has supplied new batteries for Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. However, despite a great deal of hot air there is little, if any, proof. Something stinks here.

Four events leading in one direction

President Karzai's sacking of his interior minister and the head of Afghanistan's intelligence service, the possible extradition of Mullah Barodar from Pakistan to Kabul, the rumoured talks between the Karzai government and the Haqqani network and the resignation of General McChrystal. Four events that may be connected.
President Karzai is taking seriously the mandate he was given two weeks ago at the Peace jirga in Kabul to negotiate with the Taliban with a view to striking a deal for the reintegration and reconciliation of its fighters. His emissaries have already made it clear to the Pakistan military that they will be allowed to play a role in the endgame he hopes will end the fighting and they can probably smell a deal.
It was for this reason that Karzai decided to sack the interior minister and intelligence chief immediately following the Peace jirga. Both men are regarded by the Taliban (and Pakistan) as obstacles to negotiations, preferring instead a strategy based on destroying the organisation.
Hence the suggestions now circulating in Kabul and Islamabad that Barodar - and other senior Taliban leaders now in prison in Pakistan - will be brought back to Afghanistan, where Karzai hopes they will play a role in reaching out to sections of the Taliban leadership.
Hence too the talks with the Haqqanis. They are under the patronage of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service and would do nothing without their backing. Whilst it may not be true that Sirajuddin Haqqani himself made it to Kabul last week, it is likely that a more junior member of the family was present. (More on the Haqqanis can be found in a briefing note issued by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War on Monday).
Nor is this the only attempt to reach out to the fighters in the east of the country. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami fighters have already met with the president and negotiations continue.
And so was McChrystal's resignation simply a matter of the general making a stupid mistake? Hardly. He is bitterly opposed to a negotiated solution to the fighting and was intent on breaking the back of the insurrection before considering negotiations. He had already told President Obama that this strategy would require more time and that the US forces were unlikely to be able to begin withdrawal by June next year. These views are increasingly out of line with the White House, where Obama's political reputation will stand or fall on his ability to keep his promise to begin withdrawing US troops by then. If McChrystal couldn't deliver this promise, then he had to go. He simply decided that he was not going to go quietly. Holbrooke and Eikenberry, the US special envoy and ambassador to Afghanistan respectively, may also feel they cannot support Karzai's policy and they too may make an early exit.
What has prompted Obama to back away from his general and to allow Karzai to explore his way of doing things? Probably the offensive in Marjah. Despite all the hype, the much-trumpeted offensive - and the now-aborted early entry into Kandahar - have been disastrous. Resistance continues in this small town and if the full might of the US and Coalition military cannot solve that problem, what chance of an overall military victory?

So many negotiations, pt2.

The Taliban leadership has put out a statement today on the Kai Eide affair (see article below). The statement includes the following point:
"Some baseless propaganda is underway, claiming that a delegation of the Islamic Emirate had participated in meetings held in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Maldives and now as per their claim, have met Kei Eide. The Islamic Emirate refutes these allegations and clearly declares that delegations of the Islamic Emirate have not participated in these meetings.
Similarly, the propaganda launched against the esteemed deputy Amir of the Islamic Emirate, Mullah Barodar Akhund, allegedly involving him in these meeting has no basis. No one can produce evidence to indicate his participation. This is an enemy effort to create mistrust among Mujahideen.
If some irresponsible persons presumably participated in the said meeting in the name of the Islamic Emirate, they can't be considered as representatives of the Islamic Emirate but it might have happened that some opportunists cashed in on the moribund condition of the enemy."
So according to the Taliban leadership, Mullah Barodar, who is now held in a Pakistani prison, along with several other senior leaders of the Taliban, was never involved in meetings. He remains, according to this statement, "esteemed".
At the same time, Hezb-i-Islami, the organisation controlled by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is quite definitely involved in negotiations in Kabul. This morning it was reported that a five-man delegation from Hizb-i-Islami arrived in the capital 10 days ago, and a second one, including Qutbudin Halal, a powerful figure in the group, came on Saturday.
The delegation is carrying a 15-point plan that calls for foreign forces to start pulling out in July, said the group's spokesman in Pakistan.
The plan also calls for the Afghan parliament to serve until December. After that, parliament would be replaced by an interim government, or shura, which would hold local and national elections within a year, according to the plan. A new Afghan constitution would be written, merging the current version with ones used earlier.
Two weeks ago it was reported that Hekmatyar's forces had become involved in fighting against Taliban fighters trying to move into their districts in Baghlan province in the north of the country. Around 70 Hekmatyar fighters defected to the government side.
All these events are likely to be connected to the peace jirga now being organised by the Karzai government and set for three days beginning on 29 April. Karzai will be anxious to make sure that some credible elements of the Taliban attend the jirga.

Pakistan policy change opens up new possibilities

In the three weeks since the London conference on Afghanistan, events have moved at a breakneck pace. The joint offensive in Helmand, involving up to 15,000 soldiers, is now into its second week. In Pakistan, a whole raft of senior Taliban officials have been captured; in the badlands of North Waziristan drone strikes have continued apace, in the process killing a scion of the Haqqani clan, while it has also been revealed that in early January elements of the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami met with Afghan government officials in the Maldives to discuss the possibility of peace.
Some, if not all, of these events may be related. What is beginning to emerge is that there is a possible consensus about a way forward through negotiations. The Western powers, the Afghan government, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, even Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah accept that it is possible to talk to the 'good' Taliban, providing the 'bad' Taliban - namely, those Talibs who continue to ally themselves with al-Qaeda and other Islamist fanatics - can be excluded.
The most important change - which should be seen as seismic in its importance - seems to be amongst the Pakistani military, which until now has been unremittingly opposed to a negotiated agreement between the Karzai government and the Taliban. From a Pakistani perspective, such an agreement threatened to bolster the position of India in Afghanistan, without leading to an agreement over Kashmir.
Pakistan's military and civilian leadership has always maintained (in private) that control over the mujahideen guaranteed it a place at the negotiating table over any final settlement in Afghanistan. If it was not happy, then the tribal fighters would be used to make Afghanistan ungovernable.
Several things have happened to make Pakistan rethink. The first and most important is that India was effectively isolated at the London conference. Despite having provided £1.2 billion in aid to Afghanistan, India's opposition to any talks with the Taliban was brushed aside. According to The Times of India: "The Afghanistan conference in London last week was a shocker for Indian mandarins who had hoped to muscle in and get a larger say in Afghan policy given the money and effort New Delhi has put into the reconstruction efforts. But what happened was that India got blindsided by the British swallowing the Pakistani line that Islamabad could deliver peace by negotiating with the Taliban." India continues to believe that a deal with the Taliban will mean a Taliban takeover in Kabul.
The second thing that happened is that the Pakistan military has realised that it can no longer protect its proteges in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, particularly in North and South Waziristan.
While it reluctantly agreed to launch the offensive in South Waziristan last October, it put little pressure on the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and killed very few of its fighters. But that did not stop the Americans killing most of the TTP leadership in a drone strike in mid-January. The organisation is now decapitated and on the road to disintegration.
When the American Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggested in Islamabad a week later that the Pakistani military should mount an attack on safe havens in North Waziristan sheltering the ISI-backed Haqqani network, the very next day the official spokesman of the Pakistan Army, Maj Gen Athar Abbas, haughtily stated that Pakistan’s “over-stretched” armed forces had no plans for undertaking any fresh anti-militant operations in 2010.
This was seen as a snub to the Obama administration which decided to mount its own attacks, firing dozens of rockets from drones over the next few days. So far this year there have been more than 20 drone attacks in the Tribal areas. The pace of attacks moved up a gear after the killing of seven CIA officers in Khost at the end of December by a Jordanian suicide bomber who had been trained in Pakistan.
Faced with missile strikes that were increasingly targetted on important mujahideen leaders (and whose effectiveness was confirmed this week with the death in a drone strike of one of Jalaluddin Haqqani's sons), it is clear that Pakistan can no longer protect its 'assets' in the region and it therefore makes more sense to get the best possible negotiated deal.
Whether or not the arrest of Taliban military commander Mullah Barodar in Karachi is part of this new thinking by Pakistan is unclear, but the fact that more than a dozen top Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda figures - including two shadow provincial governors - have been arrested in the last two weeks makes it is hard not to conclude that a change of direction is underway.
Perhaps we can now begin to understand the optimism exhibited by US and British military commanders at the beginning of this year. Despite what appeared to be a dire situation, McChrystal et al were all very upbeat. They would have known about the events taking place in the background - the planned negotiations, the fact that both Hekmatyar and sections of the Taliban were willing to negotiate, the engagement of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the OIC.
Fighting is still very intense in Helmand around the strategically important town of Marjah, where ISAF has already gone to great lengths to explain it is only interested in killing foreigners and die-hards. Will the momentum towards negotiations continue? My guess is that it will. The main issue now will be sorting out how the Taliban's main demand - for the withdrawal of foreign troops - can be finessed or renegotiated.
Update: Afghanistan's TolAfghan website is reporting that another senior Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Kabir, head of its political committee, has also been captured in recent days.

Remarkable film about Hekmatyar's mujahideen

Just watched award-winning film-maker Najibullah Quraishi's remarkable film Afghanistan: Behind Enemy Lines, shown tonight on Channel 4. At enormous personal risk, Quraishi spent two weeks with a mujahideen group from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezbe-Islami in the north-east of the country, around Baghlan and Kunduz.
Besides being the the first account from the standpoint of the insurgents of the situation in this part of Afghanistan, the film is absolutely gripping.
Quraishi somehow managed to obtain access to the mujahideen group, who spoke openly to him, almost as if the camera was not there. They talked about the Chechens, Uzbeks and Arabs that fought with them, the way they organised, the tactics they used. Quraishi kept his camera running throughout, even as he was being questioned by a suspicious fighter.
He was asked if he would take a gun in his hand and join in an ambush. "My camera is my gun", he replied in a swift and confident retort that could have saved his life.
We watched as members of the group lay in ambush, waiting for an American tank on a low-loader to pass. They missed it twice in the morning fog. They argued when bombs did not explode and then jumped with surprise when someone dialled a mobile number as a test - and the bomb exploded.
A senior figure told Quraishi that he commanded around 4,000 fighters - more in the summer when Pashtuns from the south arrived to fight. The fighters appeared to have easy and open access to the local villages. One stated that they had no problem blocking the road. Coalition forces in the area - mainly German - seldom engaged them. The fighters were confident, cocky even.
In a brilliant move, after he left the muhahideen group, Quraishi travelled the same stretch of road on which he had filmed the ambush and spoke to Afghan police about security. They told him the mujahideen were never anywhere near the road due to constant patrols. Quraishi filmed one confident policeman standing over a dead mujahid. Three days later he filmed the corpse of the policeman.
Quraishi worked with producer James Doran on the documentary. The two men go back to 2003, when Doran made the remarkable film Afghan Massacre: The convoy of death, about the 2001 murder of several thousand Taliban prisoners by troops loyal to General Abdul Rashid Dostum. According to Doran, US military personnel knew what was happening and refused to stop it. He has alleged that film exists of US forces present during the massacre, but this is strongly denied by the Pentagon.
Quraishi's film is deeply unsettling and will certainly have a major impact on public perceptions of the war in Afghanistan. I have little doubt that he will pick up an armful of awards for a courageous piece of film-making. He had to leave the mujahideen when two men arrived from Pakistan and began to ask how he had obtained permission to film. That of course is the real question here. Who is financing Hezb-Islami and its 4,000 fighters?

Negotiating with the Taliban - report

A new publication from the Crisis States Research Centre at the London School of Economics provides a useful summary of the background to the discussion on negotiating with the Taliban.
Negotiating with the Taliban: Toward a solution for the Afghan Conflict, is largely written by Talatbek Masadykov, together with Antonio Giustozzi and James Michael Page.
Masadyakov is currently Chief of the Political Affairs Division of the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA). In order to prepare this paper he took four months research leave in 2008, which he spent as a Visiting Fellow at the Crisis States Research Centre and travelling around the region.
One section of the report stands out and I will quote it at length:
"(The United Nations') List 1267 − expanded after September 11, 2001 and last updated on October 10, 2008 − now features 142 individuals associated with the Taliban,and 243 individuals and 113 entities or other groups and undertakings associated with Al Qaida. Despite reconciliation with the Karzai government by senior listed Taliban such as Mullah Mutawakil, Mullah Zaeef, Mullah Salaam Rocketi, Mullah Khaksar and others, none has been de-listed, largely as a result of differences among permanent UNSC members.
"Up to one third of those Taliban now on the Consolidated List also feature on ISAF and OEF target lists. Several have been killed in combat. Under heavy pressure from the US and the UK,Pakistan has placed a small number of anti-government elements under house arrest in Quetta and elsewhere. This has not prevented them from continuing to exercise authority in their respective organisations.
"The vast majority of insurgent commanders now operating in Afghanistan are not listed: they are too young to have participated in the Taliban regime. Apart from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani themselves, almost no Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin or Haqqani network commanders feature on the Consolidated List."
A very useful and timely publication, particularly in the light of reports that the UN head of mission in Afghanistan, Kai Ede, met with representatives of the Taliban in Dubai earlier this month. Today, the Taliban's Leadership Council denied the reports: " The Leadership Council considers this mere futile and baseless rumours, being a machination against Jihad and Mujahideen who are waging Jihad against the invaders. The Leadership Council once again emphasises continuation of Islamic Jihad against all invaders as a means to frustrate these conspiracies."