House Committee on Foreign
Affairs
February 15, 2007
Testimony of Peter Bergen, a
Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and adjunct professor at
the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Afghanistan 2007:
Problems, Opportunities and
Possible Solutions.
2007 will
likely be a make or break year for Afghanistan, for the international
efforts there, and, conversely, for the efforts of the Taliban and their al
Qaeda allies to turn the country back into a failed state. Our efforts in Afghanistan are important because what happens
there can have a large impact on our national security interests as we found to
our cost on 9/11, and failure to create a viable state in Afghanistan will help empower jihadist
terrorists who are planning to attack the United States and its allies.
Afghanistan today looks something like Iraq in the
summer of 2003 with a growing insurgency, the exponentially rising use of IEDs
and deployment of suicide bombers, the decline of reconstruction efforts
because of security concerns, and a descent into chaotic violence in
substantial portions of the country. Add to this the sad fact that the U.S.-led
occupation of Afghanistan
has coincided with the country becoming the world’s premier source of heroin.
There are, however, some key
differences between Afghanistan
and Iraq:
Afghans have already suffered through more than 20 years of war and they are
tired of conflict; the Taliban remain deeply unpopular, and the American and
NATO military presence is welcomed by the vast majority of Afghans.
And so, 2007 represents a real opportunity to put the country back on
course. Afghanistan will, of course, never become Belgium, but it does have a chance
to succeed, as long as success is defined realistically: Afghanistan is likely
to be a fragile, poor, weak state for the foreseeable future, but one where
security can be substantially improved, allowing for the emergence of a more
open society and a more vibrant economy.
My testimony is divided into three
sections. The first part analyses what Afghanistan’s
problems are, the second addresses potential opportunities that exist for the
country, and the third section examines some possible solutions to Afghanistan’s
problems.
1. The
Problems.
a. The
return of the Taliban.
The
U.S.
military and NATO are now battling the Taliban on a scale not witnessed since
2001 when the war against the Taliban began. When I travelled in Afghanistan
in 2002 and 2003, the Taliban threat had receded into little more than a
nuisance. But now the movement has regrouped and rearmed. Mullah Dadullah, a
key Taliban commander, gave an interview to Al Jazeera in the past year in
which he made an illuminating observation about the scale of the insurgency.
Dadullah put Taliban forces at some 12,000 fighters— larger than a U.S.
military official’s estimate to me of between 7,000 to 10,000, but a number
that could have some validity given the numerous part-time Taliban
farmer/fighters. Bolstered by a compliant Pakistani government, hefty cash
inflows from the drug trade, and a population disillusioned by battered infrastructure
and lacklustre reconstruction efforts, the Taliban are back.
I travelled to Afghanistan four times in the
past year meeting with government officials and ordinary Afghans; embedding twice
with American soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division fighting the
Taliban in the east and south of the country; travelling with a NATO delegation,
and interviewing key American military officers to get a sense of the
seriousness of the renewed Taliban insurgency. I found that while the Taliban
may not yet constitute a major strategic threat to the Karzai government, it
has become a serious tactical challenge for both U.S. troops and NATO soldiers.
A hundred miles to the south of Kabul,
for instance, the Taliban have appeared in force in nearly half the districts
of Ghazni province, which sits astride the most important road in the country
between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar. It is today
considered suicidal for non-Afghans to drive that road without security. In the
south of Afghanistan,
reconstruction has ground to a halt and foreigners can only move around safely
if they are embedded with the military or have substantial private security.
Around Kandahar
itself this past summer, fierce battles raged between the Taliban and NATO
forces that have encountered much stiffer resistance than they anticipated. As
a former senior Afghan cabinet member told me in September, “If international
forces leave, the Taliban will take over in one hour.”
Why did the
Taliban come back?
First, key mistakes were made by the American
administration in the first years of the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan due to a variety of ideological idées fixes that included a dislike of
“nation building,” an aversion to reliance on international forces, and a
preoccupation with Iraq
as a supposed centre of world terrorism. That meant that Afghanistan was short changed on a
number of levels. The initial deployment of international troops was the lowest
per capita commitment of peacekeepers to any post-conflict environment since
World War II. The Pentagon also initially blocked efforts by soldiers of the
international coalition, known as ISAF, to patrol outside of Kabul and to extend a security umbrella to
other parts of the country until August 2003. And aid per capita to Afghans in
the first two years after the fall of the Taliban was around a tenth of that
given to Bosnians following the end of the Balkan civil war in the mid-1990s.
As Ambassador James Dobbins of RAND has pointed out “Afghanistan was the least resourced
of any major American led nation building operation since the end of WWII.”
These early errors helped pave the way for the resurgence of the Taliban.
Second, Afghanistan’s ballooning drug trade
has succeeded in expanding the Taliban ranks. It is no coincidence that opium
and heroin production, which now is equivalent to one-third (36 percent) of Afghanistan’s licit
economy spiked at the same time that the Taliban staged a comeback. A U.S. military official told me that charities
and individual donations from the Middle East
are also boosting the Taliban’s coffers.
These twin revenue streams—drug money and Mideast
contributions—allow the Taliban to pay their fighters $100 or more a month,
which compares favorably to the $70 salary of an Afghan policeman. Whatever the source,
the Taliban can draw upon significant resources, at least by Afghan standards.
One U.S.
military raid on a Taliban safe house in 2006 recovered $900,000 in cash.
A third key to the resurgence of the Taliban can be
summarized in one word: Pakistan.
The Pakistani government has proven unwilling or incapable (or both) of
clamping down on the religious militia, despite the fact that the headquarters
of the Taliban and its key allies are located in Pakistan. According to a senior
U.S. military official, not a single senior Taliban leader has been arrested or
killed in Pakistan since 2001—nor have any of the top leaders of the militias
headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who are fighting U.S. forces
alongside the Taliban. For example, Amir Haqqani, the leader of the Taliban in the
central province of Zabul, “never comes across the border” from Pakistan into Afghanistan,
a U.S.
military official based in Zabul told me.
General James Jones, then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, testifying
before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2006 said that it was
"generally accepted" that the Taliban maintain their headquarters in
Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan Province. U.S. military officials say
that the important Taliban “Peshawar Shura” is headquartered in Pakistan’s
North West Frontier province.. In addition, Hekmatyar operates in the tribal
areas of Dir and Bajur; Jalaluddin Haqqani is based in Waziristan; and al Qaeda
has a presence both in Waziristan and Chitral—all Pakistani regions that border
Afghanistan.
A senior U.S.
military official told me that the Pakistanis have taken “no decisive action on
their border” to deal with the Taliban. Pakistan’s
upcoming 2007 presidential election means the Pakistani government is doing
even less than in the past because the Musharraf government is aware how unpopular
military action against the Taliban is in their border regions with Afghanistan.
It should be noted, however, that the Taliban has
released videotapes over the past year in which they attack the Musharraf
government as an “infidel” government because of its cooperation with the United States
in the war on terrorism. Indeed, Pakistan
has lost around 700 soldiers battling militants in the tribal areas over the
past several years, and Pakistan
was helpful in the overthrow of the Taliban regime in the winter of 2001. Within
the past month militants in Pakistan
have launched suicide attacks in Islamabad, Peshawar and Dera Ismail
Khan indicating that they also have the Pakistani government in their
crosshairs.
The Pakistani government denies it is providing a safe
haven for the Taliban leadership. An explanation for the seeming dichotomy
between the fact that U.S. military and intelligence officials universally hold
the view that the Taliban is headquartered in Pakistan and the Pakistani
government denial of this is that the Musharraf government does not completely
control its own territory or security agencies, and that ISI, the Pakistani
military intelligence agency, at some levels continues to tolerate and/or
maintain links with Taliban leaders. Also, many members of the Taliban grew up
in refugee camps in Pakistan
and so are very familiar with the country.
In addition, an alliance of Pakistani religious political parties
broadly sympathetic to the Taliban known as the MMA controls both the North
West Frontier Province and, to some degree, Baluchistan, the regions where the
Taliban are presently headquartered.
A fourth reason for the Taliban’s recent resurgence is that it
has increasingly morphed tactically and ideologically with al Qaeda, which
itself is experiencing a comeback along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The story of Al Qaeda's renaissance begins with
its eviction from Afghanistan
in late 2001. Unfortunately, the group didn't disintegrate—it merely moved
across the border to the tribal regions of western Pakistan where today it operates a
network of training camps. A former American intelligence official stationed in
Pakistan
told me that there are currently more than 2,000 “foreign fighters” in the
region. The camps are relatively modest in size. “People want to see barracks.
[In fact,] the camps use dry riverbeds for shooting and are housed in compounds
for 20 people, where they are taught callisthenics and bomb-making,” a senior
American military intelligence official told me. Taliban and al Qaeda
videotapes released in 2006 on jihadist websites also demonstrate that the
camps in Pakistan’s
tribal areas are training new recruits.
Al
Qaeda’s resurgence in Pakistan
was noted by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller,
the head of Britain’s
domestic intelligence service MI5, who in a rare pubic statement in November
noted that, “We are aware of numerous plots to kill
people and damage our economy …Thirty that we know of. These plots often have linked back to al Qaeda in Pakistan
and through these links al Qaeda gives guidance and training to its largely
British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale.” Similarly, the plot by a group of British citizens planning
to blow up as many as ten American passenger jets with liquid explosives that was
broken up in the U.K. last August
was “directed by al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan,” according
to Lt. General Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defence
Intelligence Agency, in testimony he gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee
last month.
The
Taliban were a provincial bunch when they held power in Afghanistan, but in the past couple of years,
they have increasingly identified themselves as part of the global jihadist
movement, their rhetoric full of references to Iraq
and Palestine
in a manner that mirrors bin Laden's public statements. Mullah Dadullah, the
Taliban commander, gave an interview to CBS News in December in which he
outlined how the Taliban and Al Qaeda cooperate: "Osama bin Laden, thank
God, is alive and in good health. We are in contact with his top aides and
sharing plans and operations with each other." Indeed, a senior American
military intelligence official told me that “trying to separate Taliban and Al
Qaeda in Pakistan
serves no purpose. It's like picking grey hairs out of your head.”
Suicide
attacks, improvised explosive devices, and beheadings of hostages—all techniques al Qaeda perfected in Iraq—are being employed
by the Taliban to strengthen their influence in the southern and eastern parts
of Afghanistan.
Hekmat Karzai, an Afghan national security expert, points out that suicide
bombings were virtually unknown in Afghanistan until 2005, when there
were 21 attacks. According to the U.S. military there were 139 such
attacks in 2006. This exponentially rising number of suicide attacks is
mirrored by other grim statistics—IED attacks in Afghanistan more than doubled from
783 in 2005 to 1,677 in 2006, and the number of “direct” attacks by insurgents
using weapons against international forces tripled from 1,558 to 4,542 during
the same time period. 2006 also saw a record number of 98 U.S. military
and 93 NATO deaths. At least 1,000 Afghan civilians died last year in clashes
between the Taliban and the coalition; one hundred of those deaths were the
result of U.S.
or NATO actions, according to Human Rights Watch.
Just
as suicide bombings in Iraq
had an enormous strategic impact—from pushing the United Nations out of the
country to helping spark a civil war—such attacks might also plunge Afghanistan into chaos. Already, suicide
attacks and the Taliban resurgence have made much of southern Afghanistan a no-go area for both
foreigners and for any reconstruction efforts. Luckily, for the moment, the
suicide attackers in Afghanistan
have not been nearly as deadly as those in Iraq. As one U.S. military official explained, almost all of
the Taliban’s suicide bombers are “Pashtun country guys from Pakistan,” with
little effective training.
b. The drug economy.
That Afghanistan has
a large drug economy is by now well known. Poppy cultivation for opium in Afghanistan
grew by 59 percent last year and it is widely acknowledged that the Taliban
resurgence is being fuelled by the profits of this opium trade. Afghanistan is
the source of an astonishing 92 percent of the world’s heroin supply.
However, four fundamental
propositions must be understood about the drug economy in Afghanistan—abruptly ending it would
put millions of people out of work and impoverish millions more as the only
really functional part of the economy is poppy and opium production. Second, Afghanistan
is one of the poorest countries in the world and many rural Afghans have very
few options to make money other than to engage in poppy growing. Third, Afghan
support for poppy cultivation is on the upswing—40 percent
now call it acceptable if there is no other way to earn a living, with two out
of three Afghans living in the Southwest saying it is acceptable, the region
where much of the poppy is grown. And so, ending the drug economy is simply not
going to happen any time in the foreseeable future. Fourth, and most
importantly from an American and NATO national security perspective, drug
policy in Afghanistan as it’s presently constructed is helping the Taliban to
thrive as they benefit from the trade. Bizarrely, our drug policy helps to fund
our enemies. (Possible solutions to this problem can be found below).
c. Weakness of the Afghan state—a result of
lacklustre reconstruction efforts, corruption, weakness of the police, and
failures of Afghan governance.
The outgoing commander of U.S.
troops in Afghanistan,
Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, has drawn a clear link between reconstruction and
violence: “Wherever the roads end, that’s where the Taliban starts.” Certainly,
Afghanistan
needs much more reconstruction. The key road from Kabul
to Kandahar—a
nightmarish seventeen hour slalom course when I took it under the Taliban, and
now a smoother seven-hour drive—remains the only large-scale reconstruction
project completed in the country since the U.S.-led invasion. Kabul residents have access to electricity
only 4-6 hours a day, if they have electricity at all. Along with endemic
corruption and the common perception that the billions of dollars of promised
aid has mostly lined the pockets of nongovernmental organizations, the
infrastructure gap feeds resentment among ordinary Afghans, some of whom may be
tempted to throw in their lot with the Taliban.
Some of the
failures in Afghanistan
are, of course, the responsibility of Afghans. Warlords like Gul Agha Shirzai
in Kandahar
were given high political office. President Hamid Karzai’s staff is viewed as
weak and inexperienced, though Karzai has recently replaced his chief of staff.
Highly competent ministers like foreign minister Dr. Abdullah and the finance
minister Ashraf Ghani have been forced out of the government for no discernible
good reason. There is little true representation of Pashtun political interests
in parliament because Karzai appears to distrust political parties. And, by all
accounts Afghanistan’s
police forces are ill-equipped, poorly trained and sometimes corrupt and poorly
led.
2.
Opportunities
There have been successes since the
fall of the Taliban—as many as five million refugees have returned to Afghanistan from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. Refugees don’t return to
places they don’t see as having a future. Presidential and parliamentary
elections occurred with high participation by Afghan voters. Millions of boys
and girls are back in school and the Afghan army has developed into a somewhat
functional organization. Afghanistan
has also developed something of an independent press with private TV stations
like Tolo TV springing up. In addition, while eight Afghan provinces mostly on
the border with Pakistan
have security problems that prevent reconstruction, in the 26 other Afghan
provinces the security situation is reasonably good.
An ABC News/BBC poll released in
December 2006 shows that despite the disappointments that Afghans have felt
about inadequate reconstruction and declining security on a wide range of key
issues, they maintain positive attitudes. It is classic counterinsurgency
doctrine that the centre of gravity in a conflict is the people. And the Afghan
people, unlike the Iraqis, have positive feelings about the U.S.-led occupation,
their own government and their lives. The conclusions of the ABC/BBC poll are
worth quoting in some detail:
“Sixty-eight percent
approve of [President] Karzai’s work – down from 83 percent last year, but
still a level most national leaders would envy. Fifty-nine percent think the
parliament is working for the benefit of the Afghan people – down from 77
percent, but still far better than Americans’ ratings of the U.S. Congress….Big
majorities continue to call the U.S.-led invasion a good thing for their
country (88 percent), to express a favourable opinion of the United States (74
percent) and to prefer the current Afghan government to Taliban rule (88
percent). Indeed eight in 10 Afghans support the presence of U.S., British and other international
forces on their soil; that compares with five percent support for Taliban
fighters…Fifty-five percent of Afghans still say the country’s going in the
right direction, but that’s down sharply from 77 percent last year. Whatever
the problems, 74 percent say their living conditions today are better now than
they were under the Taliban. That rating, however, is 11 points lower now than
it was a year ago.”
These poll results, which are very similar to another
poll taken in December 2006 by the Program on International Policy Attitude’s
World Public Opinion.org, demonstrate that there remains strong support for the
Afghan central government and U.S./NATO efforts in Afghanistan. And Afghans
overwhelmingly reject violent Islamist extremism. According to both the ABC/BBC
poll and that of World Public Opinion.org, no Muslim nation appears to have
more negative views of Osama bin Laden. Both polls found that nine out of ten
Afghans had a negative view of al Qaeda’s leader. Similarly, nine out of ten
Afghans say there is no justification for suicide bombings.
3.
Solutions
a. On the
drug trade
The current
counter-narcotics strategy that favours poppy eradication is by all accounts a
failure. This is the conclusion of a range of sources from Afghan experts to narco-terrorism
specialists to a GAO report and a U.N. Office of Drug Control report (both
published within the past three months).
Vanda
Felbab-Brown, a research fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard, has studied
counter-narcotics strategies in Columbia, Peru, Lebanon, Turkey, and
Afghanistan and found that that terrorists and insurgents don’t simply use the
drug trade as a financial resource, but also draw substantial political gains
and legitimacy from drug trafficking. Consequently an “eradication first”
policy is not only bound to fail—the crops will simply shift and appear
elsewhere—but it will foment a backlash amongst the local population that has
developed ties to the belligerents via the narco-economy. For instance, local
populations could withhold human intelligence that could be critical to the
campaign against the reinvigorated Taliban insurgency. Instead, the U.S.
should focus on defeating the insurgents and concentrate their anti-narcotics
efforts on international interdiction and money laundering.
Instead of
eradication, we need to begin splitting the fragile links between farmers/local
populations and the Taliban by concentrating our efforts by building up viable
alternative livelihoods both in farming and other sectors. This means providing
seeds for crop substitution and a build-up of roadways to transport those crops
to market. In the short term, while that infrastructure is being built crop
substitution will only really work if Afghans can get roughly the same income
that they received from poppy production for whatever crops are substituted.
This suggests that the international community should consider subsidies for
Afghan crops such as cotton, fruits and nuts similar to the subsidies that the United States
and the European Union pays for the products of many of their farmers. This
will not come cheap, but if it could substantially reduce the drug economy, it
would weaken the Taliban and make the country much more secure—that’s a trade
off that is worth the costs involved.
While the
narco-economy is valued around $3 billion, most of that flows out of Afghanistan
and farmers only get about $750 million of that. Meanwhile in FY2005, the U.S. allocated about $782 million for
counter-narcotics in Afghanistan
yet no more than 25 percent of that was targeted towards alternative
livelihoods. The U.S.
is clearly spending more money per year than the farmers make off of opium and
that money could be redirected towards subsidies for crop substitution.
Another
additional approach is to allow Afghanistan
to enter into the legalized opiate trade for morphine used for pain relief, a
trade that is presently dominated by countries like India
and Turkey
due to preferential trade agreements. While there are some legitimate
criticisms of this idea—principally how you would make sure that Afghan opium
was only going into the legitimate market—one low-risk approach would be to
allow the legalized opiate trade to debut as a pilot project on a small scale
in a province with reasonable security and smaller scale opium production
allowing greater regulatory control. Farmers engaged in legalized poppy growing
would enjoy financial incentives that could be revoked and they could also face
criminal penalties if they tried to divert the poppy to the illicit market. If
this approach worked in one province, then it could be implemented in other
provinces. And the crop substitution approach and the legalized opiate trade
approach are not either/or solutions. Both approaches could be implemented at
the same time in different Afghan provinces.
Congress
could then amend the law that requires U.S.
opiate manufacturers to purchase at least 80 percent of their opiate from India and Turkey
(affording them a guaranteed market) to include Afghanistan. This law is a preferential
trade agreement designed to serve political and strategic interests and should
be recalibrated to fit our present-day strategic interests in Afghanistan,
which is by far the most fragile democracy and economy of the three countries,
and the one where the United States has vital national security interests at
stake as the Taliban and al Qaeda regroup along the Afghan/Pakistan border.
It’s also worth noting that according to the International Narcotics Control
Board, about 80 percent of the world population living in developing courtiers
consumes only 6 percent of the morphine distributed worldwide—a shortfall that causes
massive unnecessary pain and suffering—suggesting that there is a large
untapped market for legal opiates.
Iran has played something of a useful role in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban (whom Iran nearly
went to war with in 1998.) Iran
could have acted as a spoiler in post-Taliban Afghanistan;
instead it has been something of a stabilizing influence in western Afghanistan. As
Iran
has a sizeable drug-using population it has a strong interest in preventing the
entry of drugs across its border and this could be a fruitful topic for the
international community to discuss with the Iranians in the future.
b. Rolling back the Taliban—More troops, better
troops, fewer NATO caveats, a successful amnesty program, more reconstruction,
transforming the tribal belt in Pakistan,
and standing up the Afghan police.
By all accounts the spring
of 2007 will be a bloody one. The present NATO strength of 33,250 is judged by
NATO commanders to be insufficient by around 5,500 soldiers. The calls by
Defence Secretary Robert Gates in January for additional American troops to be
sent to Afghanistan are to be welcomed as not only will those forces help fight
the Taliban, they also send a signal to regional players such as Pakistan that
the United States is in Afghanistan for the long haul. Around two years ago
then-Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld announced that the U.S. was planning to draw down its forces in Afghanistan.
That sent precisely the wrong signal to the region. (For the moment 3,200 US
troops have had their tours extended by four months to cover the NATO
shortfall.)
One caveat about
the call by Secretary Gates for more American troops is that it depends on what
troops are eventually sent. According to Afghan officials U.S. Special Forces
working with the Afghan National Army are the most effective soldiers to attack
the Taliban and al Qaeda. Similarly, NATO member states must increase their
troop strength and reduce the number of “national caveats” that prevent, say,
the German from flying at night and other such caveats that hamper the
effectiveness of NATO forces on the ground in Afghanistan. One senior NATO
commander I spoke to in December 2005 said he has 14 pages of national caveats
to contend with. While the British, Canadians and Dutch fought bravely over the
summer in southern Afghanistan,
other NATO member states that are part of the coalition must do more to match
their efforts. NATO is also severely hampered by the lack of air assets it is
able to draw on.
An amnesty program formally launched in 2005 by the
Karzai government offers one promising approach to containing the Taliban
threat. In Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul, in the spring of 2006 I
witnessed U.S.
forces release Mullah Abdul Ali Akundzada, who was accused of sheltering
Taliban members and had been arrested near the site of an IED detonation. In a
deal brokered by the Karzai government and the U.S. military, Akundzada was handed
over to a group of about thirty religious and tribal leaders, who publicly
pledged that the released mullah would support the government. In an
honour-based society such as Afghanistan,
this program is working well. According to both Afghan and U.S. officials, only a handful of
the more than one thousand Taliban fighters taking advantage of the amnesty
have gone back to fighting the government and coalition forces.
Transforming Pakistan’s tribal belt is a vital national
security interest of Afghanistan,
Pakistan, the United States,
and NATO countries as that is where the Taliban has a safe haven and al Qaeda
is regrouping. Pakistan
deployed at least 70,000 troops to the area in 2002, but they suffered hundreds
of casualties and heavy-handed Pakistani tactics further alienated the
population of the tribal areas. Pakistan
then abandoned its “military first” policy and started concluding peace agreements
with militants in both South Waziristan and North
Waziristan over the past two years. Unfortunately, after the
conclusion of the peace agreement in North Waziristan in early September 2006
there was a 300 percent rise in attacks from that region into Afghanistan according to the U.S. military. And militants in
Waziristan have now set up a parallel judicial system lynching and torturing civilians
for infringements such as drinking and documenting this on videotapes
distributed by Ummat video, the Taliban’s propaganda arm. Much of what is going
on in the tribal areas is opaque as the Pakistani government has prevented
international journalists from travelling anywhere near these areas, and
Pakistani journalists have been detained or even killed when they report on the
tribal regions.
This is not the
place to rehearse the history of British and Pakistani rule in the tribal
regions which has certainly contributed to their problems, but the present Pakistani
policy that has wavered between the fist and appeasement of the militants has
not worked well either. Pakistan
has promised a significant aid package to the region while the United States
may also be prepared to grant substantial aid. A quid pro quo for this American
aid is that the Pakistani government should allow international journalists and
other neutral observers to visit the tribal areas, (and not only on
dog-and-pony shows organized by the Pakistani military). A further quid pro quo
is that the Pakistani government should arrest Taliban leaders living in Pakistan, a policy that should be strongly
endorsed by NATO countries such as Canada,
the United Kingdom and Holland, countries whose
soldiers have borne the brunt of Taliban attacks in the summer of 2006.
As Ambassador
James Dobbins of RAND has noted, “Pakistani citizens, residents, money and
territory are playing a greater role in the Afghan civil war than are Iranian
citizens, residents, money or territory are playing in the Iraqi civil war.”
The International Crisis Group has recently proposed the excellent idea that
NATO publish monthly figures of cross-border incursions by militants into Afghanistan in order to encourage Pakistan
to do more on its side of the border to prevent those incursions.
Also the US
military and NATO, working in collaboration with the governments of Afghanistan
and Pakistan, must start identifying the identities of the suicide bombers in Afghanistan
by using information posted on jihadist websites, by good intelligence work,
and using reports in the media. The social networks and madrassas from which
these suicide bombers emerge from must be mapped for intelligence purposes, but
also because it seems probable that only a handful of madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan are producing a disproportionate
number of the suicide attackers. Armed with that information the Afghan and Pakistani
governments can then close those institutions down.
The United States should also pressure Afghanistan to recognize the Durand line drawn
by the British in 1893 as the border between Afghanistan and the Raj. The fact
that Afghanistan does not
recognize this border aggravates tensions with Pakistan and helps the militants
move back and forth across the border. The Afghan government has also proposed
the good idea of holding a loya jirga, a traditional tribal gathering, with
tribal leaders from both sides of the border meeting to discuss problems caused
by militants on either side of the border. (Suggestions by Pakistan that they will mine the 1,500 mile
border to prevent militants crossing are both impractical and strongly opposed
by Afghanistan,
which has suffered thousands of civilian deaths and injuries from mines left
over from the Soviet conflict and subsequent Afghan civil war.)
Thus far, the U.S.
government has appropriated $27 billion for Iraqi reconstruction, but only $4
billion for civilian aid and $6.3 billion for military/security aid to Afghanistan a country that has a larger
population than Iraq,
is a third larger in size and is utterly destroyed by two decades of war. That
works out to a paltry $25 dollars per year per Afghan in civilian aid and 66
dollars per year in total aid once money for the Afghan army and police is factored
in.
Without greater investments in roads, power and water resources throughout
Afghanistan,
the Taliban will surely prosper and continue to gain adherents. For that
reason, the Bush administration calls for $10 billion in aid to Afghanistan, $2
billion of which is to go to reconstruction and $8 billion to build up the
Afghan police and army, are to be welcomed.
One important caveat on the reconstruction aid—much of that aid
should be funnelled through the Afghan government and/or Afghan organizations rather
than recycled to U.S.
contractors. According to Ann Jones, an American writer who has worked in
Afghanistan as an aid worker, unlike
countries like Sweden that incur only 4 percent of their aid costs on
“technical assistance” that goes back home to Sweden, “eighty six cents of
every dollar of American aid is phantom aid” that will line American pockets
rather than go directly to Afghans. For their part, Afghan government ministries
must be more efficient at spending reconstruction money. Last year these
ministries only spent 44 percent of the aid they were given. This year they are
likely to spend 60 percent.
It is also time
for the United States to
institute a long-term mini-Marshall plan for Afghanistan. In early 2006 the Afghan
government published the Afghanistan National Development Strategy, which estimated
that $4 billion a year in aid for the next five years was needed to reconstruct
the country. For this reason the U.S.
should contribute at least half that sum every year for many years to come.
Given the fact that the 9/11 attacks emerged from Afghanistan
and cost the American economy at least $500 billion, aid for Afghanistan so that it does not to
return to a failed state is a good investment. The U.S.
should commit itself to long term reconstruction efforts in part to counter the
Taliban—which is likely to be a threat for several years to come—but also
because having overthrown the Taliban government, the U.S. has responsibilities to Afghanistan.
And a functioning, democratic Afghanistan
will have a powerful demonstration effect on countries that surround Afghanistan such as Iran,
Pakistan,
and the Central Asian republics, none of which are truly democratic states.
American aid should be tied, in part, to an Afghan public employment
program similar to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program that
followed the Great Depression in the United States. Afghanistan has
a chronic 40 percent unemployment rate and a desperate need for roads, dams,
and the repair of agricultural aqueducts destroyed by years of war. Much of the
labor required for these projects does not require great skill and millions of
Afghans should be set to work rebuilding their country in exchange for a real
American Marshall plan to the country.
In short, there should be a military, diplomatic and reconstruction
“surge” to Afghanistan,
a country where such efforts have a fighting chance of real success.