How to win votes in Afghanistan

The London Guardian reports:

Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan's presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands' permission.

Oddly, it is not the usual suspects who wanted this legislation:

A western diplomat said the law represented a "big tick in the box" for the powerful council of Shia clerics. Leaders of the Hazara minority, which is regarded as the most important bloc of swing voters in the election, also demanded the new law.

Ok Hazara, justify this.

Ustad Mohammad Akbari, an MP and the leader of a Hazara political party, said the president had supported the law in order to curry favour among the Hazaras.

But he said the law actually protected women's rights."Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters."

Akbari said the law gave a woman the right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband if she was unwell or had another reasonable "excuse". And he said a woman would not be obliged to remain in her house if an emergency forced her to leave without permission.

And women legislators? How did they rationalize the law they just passed?

"Some female politicians have taken a more pragmatic stance, saying their fight in parliament's lower house succeeded in improving the law, including raising the original proposed marriage age of girls from nine to 16 and removing completely provisions for temporary marriages.

"It's not really 100% perfect, but compared to the earlier drafts it's a huge improvement," said Shukria Barakzai, an MP. "Before this was passed family issues were decided by customary law, so this is a big improvement."

And the West spending all that blood and treasure to right things in Afghanistan, what was their reaction to this, um, step backward?

The international community has so far shied away from publicly questioning such a politically sensitive issue.

"It is going to be tricky to change because it gets us into territory of being accused of not respecting Afghan culture, which is always difficult," a western diplomat in Kabul admitted.

Here's my suggestion on how this law can be applied to protect women. Let he who fails to comply with God's law to treat his wife in a decent, moral and merciful way be declared an apostate and punished according to Islamic law. (That is, put him to death.)

Allow husbands to lord over wives if you must but only in compliance with Islam. Then it can be reasonably argued that this law does in fact protect women. Otherwise, not.

Primer on Pakistan

Here's the Idiot's Guide Pakistan to help you decipher the situation in Pakistan.

Tom Ricks wasn't impressed

Here is what former Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks (and author of Fiasco and The Gamble - and someone who is always worth reading) said about the new Afghan-Pak strategy:

I liked President Obama's Afghan stuff, as far as it went. Reducing American goals and training Afghan security forces makes sense. And reaching out to less extreme Taliban leaders is also worth trying. But I was surprised by how little the president had to offer on the other big problems. Sure, corruption in Afghanistan is easy to denounce, Mr. President, but what are you going to do about it? How are you going to stop the police from shaking down Afghans and so driving them into arms of the Taliban?

Finally, what about the Pakistani military? The saying is that most countries have militaries, while in Pakistan the military has a country.

Right now the Pakistani armed forces are part of the problem. Obama gave no indication of how they might be made part of the solution, and that worries me. I know it is difficult to say anything about this publicly -- but he should have said something.

Comments on Obama's new Afghan-Pak strategy

Here's some reportage from Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy's The Cable on what various people are saying about the new strategy. Her blog is always worth checking out, incidentally, if you're interested in the ins and outs of US foreign policy.

Obama's plan

Here's the link to the Obama administration's strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. And here is what the White House posted as a one-page summary of the plan's salient features:

What’s New in the Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan

"As President, my greatest responsibility is to protect the American people…We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists. So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future…To achieve our goals, we need a stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy." President Barack Obama, March 27, 2009

An Attainable Objective

On March 27, 2009, the President announced a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan that is the culmination of a careful 60-day, interagency strategic review. During the review process, we consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani governments, partners and NATO allies, other donors, international organizations and members of Congress.

The strategy starts with a clear, concise, attainable goal: disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens. The President’s new approach will be flexible and adoptive and include frequent evaluations of the progress being made. A Regional ApproachFor the first time the President will treat Afghanistan and Pakistan as two countries but one challenge. Our strategy focuses more intensively on Pakistan than in the past, calling for more significant increases in U.S. and international support, both economic and military, linked to Pakistani performance against terror. We will pursue intensive regional diplomacy involving all key players in South Asia and engage both countries in a new trilateral framework at the highest levels. Together in this trilateral format, we will work to enhance intelligence sharing and military cooperation along the border and address common issues like trade, energy, and economic development.

Building Capacity and More Training

For three years, the resources that our commanders need for training have been denied because of the war in Iraq. Now, this will change. The 17,000 additional troops that the President decided in February to deploy have already increased our training capacity. Later this spring we will deploy approximately 4,000 more U.S. troops to train the Afghan National Security Forces so that they can increasingly take responsibility for the security of the Afghan people.

In the President’s strategy, for the first time we will fully resource our effort
to train and support the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. Every American unit in Afghanistan will be partnered with an Afghan unit, and we will
seek additional trainers from our NATO allies to ensure that every Afghan unit has a coalition partner.

Using All Elements of National Power

As the President said, a "campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone." As a part of this strategy, we will devote significantly more resources to the civilian efforts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President will submit a budget that includes indispensable investments in our State Department and foreign assistance programs. These investments relieve the burden on our troops and contribute directly to our safety and security. The Administration consulted with the Congress during our review and is committed to working closely together to provide the resources needed to carry out the strategy. The President supports the bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Senators Kerry and Lugar to authorize $1.5 billion a year in direct support to the Pakistani people over the next five years. He also calls on Congress to pass the bipartisan bill creating Reconstruction Opportunity Zones in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan to develop the economy and bring hope to places plagued by violence.

Bringing new international elements to the effort

The President believes we need to provide more resources for the civilian aspects of the mission, working with the Afghan Government and all of our partners in NATO and the United Nations. As America does more, we will ask others to do join us in doing their part. Together with the United Nations, the Administration will forge a new Contact Group for Afghanistan and Pakistan that brings together all who should have a stake in the security of the region – our NATO allies and other partners, the Central Asian states, Gulf nations, Iran, Russia, India and China. All have a stake in the promise of lasting peace and security and development in the region.

Financing Afghanistan

According to yesterday's New York Times, President Obama is about to approve a plan that would double the number of Afghan security forces - to three times the number projected in 2002. According to the report, "even members of Mr. Obama's security team appeared taken back by the cost of the program."

The program, the Times reports, will cost up to $20 billion over seven years. Already the government in Kabul depends on the international community's largesse and the new costs are more than twice the budget of the entire government.

Nevertheless, this is a cost that it appears we will have to pay if we are interested in winning this fight. NATO, as a recent Times editorial put it, is "frighteningly close to failing" in Afghanistan.

And it is not because of the usual suspects - the terrorism, corruption and weak central government, to paraphrase the Times - that the alliance is confronting in Afghanistan. NATO is being undone by its own fecklessness. Members are compelled to come to the defense of any fellow state who is attacked - such as the U.S. was on 9/11 - but they can do so in whatever way they deem acceptable.

Germany, for example, refuses to allow its soldiers to engage in combat missions. Other nations won't eradicate opium though they acknowledge that it is now the Taliban's main revenue stream. The only states of the 26 members who have proved themselves to be mostly reliable when it comes to heavy lifting are the US, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
And no surprise to find out that many of the same NATO members that are loathe to bloody their hands are just as loathe to foot a larger bill. This, they are suggesting, is where the oil rich monarchies should come in.

While they should indeed -Al Qaeda and the Taliban love the Persian Gulf countries no more than they love the Western democracies, given all the demands about reducing carbon consumption - the source of their wealth, one wonders how eager they will be to help. Hoist yourself on your own methane gas, one can imagine them saying when Europe comes begging for Afghan alms.

Perhaps a better idea would be to let Afghanistan fund the cost. They could easily do this if they would only legalize the opium industry. Think of all the goals we could accomplish with this one step.

We could cut off the Taliban's funds, disenfranchise the criminal class, put profits in the hands of law-abiding and pro-democracy Afghans, create a tax base for the government and take Afghanistan off the international dole.

Pretending for a moment that we could even fund this new program, why lose both the War on Drugs and the War on Terror?

And on the opium front

The New York Times reports:

A suicide bomber on foot struck a police convoy about to head out on a poppy eradication mission in southern Afghanistan on Monday morning, killing 11 people and wounding 28, the police said...

Dawood Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand, said the success of recent efforts by security forces to destroy opium-poppy fields had prompted the attack on thecounternarcotics convoy, which was in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. “This was a work by Taliban and drug smugglers,” he said...

Apparently there have been many such attacks on these roads lately suggesting that the Taliban and their narcotrafficking enablers can take out whoever they want to on these roads but the ISAF and the Afghan security forces cannot take out the opium smugglers and insurgents who use the same highway.

I get why it's hard to intercept suicide attackers - who can tell what an individual is about to do? It's a logistical problem. What I don't get is why it is so hard to intercept the drug smugglers and insurgents who transit these same roads.

And I don't get why the eradication program focuses on eliminating the poppy crop itself. This only hurts the farmers who are largely subsistence and in many cases forced to grow.

Why don't they focus on the traffickers? Or at least legalize opium and then collect the taxes so Afghanistan will at least have some revenue base. Let the demand chain worry about the consequences for a change.

Pakistan: "We're watching history"

Thus spoke Javed Ali Khan, a Pakistani man who as the New York Times reports:

...traveled for days with his wife and six children to participate in a national march of lawyers and opposition political parties that came to an abrupt end on Monday when the lawyers demands were met....

“Justice,” said Mr. Khan’s wife, Rubina Javed, smiling broadly. “We came for justice...Justice is the solution to the common man’s problems,” Ms. Javed said, seated on a blue scarf on the grass with two daughters and four sons, ages 6 to 18, around her. “I want justice in schools, on roads, in transportation. Now the common man is speaking.”

As the Times report continued:

[In] Pakistan, the political class comes from a powerful feudal elite, which has largely avoided policies that would bring greater social equality, like land reform. With only half of the population literate, so far the strategy has worked.

“The ruling elite can get away with anything,” said Muhammad Ali, a software engineer. “They are like kings here.”

But the lawyers’ movement may be starting to change that. Though small in number, it is made up of an educated, diverse cross section of Pakistani society that includes lower middle
class professionals, whose reach may extend deeper into Pakistan’s 160 million population than initially expected.

“This movement has given an awareness to the common people in Pakistan of their rights,” said Shamoon Azhar, 26, a doctoral student at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, sitting on the lawn with a large group of his friends. “This is about awareness. It’s given people confidence. It’s shown people it can happen.”...

“The feudal system, it was in the past,” said Mazhar Iqbal, a private school manager. “There was no media then. No education. The poor were poor forever. Now is the time to wake up. It’s been 60 years and we’ve been wasting our time.”

Saif Abbas, a consultant who used to work for the Asian Development Bank in Islamabad, was more clear-eyed about the meaning of the march. Pakistan is still a poor country with a vast illiterate population, and a corrupt, unresponsive ruling class, he said.

“This country has to take control of its own future, and that’s education,” he said, holding a flag. “Unfortunately, we’re just not there yet.”

His vision for Pakistan is a “thoroughly democratic” country based on an Islamic system of governance, with a strong, powerful middle class, like that in Turkey or Malaysia. The current system will simply perpetuate the power of the mullahs on one hand, he said, and the elite, on the other, “who are totally disconnected from the people of this country.”

Cvilian versus a military regime in Pakistan

The New York Times reports on the clash that erupted today when members of the lawyers' movement and supporters of Nawaz Sharif, "the opposition leader" tried to stage a protest in Lahore.

[There is only one opposition leader in a country of _____ million????]

According to the Times, the police fired tear gas at the protestors, even bringing in armored vehicles to avoid being hit by the stones the protestors were hurling back at them. When the protestors started burning tires, the police chased them with batons.

This type of government crackdown on protests, according to the Times report, was unheard of during the eight-year military rule of President Musharraf. In fact, it was so weird that Sajjad Bhutta, Lahore's chief magistrate, told the Times that he refused to carry out what he perceived was an illegal police crackdown.

As the Times noted:

The current battle between Mr. Zardari and Mr. Sharif, a former prime minister, began on Feb. 25 when the president imposed executive rule on the Punjab Legislature, the stronghold of Mr. Sharif’s party.

Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its ruling disqualifying the Sharifs from holding office. To consolidate their opposition to Mr. Zardari, the brothers joined forces with the lawyers’ movement, which had called for a national protest and sit-in in Islamabad on March 16.
...
But as Mr. Zardari, the widower of Ms. Bhutto, stood firm, senior members of his party began to desert him. The minister of information, Sherry Rehman, resigned late Friday night after a prominent television news channel, Geo, was banned by the government in some parts of the country. Another senior official, Raza Rabbani, who was the party leader in the Senate, resigned from the cabinet after Mr. Zardari bypassed Mr. Rabbani and chose a more junior lawmaker, Farooq H. Naik, for the most senior post in the Senate chamber.

Sarah Chayes rethinks opium eradication

A gem from her Afghanistan Policy Action Plan:

Rethinking eradication. In line with new authorities agreed upon by NATO, interdiction efforts should be aimed not at growers, but at traffickers and profiteers, even when they hold government positions. A few patient and determined well-placed ambushes on roads linking Urozgan and Kandahar Provinces, for example, could net several thousand kilos of opium paste in a single month.

The audacity of the plan to reconcile the Taliban

The New York Times reported that the Obama administration has concluded that "most of the foot soldiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan are 'reconcilable' and can be pried away from the hard-core organizations of the Taliban and Al Qaeda."

The administration even has a figure in mind, according to "administration officials" says the Times, of "at least 70 percent of the insurgents and possibly more."

Now what does reconcilable mean you ask? Those that "can be encouraged to lay down their arms with the proper incentives." [The emphasis is mine.]

And what might proper incentives be? Charter schools for girls? Sub-prime mortgages for those whose houses have been bombed? National health care to replace missing limbs? Government funding so budding Taliban stem-cell researchers can eventually compete in the real world?

Apparently not. According to the Times, the Obama plan to reconcile the Taliban calls for a continuation of the CIA-orchestrated drone attacks inside Pakistan; and an increase in military and financial aid to Pakistan - with strings, however, says the Times.

Pakistan would have to spend the money "more on counterinsurgency and less on its long-running feud with India," according to the unnamed senior administration official the Times spoke to.

This condition should be easy enough for Pakistan to accept. How much can attacks like the ones in Mumbai last November cost?

As far as how much the Obama administration is thinking of giving Pakistan, if the legislation that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden sponsored when they were both still senators is any indication, Pakistan might well get triple the nonmilitary aid it got under the Bush administration.

Now it may rankle some that the Pakistanis would get even more aid but the benefits of their hoping they will appear to be already paying off. Since the Times report does not explicitly connect the dots, I will. Here is the salient dot:

...in carrying out missile strikes, the C.I.A. has steadily developed its own network of sources in the tribal areas, and combined with improved information-sharing with Pakistan’s main intelligence agency in recent months, as well as some technical advances like installing more mobile towers to intercept cellphone calls, the agency has been getting much better intelligence on its drone targets than it did just a few months ago, officials said.

Now what kind of numbers are they throwing around here? Oh just another $1 billion a year for Pakistan - not including whatever military aid, they get, the cost of the added cellphone towers, and the CIA only knows what else. It's a nice business Pakistan has carved out for itself out of Afghanistan's misery.

If there's still honor among the Mamoond tribe, this could be great news

The New York Times reports that yesterday the Mamoond tribe struck a deal with Islamabad. The tribe has agreed to lay down their arms; cease harboring militants; and stop training militants. The tribe runs the Taliban in the Bajaur Agency. The tribe is also believed to have provided refuge for Al Qaeda members.

Among the senior Taliban leaders the tribe has agreed to surrender are senior commander, Maulvi Faqir Muhammad and spokesman, Maulvi Said Muhammad, otherwise known as Maulvi Omar.

If the Mamoond tribe has any honor, then Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, Pakistani commander in the area, is absolutely right in saying, "It's the peoples' victory."

Displaced by the Taliban

Photo courtesy by Emilio Morenatti, Associated Press

Contrast the image above with the photos below of women in areas where they are no longer running from the Taliban. Notice any difference?

Pakistan's "victory" in Bajaur

The New York Times reports:

After a six-month campaign, the Pakistani military is claiming victory over the Taliban in Bajaur, a northern sliver of the tribal areas, saying the militants have suffered heavy losses and have been pushed over the border into Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, as the Times duly notes, the Pakistanis are alone in their assessment:

Residents and Western military experts, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the political situation, said it was likely that rather than being finally uprooted from this slice of Bajaur and a nearby stronghold in Loe Sam, the bulk of the Taliban forces had retreated to mountain enclaves, waiting to return, as they have so often, when the military eases off.

Idrees Khan, a tribal elder from the area, told the Times why he is reluctant to return to home:

He left with bad feelings and remains bitter, he said. The family tried under tremendous odds to stave off the Taliban in December, he said. When the militants attacked one of their houses near the market and his brother called for help, the army showed up late and was of little help, he said. A helicopter gunship came after the Taliban had fled, but it shot at the family house anyway, severely damaging it, he said.

His experience is apparently not unique, either:

Several residents of Inayat Kalay said they were nervous about security because they had tried to raise a volunteer army against the Taliban last fall, but had received inadequate backing from the authorities.
...He said he was reluctant to return, in part because he had no confidence in the Pakistani government. “When we returned in November they shelled us,” he said. “We don’t want to repeat that.”

The Pakistani military claims that some 1,600 militants have been killed in the six-month campaign. However, as the Times report continues, neither residents or Western military official believe this claim as Pakistan has provided no real evidence.

Moreover, as Mr. Khan pointed out to the Times reporter, the Taliban in the area seem to have come through the government's assault relatively unscathed. The main compound of Fakir Mohammed, the Taliban's main man in Bajaur, remains standing amid the rubble of everyone else's property. “Why don’t they hit his house?” as Mr. Khan inquired of the reporter.

Audacity of hope: Praying for peace in Afghanistan

Photos courtesy of UNAMA

International Women's Day, Afghanistan

Reasons not to give up in Afghanistan

School girls in Afghanistan. Photo by Sebastian Rich.

As the UNAMA writes in their press release:

More than six million children have enrolled in school since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

In 2008 the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) supported the enrollment of nearly 340,000 girls in grade one.

Change in Saudi Arabia

From today's  NYTimes.com :

Ever since King Abdullah announced a sweeping cabinet reshuffle two weeks ago, Saudi liberals have been in a rare holiday mood. Many have hailed the changes — including the replacement of some major conservative figures and the appointment of the first female deputy minister — as a “mini-revolution” and proof that the king is at last willing to tame this country’s hard-line religious establishment.

While not everyone is happy with the changes, as the Times duly notes, let's focus on those who were happy:

“The king’s message is that he is bringing new blood — legal, not religious,” said Abdul Rahman al-Lahem, a reformist lawyer who has been jailed for his advocacy. “I am very optimistic.”

More generally, the reform agenda has drawn momentum from King Abdullah’s personal popularity and a growing public dissatisfaction with radical religious figures....

The radicals’ popularity began to wane in 2003, when a series of brutal terrorist attacks here killed Saudis as well as foreigners. At the same time, public anger at the intolerance of the cane-wielding religious police has grown, fueled by a younger generation that is more exposed to the outside world.

“The sacred image of these people was destroyed,” said Awadh Badi, a scholar at the King Faisal Center in Riyadh, the capital. “Before, even the state couldn’t touch them.”

As the Times goes on to report:

To many Saudis, the issue of extremism is less important than the fact that the schools are not providing enough math and science or the broader view of the world that their children need as the country struggles to diversify its economy and oil prices fall.

“Seventy-five percent of what my 13-year-old daughter studies is religion,” said Fawziah al-Bakr, a professor of education at King Saud University. “We are all in favor of religion, but we don’t have to make all our children into clerics.”

As far as the kingdom allowing elections to be held. 

“Without changing the cultural infrastructure here, there is no point in elections or anything of the kind,” said one ardently reformist member of Saudi Arabia’s appointed Shura Council, which advises the king, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The extremists here are well organized, but the liberals are not organized at all. They don’t have channels of communication with the people.”

Afghanistan's narcotics trade: Friends, foes and enablers

There is a curious story about the Afghan narcotics trade in yesterday's (London) Times Online:

The troops, from a 2,000-man taskforce based in Helmand, have pushed west into Farah province to choke the Taliban's supply lines, part of an American plan to contain what they perceive as British "failures" in southern Afghanistan.

Why are the Americans so obsessed with routing the Taliban in Helmand?  The report continues:

Major-General Mart de Kruif, Nato’s senior general in southern Afghanistan, said central Helmand was the Taliban’s top priority. “They see it as their heartland,” he said.
“And they are fighting hardest there because there is a clear nexus between the insurgency and the drugs trade, which they are fighting to protect.”

...Lieutenant-Colonel David Odom, of the US marines ground combat element, stationed in Farah, said the insurgents used the roads west of Helmand to move “weapons, drugs and poppy money” to and from Iran and Pakistan.

The flying drones that patrol the roads day and night have watched thousands gather at impromptu bazaars to trade guns and drugs, often within a few miles of their bases. Even the Americans do not have sufficient troops to stop them.

It's not so surprising to me that the British cannot or will not put enough troops on the ground in Afghanistan to stop this trade.  What puzzles me is why than the Pakistanis and Iranians aren't more involved in stopping this flow. I get the anti-American angle to their agenda but at what cost to their people?  This makes me wonder, cui bono from the narcotics trade in those countries?  Which officials exactly benefit from looking the other way?