Perhaps the best way to celebrate a writer’s life is to appreciate the work he has left behind him. Whether or not spiritual immortality is attainable, there are many writers that hope to attain immortality, or at least vicarious long-life, through their work. Having finished two excellent books recently, I can attest that if fame were given in return for merit, Aitmatov will still be on people’s lips for hundreds of years to come. While it’s true that some of his works appear too topical to really make sense in a future world without the Soviet Union, some of his writing is about the most timeless subject of all: love in a difficult world.

The first book I read was The Place of the Skull. The original Russian title is Плаха [Plakha]. It was an incredible read. I’m not going to go into too much detail - there are more in-depth studies of this work available on the Internet. In short, it’s a book in two parts, titled Man and Wolf, respectively. The first part follows the “holy fool” Avdi, whose name is analogous with the Biblical name Obediah. The second part follows an upstanding Kyrgyz shepherd Bazarbai Noigutov. Both stories are linked, rather loosely, by following the story of the she-wolf Akbara. After reading some of the criticism available on the internet, it’s clear that some changes were made in the translation - there are whole sections that were left on the cutting room floor, unfortunately. I didn’t notice the lack, of course - the book is quite complete as it is.

If you’ve read the Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, you’ll understand the most common criticism against this book. In the middle of the work, Avdi hallucinates a very philosophical conversation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ. A very similar scene takes place in Bulgakov’s work. Aside from the same scene being paraphrased, though, the books have little in common. Chingiz Aitmatov uses the scene to make the point of Avdi’s religious devotion to Christ, as well the similarities between any two people that dedicate themselves to helping others, however misguided they might be.

The book has plenty of light moments, but on the whole it’s a very dark journey. I learned that, while the Soviet Union was nominally atheist, they certainly knew their Bible stories. That being said, Jesus comes off as a surprisingly secular-humanist type. It’s almost as if he realized that he was going to be “misunderstood” by the masses, and that hopefully someday people would realize what he was actually getting at. The crucial point to keep in mind is that this is a work of Glasnost. Published in 1986, it brought up a lot of topical issues: drug abuse among the youth, desecration of the environment, loss of religious faith and humanism, and the unforeseen costs of relying so heavily on direction from Moscow.

And now we get to the book I’m excited about. It’s one of those timeless short stories that could have been written last night or two hundred years ago. Published in 1957, it’s actually been hailed by French Communist Poet Louis Aragon as ‘the most beautiful love story in the world.’ I’d like to mention that the woman on the cover has perhaps the most beautiful half-of-a-face I’ve ever seen, and that alone sells the book for me. Whether that’s just good marketing or not, I can’t say, but it certainly makes me think Jamilia might just be that mythical “perfect woman.”

What’s more bizarre is that this new edition’s blurb on the back places the action in the Caucasus. The characters have Kirghiz names, and identify themselves as such, except for the half-Kazakh, half-Kirghiz character Seit. It’s probably calculated on the idea that more Americans are familiar with the Caucasus than Kyrgyzstan - or not calculated at all, and just an unlucky stab in the dark by the blurb writer.

The book is so short it can be read in one sitting. But what a whirlwind ride of emotion! Even though it has possibly the happiest ending of any Central Asian love story you’re likely to find, it still manages to be soul-crushingly sad at the same time. The narrator is Jamilia’s younger brother-in-law, a young boy and an aspiring painter. From the first pages, it’s clear that he has a boy’s love for Jamilia, and maybe because we see the story through his eyes, Jamilia takes on an almost eternal visage of beauty, intelligence, and femininity.

So, in short, I suggest picking up The Place of the Skull if you can, while I STRONGLY recommend Jamilia.

Of course, none of this is new information. The very crimes Griffen stands accused of would indicate the Nazarbayev family has extensive money laundering operations. Similarly, that U.S. lobbyists work aggressively, and sometimes unethically, on behalf of clients in the Former Soviet Union is no surprise at all.

Indeed, one of the only reasons Aliyev would want to come forward with this information would be to attempt to embarrass President Nursultan Nazarbayev into dropping the charges against him. The problem is, at this point, Nazarbayev is already embarrassed of Aliyev—whether it was the nasty abduction of the bank managers, his clash with the mayor of Amlaty, or his very high profile divorce of Dariga Nazarbayeva, Aliyev has too many strikes against him for there to be any realistic chance of reconciliation between him and Uncle Nazzy.

So we’re left with revenge, then. From his “spider hole” in Austria, Rakhat wants to bite the hand that kept him so well fed since independence. Good thing he has some western reporters willing to write about it.

Mohaqiq is protesting the recent violent incursion of Kuchi nomads into Hazara areas in the Behsud district of Wardak province. Reportedly, upwards of four Hazara were killed during the incursion. This is an old conflict—the Economist wrote of it last year, but it has roots going back at least into the Taliban’s rule. Many Hazara claim the Kuchi are “Taliban,” or at least Taliban-loving, because during the 90s they worked with the Taliban, who granted them access to Hazara (and Tajik) land. Naturally the Hazara are angry over this imbalance.

Here’s the rub. As a predominantly Pashtun force, the Taliban were rather notorious for their appalling treatment of all other minorities within Afghanistan, including (or perhaps especially) the Hazara. In fact, the imposed famine on the Hazarajat was particularly brutal and generally unreported in the media in the West.

Wardak is about half Pashtun, with most of the rest (somewhere around 40%, according to unreliable official statistics) Hazara. This is an area where corruption is so bad many Pashtun villagers eagerly open their arms to Taliban entreaties, whose promises to end corruption and establish justice seem to meet eager ears in many areas, and whose courts have willing participants.

This places the Hazara in a bit of a quandry. While the Taliban claim not to recognize ethnicity, they clearly hate the Hazara as Shiite apostates. Meanwhile, the Kuchi, who are Sunni, might be able to get some Taliban support in their quest to find grazing land. But both groups—Hazara and Kuchi—can quite correctly claim to have been marginalized for centuries, and claim to have been ignored in Afghanistan’s post-Taliban politics. This last complaint is a bit of a stretch: the 3 million Kuchi have a guaranteed 10 seats in Parliament, a courtesy not given the Uzbeks or Balochi. The Hazara have one of the country’s two co-vice presidencies in the man of Karim Khalili. (Neither of these facts guarantee any sort of co-equal voice in the government.)

Khalili claimed in a recent press conference that President Karzai ordered an evacuation of the Kuchi from Behsud district. Meanwhile, Hazara representatives claim several thousand have fled the violence.

The danger is that the Kuchi will reach out to the Taliban for support. While there is scant evidence this has actually happened, given the general negligence of Hazara areas—they tend to be quiet, so the troops with all those CERP funds rarely give them focus—the only way for the Hazara to draw attention to their conflict to cry “Taliban,” and maybe let slip the dogs of war. There is the possibility of armed conflict between the two groups beyond the limited skirmishes so far.

But Mohaqiq’s hunger strike is peaceful. And so far the Hazara community seems to be holding its breath to see what kind of reaction they can get from Kabul and NATO (there is a protest scheduled in Kabul for Tuesday, July 22). They shouldn’t hold it too long: the Turks, who run the Wardak PRT, pretty much never leave their compound. Similarly, a 2007 commission Hamid Karzai set up to discover a solution to the Hazara-Kuchi conflict has yet to reveal anything about its proceedings.

The unfortunate angle to this conflict is that not only is it in a generally ignored area just to the west of Kabul, it also has nothing to do with the Coalition/Taliban conflict raging further south and east. It seems, in brief, a fairly standard nomad/settler conflict, with the consequent disputes over land used both for agriculture and grazing. These types of conflicts become especially acute during times of drought or shortage, and the current squeeze over food prices, and a looming drought in the south, have probably exacerbated the conflict.

Despite the constant cries of Taliban, however, very few seem to take the Hazara complaint seriously. And here is where it could backfire: just like crying wolf, it might fall on deaf ears next time there is a real, and serious, Taliban incursion in Wardak beyond setting up a few shadow institutions. Similarly, if the Hazara succeed in painting the Kuchi as Taliban sympathizers, this might push them into seeking support from the Taliabn to gain advantage in their struggle.

In other words, Wardak right now is a tinderbox… one that is still almost entirely ignored by the West. They would do well to pay attention to the trouble brewing at Kabuls’ gates.

See Also: “The Long Walk of the Kuchi,” Walrus Magazine, July/August 2006 [link]

UPDATE: The Hazaristan Times files three reports on the protests today:

1. Karzai declares victory by ordering the Kuchi to evacuate Behsud and return the Hazara homes and lands they occupied. We’ll see if that sticks, or if it achieves any lasting change.

2. Mohaqiq has ended his hunger strike after talks with UNAMA. By all accounts Behsud is slowly emptying of Kuchis, though it appears the government ignored the five “charter demands” the protesters called for, which included the resignation of Karzai and restitution for the displaced.

3. A beautiful picture gallery of the protest. The HT claims 300,000 took to the streets; while the number certainly was large, it is unclear if it was that high. Still, the fact that a large number of Hazara-led protesters could take to the streets without much harassment is a welcome sight that maybe there is a civil society growing up there after all.

So what would Stewart make of this?

KABUL: Dozens of Taliban militants captured a remote district in central Afghanistan overnight, killing one police officer and injuring two others, the Interior Ministry said on Monday.

Local security forces fled “under lots of pressure” after the insurgents stormed into Ghazni province’s Ajiristan district, 200 kilometres southwest of Kabul, shortly after midnight, spokesman Zemarai Bashary told AFP. “Security forces abandoned the district centre after Taliban attacked. They withdrew under lots of pressure,” the spokesman said. “One police was killed and two others were injured,” he said.

“We’re working on a plan to retake the district,” Bashary said, without giving details. Ajiristan was captured by Taliban insurgents in October last year. It was retaken the following day when about 300 security forces moved into the small district centre.

This part of Ghazni is highly contentious, and is the subject of some of that reconstruction money Stewart wants redirected toward the North. Would he sell them out to an armed takeover in the hopes that other areas can be made less susceptible?

The classy fellow promising he will try to arrange a meeting between Bush administration officials and former President of Kyrgyzstan Askar Akaev, and maybe, just maybe, try to give him a nudge back into office is Stephen Payne, whom The Sunday Times absolutely pwned.

Payne has since stepped down from a Department of Homeland Security advisory council on which he sat. Payne has traveled with the President and Vice President on foreign trips, and The Sunday Times now reports that he may have been arranged in earlier shady dealings involving Central Asia. The paper is now reporting that Payne helped arrange Dick Cheney’s 2006 visit to Kazakhstan in which the Vice President heaped praise on President Nursultan Nazrbaev.

Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, who in 2005 was an adviser to Timur Kulibayev, a billionaire and son-in-law of Nazarbayev, was involved in the negotiations with Payne.

Dosmukhamedov, who has since founded an opposition party and gone into exile, said his negotiations, carried out at the behest of the Kazakh government, specified that Cheney would visit Kazakhstan.

He understood that the money was paid to Payne’s company via KazMunayGas (KMG), the Kazakh state-owned oil and gas company, on the understanding that some of it would be passed to people connected to the Bush administration.

Payne denies having received any payments from KMG, but The Sunday Times says that there is a conduit through which funds could have easily passed from KMG to Payne’s company.

A sister company to WSP, Worldwide Strategic Energy (WSE), of which Payne is also president, has a subsidiary, Caspian Alliance, which is the sole US representative for KMG.

The disclosure is contained within a draft of a 44-page WSE “placement memorandum” brochure circulated to potential energy investors last year. It adds that the Caspian Alliance was “providing KazMunayGas with political risk analysis as well as access to energy leaders and executives”.

And to make this even more interesting, Payne has a very close relationship with Randy Scheunemann, a key adviser to John McCain. It looks like Central Asia could pop its head into the US presidential campaign, though unfortunately not in the way that one might hope it would.

Though kind of Soviet looking, they nevertheless look pleasant. In 2007, however, Jon Nyswonger went back to the same spot.

Words fail.

More photographs here.

Why did General Petraeus defy doctrine and increasingly call on airpower in a kinetic role? The answer is that air and space technology have come a long way since Vietnam. New communication technology allows air and ground forces to work together much more effectively than in the past. The synergy that joint forces derive from this interaction vastly magnifies the power of the force. Soldiers and Marines’ situational awareness increases dramatically when married to airborne ISR and their firepower increases by orders of magnitude when combined with precision guided munitions…

[Precision Guided Munitions] have had a similar effect. Unlike the imprecise bombs of the 1960s, modern bombs cause little unintentional damage. When linked with good human intelligence and eyes on the ground that can identify targets as hostile, they are a radically effective way of applying firepower without killing noncombatants or putting U.S. troops in harms way. Evidence of the unobtrusiveness of this form of military power is that the press has remained almost entirely ignorant of the tenfold increase in the amount of air launched ordinance used in the surge.

This second paragraph is, frankly, an outright lie if Nick Turse’s months of documenting what seems to be a deliberate decision not to cover the air war in Iraq can be believed. In the case of Afghanistan, the futility of air strikes has been at the heart of the debate for increasing ground troops—every one from Hamid Karzai to Barrack Obama to Antonio Giustozzi have noted the significant role collateral damage borne of air strikes have played in recruiting locals to the Taliban and other militant groups. While Richard Andres is couching his argument in terms of the Surge in Iraq, he is making a theoretical argument about the use of air strikes to make up for defficiencies in ground forces… which means it should be generalizable and not only applicable to Iraq.

Even ignoring the long argument I’ve made about the outright lie of claiming to have precision weapons, Andres is willfully misleading readers about the effects of PGMs. For one, if “little unintentional damage” occurs from precision air strikes… well, I’m curious how it is that we keep on bombing wedding parties and murdering dozens of people in the process. Even when coupled with good intelligence, we cannot eliminate collateral damage—say, when lobbing artillery shells into Pakistan to kill a militant leaders and killing several innocent people in the process. Such a world, in which an enemy conveniently hides away from all possible negative consequences of U.S. action, does not exist. And it would behoove the Air Force to start paying attention to that.

Worse than the practicalities of Andres’ argument is just how strongly it goes against established, means-tested analysis of other insurgencies. The Winograd Commission, which was convened in Israel to analyze why their 2006 war with Hezbollah last year didn’t go well, came to three main conclusions about the failure of Israeli strategy. Most pertinent here is the first: Western militaries are in active denial concerning the limitations of precision weapons. This is a lesson NATO is figuring out, as evidenced by their decision to use smaller bombs to reduce the number of civilian casualties.

But the U.S. has, in the past, proven unreliable in its quest to minimize civilian casualties in operations—year after year, the number of civilians killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan climbs near to Taliban levels, and last year in Helmand were so severe a British commander reportedly requested the U.S. Special Forces withdraw to avoid further antagonizing the locals.

But it is even worse. Andres claims the first principle in counterinsurgency is to shore up the legitimacy of the government. Air strikes in Afghanistan, at least in the frequency with which they occur, have done the opposite: apart from all of our other policies, which also undermine the Afghan government, the appalling number of civilians killed in air strikes the last two years is probably the best insurgent recruiting tool out there. Hamid Karzai’s repeated public entreaties to reduce them has fallen on deaf ears; every time, then, that we mistakenly bomb a wedding party and murder 50 women, we further undercut the perception of Kabul as the political center of the country. In other words: the West has given normal citizens in Afghanistan no reason to have faith in their government.

This is because air power is not very precise, and it is not really limited—especially when you have small numbers of militants hiding in a village of mud huts. A 3-meter CEP (Circular Error Probable, which is a radius in which a weapon will land 50% of the time) is useless when even mild blast effects can rip apart mud huts and kill innocents. That is why, despite downgrading its standard munition to 500 lbs, NATO will still kill far too many civilians with such a light footprint. Over-investing in air power, and pretending that can make up for a troop shortfall, is sheer folly.

Indeed, the most precise weapon is the individual soldier, not an aircraft. How unsurprising an Air Force booster would neglect that.

SINCE 2001, when the Taliban were dislodged from power in Afghanistan, the international community has spent many billions of dollars toward the nation’s reconstruction. Yet not much progress can be seen. Poor management and lack of coordination among aid agencies are the major reasons for this dismal record, but another very simple problem has been a failure to make sure that the Afghan people have access to books and other printed materials with the information they need to move forward…

Afghanistan’s radio network is growing, and an estimated 70 percent of the population listens at least three days a week, but radio messages are ephemeral. Some people scoff at the idea of distributing books to a population that is barely 28 percent literate. But 28 percent amounts to nearly 9 million people out of a population of 32 million, and that is certainly a worthy beginning.

It is important that a high government body like the Ministry of Education endorse the concept of distributing books to the population. Money is needed, too, ideally from both foreign governments and the Afghan government. And experts are needed to write the simple, accurate texts that Afghans need — on subjects from health care and household management to science, culture, history and the environment.

A start, yes. It is depressing that the international community still seems content to hand out fish rather than teaching them how.

The trick foir a successful handover from one unit to another, say U.S. officers here, is for the outgoing commanders to pass on an anthropologist’s guide to the local power structure, economy, rivalries, kinship, ambitions and fears…

One of the first officers from the new squadron to arrive at the main base in Naray was Capt. Kevin Sopuch, the intelligence officer. Capt. Sopuch, 35, from Cape May, N.J., says he has been reading up on the country since he learned in April that he’d be spending 12-15 months here. He predicts coming to Naray will be “like moving to a new city… I’ve moved enough times in America that it’s just the same. After three months you know what restaurants not to eat at.”

Call this a conservative guess, but I’d speculate he’s in for a rather rude awakening. Learning northern Kunar isn’t quite like learning where the bad Mexican restaurants are in Indiannapolis. LTC Kolenda, who in other stories datelined in Naray has come off very well in terms of knowledge of locals, seems to get some of the astounding complexity of the ethnic groups there pretty right:

The colonel has also mastered the intricacies of the Nuristani tribe. At least two of its five subtribes, the Kom and the Kata, practice different versions of Islam and don’t get along. During the Soviet war, they backed different mujahideen factions. The Kom have four primary clans, and Lt. Col. Kolenda says they bicker among themselves as well.

The Kom and the Kushtowz, another Nuristani subtribe, have been fighting over water rights for a century, says Lt. Col. Kolenda. The Kushtowz say the Kom use their springs; the Kom say the Kushtowz stole their land and cattle. A decade ago the Kom pushed the Kushtowz out of Kamdesh District. The Kushtowz want to move back, but their rivals seeded the land with mines.

Richard Strand (natch) has produced an overview of these groups. Strand claims Nuristan itself has fifteen distinct ethnic groups who speak five generally incompatible languages, though they form their own subgroup of Indo-Aryan languages. While a bit simplified and too recent (Strand says the Kom v. Kshto/Kata dispute goes back several centuries), it is a generally good take on the conflict there (the most recent flareup of violent hostilities resulted in the razing of the Kshto settlement of Kshtorm in 1998).

I’m curious if he got this information from reading scholars like Strand and Katz (or, heaven forbid, Schuyler Jones), or if it was good on-the-ground investigation. If it is the latter, then his departure will be a serious loss in institutional Army knowledge in the area, because these kinds of things are not simple to unravel. Given the recent glaring inaccuracies over the site of a U.S. base that was recently attacked and overrun in Nuristan (see here and here, for example), it is vitally important that units deployed to these regions build off of their knowledge, rather than having to reinvent it each time a Brigade turns over. It speaks highly of the group there now that Phillips was explaining the variations among the insurgents—several different Taliban groups, al-Qaeda, HiG, and just plain old revenge fighters—and it would be a real shame to lose that… say, by treating the area like some anonymous American city restaurant scene.

Life, however, has intervened. I found out yesterday that my employer requires me to go on a work-related trip during conflicting dates, and I cannot refuse. Coincidentally, I will still be going to Afghanistan. Just with them, and for them, and not on my own or for me. This might pose issues in terms of what I can write about or photograph, and I must follow their lead. But I will do my best regardless to document and write about what I can.

This also means they’re paying for my transportation and security. Which means I don’t need to raise money right now. So over the next few days—part of what made this group so extraordinary was how many contributed—I will be returning everyone’s donations.

I am truly humbled by your respect and trust. And while I am still planning on going to Afghanistan in the spring to explore things on my own, I will wait until it is closer before I revisit the financial underpinning of such a trip.

Again, I cannot thank any of you enough. Thank you feels inadequate, but it’s all I got.

All the best,
Joshua Foust