According to Dawn Operation Omaid to clear Taliban from Kandahar has already begun.

Well sort of.

“US General Stanley McChrystal, said the offensive had begun with initial military and political efforts, including operations to secure key roads and districts.”

Alternatively:-

“We have been making preparation and plans concerning Operation Omaid,”said General Sher Mohammad Zazai, Afghan army commander in the country’s
south.

“We’re still working on the plan,” he said, without giving further details.

Little contradictions like that to one side, this may mean the military has decided against the sort of invasion we saw in Marjah.

Alternatively, it could be that now Karzai has visited Marjah, it is all done and dusted.

I don’t like the sound of either of the above.

Having failed to properly clear and hold anywhere outside Kabul for eight years, do these guys think they can now do two at once? I don’t like the sound of that either.

Bing West—with an apparently unlimited travel budget?—has a report up about Operation Moshtarak, asking if we can learn any lessons from it. While the obvious answer is, “yes,” there are some things to consider.

First, nowhere in the first four pages does West mention even tangentially the needs or concerns of the local population. Since the paper he is writing is subtitled, “Applying Counterinsurgency to Local Conditions,” and he talks a lot about the Taliban in the area, one would wonder why he never asked why the Taliban was so especially concentrated in Marjeh (it was at least partially our fault). Secondly, while West is explicit in his focus on warfighters, we learn nothing of the environment in which they operate, save a few Taliban here and there and a whole lot of IEDs. I do believe people also live in this area, but much like the first point we really don’t hear much beyond BG Nicholson “reaching out to hundreds of elders and mullahs” or something. How did he reach out? What did he say? If the outreach was so good why have Taliban already filtered back in to behead collaborators? Is that also a “best practice?” West addresses none of these questions.

There’s also a worrying bit here about opium:

The next stage will be the poppy harvest in late April and early May. Marines and DEA are intermingled with police making it tough to export drugs via the main roads. Odds are the Taliban have taken a large hit in finances, because they won’t be able to organize the purchase and export of wet opium, let alone refine it inside Marja. Instead, many small-time dealers will resort to smuggling small amounts over the back roads, fracturing Taliban control and reducing the profit margin.

I’m guessing by “wet opium” he means opium paste? Anyway this is a big part of the point above about not knowing the population and focusing only on the enemy—which is not really doctrinaire American counterinsurgency. In Marjeh, opium IS the local economy. You cannot make it “tough to export drugs” without making it tough for regular people to earn a living, at least not now at this point in the season. And the drug smugglers are widely reported to have a stockpile of several thousand tons of opium paste—years’-worth of the global demand—saved up for just such an eventuality. As the Taliban learned in 2001, seizing drugs and clamping down on exports only drives prices into the sky, making opium that much more profitable. The DEA is, in other words, and contra what West reports (from whom, I wonder?), actively enhancing the profit margins on the opium paste already stored up for export.

Then there’s this:

A grunt doing seven months can do with less and push harder than when he has to do twelve months. The argument that he makes less meaningful relations with Afghans is shallow. Most grunts don’t form relationships because they don’t live in the villages, and there is no evidence that twelve months yields better intelligence results. There is ample evidence that twelve months does yield fewer patrols per day.

A reporter recently made this same argument to me, but it is actually part of the problem with population-centricity in Afghanistan. West is quick to draw a paragraph analogy to Anbar, but in Anbar (and in Baghdad) Marines actually were living in the villages, in community security outposts, amongst the Iraqis. They refuse to do that in Afghanistan—despite having terrible logistical support, the Marines sent out into the bush do not live off of or participate in the local economy. Everything they eat, drink, and wear is, essentially, imported from Dubai. So while a seven-month rotation might allow them to endure more punishing combat operations, there still isn’t enough evidence that the improved security they can create actually translates into more permanent COIN-type gains at the local level (and there is already plenty of evidence to support that they are merely as effective as the Army in this regard).

But at the end, West’s conclusions either agree with established Army practices (i.e. train local forces locally, and go after the enemy), or outright snipes at the Army (i.e. the bit about tour length, which is stated rather than argued). Which tells us… just about nothing, save the insight his piece lends into how the Marines are choosing to view their efforts in Central Helmand.

Oh well. I can’t wait for his book to come out.

For several years, U.S. officials have alleged that “Iranian weapons” were being supplied to Taliban militants, mostly in Farah and Herat but also elsewhere in the country. Most often, the official would make the charge in the passive voice, leaving it open to interpretation whether the arms shipments—assuming they were even identified correctly—were official Iranian policy or merely origination from other groups in Iran.

I’ve been a consistent critic of these charges (and the casual assumption of “Iranian-backed” to describe Taliban leaders we don’t like)—sure they might happen on a small scale, but does it really make sense for Iran to arm an immediate enemy against a more distant one?

A major reason I disbelieve these charges is Iran has a tremendous amount to gain from a prosperous Afghanistan, and their investments in Hazara and Tajik communities has been among the more successful foreign aid projects of the last eight years… and the Taliban will destabilize and destroy those areas should they gain the upper hand in the war. If they fund the Taliban, who then destroys hundreds of millions of dollars of Iranian investment, the regime has managed to embarrass the United States, true, but at a ludicrous cost that would leave it in the weak and borderline-unwinnable position it found itself in when the Taliban massacred its diplomats in Mazar-i Sharif in 1998. (In 2002, Iranian special forces collaborated with American special forces in the West to drive out Taliban units.)

Channel 4, however, claims to have acquired hard evidence that Iran is, in fact, doing something so astoundingly counterproductive.

The exclusive images and documents show, for the first time, the full extent of Iranian support for the Taliban in the shape of tonnes of weapons of the type being used against UK troops in Helmand province.

Despite the millions of dollars being spent by the international community to ensure cross-border security between Iran and Afghanistan, Channel 4 News has been shown vast hauls of weaponry which Afghan security services have told us are just a fraction of hardware intercepted from Iran on their way to the Taliban.

They claim it shows the true extent of direct support from the Iranian government for the insurgency.

This is enormously damaging, if true. It brings into question the close ties between Hamid Karzai and the Iranian government, as well as the entire nature of the security posture of NATO forces in the South. However, 13 paragraphs in we see:

Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which operates in Herat, said that they did believe there was “limited” Iranian support for the Taliban through weapons and training, however they did not believe that it was at a level that was “decisive” to the outcome of the anti-insurgency effort.

They go on to interview a Taliban commander in Kunduz who says the Iranian government is crucial support for his insurgency because of the pressure Pakistan has placed on militants. But even there, it doesn’t seem as open-and-closed: the commander, for example, says he and his men have to rely on “professional smugglers” to get weapons, money, and so on, which implies there probably isn’t widespread official endorsement of the activity. When they don’t use smugglers they personally carry these items. So where are they buying them in Iran?

Of course, just last month Frontline ran a high-larious story on the Taliban in Baghlan province, just south of Kunduz (they were really HiG, but whatever). Those guys were very obviously run and managed by Pashtuns and Arabs from Pakistan, not Iran.

So at least based on what they have posted online, it doesn’t seem like a slam-dunk case, to borrow a troubled phrase. It is a narrative that plays to American and British assumptions of Iranian perfidy, but despite the cache of weapons on display it doesn’t directly implicate the Iranian government in any of the smuggling—any more than the Taliban operating in Waziristan directly implicates the Pakistani government (that is to say: neither government is monolithic and certainly has factions that behave semi-autonomously). If, however, the Channel 4 documents actually involve official Iranian government in shipping arms to the Taliban as part of a deliberate strategy to “bog down” the U.S., then it would be the first time concrete evidence of their involvement has been shown. And if that actually happens, then we have a rather big deal on our hands.

Ms. Alyona Minkovski was kind enough to have me back on her show to discuss what’s going on with the bizarre Michael Furlong/AfPax/NY Times “private spies for hire” thing.

Yes, that was over Skype, yes it was a terrible connection, yes that is medical tape barely holding my glasses together, and yes I need to buy a lamp or something.

Anand Gopal has an excellent piece on Marjeh before Moshtarak:

Many Marjah residents say that the two years of Taliban rule were better than the six years of Afghan government rule that preceded it. The Taliban ruling apparatus was not sophisticated, but for the rugged, simple town of Marjah it met the bare-minimum requirements. This was not necessarily a positive appraisal of the Taliban; rather it was an indictment of the Afghan government and its Western backers…

The Taliban’s protection of the drug economy—which many in Marjah are involved in—and the provision of rudimentary services (judiciary, policing, and some development) won them support from the local population.

It’s a point I’ve repeated here ad nauseum as well. Good on him for seeking out locals to talk to.

The reservoir that was.

This just in – a dam burst in Kazakhstan killing dozens and injuring hundreds.  A particularly quick Wiki-response was in the offing, perhaps due to the romanticized notions of famous dam-burstings and their apocalyptic wrath.  This particular dam is identified as the “Kyzyl-Agash” [Red Tree] dam, which I guess provides electricity and/or water for drinking/agriculture for the nearby town of Kyzyl-Agash.  The official response has been typically harsh, and the search for a scapegoat has already begun.  Considering the sorry state of even the US’s infrastructure, it doesn’t take a particularly brave leap of faith to assume Kazakhstan’s is also below par.  Nor can I say this response from Kazakhstan is unexpected, considering any democracy’s knee-jerk reaction to public disaster is a lynch mob.  [See?  Kazakhstan IS a democracy!]

My heart goes out to the people, and I hope that they made find help and comfort with friends and family next week with the coming of spring and the Наурыз holiday.  Perhaps the town will cease to exist, as I imagine the reservoir was an important source of water, employment, electricity, and irrigation.  If the dam is rebuilt, one can hope its maintenance will be taken seriously and plans made for a dam capable of withstanding any level of spring snow-melt.

This particular dam was not particularly close to any large urban areas, being rather close to the Kazakh-Chinese border, about a third of the way from Almaty up to Ust’ [Өскемен].  To make recovery and repair problems worse, the town and dam are on the “far side” of Lake Balkhash, quite off the beaten path of developed Kazakhstan.

Perhaps I am not alone in being reminded of this story, which pops up every couple of years to titillate and terrorize global readers.  Tajikistan, being home to a lot of water at high elevation, is the atomic bomb factory of “Gravity+Water=Chaos” equations.  This terror of the possible disaster might well be fed by the American culture of Disaster Scenarios, and our own terrible history of dam tragedies, topped off by the unspeakable terror of the Johnstown nightmare of the late 19th century.  A dam burst, killing over 2000 people in a deluge beyond biblical proportions, forcing narrators to empty their pockets of all the horrible adjectives and Revelations-strewn metaphors in their attempts to describe the terror felt by the eye-witnesses and stranded survivors.

Two weeks ago, I wrote in the New York Times:

Good government will matter little, though, if the local economy is in a shambles. Marja’s agricultural base relies primarily on opium, and any new counternarcotics policies will wreak havoc; arresting or killing the drug traffickers will ultimately be the same as attacking local farmers. The timing of the offensive could not be more damaging: opium is planted in the winter and harvested in the spring, which means those who planted last year cannot recoup their investment.

In Helmand, opium is the only way farmers can acquire credit: they take out small loans, called salaam, from narcotics smugglers or Taliban officials, often in units of poppy seed, and pay back that loan in opium paste after harvest. If they cannot harvest their opium, they are in danger of defaulting on their loan — a very dangerous proposition.

Western aid groups distributed wheat seeds last fall, but there was little follow-up and it seems few farmers used them. This year, the aid workers should be prepared to pay farmers compensation for any opium crops they are unable to harvest as a result of the fighting, and the Western coalition should help the groups develop a microcredit system.

Behold:

The swift American-led military offensive that drove the Taliban from power in this southern Afghan farm belt came at an inopportune time for the area’s poppy farmers. That’s created a quandary for Marjah’s new, U.S.-backed leaders and for the American military as they try to transform this sweltering river valley, whose biggest cash crop is opium poppy, into a tranquil breadbasket.

“The helicopters are landing in my field,” the weathered farmer told Fennell as they sat in the dirt outside the Marines’ newest forward operating base in Marjah. “You have to stop landing there. Next time, the Taliban will put an IED in the field,” an improvised explosive device, the military’s term for a homemade bomb.

Unfortunately, the Marines are refusing to compensate farmers for any damage they cause to their poppy fields. This is counterproductive—as the farmer himself strongly hinted, there remain strong ties to the Taliban in the area (more on that below): the Taliban, in fact, rescued Marjeh from predatory government officials some time ago and had set up a relatively stable set of economic and judicial institutions. If the Marines are going to destroy those, and there are many reasons why they should, they have to immediately provide alternatives or risk brutalizing the very people they need to win over.

Unfortunately, the Marines in Marjah seem determined to stamp out opium—a far cry from the clear thinking that accompanied their first deployment to Helmand in 2008, when they vowed to resolutely ignore the opium and focus on more important things (seriously: focusing on opium instead of almost anything else badly misses the point).

There’s no time to waste. In that same NYT article, I wrote:

Last, progress on these other fronts will do nothing if the Taliban return, which means a significant number of troops must stay for at least a year. Gen. David Petraeus, head of the Central Command, has said that Marja was merely an “initial salvo” in an 18-month campaign to also retake neighboring Kandahar Province, the birthplace of the Taliban. Kandahar is Afghanistan’s second-largest city, so it is reasonable to assume that many troops will be pulled out of Marja for that campaign…

At a minimum, at least two battalions should stay in Marja permanently, to undergird the new government. They shouldn’t build a new base outside the town for this, or “commute” to the area from strongholds in Helmand like Camp Leatherneck. They should live right inside the town, providing security and guidance from within. You can’t have a “population-centric” counterinsurgency unless you take care of the people.

There are reports emerging from Marjeh that the Taliban is already reasserting itself. While the military ferries Haji Zahir, the new “governor,” to and fro in a helicopter—quite the vote of confidence, considering Marjeh is an area of only a few dozen miles on a side—the Taliban have already begun posting night letters, and beating and even beheading people who cooperate too closely with the U.S. Even so, the barriers to the new government succeeding are basic enough to make me question whether ISAF was lying about having a government in a box ready to go.

“How may of us are from Marjah?” U.S. Marine Col. Randy Newman asked the two-dozen men taking part in the meeting. “None. The Taliban are from Marjah. They have earned some amount of trust of the people. The people trusted the Taliban justice. If we continue in this manner, we will not earn their trust.”

During Sunday’s meeting, the U.S. Army adviser working with Afghan forces told Zahir that the security forces were being constrained because there was no judicial system in place to jail suspected Taliban insurgents turned in by local residents.

We need to sit down and have a very strong discussion about how we’re going to deal with Afghan justice for these men we know are hurting people,” said Matt, who’s advising Afghan police in one section of Marjah. They look at me and smile because they know they’re going to be released within 24 to 48 hours.

“The people of southern Marjah are not going to be confident in our ability to bring security until we can permanently take those men off the battlefield,” he said. “That’s where we earn the population’s trust.”

Again: we destroyed a functioning government and replaced it with borderline-chaos. If the Marines cannot get this under control very quickly, it will turn against them in a very bloody way.

A report in Asia times implies Uzbekistan has gone Mugabe-esque.

Seems that Karimov has ordered the arrest of a whole slew of Uzbekistan’s richest.

And what do you know -
“Uzbek officials are portraying this campaign as a sort of anticorruption drive”

Alternative theories are – “the crackdown could be connected to the president’s daughters. Such reports say Gulnara and Lola are furthering their business interests in Uzbekistan and possibly eliminating obstacles to any succession process ”

Or – “Uzbek authorities could be clearing out the old guard to make way for a new generation that would remain loyal to the Karimov family”

Whichever way you slice it, seems like the Karimov family is tightening its grip in the economic sphere.

This is not likely to be good for economic growth in Uzbekistan.

Today I had the opportunity to hear Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) give a short talk on what he does and what he is trying to do. He had lots of interesting things to say (as someone who went to University of Turin, Moscow State, and Cal-Berkeley in the 60s and 70s should) and had the incredible quip of “I lead prosecution against Terrorism, Drugs, Organized Crime, and Corruption. I basically am the United Nations’ point man for Sinister Affairs.” There were lots of good questions and he made lots of good points, and only a few were truly relevant to what we focus on here. I’m going to focus on one of them that I thought was particularly interesting.

One of the main things Mr. Maria Costa brought to light was the connection between drug use and drug abuse and a dearth of what he calls “Palliative Care,” particularly in the developing world. Using Central Asia as an example, it is very difficult to find a clinic or to find basic pain relieving medication in, say, Turkmenistan. It is also very difficult to deal with depression, post-traumatic stress or other similar ailments through legal means. Drug abuse is, in many ways, the only means of relief for anyone without the correct connections, and Turkmenistan’s current tiff with Medecins Sans Frontieres only accentuates that. There isn’t only a deficiency of general medical competency in Turkmenistan, many of the global initiatives go towards issues such as AIDS, landmines, etc. Post-hoc AIDS treatment, though, is far more expensive per-patient than peremptory anti-needle-abuse care. AIDS education on a general level still really really has to happen, though.

Another thing I thought was interesting, from a legal perspective, is the utter lack of jurisdiction over what he termed “sovereign non-state actors.” ISAF, NATO, UN, etc. treat these transnational terrorist groups with a certain amount of respect when they collate every anti-state actor in Afghanistan as “The Insurgency” in the press, but they and we also realize that they aren’t a monolith at all. Perhaps the greatest success of, um, The Insurgency has been its ability to operate extra-judicially. Even bad folks like ETA, the Medellin Cartel, Sendero Luminoso or what have you were able to be targeted in courts of law. Some were able to overcome that (say, by killing judges who held against them) but the judiciary was still able to be implemented as a weapon against the insurgency. In Afghanistan, the judiciary has been impotent for a whole myriad of reasons. It’ll take some clever reformation in order to form a legal basis that will be able to be used against a transnational insurgency…Guantanamo and the ICC aren’t going to cut it.

Finally, the bureaucratic balancing act between fighting drugs and fighting terror is difficult. Real, real, difficult. For every head-slap where folks realize that resource smuggling and drug abuse go hand-in-hand, there are issues where really legitimate medical operations get attacked for their security value. I’m not sure I believe in the existence of a String Theory of violence, state destabilization, and drug trafficking, but I do believe that any state-building solution involves attacking the issue as a whole and not allowing bureaucratic pillow-fights to win the day.

Things are a bit of a mess, yes, but there are some really sharp minds trying to find solutions (Maria Costa, not me). I’d be interested in seeing a more localized form of clinical care get up-and-running where drug abuse is treated as a health risk, not a criminal act. It’s really a place where religious groups could come into play under state control as well, which seems to be a mutually beneficial idea in our region where state secularism clashes against Islamic identity. As for jurisdictional matters, well, let me get a bit more educated first.

Richard Holbrooke, everyone’s favorite envoy they love to hate to love, has an almost Biden-esque talent for saying things that make people angry. His most recent comment, that “Taliban is woven into the fabric of Pashtun society on both sides of the border with Pakistan and almost every Pashtun family has someone involved with the movement,” has, naturally, sparked anger from Pashtun families who do not have Taliban amongst their ranks (and that’s most Pashtun families, to be honest).

In response, Hazrat Sebghatullah Mojaddadi, Head of Meshrano Jirga (or upper house of the Afghan parliament), issued the following statement:

Mesharano Jirgs vehemently denounces the recent statement of Richart Holbrook, who had said in a gathering on 05 March 2010, that “there is a Talib in each Pashtun family. This kind of statement is considered to be unrealistic and baseless, and it is a major obstacle for strengthening peace and reconciliation in the country.

At the present time, Afghanistan is combating international terrorism alongside of international community, and has endured tremendous sacrifices for peace and stability both in the region and the world. The U.S. Special Representative should make efforts under the circumstance towards bringing national unity in the country, because terrorism is the common enemy and it should not be attributed specifically to a tribe or nation.

Mishrano Jirga as an independent body and representing the Afghan people in the Parliament, demands Mr. Holbrook to make every effort for strengthening the cooperation, extended by the United States and international community, with the people of Afghanistan, and should exercise caution in this sensitive environment of the country.

It’s kind of weird how the Obama administration has such a reliable knack for angering the government it claims to hope to want to help.