Afghanistan – behind enemy lines

By: James Fergusson

The sound of a propeller engine is audible the moment my fixer and I climb out of the car, causing us new arrivals from Kabul to glance sharply upwards. I have never heard a military drone in action before, and it is entirely invisible in the cold night sky, yet there is no doubt what it is. My first visit to the Taliban since 2007 has only just begun and I am already regretting it. What if the drone is the Hellfire-missile-carrying kind?

Three years ago, the Taliban’s control over this district, Chak, and the 112,000 Pashtun farmers who live here, was restricted to the hours of darkness – although the local commander, Abdullah, vowed to me that he would soon be in full control. As I am quickly to discover, this was no idle boast. In Chak, the Karzai government has in effect given up and handed over to the Taliban. Abdullah, still in charge, even collects taxes. His men issue receipts using stolen government stationery that is headed “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan”; with commendable parsimony they simply cross out the word “Republic” and insert “Emirate”, the emir in question being the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Omar.

The most astonishing thing about this rebel district – and for Nato leaders meeting in Lisbon this week, a deeply troubling one – is that Chak is not in war-torn Helmand or Kandahar but in Wardak province, a scant 40 miles south-west of Kabul. Nato commanders have repeatedly claimed that the Taliban are on the back foot following this year’s US troop surge. Mid-level insurgency commanders, they say, have been removed from the battlefield in “industrial” quantities since the 2010 campaign began. And yet Abdullah, operating within Katyusha rocket range of the capital – and with a $500,000 bounty on his head – has managed to evade coalition forces for almost four years. If Chak is in any way typical of developments in other rural districts – and Afghanistan has hundreds of isolated valley communities just like this one – then Nato’s military strategy could be in serious difficulty.

Petraeus the Next Eisenhower?

Arnaud de Borchgrave

U.S. President Barack Obama has scaled back the scope of the Afghan war, now about to enter its ninth year, to a limited military objective: deny al-Qaida a safe haven. And since we are now told there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan – the rest are in Pakistan’s tribal areas – a three-way deal between the Karzai government, powerful warlords and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar would seem to be the better part of valor. After Iraq, we cannot afford another trillion-dollar war.

It took the United States 233 years (1776-2009) to amass a national debt of $1.4 trillion. This is now projected to double in the next 10 years. The national debt ceiling is going up another $2 trillion to $12.3 trillion. The federal budget deficit for 2009 hit a record $1.42 trillion; 2010 is expected to set a new record of $2 trillion. One trillion dollar bills, end to end, would cover the distance between Earth and the sun, or to the moon and back 200 times.

That al-Qaida would return to a Taliban-run Afghanistan in a heartbeat is an article of faith in Washington. But nothing is less certain. Afghanistan is ripe for stealthy Special Forces, rental deals with warlords who cannot be bought, a modus vivendi with a new Taliban whose chief Mullah Omar had already grown fed up with self-promoter Osama bin Laden when the UPI team led by this reporter interviewed him in Kandahar on June 4, 2001.

Omar, visibly annoyed, complained bin Laden was issuing too many fatwas (religious edicts), which he said he was not authorized to do. We told Omar then if he didn’t turn over bin Laden, the United States would invade Afghanistan and defeat him. He thought we were bluffing.

Today, Taliban chieftains and warlords could probably be swayed to take sides against al-Qaida, the alliance that led to their demise in October 2001.

Why Obama still felt compelled to add 30,000 troops to the 68,000 boots already on the ground, at $1 million per soldier per year, is not much of a mystery. The fear of being branded an appeaser and losing the House of Representatives next year and the White House in 2012 to Republicans is clearly paramount. The president is out on a limb but is staying close to the trunk, which leaves little room for Republican and lukewarm left-wing supporters who would saw it off. He can see these two adversaries pre-empting his own post-imperial agenda with a new slogan – e.g., Americans come home … time to rebuild America (before China eats our lunch).

U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus is already being auscultated by GOP scouts parsing the potential field. They recall how Gen. Dwight Eisenhower clinched his presidential campaign with “I shall go to Korea” to end an unpopular war. Once in the White House, he gave the U.S. economy a formidable booster shot – and ordered up the interstate highway system. It became the largest public works project in history and the largest highway system (46,876 miles) in the world.

Americans are fast losing interest in promoting democracy abroad. They see China, with the world’s most modern infrastructure, steadily gaining ground in the superpower stakes. Only 10 percent of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations’ 642 members say they think democracy around the world should be a U.S. priority, and only 35 percent say the United States should strive to improve living standards abroad. Almost half the general public says the United States should “mind its own business internationally, and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

All that is a sea change since 2001, when al-Qaida attacked New York and Washington. Forty-four percent of CFR’s members already see China as the world’s leading economic power vs. 27 percent who say the United States still is – and this at a time when the U.S. economy is still twice the size of China’s.

Fewer than half the general public and only 41 percent of CFR say they believe the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan can be averted. Aspirant political leaders will ignore these stats at their peril.

For Obama, the Vietnam analogy is a false reading of history. When Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968, he told this reporter nothing could be achieved until he managed to bring the Vietnam War to an end. And when he launched incursions into eastern Cambodia’s “Parrot’s Beak” in April 1970, he was roundly denounced for widening the war to another country. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese army had long since established safe havens, ammo dumps and underground headquarters in this sparsely populated Cambodian region close to Saigon. Nixon’s decision gave the South Vietnamese precious time to bolster their own forces with a view to fending for themselves without U.S. troops. This, they did. The last U.S. fighter left Vietnam March 29, 1973, two months after the Paris peace agreements. The South Vietnamese army fought on for two years until Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford became president, and Congress, in its infinite wisdom, cut off all military aid to South Vietnam. Saigon fell four months later.

Thirty-five years later, almost 60 percent of Americans asked say the country is on the wrong track. They are confused. The administration says the economic recovery is well under way. Yet almost 25 million Americans are without jobs (including those who no longer qualify for unemployment compensation as well as those who gave up looking). Seven million Americans are behind on their mortgages and risk foreclosure. Economist Peter Morici reports Wall Street banks are divvying up $140 billion in year-end bonuses on the back of $280 billion in new profits. Military men and women are pulling up to five wartime tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. U.S. Rep. David R. Obey D-Wis., chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, says we cannot continue without a war surtax. This could cost the Democrats both houses – and change history.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, a member of the Atlantic Council, is editor-at-large at UPI and the Washington Times. This essay was syndicated by UPI as “President Petraeus?” Photo credit: Getty Images.

Author Examines Drug Trade, Afghan Insurgency

JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, the Afghan insurgency and the drug war. Margaret Warner has our story.

MARGARET WARNER: Ninety percent of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan, and a hefty share of the profit fuels the Taliban-linked insurgency there, including elements tied to al-Qaida.

The U.N. estimates the insurgency reaps $300 million to $400 million a year from the drug trade, and the U.S. believes that amounts to half to three-quarters of its total revenues.

How does the drugs, money, insurgency network operate? Journalist and author Gretchen Peters, who spent 10 years in Afghanistan for the Associated Press and ABC News, set out to find out. The result is her new book, “Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bank Rolling the Taliban and al-Qaida.” And she joins me now.

Gretchen, welcome.

GRETCHEN PETERS, author: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

The ‘protection trade’

MARGARET WARNER: Now, this, I’m sure, was a dangerous book to report, given the criminal ties, the political ties of people involved in the drug trade. Why did you take it on?

GRETCHEN PETERS: Well, I first worked in the region prior to 9/11. And I felt that we did a lot of important reporting in those days about the many abominable things the Taliban did towards women and other human rights abuses, but most journalists who were out there really missed the story.

The terror camps were all around us, and we didn’t report on them. And we were, in fact, discouraged from reporting from them. So I sort of vowed that I wouldn’t let that happen again.

And so when I saw the drug trade starting to grow and grow and grow and kept hearing that it was fueling the resurgence of the Taliban and these other extremist groups in the border areas, I decided that I needed to get to the bottom of it.

And it was dangerous. There were times when I was in danger, and the local reporters who helped me on it really did a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard. But I felt it was going to be more dangerous not to report the story, and so that was why I did it.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, in a nutshell now, explain how this works. How is the Taliban and the other insurgent groups enmeshed in the drug trade?

GRETCHEN PETERS: Well, it does depend on the group, and it depends in what region or what part of the border you’re on.

The Taliban in southern Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban, taxed the drug trade. They taxed the farmers. They also taxed the drug convoys leaving the areas. They provide protection. That’s probably their biggest source of earnings from drugs, is protecting the drug convoys, protecting drug labs along the border. They also get direct donations from trafficking groups to the high-level leadership.

Other groups, like al-Qaida, and other regional extremist groups, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, they come in at the border areas. And they start moving the shipments as they leave Afghanistan and start heading out of the region. That’s where you actually stand to profit the most. Again, they’re by and large in the protection trade.

So far, none of these groups are actually drug traffickers themselves. However, increasingly you hear stories about Taliban commanders running their own heroin labs along the border. They’re vertically integrating through the trade.

And what that means is that it’s very much following the pattern of what happened in Colombia with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC. They eventually said, “You know, we’ve got the guns. We’ve got the power,” and they just took over the drug trade. So that could happen in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It hasn’t yet.

U.S. government’s involvement

MARGARET WARNER: And then the profits they reap off of this, over whatever their role is, that just goes to buy, what, weapons, ammunition, everything else they need on the global market?

GRETCHEN PETERS: It was very clear from my research that drug money pays for the vast majority of the Taliban’s operational expenses. So that means every time a U.S. soldier is killed in an IED attack or a roadside bomb, drug money helped pay for putting those explosives in place or paid the insurgents who did it.

MARGARET WARNER: In the book, there’s a lot of very interesting history which we cannot get into totally, but what you point out is the seeds of these seeds were really planted both in the ’80s when the U.S. was involved there helping to fight the Soviets…

GRETCHEN PETERS: Absolutely.

MARGARET WARNER: … actually backed the insurgents, then Mujahideen, and as well in the ’90s, when the Taliban were in power, ostensibly against all drugs, but not the case?

GRETCHEN PETERS: Right. The history of this is fascinating. To my mind, the two history chapters are, for me, the most interesting chapters in the book and the most fascinating to research. We helped fund this. We overlooked this — the United States government, when I say “we,” it’s what I mean — in the 1980s. The…

MARGARET WARNER: Meaning because the Mujahideen were involved in this trade?

GRETCHEN PETERS: Yes, it was clearly known. There were intelligence documents, State Department cables that went back, U.S. officials working on supporting the Muj in the Soviet resistance, knew that they were involved in drugs trafficking.

And the ones who were most deeply involved in drugs trafficking are the ones that went on to become or to — members of those groups went on to become the Taliban and al-Qaida.

And there’s a widely held misperception in this country that the Taliban was anti-poppy because for the one year they banned farmers from growing poppy. But from my research, it was quite clear that there were such huge stockpiles of poppy by the year 2000, because Afghanistan was producing these unbelievably enormous poppy crops, that they banned it so the stockpiles would go up in value. It was essentially an insider trading deal.

U.S.’s ‘greatest’ security failure

MARGARET WARNER: Now, you say somewhere in the book that the single greatest failure of the U.S. since 9/11 in a security sense has not been the things we usually point to, but has been what you said the spectacular incapacity of Western law enforcement to disrupt the flow of money that’s fueling Taliban, al-Qaida and so forth.

What is the problem there? I mean, they do have units designed to track this money and try to go after it or try to go after the kingpins. What’s missing?

GRETCHEN PETERS: Well, it’s an unbelievably complex proposal, what I’m suggesting we need to do, but I also think it’s unbelievably important. But very little has been done to disrupt the funds that are getting to the Taliban.

Every time somebody puts together a new proposal for Afghanistan, it’s always about the farm level. It’s always about giving them alternative crops or spraying the fields. We need to start tracking flows of money to that region, separating the good from the bad. And that means regulating the Hawala network. That means…

MARGARET WARNER: That’s their informal money-moving…

GRETCHEN PETERS: The informal — it’s like the subcontinent’s answer to Western Union, basically. We need to go after the traffickers. There’s a very, very small number of people who control this industry, and they are known. They are known to our law enforcement and intelligence community, but the focus is always on the farmers.

I say we need to take it off the farmers and put it on the money. The money is — we need to follow the money. And that is going to lead us to the people we’re looking for in that region.

Allies ‘deeply corrupted’ by drugs

MARGARET WARNER: And that may include people who are very deeply involved in the Afghan and Pakistan government?

GRETCHEN PETERS: Well, yes. I mean, the biggest challenge we face out there is not the fact that the insurgents and extremists are making hundreds of millions of dollars off the drug trade. It’s actually that our allies in the region are also so deeply corrupted by drugs.

There’s been a lot of reporting in the media about drug corruption within the Karzai government. Karzai’s half-brother and other officials get named all the time as alleged facilitators of the drug trades.

What almost never gets reported is drug corruption within the Pakistan government. And I think that needs to — we need to start doing investigations of that. There needs to be some sort of effort to — some sort of joint effort to investigate some of these claims, these widely made claims, and put them to rest.

MARGARET WARNER: Gretchen Peters, thank you so much.

GRETCHEN PETERS: Thank you.

5 Questions for Robert Oakley

James Joyner

Robert Oakley served as U.S. ambassador to Zaire (1979-82), Somalia (1982-84), and Pakistan (1988-92) and as Special Envoy to Somali (1992-1994) and directed State’s Office of Combatting Terrorism (1984-86). I had the opportunity to get his thoughts on some key issues of interest to the Atlantic Council community.

1. What lessons can we draw from the American experience in Somalia in the 1990s in dealing with the recent piracy problem?

It’s worth remembering that the [George H.W.] Bush administration considered force the last resort in Somalia, ultimately sending in a humanitarian mission when the situation deteriorated. President Clinton changed that, trying to turn Somalia into a democracy. This angered the local population, turning them against us, and ultimately led to the Blackhawk Down tragedy. This in turn caused problems for Clinton for years to come, notably in Rwanda, Haiti, and elsewhere.

We have a superbly trained and capable military. Taking out pirates isn’t a problem. But the question becomes “Then what?” Who do we arrest? How do we deal with the backlash?

2. Most observers argue that the piracy is part of a deeper problem: Somalia as a failed state. Do you agree? What, if anything, can the United States and its allies do to promote stable governance there?

It’s a very interesting question. We spent a number of years going down the wrong track. We were paying warlords to keep order but this made the Islamic courts much stronger. The Ethiopians solved that problem for a while but they’re gone now and the Islamists are back in control.

Somalis are going to fight each other if left on their own but will quickly unite against foreigners who come in. The Al-Shabaab splinter group, which has strong al Qaeda links, is largely a product of our mistakes. And they’re helping to fund the pirates we’re now trying to fight.

There’s a really good editorial in Tuesday’s Washington Post , outlining what needs to be done. We’ve got to gradually cultivate the current president and build up a sustainable government, relying on allies like the Saudis and the relevant NGOs as much as possible. The goal should be economic development and security but we must do that with very little American presence on the ground. Somalis aren’t hard to rent.

We’ve just got to peel off the layers until we get to the hard core extremists. Only then do we consider military options within Somalia.

All of this is going to require a lot of patience, something Americans haven’t exactly been known for in recent years. It’s going to be very expensive but worth it in the long run. We can’t be impatient. We have to accept making progress slowly, always with the promise of doing more later.

We have to enlist allies with long term interests in the region. Back when I was ambassador there in 1983, President Barre was doing a huge amount of business with Saudi Arabia, for example. They love to buy Saudi sheep and camels. So, we need to help them get legitimate commerce going to make piracy and other criminal activity less attractive.

3. Moving to Africa generally, the United States has made a concerted effort in recent years to step up our engagement, including the creation of AFRICOM and a much larger financial commitment to public health. Why is that continent so important to our interests? What more should we do there?

We got off on the wrong foot with AFRICOM, which Africans perceived as a takeover under the guise of development. That’s largely been sorted out now, though.

Africa is just so important to the United States in so many ways. The mineral resources — oil from Angola, Nigeria, and Algeria — plus cobalt, copper, and so forth are critical to our economy. Terrorism is also a major issue, especially in Algeria and Nigeria. We’ve set up a naval task force to deal with the issue along the West African coast.

And humanitarian issues are obviously of major moral concern to the United States. Yes, many Americans worry about corruption and aid money not going to the people we’re trying to help. But we’ve learned a lot over the years. The Millennium Challenge Fund, for example, rewards leaders for good behavior and has strong accountability measures. Money for AIDS and other programs are now being very well targeted.

4. The Obama administration has made an effort to improve our relations with the Muslim world. At the same time, however, he seems to be receiving substantial pushback from Pakistan in his efforts to pressure them to address security issues there. What advice would you offer in balancing these objectives?

I recently met with a Pakistani expert and asked her whether things were as bad as it looked from here and she replied that “It’s even worse.” We’ve forgotten Rumsfeld’s question: “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?” And we probably are. The drones may be killing a lot of Taliban and al Qaeda but they’re alienating the tribesmen we need to win the war.

We’ve pushed the Pakistani army to fight our war and created a huge backlash. They’re not trained or equipped for counterterrorism and they’re getting killed and killing the wrong people, essentially fighting their own.

Worse, what we’re calling “benchmarks” remind them very much of the “sanctions” they had hanging over their heads for so many years. [Editor's note: Pakistan's ambassador, Husain Huqqani, made this point in his Atlantic Council appearance last week.] By demanding that they divert troops from the Indian border to fight the Taliban, we’ve alienated them tremendously. Whether we agree or not, the Pakistanis consider India to be the biggest threat to their security.

Right now, the Pakistani military has control over their nukes. But, if the Islamists gain ground, who knows what’s going to happen?

Beyond that, the Pakistani president is both incompetent and corrupt. He’s got no clue on the economic side of things.

5. Finally, the war in Afghanistan has been underway for more than seven years with no end in sight. What prognosis do you have for the NATO mission there?

The problem is that we can’t do one without the other. If we can’t contain the problem in Pakistan, we don’t have any chance in Afghanistan.

It’s going to take a long time. The progress on the civil side has been encouraging. We’re finally making a real effort there. Still, the Karzai government is not providing sufficient protection. We’ve had great success training the army but the police is in shambles. Right now, the people dislike the police more than the Taliban.

Ultimately, we’ve got to ease Karzai out. The problem is that we’ve made it known that we want to get rid of him, which has created its own backlash. We’ve got to be more subtle.

We’re not very good at subtle.

No, we’re not.

James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council.

Cut CIA’s Footprint In Pakistan

Here’s something you won’t hear the American mainstream media talk about.

By AHMED QURAISHI

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan-The United States Central Intelligence Agency faces its toughest test yet to prove wrong the suspicions of many within the Pakistani strategic community that some of the terrorism exported from Afghan soil into Pakistan has direct or indirect support from Washington.

The immediate test centers on Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the bandits who present themselves as Pakistani Taliban. The Americans have begun some cosmetic drone attacks on Baitullah’s territory and there are reports Washington has agreed to launch a joint operation with Pakistan against this bandit. The purpose is to assuage Pakistani concerns about the U.S. role. In July last year, Pakistan’s military leadership confronted senior CIA and U.S. military commanders with evidence showing Washington indirectly protecting anti-Pakistan terrorists on the ground. This newspaper broke that story on Aug. 5, 2008, with a front page headline, ‘US told not to back terrorism against Pakistan’.

For quite some time now, some Pakistani officials have reason to believe that not everything the Americans have been and continue to do in our region is shared with or has the consent of Pakistan, their supposed ally in this war.

Mehsud is a good example.

This bandit and his former leader and associate, Abdullah Mehsud, pioneered the attacks on Chinese interests in Pakistan, which was the first thing Abdullah did after being released from Gitmo in 2003. Interestingly, he was not handed back to Pakistan despite being a Pakistani citizen but was released to Afghanistan where he went back into the custody of U.S. military and the Karzai government. Abdullah was killed not on his home turf but when Pakistani security forces caught him sneaking back into Balochistan from a secret visit to Afghanistan, where he most probably was meeting his handlers. How he financed, armed and sustained a 25,000-strong militia remains beyond explanation. This militia continues to have quality arms and generous funding. Until now CIA drones have never targeted Abdullah or Baitullah or any other militia that is committed to attacking Pakistan. During the operations in Bajaur, our soldiers were reportedly stunned at one point to see close to 600 well armed terrorists come in from Afghanistan, fight the Pakistani military and then escape across the border. CIA never attacks such ‘terrorists’. There has been a meteoric rise in the number of anti-Pakistan militias and fighters within our tribal belt since 2004 and onwards, complete with religious brainwashing justifying the killing of Pakistanis as a first priority. This has coincided with the launch of terrorism in Balochistan and northern Pakistan, engulfing the area between Gwadar port and the Chinese border.

There are reasons to believe that, in order to punish the real or imaginary Pakistani tolerance for ‘Afghan Taliban’ – the real Taliban, I must add – someone who wields power in Afghanistan decided to make Pakistan pay by grooming their own Islamic fighters who’d solely focus on fighting Pakistan, as compared to the Afghan Taliban who focus on fighting the Americans inside Afghanistan. The idea is simple: pushing fake Islamists – professional killers trained in the art of recruiting and organizing death squads, Islam-focused propaganda experts tasked with brainwashing and mind twisting, fluent in Pashto, Uzbek, Arabic and possibly Chechen, and develop conduits for money and arms supplies from Afghanistan into Pakistan – and let them exploit to the hilt Pakistan’s multiple ethnic and religious fault lines.

We know that Indian spymasters and the intelligence service of the U.S. client government in Kabul are aiding terrorism inside Pakistan. The question is: how much of this has Washington’s covert or overt approval?

It’s also quite interesting to note how the U.S. uses India to ratchet up the heat on Pakistan whenever there is a hiccup in the relationship. These days the Indian climbdown coincides with renewed signs that Pakistan’s political and military leaderships are cooperating with Washington.

This is not the Cold War era. The role of CIA outposts in Pakistan is becoming disputable now in many areas. While there is no question that both countries need to maintain close intelligence cooperation, the conflicting visions of America’s and Pakistan’s respective national security interests in Afghanistan and the region means that we need to reduce the level of unbridled CIA presence here and roll back some of the concessions that were necessitated by 9/11. In 2002, the Americans were allowed to establish bases in Balochistan and CIA was given the right to recruit Pakistanis in the tribal belt. These two areas of Pakistan are the most disturbed parts of our country seven years later. And now our territory is being used to attack the interests of Iran and China. We don’t have problems with these two nations but the U.S. does. It is also quite clear that Washington is creating conditions across our western belt that would make it impossible for China to pursue trade and energy corridors through Pakistan. The U.S. media alone has created and is sustaining an undeclared war against Pakistan whose intensity varies with the fluctuations of the U.S.-Pakistani ties.

Hopefully Mr. Richard Holbrooke heard this week in Islamabad that we don’t accept American diktat over Afghanistan where we have our own interests to watch like everyone else. While diplomats can handle the political side, it is the intelligence cooperation, and the CIA role specifically that is problematic from the Pakistani viewpoint.

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