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The West invaded Afghanistan, but Pakistan may have been the "true enemy" — and the real power behind the current election.
An Afghan woman in a burka flips an ink-stained middle finger to a Talib armed with a Kalashnikov to show she was unafraid to cast her vote in the presidential election.
The cartoon has been widely circulated on social media among urban, Internet-savvy young Afghans, who have grown up with U.S. presence — memorably described as “Generation America” by the Wall Street Journal.
“This is our Afghan people’s message to insurgents and enemies,” tweeted Omaid Sharifi, a young political activist in Kabul who shared the cartoon.
Images of large crowds of men and women waiting in (separate) lines outside polling centres in cities like Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif and the inky fingers proving they cast a ballot were exchanged on Twitter and Facebook, helping Afghans win the world’s admiration for standing up to the Taliban and voting on April 5.
About 58 per cent of eligible voters, or 7 million out of 12 million, turned out, according to the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan, a figure close to the 61 per cent of Americans who cast a ballot in the last U.S. election.
With 500,000 ballots counted, Abdullah Abdullah, an eye specialist and former foreign minister, had the lead with 41.9 per cent of the vote. Ashraf Ghani, once a World Bank executive, was in second place at 37.6 per cent.
The final winner will be announced on April 24. If no candidate wins a clear majority, a runoff is expected in May.
But the euphoria of election day may be an urban story.
To paraphrase Gandhi, Afghanistan’s soul lives in its villages, and villagers are far removed from city folks on Facebook. For them, the elections were violent. There were 690 attacks aimed at disrupting the election, according to the Afghan defence ministry. Most happened in the rural east and south, areas bordering Pakistan where the Taliban is entrenched.
The next Afghan president will govern a fractured country and take on a fearsome insurgency and tribal warfare without the military and financial muscle provided by the U.S. and its NATO allies, who are packing up Humvees and flying home for good as ballot boxes strapped to donkeys arrive from mountain villages. It is unlikely the insurgents will fade into the mountains.
Other, more complex factors are at work besides the simplistic pro- or anti-democracy narrative usually applied to Afghans.
Much of what happens, particularly in the border provinces, will depend on the reaction in Pakistan.
In December 2001, a war council convened in Peshawar, the Pakistani frontier town. Most of the world was celebrating the success of the U.S.-led air campaign against the Taliban, but the 60 men gathered in the meeting hall were in no mood to concede defeat.
Afghan commanders and Pakistani religious and militant leaders discussed how to confront the U.S. military and its allies. Watching from the sidelines were Pakistani military and intelligence figures who helped bring the Taliban to power in the 1990s, writes New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who recounts the meeting in her new book, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.
“For Islamabad, it was the worst possible scenario because it had taken two decades to build their influence in Kabul,” she writes.
A new generation of anti-Taliban leaders was in power in Kabul backed by the U.S. And they weren’t village mullahs ready to do Islamabad’s bidding. Among the political elite was Ghani, the finance minister, Abdullah, the foreign minister whose northern militia were among those who fought the longest against Taliban rule, and Zalmai Rassoul, the courtly civil aviation minister from an old aristocratic family. Today, they are the leading contenders in the presidential election.
The decision was made at the Peshawar meeting to “trip up America,” one of the men said, according to Gall. Afghanistan was divided into operation zones and each commander assigned a region.
Tripping up America was exactly what they did during the next decade.
Gall puts the war in a different, more troubling context: Pakistan’s ongoing determination to use militants as proxies and drive out America so it can continue a 40-year pursuit to dominate its weak neighbour.
“Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy,” concludes Gall, accusing Pakistan, supposedly America’s ally, of “driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons.”
Those reasons have to do with India, Pakistan’s old enemy, and a desire for a malleable state next door in Afghanistan.
Failure to see regional dynamics clearly has come at a great cost to the West.
From 2001 to 2006, when Canadian and British troops arrived in the south, Gall details how the Quetta Shura was formed in the eponymous Pakistani city and with the help of the S Directorate, a top-secret unit within Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main spy agency, and fomented violence in Afghanistan. She alleges the S Directorate is responsible for covert operations in Kashmir and Afghanistan, gives weapons, ammunition and fuel to the Taliban and co-ordinates support for its offensives.
“This was a covert program and designed to be deniable,” she writes.
The Taliban and their Pakistani backers were able to exploit the errors and missed opportunities made by the U.S., its allies and Afghans.
If the outgoing president, Hamid Karzai, had guaranteed the Taliban’s exiled leaders in Pakistan that they could return home peacefully, the insurgency’s strength could have been sapped, particularly since Pakistani intelligence was warning insurgents that unless they fought in Afghanistan they would be handed over to Americans who would ship them to Guantanamo Bay.
“For many Taliban members in exile there were few options,” she notes.
Lack of understanding of tribal culture in the south was also catastrophic.
British troops did not realize that a tribal civil war was underway in Helmand province when they arrived in 2006 and worsened the situation, writes former British army captain Mike Martin in his book An Intimate War: An Oral History of Helmand 1978-2012.
As the Afghans fought over land and water, the ISI attempted to control the south through a campaign of assassinations and offers to fund disgruntled farmers fighting poppy eradication — and the British.
The British had little clue.
In 2006, as Canadian troops arrived, the Quetta Shura deployed the notorious Mullah Dadullah to capture the south.
The high number of civilians killed by NATO airstrikes and the posting of predatory officials in key government and police roles were huge sources of anger among Afghans, both authors write.
The Taliban’s offensive continued as they attempted to lay siege to the capital with road blocks, assassinations and IEDs.
Gall notes that many attacks bore the hallmarks of Pakistani involvement. During the January 2008 bombing of the Serena Hotel in Kabul, the two suicide attackers called their controllers in Pakistan 14 times. After the Indian Embassy bombing that left 50 dead, American and Afghan surveillance intercepted phone calls from ISI officials discussing the siege.
The patterns were similar: suicide bombers breach the outside security perimeter, gunmen and bombers rush in from behind, a degree of planning and expertise that suggest military training, Gall notes.
“The aim is to make the cost too high for everyone to continue backing the Karzai government. The ISI want them to all go home,” she writes.
As the violence reached new levels, with thousands of civilians dying every year, grown men cried on Afghan television, pleading for Karzai and the Americans to end the violence. A rattled government spokesman appeared on Tolo television after one particularly brutal attack on Kabul in 2011, yelling obscenities at the Taliban and describing them as “hairy barbarians.”
Karzai himself began to show signs of unravelling. He burst into tears in public and threatened to join the Taliban as he continued to tell the Americans to look at ISI headquarters and the madrassas as sources of the insurgency — which led to his falling out with his Washington benefactors.
One counterterrorism official told Gall that Pakistan’s purpose is to keep Afghanistan violent so it can play a larger role in the region’s politics, using “chaos as a principal weapon.”
The 350,000-strong Afghan army and police, trained and funded by international donors, face a tough fight when foreign forces leave.
To this end, Ghani, Abdullah and Rassoul have promised to sign a bilateral security agreement, a long-term arrangement with Washington to keep a contingent of military personnel in the country after 2014 for training and counter-insurgency.
Omar Samad, the former Afghan ambassador to Canada, said the agreement is critical.
“Without that signature, we are taking a major risk and a gamble, and it will to an extent impact the morale of the Afghan army as well as the effectiveness of the security forces,” he said in a telephone interview.
Against this backdrop, Afghans went to the ballot box.
It is doubtful that Pakistan’s attempts to bring Afghanistan to heel will end. A spokesman for the Haqqania madrassa in Pakistan, which has pumped out suicide bombers, made this vow to Gall:
“The white flag of the Taliban will fly again over Kabul,” he said.
Thousands of Punjab-based militants have gathered at the Afghan border to fight with the Taliban once foreigners leave, Associated Press journalist Kathy Gannon reported last September. She was recently shot and wounded in Afghanistan.
To prevent the country from falling apart, the next Afghan president will need to deftly win over the restive tribes in the south. Ghani and Abdullah sent thousands of campaign observers there to monitor election fraud, said Graeme Smith, senior analyst in Kabul for the International Crisis Group.
“They were the only ones really pushing out into the districts,” he said in a telephone interview.
For the cast of supporting actors in the American-led mission, including Canada, none of this may matter. Canadians may be able to retreat and leave it for historians to debate the value of the 12-year engagement.
But for the Afghans waiting for the results of the ballot box, that option is not available.
Afghan election: Why the Taliban will win | Toronto Star
An Afghan woman in a burka flips an ink-stained middle finger to a Talib armed with a Kalashnikov to show she was unafraid to cast her vote in the presidential election.
The cartoon has been widely circulated on social media among urban, Internet-savvy young Afghans, who have grown up with U.S. presence — memorably described as “Generation America” by the Wall Street Journal.
“This is our Afghan people’s message to insurgents and enemies,” tweeted Omaid Sharifi, a young political activist in Kabul who shared the cartoon.
Images of large crowds of men and women waiting in (separate) lines outside polling centres in cities like Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif and the inky fingers proving they cast a ballot were exchanged on Twitter and Facebook, helping Afghans win the world’s admiration for standing up to the Taliban and voting on April 5.
About 58 per cent of eligible voters, or 7 million out of 12 million, turned out, according to the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan, a figure close to the 61 per cent of Americans who cast a ballot in the last U.S. election.
With 500,000 ballots counted, Abdullah Abdullah, an eye specialist and former foreign minister, had the lead with 41.9 per cent of the vote. Ashraf Ghani, once a World Bank executive, was in second place at 37.6 per cent.
The final winner will be announced on April 24. If no candidate wins a clear majority, a runoff is expected in May.
But the euphoria of election day may be an urban story.
To paraphrase Gandhi, Afghanistan’s soul lives in its villages, and villagers are far removed from city folks on Facebook. For them, the elections were violent. There were 690 attacks aimed at disrupting the election, according to the Afghan defence ministry. Most happened in the rural east and south, areas bordering Pakistan where the Taliban is entrenched.
The next Afghan president will govern a fractured country and take on a fearsome insurgency and tribal warfare without the military and financial muscle provided by the U.S. and its NATO allies, who are packing up Humvees and flying home for good as ballot boxes strapped to donkeys arrive from mountain villages. It is unlikely the insurgents will fade into the mountains.
Other, more complex factors are at work besides the simplistic pro- or anti-democracy narrative usually applied to Afghans.
Much of what happens, particularly in the border provinces, will depend on the reaction in Pakistan.
In December 2001, a war council convened in Peshawar, the Pakistani frontier town. Most of the world was celebrating the success of the U.S.-led air campaign against the Taliban, but the 60 men gathered in the meeting hall were in no mood to concede defeat.
Afghan commanders and Pakistani religious and militant leaders discussed how to confront the U.S. military and its allies. Watching from the sidelines were Pakistani military and intelligence figures who helped bring the Taliban to power in the 1990s, writes New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who recounts the meeting in her new book, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.
“For Islamabad, it was the worst possible scenario because it had taken two decades to build their influence in Kabul,” she writes.
A new generation of anti-Taliban leaders was in power in Kabul backed by the U.S. And they weren’t village mullahs ready to do Islamabad’s bidding. Among the political elite was Ghani, the finance minister, Abdullah, the foreign minister whose northern militia were among those who fought the longest against Taliban rule, and Zalmai Rassoul, the courtly civil aviation minister from an old aristocratic family. Today, they are the leading contenders in the presidential election.
The decision was made at the Peshawar meeting to “trip up America,” one of the men said, according to Gall. Afghanistan was divided into operation zones and each commander assigned a region.
Tripping up America was exactly what they did during the next decade.
Gall puts the war in a different, more troubling context: Pakistan’s ongoing determination to use militants as proxies and drive out America so it can continue a 40-year pursuit to dominate its weak neighbour.
“Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy,” concludes Gall, accusing Pakistan, supposedly America’s ally, of “driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons.”
Those reasons have to do with India, Pakistan’s old enemy, and a desire for a malleable state next door in Afghanistan.
Failure to see regional dynamics clearly has come at a great cost to the West.
From 2001 to 2006, when Canadian and British troops arrived in the south, Gall details how the Quetta Shura was formed in the eponymous Pakistani city and with the help of the S Directorate, a top-secret unit within Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main spy agency, and fomented violence in Afghanistan. She alleges the S Directorate is responsible for covert operations in Kashmir and Afghanistan, gives weapons, ammunition and fuel to the Taliban and co-ordinates support for its offensives.
“This was a covert program and designed to be deniable,” she writes.
The Taliban and their Pakistani backers were able to exploit the errors and missed opportunities made by the U.S., its allies and Afghans.
If the outgoing president, Hamid Karzai, had guaranteed the Taliban’s exiled leaders in Pakistan that they could return home peacefully, the insurgency’s strength could have been sapped, particularly since Pakistani intelligence was warning insurgents that unless they fought in Afghanistan they would be handed over to Americans who would ship them to Guantanamo Bay.
“For many Taliban members in exile there were few options,” she notes.
Lack of understanding of tribal culture in the south was also catastrophic.
British troops did not realize that a tribal civil war was underway in Helmand province when they arrived in 2006 and worsened the situation, writes former British army captain Mike Martin in his book An Intimate War: An Oral History of Helmand 1978-2012.
As the Afghans fought over land and water, the ISI attempted to control the south through a campaign of assassinations and offers to fund disgruntled farmers fighting poppy eradication — and the British.
The British had little clue.
In 2006, as Canadian troops arrived, the Quetta Shura deployed the notorious Mullah Dadullah to capture the south.
The high number of civilians killed by NATO airstrikes and the posting of predatory officials in key government and police roles were huge sources of anger among Afghans, both authors write.
The Taliban’s offensive continued as they attempted to lay siege to the capital with road blocks, assassinations and IEDs.
Gall notes that many attacks bore the hallmarks of Pakistani involvement. During the January 2008 bombing of the Serena Hotel in Kabul, the two suicide attackers called their controllers in Pakistan 14 times. After the Indian Embassy bombing that left 50 dead, American and Afghan surveillance intercepted phone calls from ISI officials discussing the siege.
The patterns were similar: suicide bombers breach the outside security perimeter, gunmen and bombers rush in from behind, a degree of planning and expertise that suggest military training, Gall notes.
“The aim is to make the cost too high for everyone to continue backing the Karzai government. The ISI want them to all go home,” she writes.
As the violence reached new levels, with thousands of civilians dying every year, grown men cried on Afghan television, pleading for Karzai and the Americans to end the violence. A rattled government spokesman appeared on Tolo television after one particularly brutal attack on Kabul in 2011, yelling obscenities at the Taliban and describing them as “hairy barbarians.”
Karzai himself began to show signs of unravelling. He burst into tears in public and threatened to join the Taliban as he continued to tell the Americans to look at ISI headquarters and the madrassas as sources of the insurgency — which led to his falling out with his Washington benefactors.
One counterterrorism official told Gall that Pakistan’s purpose is to keep Afghanistan violent so it can play a larger role in the region’s politics, using “chaos as a principal weapon.”
The 350,000-strong Afghan army and police, trained and funded by international donors, face a tough fight when foreign forces leave.
To this end, Ghani, Abdullah and Rassoul have promised to sign a bilateral security agreement, a long-term arrangement with Washington to keep a contingent of military personnel in the country after 2014 for training and counter-insurgency.
Omar Samad, the former Afghan ambassador to Canada, said the agreement is critical.
“Without that signature, we are taking a major risk and a gamble, and it will to an extent impact the morale of the Afghan army as well as the effectiveness of the security forces,” he said in a telephone interview.
Against this backdrop, Afghans went to the ballot box.
It is doubtful that Pakistan’s attempts to bring Afghanistan to heel will end. A spokesman for the Haqqania madrassa in Pakistan, which has pumped out suicide bombers, made this vow to Gall:
“The white flag of the Taliban will fly again over Kabul,” he said.
Thousands of Punjab-based militants have gathered at the Afghan border to fight with the Taliban once foreigners leave, Associated Press journalist Kathy Gannon reported last September. She was recently shot and wounded in Afghanistan.
To prevent the country from falling apart, the next Afghan president will need to deftly win over the restive tribes in the south. Ghani and Abdullah sent thousands of campaign observers there to monitor election fraud, said Graeme Smith, senior analyst in Kabul for the International Crisis Group.
“They were the only ones really pushing out into the districts,” he said in a telephone interview.
For the cast of supporting actors in the American-led mission, including Canada, none of this may matter. Canadians may be able to retreat and leave it for historians to debate the value of the 12-year engagement.
But for the Afghans waiting for the results of the ballot box, that option is not available.
Afghan election: Why the Taliban will win | Toronto Star
