Details on the Afghan-Indian Strategic Agreement

The India-Afghanistan strategic agreement will have major implications for the region. The deal, made public earlier this month, precedes an anticipated US-Afghan strategic agreement that is expected to include a long-term US troop presence. The US will also likely pledge to cover the expenses of a large standing army that the Government of Afghanistan can't possibly meet.

Last week Secretary of State Hilary Clinton told a congressional hearing that 90% of the US-Afghan Agreement is complete. The outstanding issues are critical and include troop levels, weapons transfers and training. The Government of Afghanistan will be hosting a Loya Jirga in the coming weeks to try and get approval for these controversial issues.

Afghan-Indian agreement heralds a strategic shift in the region
CJ Radin, Long War Journal, 31 October

"Signaling a shift in policy, Afghanistan and India have signed a strategic partnership agreement. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh signed the document, which includes provisions for both security and economic cooperation, earlier this month in New Delhi. This is the first time Afghanistan has made such an agreement with any country, at least since 1979.

The document has three notable provisions.

First, India will help train Afghan National Security Forces. India will train and mentor Afghan army and police personnel in Afghanistan, and Afghans will attend training academies in India. India will also assist in equipping the Afghan forces. The agreement does not include any deployment of Indian combat troops to Afghanistan. Both countries already share intelligence information.

Second, India will furnish Afghanistan with economic aid and assistance. The agreement provides an additional $500 million on top of the $1 billion India has already spent since 2002. In addition, India and Afghanistan will cooperate in the development of mining and energy production.

Third, Afghanistan and India will establish a strategic dialogue between their respective national security advisers "to provide a framework for cooperation in the area of national security."

The agreement leaves open the possibility of even closer ties in the future. The Indian prime minister has said that India will support Afghanistan as it assumes the responsibility of governance and security after the withdrawal of international forces.

Strategic significance

This agreement signals a shift in policy for Afghanistan and India. Up until now, India has played a very limited role in Afghanistan in spite of India's national interest in the country. This has been largely due to Pakistani sensitivity to the issue of Indian presence in Afghanistan. Significant Indian involvement in Afghanistan has been seen by Pakistan as a threat, an attempt by India to encircle Pakistan. Accordingly, the US and Afghanistan have sought to maintain relations with Pakistan, even if it meant keeping Indian relations at arm's length.

The new pact indicates that Afghanistan's strategic calculation has changed. Maintaining a relationship with Pakistan is no longer the top priority, and Indian support for Afghan development is now a higher priority. This does not mean, however, that India and Afghanistan have decided to disregard their relationships with Pakistan entirely. Both Afghanistan and India have attempted to reassure Pakistan in the wake of the agreement. Speaking in New Delhi, President Karzai said:

Pakistan is our twin brother, India is a great friend. The agreement we signed with our friend will not affect our brother ....This strategic partnership ... is not directed against any country ... this strategic partnership is to support Afghanistan.

Similarly, the Indian prime minister said after announcing the agreement: "Our cooperation with Afghanistan is an open book.""

Loya Jirga to Approve Long-Term US Military Presence

The Afghan government has announced that a Loya Jirga will convene in November to try reach unity on a new security agreement that would allow a long-term U.S. military presence in the country beyond 2014. A key issue will be the legal framework. Much will hinge of the level of immunity the Afghan government will allow to the foreign troops and contractors.

The proposed agreement has been drafted over many months by representatives of the U.S. and Afghan governments.

The United National Front a newly formed Afghan political group is pushing back. Calling for the removal of all foreign forces.

"Experience has shown us that foreign forces cannot bring peace to Afghanistan. We will have peace when we remove the causes of conflict among [Afghan] people," Mozhdah said. "One of the key reasons for fighting here is that we don't trust each other. We need to sit and talk to each other to gain each others trust."

Abubakar Siddique has the story. Entitled Afghan Opposition Grows to Next Stage of U.S. Military Presence.

"The opposition to the draft agreement also reached the halls of parliament, where the issue was discussed this week. The next stage for the debate is a loya jirga, or national council, whose date was announced this week and is intended to help determine a course of action.

The traditional gathering, set to begin on November 16, will provide a setting for more than 2,000 Afghan politicians, tribal leaders, clerics, and lawmakers to debate over a four-day period.

The 2005 security agreement signed by Kabul and Washington pledged U.S. cooperation for democracy building, improved governance, and economic and security cooperation. The new agreement focuses on the U.S. military role in the country after 2014, when most NATO combat operations are expected to be over.

Specific details are unavailable, but Afghan officials reportedly say the new agreement would likely give the government greater control over foreign aid and military operations while allowing a long-term U.S. presence in the country.

Afghan officials have also suggested in local media that some of their key demands, such as an end to night raids by foreign forces and mechanisms to protect Afghan civilians, are likely to be part of the final agreement.

In Afghanistan's Interests

These are among the most divisive issues within the Afghan government in its dealings with the United States, according to lawmaker Gul Badshah Majidi. He says that lawmakers on October 24 rejected a 2002 agreement with the International Security Assistance Force that allowed them to freely conduct military operations across Afghanistan. This, he says, indicates opposition to the new strategic agreement, which was also opposed by some lawmakers in recent debates.

Majidi says that the government needs to launch a robust information campaign to convince Afghans that the new agreement is different from the past agreements. And that it will actually serve Afghanistan's national interests. He says that the issue comes up in discussions with his constituents in southeastern Paktia Province who express pessimism over the deal.

But he says that they often change their views after learning more about the nature of the agreement. "I think the ultimate decision about the agreement will entail a legal framework for the presence of these forces. Their presence is needed in Afghanistan and it will serve Afghanistan's national interests," Majidi says. "The people of Afghanistan are still concerned about the return of the Taliban. They are also worried about an occupation by the Pakistan-based [fundamentalist] militias."

Afghan officials expect to host 2,030 people in the November loya jirga. They plan on briefing participants on the draft agreement before the assembly formally opens on November 16.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently indicated that the draft agreement agreed by the traditional leadership council will be sent to the parliament for final approval."

115 Dead After 7 Day NATO Assault in Kunar

The Associated Press is reporting that "NATO and Afghan forces have killed at least 115 insurgents over the past week as part of an ongoing operation in a northeastern Afghanistan province."

“NATO said the operation has been going on since around Oct. 15 and has included the use of fighter jets and long-range bombers.”

Last week, a study of NATO press releases by the Afghanistan Analysts Network found that 5% of the casualties from NATO attacks were 'leaders' or 'facilitators'.

NATO continues to claim they are deliberate in their targets.

"The fact is, we target bad guys," said Nicholas Conner, NATO Spokesperson. In tandem with NATO's Afghan partners, "we go after them wherever they are; whoever they are."

The details of the on-going campaign coincides with a surprise visit by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton who is in Kabul urging Afghan officials to continue negotiating with Pakistan and the Taliban.

Kajaki Dam and the Helmand Valley Authority

Jean MacKenzie reports about the history of the Kajaki dam project in Helmand Province. The upgrade of the dam has been billed as the linchpin of the military effort in Helmand, and key to delivering power – and of course influence – in Kandahar. It is a story of a failure.

Watershed of Waste: Afghanistan’s Kajaki Dam and USAID

It is also an update of a project with a very long history, and many previous failures. A project that was modeled in many ways on the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US .

It started in 1946 when the government of Afghanistan first “hired the largest American heavy engineering firm, Morrison Knudsen, Inc. of Boise, Idaho, to build a dam. Morrison Knudsen, builder of the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and soon the launch complex at Cape Canaveral, specialized in symbols of the future. The firm operated all over the world, boring tunnels through the Andes in Peru, laying airfields in Turkey.”

It is a fascination story told by Nick Cullather.

He explores the way development was used in the post-colonial period to gain influence and sheds light on the chapter of Afghan history that is little know; when the U.S. and the Soviet Union sought influence in Afghanistan through development project and not armies.

From New Deal to New Frontier in Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State

The goal of the project was to project power – by a central government – over areas of the country it had little control. It was to modernize the country. It was political, fueled eventually by the desire of the Monarchy to create a ‘Pastunistan’ consisting of most of Northern Pakistan that would address the uncertainty of Pashtuns after the partition of India in 1947.

The long history of US companies and U.S. aid.

The Helmand Valley project “came under American supervision in 1946 and continued until the departure of the last reclamation expert in 1979, outlasting the theories and rationales on which it was based. It was lavishly funded by U.S. foreign aid, multilateral loans, and the Afghan government, and it was the opposite of piecemeal. It was an “integrated” development scheme, with education, industry, agriculture, medicine, and marketing under a single controlling authority. Nation-building did not fail in Afghanistan for want of money, time, or imagination. In the Helmand Valley, the engines and dreams of modernization had run their full course, spooling out across the desert until they hit limits of physics, culture, and history.”

Here is how it starts.

“In May 1960, the historian Arnold Toynbee left Kandahar and drove 90 miles on freshly paved roads to Lashkar Gah, a modern planned city known locally as the New York of Afghanistan. At the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers, close against the ancient ruins of Qala Bist, Lashkar Gah’s 8,000 residents lived in suburban-style tract homes surrounded by broad lawns. The city boasted an alabaster mosque, one of the country’s best hospitals, Afghanistan’s only coeducational high school, and the headquarters of the Helmand Valley Authority, a multipurpose dam project funded by the United States. This unexpected proliferation of modernity led Toynbee to reflect on the warning of Sophocles: “the craft of his engines surpasseth his dreams.” In the area around Kandahar, traditional Afghanistan had vanished. “The domain of the Helmand Valley Authority,” he reported, “has become a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape. …The new world they are conjuring up out of the desert at the Helmand River’s expense is to be an America-in-Asia.”

…..

“Nothing becomes antiquated faster than symbols of the future, and it is difficult, at only fifty years remove, to envision the hold concrete dams once had on the global imagination. In the mid-20th century, the austere lines of the Hoover Dam and its radiating spans of high-tension wire inscribed federal power on the American landscape. Vladimir Lenin famously remarked that Communism was Soviet power plus electrification, an equation captured by the David Lean film Dr. Zhivago in the image of water surging, as a kind of redemption, from the spillway of an immense Soviet dam. In 1954, standing at the Bhakra- Nangal canal, Nehru described dams as the temples of modern India. “Which place can be greater than this,” he declared, “this Bhakra -Nangal, where thousands of men have worked, have shed their blood, and sweat and laid down their lives as well? …When we see big works, our stature grows with them, and our minds open out a little.”43 For Nehru, for Zahir Shah, for China today, the great blank wall of a dam was a screen on which they would project the future.”

GLOBAL DAY of LISTENING | Friday 21 October

6:30 pm Afghanistan time (10 am Eastern, 7 am Pacific).
Will continue for 4 hours.

Click here for details

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The Goal

Every month people from around the world listen together to ordinary people living in war-torn countries. It is a way of letting them know that someone is listening; and a way for us to learn what the realities of war and hope look like.

The meetings began with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and spread to include conflict and war zones around the world.

Join Us.

Details on last meeting here.

Write to GlobalDaysOfListening@gmail.com to request a time to talk.

The Border War with Pakistan | Focus Paktika

The NYT has a front page article on increased violence in Paktika Provence. The region includes a long border with North and South Waziristan in Pakistan. The details come from an embedded journalist at the US base Sharana, one of the areas of the country where the US surge has sent additional troops.

The point of the article is to show that soldiers feel their hands are tied.

It says something about the way the war is fought in Afghanistan when having your hands tied means you need to limit the number of high explosive weapons used and must refrain from using artillery shells with White Phosphorus.

The article notes that there is a CIA base in the province. But say’s nothing of the CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Over the past six years strikes have focused on North and South Waziristan. Over the past two years, there has been a dramatic shift in the location of the strikes. In 2009, 42% of the strikes took place in North Waziristan and 51% in South Waziristan. In 2010, 89% of the strikes took place in North Waziristan and 6% in South Waziristan.

The graphic above is from the Long War Journal.

The map shows the number of internally displaced Afghans along the border.

Here are the details.

“There were at least 102 of these so-called close-border attacks against the same outposts since May, including one on Oct. 7 that the American military called the largest and most coordinated insurgent operation in the province since 2009. Last year, during the same period in the same places, there were 13 close-border attacks. Most of the indirect-fire attacks, officers said, have been with 107-millimeter rockets, which have a range of about five miles.”

Interviews with soldiers focus on their frustration.

“When taking fire from Afghanistan, they said, they return fire with barrages of high-explosive and white phosphorus artillery rounds. (The burning effects of white phosphorus, they said, can detonate rockets waiting on launchers; for this reason, white phosphorus falls within rules guiding the soldiers’ use of force.)

When receiving fire from Pakistan, they said, they do not return fire with white phosphorus and fire far fewer high-explosive rounds. Attack helicopters and aircraft are also less likely to fire ordnance the closer the firing position is to the border, they said, even if it is on the Afghan side.”

Ghosts of Afghanistan | New Book by Jonathan Steele

Jonathan Steele has covered Afghanistan for the Guardian (London) for more than thirty years. He was part of the Guardian team which published the Wikileaks Afghanistan cables.

His latest book, Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths, has just been published.



Advanced praise:

"In this original look at the West's obsession with Afghanistan the ghosts include, of course, the inevitable innocents who fall in war but also the public myths, official lies and inconvenient truths that lie behind so much of the bloodshed there. In a riveting chapter, Steele also puts to rest the notion that America had no choice but to go to war after Osama bin Laden's orchestration of the 9/11 attacks." —Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker

"Ghosts of Afghanistan is the best single book on the inter-related US policy crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan and should be read by all students of foreign affairs." —Selig S. Harrison, author of Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal

Synopsis

Yes, there are dozens of books on the Afghan wars. Most of them are all about firefights and heroics. But this is the first to take the events of the war Bush and Blair started and put them in the context of the Soviet war and even the British imperial wars that preceded them, and draw the lessons out, and make a sharp summary of what should happen next. No war is ever won against the Afghans. The only option is to give up, but the military never want to give up. The politicians eventually resume control, but Obama has not overruled his generals yet.

Read Steele to see how the Russians coped; how Gorbachev ended the wasteful war, and see how Obama might. This is an extremely well-written modern history -- clear, coherent, with real explanatory power. It's a synthetic work, drawing on Steele's deep experience of the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1988 during which period he was the Guardian's man in Moscow, and using that to illuminate the course of war since the post-9/11 invasion.

As Steele makes plain in reporting the views of all sides on the ground, almost all Afghans simply want all foreigners off their soil whether they be jihadist Arabs or Texans, and will fight until that happens. This is, as Steele demonstrates, like all previous foreign invasions of the country, an unwinnable war for the Western allies.

Ghosts of Afghanistan stands out for the combination of its calm clarity and comprehensibility, the firmness of its arguments, Steele's stature as an analyst of the region of 30 years standing, his position as the one UK journalist who had first access to the WikiLeaks cache on Afghanistan, and his interpretation of what he found there.

10 Myths About Afghanistan | Recent article by Jonathan Steele