Kabul: A City at Work | Who is the Graffiti Artist?

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Who is the Graffiti Artist?

I was born and raised in Iran and in the last 3 years of school I wanted to chose art as my major subject but I was told that as an Afghan I wasn’t allowed. So I studied accounting which was okay but a million miles away from painting.

When my family came back to Afghanistan I tried again and passed into the Faculty of Fine Arts at Kabul University. Art is such a part of my life that I don’t know what would happen if was not able to continue. It would be like having a piece cut out of me.

At present I work with a team of 10 Afghan artists called Roshd, meaning ‘growth’. I do Modern Art. It is something new and so Afghans are against it on principal. They say it’s a western imposition. I don’t see that it has anything to do with the West if the artist and artistic concept are Afghan. My interpretation of art is founded on the classical techniques and styles I was taught.

In December 2010 there was a graffiti workshop that was organized by Combat Communications. Until then, I didn’t know what graffiti was; I had seen some things on the walls in the city but it was advertising not art.I was used to working with paints on canvasses but when I used a spray can for the first time and worked on a big wall it was exciting and cool and such an achievement.

At first I didn’t know what to graffiti as the wall was so big and the spray cans took time to get used to but Chu was a really good teacher. I wanted to do something about women’s rights in Afghanistan and the burqa, but in an ironic way and take the idea of the burqa away from how we are used to seeing it.

But when I was working I had images of all the problems in Afghanistan and all the problems women have here. It was all in front of me, and I felt I wasn’t doing them justice. I worked on an image of a woman in burqa sitting on the ground and had made up a poem about her life. I did few others like her as I wanted to mix the modern style of my painting with their past life to show what kind of life women have in this age.

When I paint, I often paint fish covered with bubbles over their bodies it’s a conceptual idea I have created about not being free to express yourself.

I mean, if a fish opens its mouth, bubbles come out, right? And if its mouth is closed, there are no bubbles. So the bubbles I paint are the bubbles of things it wants to say but can’t. All the bubbles get stuck in its body like artistic ideas with no avenue for expression.

I haven’t been to many places to graffiti. One was the workshop and the other was at the Goethe Institute which is a secure and means I don’t get hassle on the streets, which as a girl, happens almost daily. Sadly It means I don’t get to practice that much so people are like, ‘How can you call yourself a graffiti artist if you can’t graffiti on buildings?’ But it’s just too dangerous to walk around on the streets. Once I went to the Russian Cultural Centre to graffiti and was so scared. It was dark and damp and I was afraid of stepping on a landmine or something.

I graffiti in my own way at home. I have photographs of old alleyways and the walls of Kabul and I graffiti the photograph. It is a comment on the restrictions of women in its own way.

In any case, I don’t think Afghan society is ready to accept graffiti as a form of art. The country has been in war for so long that most people are still pre-occupied with politics or just trying to stay alive.

But generally I only have one wish. I want to see Afghanistan vying with other countries in the art world. In Iran, if you mentioned Afghanistan people would think negative things. In the West, people say there is no art in Afghanistan but if only they came here, they could see what is developing, albeit very slowly. I personally think that art can be so useful for changing the situation of a society, it is part of the culture and culture has a role in representing a country. Everyone has to try as much as possible to rebuild the country, not just artists.

Assassinations | CIA Drone Strikes | US Policy

At an open public briefing yesterday, President Obama admitted that the United States has been directing the CIA to carry out targeted killings, or assassinations, in Pakistan.

The drone program, extensively discussed among activists and legal scholars, has been Washington's worst-kept secret. Last night CIA drones killed 12 in Yemen.

Here is the big question. At what point does official acknowledgment of an on-going 'covert' action that is killing thousands of people demand accountability? And, how do you stop it?

Jonathan Master writing with the Council on Foreign Relations lays out the post 9/11 strategy and rationale for CIA and special forces targeted killings.

“The United States adopted targeted killing as an essential tactic to pursue those responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have employed the controversial practice with more frequency in recent years, both as part of ongoing combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.”

The domestic rational rest on the expansive language of a statute passed by the US Congress just days after the 9/11 attack.

“As a matter of domestic law, the legal underpinning for U.S. counterterrorism operations and the targeted killing of members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and its affiliates across the globe is the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which the U.S. Congress passed just days after 9/11. The statute empowers the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force" in pursuit of those responsible for the terrorist attacks.”

The New American Foundation estimates that drone strikes in Pakistan alone have killed between 1,700 and 2,700 people in the last eight years. The government of Pakistan has consistently condemned the bombing attacks as a violation of its sovereignty.

Additional Resources: How the CIA Became a Killing Machine

Out of the Loop: The Future of Drones | Shane Harris

Shane Harris reveals the dangers of relying on robotic/computer technology for modern weapons systems. He does not neglect the threats to international law and morality as well.

“In 1988, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser on patrol in the Persian Gulf, shot down an Iranian passenger jet, after the ship’s Aegis targeting system mistook it for a military fighter. The crew of the Vincennes could tell from the plane’s course, speed, and radio signal that it was a civilian aircraft. But Aegis, which had been programmed to identify large Soviet bombers, said otherwise.

“Even though the hard data was telling the crew that the plane wasn’t a fighter jet, they trusted what the computer was telling them more,” Singer writes in Wired for War. “Aegis was on semiautomatic mode, but not one of the eighteen sailors and officers on the command crew was willing to challenge the computer’s wisdom. They authorized it to fire.”

Singer notes that the Navy had such faith in Aegis’s abilities to identify a true enemy that the Vincennes was the only ship in the area allowed to fire on its own volition, without the crew seeking permission from more senior officers in the fleet. All 299 passengers and crew aboard the Iranian jet died, among them sixty-six children.”

Here is the introduction...

"In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature,I suspect, is on the side of the machines."

—George Dyson in Darwin Among the Machines

"If you want to understand how human beings stack up next to machines in the conduct of modern warfare, consider this:

In World War II, it took a fleet of 1,000 B-17 bombers—flown, navigated, and manned by a crew of 10,000 men—to destroy one Axis ground target. American bombs were so imprecise that, on average, only one in five fell within 1,000 feet of where they were aimed. Aerial bombing was a clumsy affair, utterly dependent on the extraordinary labor of human beings.

Just one generation later, that was no longer true. In the Vietnam War, it took thirty F-4 fighter-bombers, each flown and navigated by only two men, to destroy a target. That was a 99.4 percent reduction in manpower. The precision of attack was also greatly enhanced by the first widespread use of laser-guided munitions.

After Vietnam, humans’ connection to air war became more attenuated, and less relevant. In the Gulf War, one pilot flying one plane could hit two targets. The effectiveness of the human-machine pairing was breathtaking. A single “smart bomb” could do the work of 1,000 planes dropping more than 9,000 bombs in World War II. By the time the United States went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, one pilot in one plane could destroy six targets. Their weapons were guided by global positioning satellites orbiting thousands of miles above the surface of the earth. And increasingly, the pilots weren’t actually inside their planes anymore.

The historical trend is sobering. As aircraft and weapons have become more precise, human beings have become less essential to the conduct of war. And that may suit the military just fine."

Do Drones Undermine Democracy?
P.W. Singer | 21 January 2012 | New York Times

"I do not condemn these strikes; I support most of them. What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make. Something that would have previously been viewed as a war is simply not being treated like a war.

THE change is not limited to covert action. Last spring, America launched airstrikes on Libya as part of a NATO operation to prevent Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government from massacring civilians. In late March, the White House announced that the American military was handing over combat operations to its European partners and would thereafter play only a supporting role."

US Drones Patrolling Its Skies Provokes Outrage in Iraq
Eric Schmitt and Michael Schmidt | 30 January 2012 | New York Times

"A senior American official said that negotiations were under way to obtain authorization for the current drone operations, but Ali al-Mosawi, a top adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki; Iraq’s national security adviser, Falih al-Fayadh; and the acting minister of interior, Adnan al-Asadi, all said in interviews that they had not been consulted by the Americans.

Mr. Asadi said that he opposed the drone program: “Our sky is our sky, not the U.S.A.’s sky.”

Additional articles on Drones.

NATO Purchases Leave Afghans Short of Fuel

NATO Purchases Leave Afghans Short of Fuel
By Khan Mohammad Danishju - Afghanistan

As fuel becomes scarcer and pricier in the Afghan capital Kabul, many are pointing the finger at NATO for buying up oil products domestically to make up for blocked supplies from Pakistan.

NATO has been unable to bring in fuel across the Pakistan border since late November, when Islamabad imposed a blockade and choked off a major supply artery for the 130,000-strong American-led force.

Relations between Islamabad and Washington have been deteriorating fast, and Pakistan closed the route in protest at a NATO airstrike on its border that killed 24 of its soldiers on November 26.

Since then, the United States has had to pay six times as much to import supplies via alternative routes, according to an Associated Press report on January 20.

While most of NATO’s supplies are now coming in via Uzbekistan along a route known as the Northern Distribution Network, NDN. Even before Pakistan closed down the supply route, NATO was switching over to the NDN because of frequent attacks on convoys on the roads south. US officials say 85 per cent of the fuel for the military now come from the north.

Afghan businessmen say the international force is topping this up with purchases inside the country. This is affecting the market, forcing up prices and making petrol and public transport more expensive for the locals.

Farid Alokozay, head of the government agency responsible for petroleum products, said NATO was increasingly buying in fuel from domestic firms.

Mohammad Qorban Haqjo, chief executive of the Afghan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, confirmed that 20 local firms had signed a lucrative fuel supply deal with NATO.

“The contract was signed recently and is worth one billion dollars,” he said, adding that some of the firms belonged to relatives of senior Afghan officials.

NATO insists it has sufficient supplies of fuel and that the Pakistani blockade will not affect Afghans.

“The people of Afghanistan will not be challenged by NATO buying their fuel and their food. NATO’s stockpiles are more than sufficient,” NATO spokesman Brigadier-General Carsten Jacobsen said on January 2, according to the AFP news agency.

However, Kabul residents insisted they were being affected.

“Since NATO forces started buying on the domestic market, not only have prices increased, but fuel is no longer available consistently,” Hajji Sayed Ahmad, who owns a petrol station in the city’s Deh Mazang district.

The shortage has prompted him to raise his prices, much to the annoyance of his customers.

“We have fights with dozens of people every day,” Ahmad said. “They think it’s our choice to increase fuel prices.... The general public don’t realise that fuel isn’t widely available and that the foreigners are buying it up.”

Kabul taxi drivers have increased their fares, leaving people queuing in the freezing cold for hours as they wait for cheaper but more erratic bus services. Once on the buses, they find that ticket prices have also increased.

“First you can’t find a bus, and then when you do find one, you get charged double the price,” said Mohammad Afzal, a resident of the city’s District 15.

While his bus trip to work previously cost the equivalent of 60 cents, Afzal now pays one dollar.

Taxi driver Mohammad Amin said inflation was driving him out of business. He has regular rows with customers because he has raised his fares, but even then he is taking home virtually nothing, he said. He said that when he asked petrol station owners why fuel prices had gone up, they blamed NATO.

Kabul University economist Hamidullah Faruqi said the capital’s transport system was in danger of collapsing unless the government intervened in the fuel crisis.

Separately from the clampdown on NATO supplies, Afghans say hundreds of their trucks are held up in Pakistan, further affecting the price of goods.

The Afghan Divide | Sarah Chayes

Is the United States succeeding in Afghanistan?

It may seem like an absurd question, but in policy circles, analyzing that question means a great deal. Sarah Chayes explores the contradictions between the assessments and recommendations of the U.S. intelligence agencies and the U.S. military/political agencies. The article in full is below.

She also brings in the even greater divide that is the Afghan experience.

“Humanitarian groups, by contrast, were tabulating all violence suffered by civilians, no matter who the perpetrator, including kidnappings and shootings at the hands of the militias that the U.S. military has armed to fight the Taliban.

Afghans themselves are attuned to something less tangible: the likelihood of danger. Take last September's attack by a few militants shooting rocket-launched grenades from a tower in central Kabul, which shut down the U.S. Embassy and nearby NATO headquarters for 20 hours.

Foreign officials might record such an incident as a single attack. But to Kabul residents, it sent an overpowering message that their city was unsafe, that the terrorists could do what they wanted.”

She ends with an appeal.

“Though I doubt the nation's intelligence community can be easily cowed, even by three generals and an ambassador, the impulse to interfere is wrong. Writing problems out of documents won't make them go away. Obama deserves a clear exposition of competing assessments of national security issues. Then it's for him to hash out the differences in internal debate.”

The Afghan Divide | Sarah Chayes

How should we measure success in Afghanistan? It's a crucial question, but there isn't much agreement on an answer.

In mid-January, this newspaper ran a story on the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, a classified assessment drafted by analysts at more than a dozen U.S. intelligence agencies. According to The Times, the report "warns that security gains from an increase in troops have been undercut by pervasive corruption, incompetent governance and Taliban fighters operating from neighboring Pakistan."

Those with direct responsibility for the war — top military commanders and the U.S. ambassador to Kabul — reportedly contested the report's findings in a written dissent. The dispute highlights an ongoing struggle to shape U.S. perceptions on Afghanistan.

Analysts like using numbers to bolster their arguments because numbers seem hard and fast. But they don't always agree. Last summer, for example, the NATO command in Kabul announced that for the first time since 2006, insurgent attacks were down compared with the previous year. But United Nations agencies and humanitarian organizations were reporting large upticks in violence and its effect on civilians.

Numbers draw their significance from what they count. In this case, the military tallied attacks that insurgents initiated where international troops were present, including improvised bombs that exploded but not ones that had been defused.

Humanitarian groups, by contrast, were tabulating all violence suffered by civilians, no matter who the perpetrator, including kidnappings and shootings at the hands of the militias that the U.S. military has armed to fight the Taliban.

Afghans themselves are attuned to something less tangible: the likelihood of danger. Take last September's attack by a few militants shooting rocket-launched grenades from a tower in central Kabul, which shut down the U.S. Embassy and nearby NATO headquarters for 20 hours.

Foreign officials might record such an incident as a single attack. But to Kabul residents, it sent an overpowering message that their city was unsafe, that the terrorists could do what they wanted.

Underlying the current dispute over the intelligence estimate is another, deeper divide. The assessment reportedly acknowledges the hard work by Afghan and foreign troops in driving the Taliban out of many of its strongholds. That success is clearly visible in Kandahar, where I have lived for most of the last decade. But its significance is less clear.

"Yes, we've made gains against the Taliban around Kandahar," a minister and former Kandahar governor told me recently. "But it takes 18,000 men for a single district. We can't sustain that."

And there have been other costs. As troops moved into rural districts the Taliban had held, they built dirt roads right through farmers' vineyards and orchards. I saw the results when I went to visit a friend's family land. Debris had been shoved into an irrigation channel that once watered the whole village, razor wire had been looped across a road, and buildings where families dry their grapes to make prized raisins had been destroyed.

There were good tactical reasons for inflicting such damage. Many of the buildings had been booby-trapped by the retreating Taliban, or they obstructed the troops' lines of sight. But the local economy, already one of the most threadbare on Earth, has been badly hurt. Compensation money was paid out, but still, success against the Taliban came at great cost to residents.

They are left with the question: What now? If their grapevines or fruit trees dry out, what should they plant? If insurgents offer poppy seeds, should they accept? And what about the Afghan soldiers who stole the furniture out of the blown-up buildings? Villagers can't take them to court because the judicial system is deeply corrupt. So who can give them recourse? A sense of justice? Maybe the Taliban.

If, on the other hand, the Taliban does move back in, or if it is given power in some deal negotiated by the United States and an Afghan government most of its citizens don't view as legitimate, how will the many Afghans who don't wish to be subjected to Taliban rule react?

The Afghan security forces the United States has been working so hard to build up are largely commanded by viscerally anti-Taliban groups. Is U.S. policy driving Afghanistan back toward civil war?

It is this potential for systemic collapse that the intelligence estimate reportedly highlights, to the dismay of the dissenting officials.

But even if withdrawing on the current schedule brings about Afghanistan's implosion, that might still be the right thing to do. If the U.S. government chooses not to address the two fundamental political and diplomatic challenges its intelligence estimate is said to highlight — corrupt government and Pakistan's support for extremist violence — then why waste more blood and treasure? But President Obama must make that decision in full cognizance of the dangers, so he can plan for them and try to mitigate some of them. He needs more divergent views, not fewer.

The aggressive efforts by some to spin perceptions of Afghanistan have grown unseemly as well as dangerous. I've seen dissent disappear from interagency documents. I've heard officials tell public affairs officers to pressure reporters about their stories.

Though I doubt the nation's intelligence community can be easily cowed, even by three generals and an ambassador, the impulse to interfere is wrong. Writing problems out of documents won't make them go away. Obama deserves a clear exposition of competing assessments of national security issues. Then it's for him to hash out the differences in internal debate.

Sarah Chayes lived and worked in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010. She advised the NATO command in Kabul and the U.S. Joint Staff, wrote "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban," and is a contributing writer to Opinion.

The Best Way to Peace | Anatol Lieven

A political/military overview of Afghanistan’s recent history with foreign intervention and war. Using the Soviet experience – and a variety of books – Lieven offers valuable analysis and suggestions. The failure to design and implement inclusive peace processes along the way have led to more violence and increased tension in the region.

The insights into US-Pakistan relations, the impact of a long-term US presence and the need to acknowledged a post-Karzai Afghanistan are all discussed.

The book list is below.

Afghanistan: The Best Way to Peace

“The United States and its allies today find themselves in a position in Afghanistan similar to that of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, after Mikhail Gorbachev decided on military withdrawal by a fixed deadline. They are in a race against the clock to build up a regime and army that will survive their withdrawal, while either seeking a peace agreement with the leaders of the insurgent forces or splitting off their more moderate, pragmatic, and mercenary elements and making an agreement with them. The Soviets succeeded at least partially in some of these objectives, while failing utterly to achieve a peace settlement.”

Negotiations with the Taliban

“On the basis of my conversations in recent years with former leading figures in the Taliban and Pakistanis close to Mullah Omar and his colleagues, my own judgment is that a peace settlement between the US, the administration in Kabul, and the Afghan Taliban would probably have to be based on some variant of the following elements:

(1) complete withdrawal of all US troops according to a fixed timetable;
(2) exclusion of al-Qaeda and other international terrorist groups from areas controlled by the Taliban;
(3) a government in Kabul headed—at least nominally—by men the Taliban would see as good Muslims and Afghan patriots;
(4) negotiations on a new Afghan constitution involving the Taliban and leading to the transfer of most powers from the center to the regions;
(5) de facto—though not formal—Taliban control of the region of Greater Kandahar, and by the Haqqanis of Greater Paktika;
(6) a return to the Taliban offer of 1999–2001 of a complete ban on opium poppy cultivation and heroin production in the areas under their control, in return for international aid.

On the last point, it should be remembered that the Taliban are the only force to have achieved such a degree of control of the drug trade during the past thirty years. Certainly, based on their record to date, the idea that our own Afghan allies will do so after the US withdraws is pure fantasy.”

Pakistan, the impact of a long-term US military presence, preparing for a post-Karzai Afghanistan.

"For the Pakistani military as a whole, however, a peace settlement along the lines I have sketched above would fulfill its essential needs. It would keep the influence of India in Afghanistan at a distance from Pakistan’s borders. It would ensure adequate Pashtun representation in Afghan government, limiting the power of forces linked to India. It would remove the catastrophic threat of Indian-backed Tajik forces fighting an ethnic civil war in Afghanistan’s Pashtun territories, sending fresh millions of refugees fleeing into Pakistan. And it would end the US drone strikes and raids that are infuriating the lower ranks of the Pakistani military and leading to catastrophic clashes between Pakistani and US forces along the Afghan border.

Such an outcome would serve a vital interest of the United States. For it is no exaggeration to say that the tension between the Pakistani military and the United States now poses a threat to US security that dwarfs either the Taliban or the battered remnants of the old al-Qaeda. As I have found from speaking with Pakistani soldiers, and from visiting military families in the chief areas of recruitment in northern Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the fury of the junior ranks against the US is reaching a dangerous pitch. These soldiers share both the sympathy for the Afghan Taliban of the population at large and that population’s deep distrust of US intentions. They are increasingly angry with their own commanders, whom they view as cowardly and corrupt; and they are profoundly humiliated when they return to their towns and villages and are asked by neighbors—and even their own women—why as slaves of the US they are killing fellow Muslims.

There seems, as a result, a strong likelihood that if Pakistani soldiers encounter US soldiers on what is or what they believe to be Pakistani soil, they will fight. This is apparently what happened in the incident on November 26 in which twenty-four Pakistani soldiers were killed by US forces, leading to a drastic further deterioration in relations (including retaliatory closing of the border to NATO). That encounter was bad enough; but if such clashes continue then at some point things will go the other way, and Americans will be killed—possibly a lot of Americans, if for example the Pakistanis shoot down a helicopter. If on the other hand the Pakistani generals order their men not to fight, the resulting outrage could undermine discipline to the point where the unity of the army could be in question—and if the army breaks apart, not only will immense munitions and expertise flow to terrorists, but the Pakistani state will collapse. This would be a historic triumph for al-Qaeda and its allies—and like the invasion of Iraq, one made possible for them by the United States.

To my astonishment, I find that some US officials are now arguing that a principal reason why the US must retain bases in Afghanistan—even at the price of making a settlement with the Taliban impossible—is in order to continue striking at al-Qaeda and other extremist targets in Pakistan’s border areas. More than ten years after September 11, it is simply appalling that supposedly well-informed people are still treating the terrorist threat in such a crude and mechanistic fashion. Have they not realized that the membership of al-Qaeda and its allies is not fixed, but depends on al-Qaeda’s ability to recruit among Muslims infuriated by US actions? Or that a terrorist attack on the US is as likely—more likely—to be planned in Karachi, Lahore, the English town of Bradford, or New York as in Pakistan’s frontier areas? An essential US motive for a peace settlement in Afghanistan, one allowing complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, is precisely that it would allow America to pull back from the existing confrontation with Pakistan—not continue it into the indefinite future, with all the gains that this would create for resentment by extremists.

Even if the advantages of a settlement are recognized by Washington, how can the US sell it to its allies in Afghanistan, to President Karzai and his followers, and to the leaders of the non-Pashtun ethnic groups? The answer lies partly in assuring all the other parties that the US will continue to guarantee military support against any future Taliban move to attack Kabul or invade the north; and partly in the approaching train wreck that the simultaneous departure of both US troops and Karzai may cause.

The pursuit of a peace settlement should be combined with the discussion of a post-Karzai political order in Kabul, and with an Afghan national debate on reform of the constitution, which is now widely recognized to be deeply flawed and far too centralized, and which was never truly approved by the Afghan people. The first step to peace with the Taliban therefore should be to acknowledge their right to participate in a genuine national debate on a new Afghan constitution.

Finally, what of the fate of the social progress made since 2001, especially with respect to women’s rights? Jonathan Steele gives a powerful answer to the question. The melancholy truth is that the Taliban are no more reactionary in this regard than most of Afghan rural society. As the briefest glance at media coverage of Afghanistan in recent years makes clear, the limited gains for women’s rights have been made only under intense Western pressure and in the face of apparent strong resistance from our own Afghan political and military allies.

Where the Taliban were different—and attracted international opprobrium—was not in their basic culture, but in the way they codified the suppression of women in state law rather than leaving it to local and family custom. Moreover, they extended this suppression to the cities where women had made real though precarious progress over the course of the twentieth century. The task of the US and its allies therefore must be to preserve the cities at least as areas where women can continue to enjoy more rights and opportunities in the hope that a new culture will gradually spread from them to the countryside.

This is a depressing prospect when compared with the hopes that followed the overthrow of the Taliban ten years ago. But let us face facts. Our societies and official establishments have demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that they lack the stamina and capacity for sacrifice necessary to remain in Afghanistan for the decades that would be necessary to transform the position of Afghan women as a whole; and there is nothing ethical or responsible about setting goals from the safety of London or Washington that informed people know cannot in fact be reached. We do have a chance to try to do better than the Soviets and to try to save Afghanistan from an endless future of civil war, and to establish a peace in which future progress may be possible. It is our duty to take that chance."

The books

Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89
by Rodric Braithwaite

A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
by Artemy M. Kalinovsky

Killing the Cranes: A Reporter’s Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan
by Edward Girardet

Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths
by Jonathan Steele

The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers
by Peter Tomsen

Afghanistan and Pakistan: Conflict, Extremism, and Resistance to Modernity
by Riaz Mohammad Khan

Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan
US Department of Defense

Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field
edited by Antonio Giustozzi

An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970–2010. by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn

Warlords and the liberal peace: state-building in Afghanistan

This article by Roger Mac Ginty is pretty heavy on theory but insightful and important. It is part of the ‘war of ideas’ that are inspiring so many Afghans today. Movements for accountability and transitional justice, calls for de-centralized power-sharing, negotiations with the Taliban, and the need to rewrite the constitution are all being discussed.

The article helps to explain where the international community is coming from. Liberal peace in contemporary peacebuilding is the promotion of democracy, market-based economic reforms and a rage of other institutions associated with dominant states.

By examining these concepts Mac Ginty offers a critique of a framework that has guided virtually every post Cold-War intervention conducted in the name of the ‘international community’. That means leading states, leading international organizations and the international financial institutions.

This is about Afghanistan, an exploration of the systems that produce and maintain warlordism, and a discussion on the implications of incorporating warlords into government for the liberal peace. The pro's and con's excerpted.


Overview

"This article draws out the contradictions in the liberal peace that have become apparent in post-Taliban state-building in Afghanistan. In particular, it focuses on how warlords have been incorporated into the government. The government has been unable to achieve a monopoly of violence and has relied on the support of some powerful militia commanders to secure itself. This raises a number of practical and ethical questions for the liberal peace. The focus of the article is on warlordism, rather than in providing detailed narrative accounts of particular warlords. The case illustrates the difficulty of extending the liberal peace in the context of an ongoing insurgency."

***

"Criticisms of the liberal peace are extensive, and conform to the critical traditional in peace studies that is skeptical of ‘problem-solving’ approaches to conflict that seem to minister to manifestations but avoid structural factors. The criticisms can be listed in abbreviated form:

. Ethnocentric (conforming to the cultural and policy mores of the global North);
. Elitist (power is restricted to national and international elites);
. Security-centric (privileges order and security over emancipation and diversity);
. Superficial (disinterested in the underlying causes of conflict and inequality);
. Technocratic and rigid (it reduces peace-building to a series of technocratic,
. Privileges neo-liberal economic policies (it is insufficiently aware of the human costs of shock therapy);
. Conservative (despite emancipatory liberal language, it rarely heralds significant social change).


Notwithstanding the lengthy list of criticisms, and case study evidence to back them up, the liberal peace is not short of defenders. The most prominent defense stems from the international organizations, states, INGOs and policy think-tanks actively engaged in liberal peace projects. They point to the lives saved and improved by liberal interventionism, and note how it is often only leading states in the global North that have the logistical capability and political will to make stabilizing interventions into societies emerging from violent conflict. Moreover, they often stress the paucity of viable alternatives to the liberal peace. Quinn and Cox argue that narratives of neo-imperialism or US hegemony miss the point. Instead, the US and other liberal powers operate benignly: ‘whatever its shortcomings, the settlements produced by American driven interventions are often, at least arguably, equal or superior in quality to the social circumstances they have been imposed to address’."