29 January 2008: Straits Times
By Anthony Paul, Senior Writer
KABUL - AT THE Davos Economic Forum last week, Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai warned of a 'wildfire spread of terrorism' across West Asia that 'bodes terribly badly for the whole world'.
At the same time, a group monitoring security of non- governmental organisations in Afghanistan pointed to 'a fourfold increase' in attacks initiated by armed opposition groups between February and July last year. The Islamist terrorist movement, the Taleban, had 'seriously rejoined the fight', said the report.
But from the perspective of US ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood, who once served in insurgency-troubled El Salvador, Kabul can point to much recent progress.
In a conversation in Kabul last week with The Straits Times, he said 2007 had been 'an extremely good year' for the coalition's counterinsurgency effort, and 'a bad year for the Taleban'.
Here are edited excerpts from the interview:
The Straits Times: On Thursday, I was at a media briefing at which a very upbeat US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said: '2008 may be characterised as the year we build on our successes.'
But by next month - Feb 13, I believe - Americans will have been fighting this war 1,000 days longer than they fought World War II.
And in (last week's) Kabul papers we read of deep pessimism from President Karzai. What do we believe: American optimism or Afghan pessimism?
Mr Wood: 2007 has been an extremely good year. From 2002 to 2006, the US and others provided more developmental and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan than security assistance.
As we were all emphasising development, the Taleban reconstituted itself, based outside the country. Some illicit power centres - warlords and others - confirmed their hold on local areas, and narcotics traffickers and corruption, violence and lack of governance and rule of law that goes with it doubled. So in the summer of 2006, we and the allies got together and made 2007 a surge year.
We gave more assistance to the Afghan army and police than we'd given in 2002- 2006 combined. We increased the US military presence here and the allies increased theirs.
As a result, what was at one time a source of concern - the so-called 'spring offensive of the Taleban' - didn't materialise. In fact, the fighting season from last March to about Nov 1 was, with some ups and downs, a pretty good fighting season for the government and coalition.
There have now been four or five operations that have genuinely been led by the Afghan army successfully.
It was a bad year for the Taleban: They lost troops, commanders and dominance of territory.
The Afghan economy, according to the IMF, grew by a real 13 per cent, South Asia's fastest-growing economy. Per-capita income has doubled since 2002; 80 per cent of the population have access to medical care; more children are in school than there ever were. The death rate for children under five has declined by 85,000 a year.
Governance has also had a breakthrough. A decision was taken to transfer responsibility for local government from the Interior Ministry and place it directly under the President. He appointed a good man to run it.
So the Interior Ministry wasn't working well?
It was not working well. What we've seen (recently) is much better governors who are establishing a much better connection with their provinces and a much better linkage between their provinces nationally.
Police reforms, appointment of better local police chiefs, increased police wages and also demotion or removal of those who didn't deserve higher wages (are) producing more local confidence in the local cop, the most evident sign of local government authority and competence.
That doesn't mean there hasn't been bad news. Drugs, terrorism - which is different from the battlefield. As the year has progressed, the Taleban has been emphasising less and less traditional insurgency and more and more suicide bombs and atrocities apparently aimed at simply intimidating people.
Is their policy working?
Certainly, national security is better. But because of the combination of terrorism, criminality and still-weak governance, I don't think the people feel safe. That puts us in the funny position that the government's winning but the people don't necessarily feel like it's winning.
I've just come from Pakistan, where one gets the impression, as President Karzai said at Davos, that insurgency is 'spreading like wildfire' into Pakistan tribal areas and all the way to Islamabad (as in the case of Ms Benazir Bhutto's murder).
I'm reminded of the way in the early 1970s when Vietnam's insurgency spread into Cambodia. Indochina's counterinsurgency was not a success. Why should we feel that it's going to be a success here?
I actually don't think you do policy by analogy. We have a President here who is genuinely popular, a respected Constitution and a clear commitment, not just from the United States but also the international community.
I think we have to evaluate Afghanistan on its own merits. I don't want to compare it with Vietnam, which had one history, or with Malaya, which had another history. And I'm heartened frankly that President Karzai was expressing concern about Pakistan because I think this represents a shared concern about a shared problem.
But President Karzai referred (in his Davos speech) to 'a venomous snake that some among us tried to nurture and befriend at the expense of others, which I hope we realise now was a mistake'. To whom do you suppose he was referring?
If he didn't choose to put a name to it, there's no reason for me to. Certainly, I don't see any reason to believe that it applies to anybody who's alive today, for instance.
Have you seen any reliable evidence that Pakistan or rogue elements in its intelligence service or military forces are helping the Taleban in Afghanistan?
No.
Just that simple answer?
Yes.
You describe a rather optimistic military picture. But Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of your Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaking to Congress (recently) about the lack of military resources, said: 'In Iraq, we do what we must. In Afghanistan, we do what we can.'
That suggests, if not a forgotten war, then a sideshow.
I wouldn't use either of those characterisations. It is certainly true that we are not resource-rich here. The US has itself had to increase our military participation and the announcement just last week of the deployment of another 3,200 marines is an example.
We've also been completely straightforward with our Nato allies and others (in expressing the view) that the coalition should be providing more forces and that they should be provided with more flexibility in their deployment and operations.
Those (restrictions on the use of some Nato forces) seem to show a lack of interest. We hear, for example, of the Italians and the Spanish refusing to fight in the embattled southern provinces.
Congressman Joe Sestak, a retired three-star admiral, said that some of the European allies 'refuse to do combat ops at night and some don't fly when the first snowflake falls'.
Those caveats are a hindrance to the alliance's ability to operate together. (But) it would be wrong to underestimate the commitment by nations deploying their young men and women to a dangerous theatre.
This is going to be a very long war, wouldn't you agree? The British defence minister said the other day 'decades'.
I think he said British forces would be present for decades. He didn't say they'd be taking a lead in the fighting for decades nor did he say they'd be present in these numbers for decades.
It will be a long war, (but) we're committed here to getting the job done. All the major candidates (for the US presidential election) support a robust, forceful US presence in Afghanistan.
I also note the Democrat- dominated Congress passed our last appropriations Bill with $100US million ($144S million) more than was requested by the Republican administration.
There are about 42,000 coalition military forces here. (During) the Soviet Afghan war, the Russians stopped their effort with 120,000 or 130,000 troops. I can recall the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London then estimated it would take 300,000 minimum to fight a successful counterinsurgency here. And at that point the Russians withdrew.
We often find ourselves fighting the last war. I think the US military presence here is the best balance of military and civil undertakings and I've been doing this for about 20 years, since El Salvador in 1980.
It's important to recall that we're dealing with perhaps the world's fifth-poorest country, perhaps 40 per cent literacy. And it's been exhausted by 25 years of violence. The average life expectancy here is 45 years, which means the overwhelming number of adults here have never known a stable period.
Nevertheless, an NGO security group says that if you take out the support troops, the coalition is deploying only between 5,000 and 7,000 combat troops. The Russians must have had many tens of thousands of combat troops. There's an imbalance there which is hard to accommodate.
And yet (the coalition) and the Afghan army are winning. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with what's happening on the ground rather than with somebody's calculations.
Yet we hear that Oxfam says that, in some areas in the south, schools built by international military forces are twice as likely to be hit by militants. At least 230 students and teachers have been killed and about 250 schools attacked in the past three years.
In the south, most of an entire whole generation will lack education. To me, the only answer seems to be armed guards in each school.
There are about 10,000 schools. So 250 being attacked means one out of 40. But you're exactly right: there has to be protection for schools and pupils. And partly that has to do with police and partly with greater confidence in those communities.
Your immediate predecessor here, ambassador Ronald Neumann, has suggested (raising) a large conscripted military force. He gave the example of Korea, where America helped mobilise a 700,000-man South Korean army in the 1950s in a country that then had a population two-thirds of present-day Afghanistan's.
The fact of the matter is they can recruit more Afghans than can be trained. The shortage is trainers, not troops.
But that's not an answer, is it? If America threw money at the problem, couldn't you find trainers?
You mean, if we added more trainers and more equipment, and we could build up sufficient leadership to accommodate this, would a faster recruitment rate be a good idea? If so, would a draft be the way to go? The short answer is we have not yet seen an inability to recruit young, eager Afghan men for the armed forces, and since we don't seem to have a problem there, I'm not sure I see the advantage of compulsory conscription.
Well, numbers - in a hurry.
We're getting numbers in a hurry. We're beginning to get as many recruits as we can train and equip right now.
But I think what he's saying, isn't he, is that we need a lot more troops in a hurry, like hundreds of thousands a couple of years from now?
All I can say is that I think we're getting adequate numbers, and better training than they've ever gotten before. Large numbers of draftees who are not adequately trained, led or equipped gives us more of a problem than a solution. Unfortunately, even with the draft, you can't produce a baby in less than nine months.
We hear that the weak spot here is the police.
The police have been trouble. The police have also been dedicated. The casualty rate in Kandahar province last year for the police was 27 times that of the army. That's because the police deploy in smaller units and are much more closely tied to the local community.
It's only lately that we've been able to separate to our satisfaction the police who want to be police from those who simply want to be young men with guns.
Lastly, let's discuss narcotics. More than 90 per cent of Europe's heroin is said to come from here, and Afghanistan is said to be displacing even Myanmar, the traditional source of heroin for South-east Asia and Australia.
The Nato commander here told a recent news conference: 'I expect to see yet another year of explosive growth in poppy production.'
Certainly I can say that since narcotics production continues to grow, what we have been doing hasn't worked and we're not satisfied with it.
(But now) I think we're seeing a real consensus. I think we'll be seeing increased interdiction of shipments, traffickers, laboratories, dirty money. We'll continue a high level of public information. It's pretty widely accepted that drug trafficking is contrary to the values of Islam. Even the Taleban think so at this point.
But they're financed by it.
Absolutely. They claim to be defending the values of Islam, yet anyone who is familiar with the drug industry here, even at the farmer level, is familiar with the Taleban connection to it. So this is a real public relations problem for them.
