The Sandbox and Areas Reports Thread (August 2007)

[GAP]

In Afghanistan, the poppies are just a symptom
MIKE CAPSTICK  Special to Globe and Mail Update August 30, 2007 at 12:01 AM EDT
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The United Nations Office of Drug and Crime's annual report on poppy cultivation has unleashed critics of the Afghan mission, with interest groups renewing calls for opium commercialization and licensing and columnists and commentators declaring the mission to be "hopeless." Coupled with recent casualties, the report has led many to declare Afghanistan beyond help. Canadian opposition leaders have threatened to topple the government unless it goes firm on a February, 2009, withdrawal date.

All of this means one thing: The Taliban strategy is working.

Insurgent leaders know that they cannot defeat Canadian and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces on the battlefield, but they can beat our leaders on the moral plane.

The implication inherent in the criticism is that Afghan history and culture are at the root of the many issues still plaguing the country six years after the Taliban's fall. But nothing could be further from the truth. After a year in Kabul, I could only conclude that the real issue was the lack of international strategic vision, political will and unity.

In a recent New York Times article, three former U.S. ambassadors to Kabul acknowledged a lack of strategic vision and commitment to nation-building. The same article describes the international disagreements and recounts some of the major strategic-level failures to capitalize on the initial military successes in Afghanistan.

Both of these problems — lack of vision and international incoherence — bedevil the fight against poppy cultivation. But the poppy issue itself is just one difficult issue among many. Clearly, establishing and maintaining an Afghan-international strategic vision and implementing it coherently is the prerequisite for the mission's success.

The vision itself was, in fact, established at the London Conference in 2006. The Afghanistan Compact lays out an ambitious strategic vision agreed to by Canada and more than 60 other countries. The real issue now is the ongoing failure to make real progress in implementation.

In Kabul, there is no real "hammer" co-ordinating the work of the multiplicity of official development agencies, international organizations and donors. Co-ordination between NATO and the UN is ad hoc and Afghan state institutions remain weak.

All these problems can be attributed to weak governance. They could be solved by a renewed international commitment to the Afghan Compact, coupled with tough measures to ensure that President Hamid Karzai's government meets its commitments.
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[Wootan 9]

GAP...Thanks for posting article.  Tried for the "Comment" section but G&M decided to put it on the web instead.  Piece has sure raised the ire of the left and the "peace at any price" defeatists.  See comments at : http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070829.wcomment0830/CommentStory/Afghanistan/home  (sorry, don't know how to make direct link but you can get it from GAP's post).

Not sure that debating these folks is worth the aggravation.  That said, I wonder who the "chairborne commandos" are - those of us who've been there or the armchair critics at home?

MC

 

[freeze_time311]

JANDA, Afghanistan - Taliban militants on Thursday released the final seven South Korean captives they had been holding, bringing an end to a six-week hostage drama, witnesses said.
The captives were handed over to Reto Stocker, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Afghanistan, in two stages on a road in Ghazni province in central part of the country, an Associated Press reporter at the scene said.

Two men and two women were released first. Hours later, two women and one man who were covered in dust walked out of the desert, accompanied by three armed men, and also were turned over to waiting ICRC officials a few miles from the earlier site.

None of the freed South Koreans made any comments.

The Taliban originally kidnapped 23 South Koreans as they traveled by bus from Kabul to the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar on July 19. In late July, the militants killed two male hostages, and they released two women earlier this month as gesture of goodwill. Another 12 were freed Wednesday.

Under the terms of a deal reached Tuesday, South Korea reaffirmed a pledge it made before the hostage crisis began to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year. Seoul also said it would prevent South Korean Christian missionaries from working in the staunchly Muslim country, something it had already promised to do.

The Taliban could emerge from the hostage-taking with enhanced political legitimacy for negotiating successfully with a foreign government.

No money changed hands
South Korea and the Taliban have said no money changed hands as part of the deal.

An Indonesian government official who took part in the negotiations Tuesday between three South Korean officials and two Taliban commanders where the deal was struck said money was not brought up.

“From what I saw and from what I heard in the talks, it was not an issue,” Heru Wicaksono told the AP.

Wicaksono, a high-ranking official at the Indonesian Embassy in Kabul, said the Taliban were motivated by “humanitarian feelings” to free the captives.

The Afghan government was not party to the negotiations, which took place in Ghazni and were facilitated by the ICRC.

Wicaksono was an observer at the talks, chosen by both sides because Indonesia is a large Muslim country.

South Korea’s government, which has been under intense domestic pressure to bring the hostages home safely, said it had tried to adhere to international principles while putting priority on saving the captives.

Deal criticized
Afghan Commerce Minister Amin Farhang criticized the deal.

“One has to say that this release under these conditions will make our difficulties in Afghanistan even bigger,” he told Germany’s Bayerischer Rundfunk radio. “We fear that this decision could become a precedent. The Taliban will continue trying to take hostages to attain their aims in Afghanistan.”

A German engineer and four Afghan colleagues kidnapped a day before the South Koreans are still being held.

Afghanistan has seen a rash of kidnappings of foreigners in the past year.

The Italian and Afghan governments were heavily criticized in March for agreeing to free five Taliban prisoners to win the release of an Italian journalist. The head of the Italian aid agency Emergency also has said Rome also paid a $2 million ransom last year for a kidnapped Italian photographer — a claim Italian officials did not deny.

 

[GAP]

Millions in aid gone astray, group says
Thursday August 30, 2007 (1948 PST)
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OTTAWA: The Canadian government has done little to relieve the suffering of the Afghan people, says a policy group that cites the disappearance of millions of aid dollars, an absence of oversight, and thousands of refugees who have been left to starve.

The Canadian International Development Agency says Canada has committed to spending $1.2-billion between 2001 and 2011 to foster the reconstruction of Afghanistan. By its own accounting, it transferred $39-million last year to the volatile Kandahar district, where Canadian troops are stationed, and another $100-million to the country at large.

But the Senlis Council, an international think tank that examines security and development issues, has been working in the country for two years and says it is hard-pressed to find positive results from that expenditure.

"We were not able to see any substantial impact of CIDA's work in Kandahar and, as a matter of fact, we saw many instances of the extreme suffering of the Afghan people," Norine MacDonald, the council's president and lead field researcher, told a press conference.

When the Senlis Council originally complained that Canadian aid was ineffective, CIDA officials offered a list of Afghan projects that the agency had funded and asked that researchers be dispatched to check them out, Ms. MacDonald said.

What they found this month were an overcrowded and filthy hospital in Kandahar city that could provide few services to patients; refugee camps that had gone without food aid for 11/2 years; a construction project that employed child labour, and a displaced population struggling to survive.

The development agency said earlier this year that it had given $350,000 to UNICEF to establish a maternal waiting home at the hospital, plus a grant of $5-million to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had specifically appealed for money for the medical facility. A later e-mail announcement reduced the $5-million figure to $3-million.

But "we could not find evidence of CIDA's work, or CIDA-funded work that matched the information given to us by CIDA" at the hospital, Ms. MacDonald said.

The maternity project was supposed to have been operating in a temporary tent on hospital grounds. But the tent was empty on the day the Senlis researchers arrived. And the next day it was gone.

CIDA officials say UNICEF had set up a temporary maternity project that is no longer running but will be re-established on a permanent basis with much more funding. Ms. MacDonald said she was told that it had simply never existed.
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[MarkOttawa]

ARTICLES FOUND AUGUST 31

La France redéploie ses avions de combat dans le Sud afghan
LE MONDE | 30.08.07
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3216,36-949304@51-947771,0.html

a France a décidé de s'impliquer davantage en Afghanistan. Le ministre français de la défense, Hervé Morin, doit effectuer un voyage au Tadjikistan et en Afghanistan, du 6 au 8 septembre. Il profitera de cette occasion pour annoncer que les avions de combat Mirage 2000 D et Mirage F-1, qui se livrent à des missions de bombardement dans le sud de l'Afghanistan à partir de l'aéroport de Douchanbé au Tadjikistan, vont être prochainement stationnés sur celui de Kandahar, la grande ville du sud afghan.


Cette décision, prise à la mi-août et officiellement présentée comme un "redéploiement technique", souligne la volonté politique de la France de répondre favorablement aux appels pressants lancés par l'Alliance atlantique et Washington pour une plus grande implication militaire des pays européens en Afghanistan, en particulier dans le Sud et l'Est où se déroule l'essentiel des combats contre les talibans. Elle confirme aussi de facto la volonté de rapprochement avec les Etats-Unis, récemment affirmée par le président Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sur les six avions de chasse actuellement basés à Douchanbé, trois auront rejoint Kandahar à la fin du mois de septembre, et trois autres mi-octobre. Les quelque 150 personnels de soutien de ce dispositif aérien les rejoindront progressivement [emphasis added]. Il n'est cependant pas question d'abandonner le site de l'aéroport de Douchanbé, chèrement négocié par Paris avec les autorités du Tadjikistan et convoité par les Etats-Unis. "Douchanbé, précise un officier, reste le cordon ombilical, le point d'entrée sur le théâtre afghan."

Les deux avions de transport C-160 Transall y resteront donc, et la France maintiendra un ou deux avions de ravitaillement C-135 à Manas, au Kirghizstan. L'aéroport de Kandahar est désormais le principal site militaire pour les opérations que l'OTAN poursuit en Afghanistan, via sa Force internationale d'assistance à la sécurité (ISAF) : 11 000 soldats étrangers y sont stationnés, ainsi qu'une centaine d'avions de combat, notamment américains, britanniques, néerlandais, australiens et canadiens [oops!].

Si la France ne modifie pas la mission de ses avions, ni l'ampleur de ses moyens, les Mirage vont cependant gagner en efficacité, dans la mesure où ils pourront mener des missions de plus longue durée, en économisant le temps du trajet aller-retour de Douchanbé au sud de l'Afghanistan, soit plus de deux heures. Sur le plan diplomatique, il est significatif que la France accepte de positionner ses avions de combat dans le sud de l'Afghanistan, qui plus est sur une base qui est sous la responsabilité des forces américaines...

Comme l'a récemment annoncé M. Sarkozy, la France va augmenter de 150 soldats le nombre de ses instructeurs militaires, qui seront affectés auprès du 201e corps de l'armée afghane, dans la région de Kaboul [emphasis added].

Au total, un millier de soldats français sont présents en Afghanistan. Fin 2007, 20 % de cet effectif devrait être consacré à des tâches de formation et d'encadrement de l'armée afghane. La décision de Paris de stationner son groupe aérien à Kandahar sera bien reçue à l'OTAN, où l'on y verra une volonté de Paris d'accélérer son retour complet au sein de l'Alliance atlantique.

Mark
Ottawa

 

[GAP]

Dutch decision on Afghanistan affects Canada
TheStar August 31, 2007  Chantal Hébert
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OTTAWA - Any day now, the government of the Netherlands is expected to chart the future of its deployment in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan. One way or another, the decision will add fuel to the raging fire of the debate on Canada's own role in the region.

If the Dutch pull out of the province at the end of their tour, they stand to trigger a domino effect that would almost certainly see Canada follow suit in early 2009. In the absence of volunteer countries to step into the breach, the mission as it is currently configured by NATO would have to be put back on the drawing board. But if the Dutch opt to extend their stay, the burden of rocking the NATO boat by bailing out stands to fall squarely on Canadian shoulders.

The Netherlands' rotation in southern Afghanistan is slated to end in 12 months, but the country is under intense NATO pressure to sign up for another tour.

There, as in Canada, the external pressures to extend the mission are on a collision course with public opinion.

A majority in the Netherlands is dubious as to the merit of the deployment and hostile to its extension.

The advent this week of a 10th Dutch casualty in Afghanistan prompted headlines that have become familiar in Canada. One newspaper wondered how many deaths the Netherlands public would tolerate before it lost all faith in the deployment. Government officials scrambled to state that there would be no premature end to the mission.

Like Paul Martin's former Liberal government, the Dutch government stressed the reconstruction aspects of the mission when it first signed its troops up for their current duties in 2006.

Ten casualties later, there are those who feel the case was deliberately misstated.

A Radio Netherlands program broadcast last month pointedly asked whether the Dutch had been "hoodwinked" into a combat role in Afghanistan. That report and the range of views it presented could just as easily have been assembled in Canada.

When Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende visited Ottawa in June, the Dutch journalists on hand were almost exclusively concerned with the Afghan issue. With his Canadian colleague watching, Balkenende fended off their questions by repeating that he would propose a follow-up plan to his parliament by the end of the summer.
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