Afghanistan – Pike & Hurricane

YNTR – May 2020: New government in Israel, Afghanistan & the Taliban, and attacks on civilians in Syria

EditorChief — Sun, 17 May 2020 15:30:13 +0000

Israel. The new government of Israel was sworn in on the 14th of May. Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz eventually succeeded in forming a government after one and a half years without a functioning government. The contract of the coalition says that for the first 18 months, Netanyahu will serve as premier. After this period, Gantz, who serves in the meantime as defense minister, will take on the role for another 1.5 years. Together they serve as prime minister and “alternate prime minister”.

Afghanistan. After attacks at a clinic and a funeral, president Ashraf Ghani orders the resumption of military attacks against the Taliban. While the Taliban deny any responsibility for the attacks, the government gave orders to the military to be rather offensive against armed groups, contrary to the defensive approach of the United States who is currently withdrawing troops. US officials had previously been in talks with Taliban and signed an “agreement for bringing peace”.

Syria. The report “Nowhere is safe for us: Unlawful attacks and mass displacement in north-west Syria” by the human rights organisation Amnesty International reports on attacks on schools and medical facilities in Syria. While civilians are targeted and massively affected, there is evidence for the use of cluster munition, which is against the international law. This puts new pressure on the ruling dictator al-Assad and the Russian military, which supports the Syrian government. The report is among others based on interviews with displaced people, teachers, doctors and humanitarian workers in aid organisations.

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Portrait of a female warlord

Oliver Ösmark — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:00:11 +0000

The Taliban are well-versed in crime. En masse, they’ve effectively run the gamut of all crimes founded on a total contempt for humanity, in all its forms, except for those that abide by the constrictive and unaccommodating codification of ethics only they have authorship of. As is common among terror organizations and their death-worship, they set those enthralled under their tyranny up to fail, and relish in imparting the brutal—many times fatal—penalties for noncompliance. Amorality and psychopathy are rewarded with the spoils of their “holy” war, and in a society which offers no commensurate glory for the person with little aspiration for the homicidal narcissism of the Taliban Jihadist, fear prevails.

With good reason. More than 10,000 civilians in Afghanistan were killed or injured last year, of which 47% is attributed to Taliban actions. These numbers have been stable since 2014, from which they escalated at a worrying rate in 2009. The UN estimates that civilian casualties have exceeded 100,000 since the organization began documenting the impact of the Afghan war more than a decade ago. Much like ISIL’s genocidal murder and abductions of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children shortly after declaring themselves a state in June 2014, the Taliban have their own sins yet to be answered for.

In the mid-1990’s, the Taliban committed to a strategy of fear and bloodshed targeting civilians. UN officials stated that between 1996–2006 there had been as many as 15 massacres. One such was the attack on Mazar-e Sharif in August 1998, representing one of the single worst examples of killings of civilians in the wars that have raged in the Afghan region since the Soviet invasion of 1979. In what is considered an act of ethnic cleansing, the Taliban launched an attack on the city and began killing an estimated 5,000-6,000 ethnic Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks indiscriminately. This society of dread and servility under threat of death will have shaped generations that have known little else but war.

Kaftar, the dove of war

In the mountains outside of the Baghlan Province in northern Afghanistan, an ex-commander with the mujahideen that fought the Soviet forces operates out of a compound with an alleged 150 fighters. Her name is Bibi Aisha Habibi and she is Afghanistan’s only known female warlord. She is referred to as Kaftar, or “dove” in Dari; a diminutive sobriquet—by one account—given to her by her father because she would quickly move from place to place as if she were a bird. She was born in 1953, in the village of Gawi in Baghlan province’s Nahrin District, the daughter of an important community leader, or arbob. She was one of the middle children of 10, and, being as she remembers it, her father’s favorite. She’d follow him around as he worked to settle disputes and give advice to villagers on matters of farming and family affairs.

She was engaged at the age of 12 to a man 10 year her senior. This was normal practice for most girls living in rural Afghanistan; where around 80% of the Afghan population live. Unlike other girls she wasn’t removed from public life and it was agreed—and consented to by her husband—that she’d continue to be allowed to act on her father’s behalf as an arbob. She took pleasure in working as an intermediary in marriage disputes; sometimes forcing families to allow women to choose whom they wanted to marry. Also, she implemented rules to reduce dowries, which was an obstacle for many couples not able to marry under previous conditions. In the wars to come, her husband would stay at home with their 7 children while she rode into battle.

In 1979, the Soviets invaded. A group of Soviet commandos swarmed her mountain and killed many villagers, including her son. She took to Jihad and against the Soviet forces for the next ten years. She lost family both to the Soviets as well as the Taliban which was in conflict with the mujahideen. After the Soviets, the Taliban would eventually take Kabul and control up to three-fourths of the country. In the years to follow, Kaftar would lose brothers, sons, nieces, and nephews to the Taliban.

She considers herself a collector of lost and exiled men. Her fighters consist of ex-Taliban, ex-mujahedeen, fighters of dejected ethnic minorities compelled to take up arms against the threat of bandits, brigands, and Taliban. Yet, she has herself lost family that swore allegiance to the Taliban and has, on numerous occasions, been a target of assassination attempts orchestrated by relatives. Regarding this she says, “It’s really painful when your own family members come to kill you, and then later it’s painful when you kill them.”

War all the time

With the U.S. invasion in 2001, she thought that peace would be imminent. The Taliban were routed to the south and east part of the country by coalition forces and trained Afghan security forces. Armed unaffiliated militia groups like Kaftar’s were seen as a destabilizing factor, and in 2006—convinced by the prospect of peace—she agreed to surrender most of her and her fighters’ weapons as a part of the UN’s Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups programme.

But disarmament hasn’t proved an effective strategy for peace in a culture already plagued by unresolved endemic conflicts. The Taliban were revived with a fresh dynamism. Troubled by family feuds of tit-for-tat violence and regular death threats made by the Taliban, Kaftar has experienced none of the peace promised to her by the UN and the “democratic transition of power” heralded by the war against the Taliban.

As the U.S. prepares to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan, many fear the return of Taliban rule. This time, however, her fighters aren’t prepared for active revolt. The legitimacy granted to the Taliban by the current peace talks give them a political advantage over the poorly armed rural resistance fighters. In a 2014 interview, she says that she would like to seek asylum outside of Afghanistan, but has to ensure the passage of 30-40 of her family members first. Without help or enough weapons, she fears that the extremist militants will target her and her family. “I was proud of my career,” she says. “But since I have been getting threats and I’m struggling and suffering, now I think I should not have become a commander. I wish I would have been just a normal housewife. That no one would know me, no one would come to talk to me, and I would have been just a normal housewife. Now I am sitting awake at night, always on guard, with a gun, ready to protect myself.”

Blood can’t wash blood

While she has, in her own way, worked to moderate the divides between men and women, and has taken an unlikely role in her society as the leader of a community and armed fighters, she is not a respected woman among warring factions and squabbling relatives. The old Afghan proverb “Zar, zan, zamin”—gold, women, land—still motivates violence in a culture of guns and rivalries. Until the paradigm of fundamentalism and lawlessness is dismantled by means of education and stable government institutions, the rule of the sword will persist and those able to fight will give their lives to protect those they hold dearest.

Kaftar knows this life all too well, but doesn’t wish it on the generations to come. The life of a warrior is a precarious one, but if it comes to the choice between fighting and submission, the prospect of subservience under Taliban rule will always inspire bloody insurgency. Despite her hardships, she knows this: “It makes no difference if you are a man or a woman when you have the heart of a fighter.”

Photo credits:

Afghanistan Observes 2007 International Peace Day, United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

High Moon over Nili, Afghanistan, United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Afghanistan-1, Ekaterina Didkovskaya, CC BY-NC 2.0

100331-F-2616H-011, Kenny Holston, CC BY-ND 2.0

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Afghanistan and Private Military Companies: Interview with Tim Foxley

Rodrigo de Souza — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 11:16:54 +0000

Following our last issue on PMCs (Private Military Companies) and Afghanistan, we interviewed Tim Foxley, an Afghanistan political and military analyst, on what he predicted would be the future of this central Asian country and which role PMCs would play after the departure of most foreign troops at the end of 2014.

Pike and Hurricane: What started your interest in this field and how did you end up working as an analyst for the British Government?

Tim Foxley: I joined (actually, I think “drifted into” is a more accurate description) the UK Ministry of Defence in 1987 after graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in 1986. This was during the time of the Cold War and when the Soviet Army was experiencing its own difficulties with counter insurgency in Afghanistan. After five fruitless and bored years of working in a finance and administration branch I got the chance to transfer over and become a political/military analyst in 1992. My “qualifications” as such were a fairly standard history and politics degree, a thesis on the evolution of trench warfare in the First World War, and an interest in military history more generally. During the 1990s, amongst the areas I looked at were security in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In the mid/late 1990s I spent some months in Sarajevo and also looked at the Kosovo conflict in 1999.

P&C: Why did you choose to become specialized in Afghanistan?

Tim Foxley: The subject of Afghanistan was more or less chosen for me! Perhaps like many analysts at the time, the events of 9/11 proved difficult to avoid. I was reassigned to a South Asian team in November 2001 and told to get on with looking at the ground conflict and start trying to understand Taliban and militia groups across the country. It was very highly-pressurised hard work, providing political and military analysis – threat assessments, security briefings and longer-term strategic analysis.

If I had a particular “lessons learned” moment from that early period, it was that during a fast moving and unexpected international crisis, far reaching decisions with strategic impact are often made when the decision makers know least about the area in which they will be operating.

P&H: Although it is hard to predict, what are the possible scenarios for the future of Afghanistan after the withdrawal of most foreign troops?

Tim Foxley: Someone once said that making predictions is difficult, particularly about the future. At the risk of parroting what most Western governments tend to say when asked this sort of question, all lot of progress has been made, but a lot of challenges remain. By any analysis, Afghanistan is going to be struggling for years. It is not enough to list out the “statistics of progress” – kilometers of road built, number of girls going to school, size of the Afghan National Army, etc. At the end of this year, almost all the international troops will have departed, baring a residual force of approximately 10,000 (remember this is down from a peak of around 140,000 in 2011) and the Taliban, although bloodied an unlikely to capture Kabul, are undefeated.

Afghanistan can clearly go in several directions after 2014. For me, the most optimistic outcome is a slow and painful improvement over several years in the security situation, leading to development of the political and economic roots that are still only quite small. The array of negative solutions include a gradual deterioration of the security situation, a more rapid collapse of the Afghan army in the face of a resurgent Taliban, the implosion of government in some form of coup, or the fragmentation of the country back into smaller, warlord-dominated fiefdoms.

I am more of a pessimist than an optimist. There are too many things that can go wrong. The new President, Ashraf Ghani, is dynamic, energetic and, as far as I can tell, honest. But he faces a lot of problems and there appear as yet to be no realistic plans for engaging in peace dialogue with the Taliban. The Taliban is certainly more emboldened this year, as ISAF forces pull out, and is engaging in larger scale operations now that they have less fear of US airpower. Two weeks ago, reports were coming out form Afghanistan that the Afghan Army is suffering “unsustainable” casualty rates.

The Master’s thesis I wrote last year as part of the Malmö University Peace and Conflict Studies, suggested that a five to ten year military stalemate was plausible and that perhaps an even greater risk than the military capabilities of the Taliban was the risk of government inertia or failure, and a battle for political control of parts of the armed forces. This might see a return to the brutal civil war of the 1990s.

P&H: What role do you think PMCs (Private Military Companies) will play in this future?

Tim Foxley: Given the diminishing role of US military activity over the last few years and the negative publicity accorded to some of the “classic” PMCs (i.e. Blackwater/Xe/Academi), I do not see an upturn in large-scale PMC activities in Afghanistan for the medium term (the next 2-3 years). Of course, many private security groups will remain – personal protection for individuals and embassy protection for example. The trend might reverse if the Afghan army suffers military reverses and recruitment problems.

P&H: Do you think increasing the use of PMCs will be norm in the future of warfare for post-conflict areas and how legal issues will be handled?

I am not sure about the “norm” but, given the West’s difficulties with complex conflicts and an apparent reluctance to directly put “boots on the ground” for the next few years, PMCs might form a less risky way of engaging. Mercenaries of various sorts will always be a quick, easy solution – albeit expensive – to conflict situations around the world. However, there are many scandals associated with PMCs and the spectacular failures in Iraq still stick in the mind.

But we must be careful these days not to simply equate “PMC” with American multi-million dollar corporations using primarily ex-Special Forces. I think the definitions might begin to blur – with the legal implications likely struggling to keep up – and become more complex. I am starting to wonder if armed local civilian groups might start to encroach into the area previously occupied by PMCs. In Afghanistan, local militia groups (effectively warlords) jumped onto the bandwagon a few years ago, providing “protection” for the movement of supplies along dangerous roads. Often their relationship with local insurgent groups is “complex”, to say the least. I think they would prefer to see themselves as PMCs and present themselves as such. Although in a slightly different context, I would also be interested to understand more about the evolution of the volunteer militia battalions in Eastern Ukraine. A study of their activities, funding, command structure and political/criminal connections might be very interesting.

By Rodrigo de Souza

Image Credit:

Image 1: DVIDSHUB, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Image 2: The U.S. Army, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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