Kabul, Afghanistan
credit: courtesy of @saadmohseni Twitter feed
“There is a young and forward looking generation of youth that don’t want to associate themselves with the warlordism/the Civil War of the 1990s, that identify themselves as Afghans and don’t identify themselves necessarily along ethnic lines. Afghanistan has a very robust and vital press compared to its neighbors I think. And they enjoy I think a much more healthy level of dissent, political dialogue, than many of its neighbors and that’s a very healthy thing. As messy as the elections may be, there’s still a high degree of interest in political participation here. And… a lot more children are going to school.” — Wall Street Journal Reporter Nathan Hodge (Kabul, Afghanistan) at a public talk “Afghanistan: The Next Phase” with Duke professors Bruce Lawrence and Jayne Huckerby, on February 26, 2014.
By *JULIE POUCHER HARBIN, EDITOR, ISLAMiCommentary, on MARCH 24, 2014:
A woman voting. Photo: courtesy Tolo News
At the end of next week (April 5), provided all goes as planned, the Afghan people will go to the polls and elect a new President. It will be the nation’s first proper democratic transition between governments in its modern history.
It looks to be a time of transition on multiple levels — political, military, security, economic.
After 12 years in country, all NATO troops are set to withdraw from Afghanistan within 9 months, by the end of 2014. On March 15, in his final speech to parliament before the elections, President Hamid Karzai said the Afghan military, which protects 93% of the country, is ready to take over entirely.
He told parliament that he won’t sign the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA). It would have allowed about 10,000 US troops to stay on. Under the BSA the bulk of the US troops that would stay on would continue to train and mentor Afghan troops, while some US special forces would also be left behind ostensibly to fight al Qaeda. (Despite Karzai’s demurral, all the nine presidential candidates have indicated they would sign.)
During his parliament address Karzai detailed his accomplishments as president including schools that function, women with more rights, new energy projects, and also a stabilized Afghan currency.
‘‘I know the future president will protect these gains and priorities and will do the best for peace in the country and I, as an Afghan citizen, will support peace and will cooperate.’’
Overshadowing this optimism are Taleban threats to “use all force” to disrupt the polls and a warning to Afghans not to participate in the elections. There’s already been increased violence in the run-up to the elections.
Early last Thursday morning Taleban insurgents killed 10 police officers and a civilian at a police station in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, and later that night gunmen killed at least 9 people — including an AFP reporter, his wife and two children, a Paraguayan elections observer, an Afghan MP, another Afghan women, and two attackers — while Afghans were celebrating Norooz (Persian New Year) at Kabul’s upmarket Serena Hotel. The Taleban claimed responsibility.
From the Feb. 2 start of the campaign period up to March 16, independent monitors from the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan had reported at least seven murders, one assassination attempt and several incidents of election-related violence and intimidation.
And just yesterday, The Guardian reported that two foreign election observer and support missions pulled staff out of Afghanistan following the hotel attack, “in a move that could undermine confidence in the outcome of next month’s vote.”
… Late last month the Duke Islamic Studies Center’s ISLAMiCommentary project and Duke Law convened a public panel to discuss Afghanistan’s transition. Emeritus Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies Bruce Lawrence, who had been following developments in Afghanistan since the 1970s, moderated the public talk.
Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Duke Jayne Huckerby, most recently a human rights adviser to UN Women, discussed the rollback of women’s rights ahead of the transition. Huckerby’s work on Afghanistan has mainly been at the international level; developing frameworks for how to support and ensure women’s rights in conflict and post conflict contexts and working with women’s rights groups in Afghanistan on implementation.
Wall Street Journal Reporter Nathan Hodge, who’s covered Afghanistan for several years, participated in a pre-taped interview with Bruce Lawrence the week before, and also joined the Duke group via Skype from Kabul to give his on- the-ground assessments and analysis.
There was a lot of ground to cover.
March 19 Ashraf Ghani campaign rally in the Awden desert in northern Kunduz province, Afghanistan.
Photo: Twitter feed of Habib Khan Totakhil (@HabibKhanT)
Afghanistan Goes to the Polls
First, the election timeline. While Karzai is due to step down – he’s limited by the constitution from seeking another term — his departure, realistically, might not come for some time.
Provided elections go forward April 5, there’s likely to be a second round, said Hodge, which according to Afghanistan’s Independent Elections Commission, would likely be sometime later in May. Taking into account further vote counting, adjudication of disputes and the like, a new president might not be in place before mid-to-late summer. (In other words, if the new president kept to his campaign promise and signed the BSA, it might not leave enough time to adjust to facts on the ground.)
Hodge warned there could be protests over the results and allegations of fraud as there was following the 2009 presidential election.
The ideal outcome for Afghans and the international community alike, he said, is an election that’s credible, seen as fair, and doesn’t become “embroiled in violence.”
There is also widespread concern, especially in insecure areas, about how the polls will be monitored, Hodge said: “Is there going to be ballot stuffing in places where security is bad? How do you win an election in parts of the country where people are worried about Taleban intimidation, where they’re worried about violence on the day of the polls ?”
“Certainly I’m not in the business of trying to predict how the election will come out but the ideal outcome at least in the eyes of the international community and most of the ordinary Afghans that we speak to, and officials we speak to, is an election that doesn’t become embroiled in violence; that there is not major or massive violent disruption of the election by the Taleban, by other groups, and that it is not a result that leads some of the factions — the traditional factions that fought each other in the (Afghan) Civil War in the 90s — to rearm… because that’s what led to considerable destruction of part of the city of Kabul, and the deaths of a lot of people in the 1990s,” said Hodge. “No one would like to see a reprise of that, but if the elections are not seen as fair, and if they are seen as giving short shrift to one or another group, then it could be potentially dangerous.”
As of this week there were nine presidential contenders remaining in the field. Former Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, and Qayyum Karzai, brother of current President Hamid Karzai, both dropped out in recent weeks.
Abdullah Abdullah (Photo: US embassy Kabul/Flickr)
One candidate who’s been seen as a likely frontrunner is Abdullah Abdullah, a former Foreign Minister who came in second place in the 2009 election with more than 30% of the vote but during the second round “withdrew from a head-to-head runoff with incumbent Karzai, claiming he lacked confidence that the ballot would be free and fair.”
Said Hodge, “He’s said to this paper (WSJ), that his main enemy in this campaign is going to be fraud.”
Another contender, one who placed a distant fourth in the 2009 election, but who’s also on the frontrunner list, is Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai.
Duke professor Lawrence — who first met him back when Ghani was an academic in the ‘70s and before Ghani joined the World Bank — recently had the chance to see him again. Ghani’s benefit is also his deficit: he is so closely connected to overseas forces that have countered the Taleban that Ghani, in Lawrence’s words, “has to defend himself against the perception that he lacks the ability to connect with voters.” Bluntly stated, is Ghani too connected with the international community to get Afghan votes?
Ashraf Ghani (photo: US embassy Kabul/Flickr)
Ghani returned to Afghanistan in 2001 following the defeat of the Taleban to serve as Special Advisor to UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. It was he who “helped draw up the Bonn Agreement that shaped structures for the new Afghan state.” He went on to serve as finance minister with the transitional government before running for president in 2009 and placing a distant fourth.
Lawrence asked Hodge about the read on Ghani’s chances this time around.
“He is well known in the international community and is well known in development circles and is a prominent thinker about development issues,” said Hodge. “He’s come into I think, it’s fair to say, more prominence in the past couple of years. He was the chief transition advisor to President Karzai, which meant that he spent a lot of time travelling around the country, meeting with provincial and district leaders to talk about how this process of handing over responsibility for security would happen across the country as U.S. troops drew down.”
Ashraf Ghani’s wife making a women’s day speech in Loya Jirga tent, Kabul, March 8, 2014. Photo: Twitter feed of @SultanFaizy
Ghani is a member of an influential family within the Ahmadzai, a powerful Pashtun tribe.
“He (Ghani) joined forces with (his choice for first vice-president) Abdul Rashid Dostum who’s a prominent former warlord who can be counted on to draw a good number of votes in the north, which is an interesting move,” said Hodge. “One of the things that happened after Ghani joined forces with Dostum was that Dostum issued an apology for some of the … misdeeds that happened in the past, during the (Afghan) civil war, which was a pretty remarkable thing.”
This political move, according to an Institute for War & Peace Reporting pre-election write-up about the candidates, is “a prime example of the kind of coalition-building that candidates have resorted to.”
The Women’s Vote & Women’s Rights: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?
Also important to coalition-building is the women’s vote – which can’t be underestimated.
While there are no female candidates for president, three of the candidates have named female second vice presidents — all with teaching backgrounds — to their tickets this year.
Hedayat Amin Arsala (left) (Photo: US embassy Kabul/Flickr); Safia Seddiqi (right) (Photo: http://www.afghan-bios.info/index)
Hedayat Amin Arsala a technocrat and successful economist who became the first Afghan to join the World Bank, a Foreign Minister in the mujahedin government formed in 1992, as well as Vice President, Finance Minister, and Trade and Industry Minister under Karzai, listed as his Second Vice President Kabul university lecturer and former MP Safia Seddiqi, a Pashtun. (Source: IWPR)
Zalmai Rasul, former National Security Advisor to Karzai, and a medical doctor by training who worked for the exiled monarch Zahir Shah and returned to Afghanistan in 2002, has chosen former pioneering governor of Bamiyan Province and pharmacy professor Habiba Sarobi as Second Vice President. (Source: IWPR) Rasul is one of the favorites of President Karzai, reported Hodge in November.
Zalmai Rasul (left) (Photo: Master Sgt Michael O’Connor/US Air Force); Habiba Sarobi (Photo: http://www.afghan-bios.info)
Mohammad Daud Sultanzoi, a Pashtun from Ghazni province and former pilot for United Airlines based in California, who returned to Afghanistan after 2001 and served in Ghazni’s parliament in 2005, according to IWPR, “is seen as a moderate technocrat who worked hard to get out the female vote in previous elections, and has emphasized the importance of democratic institutions.” His choice for Second Vice President is university teacher Kazima Mohaqeq, a Hazara.
Mohammad Daud Sultanzoi (Photo: Mohammad Daud Sultanzoi’s Facebook page)
“Women Could Play Influential Role in April’s Elections” read a recent Tolo News headline.
While women make up close to half of the Afghan population, so far only around 1.2 million have registered to vote. This amounts to less than half of the men registered to vote this year, according to the IEC.
In past elections many female voters cast their votes in favor of whomever their male relatives chose, but this could be changing, with women appearing “adamant about going to the polls on their own terms” this time, wrote Tolo News reporter Saleh Sadat.
But she noted that both women and men have cautioned female voters about “pandering politicians.”
“Apparently at this point, it seems like candidates are using them as a tool, meaning that they are using women’s interests as their slogan but there are no determined, specific and serious programs for them,” said MP Fowzia Kofi, the head of the Women’s Affairs Committee of the Afghan House of Representatives, according to Sadat’a report.
Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf (left) with his running mates Ismail Khan and Abdul Wahhab Irfan. Photo: Mina Habib, IWPR
The candidacy of Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf, a former mujahedin commander (the Ittehad-e-Slami faction) and one of the most conservative of the leading candidates, has raised a lot of concern in diplomatic circles, Hodge said, about his commitment to women’s rights. Rabb has opposed women’s rights legislation in the past.
“It was very interesting to me to attend his campaign rally in what’s called the Loya Jirga hall here in Kabul. There was only a very small group of women who attended and Sayyaf actually went on an extended riff addressing international criticism of his record on women’s rights. And one of the points he made is that he actually supported the rights of women to exercise their political rights to go out and vote, to be in the workplace, to work outside of the home, but in addition to women’s rights he also emphasized that, and I think this was code word for the audience he was addressing, ‘protecting the dignity of women’, which I think some people, women’s rights advocates would view with skepticism. Dignity according to whom and who decides? Obviously this is going to be a problem and he’s faced a lot of questions about it.”
A Pashtun from Kabul province, Sayyaf was educated at Cairo’s al-Azhar University and is seen as a religious conservative, as is his running mate former governor of Herat Ismail Khan. (Source: IWPR)
“There’s a lot of trepidation around the upcoming elections in Afghanistan, not only a concern about the number of candidates who are not conducive to women’s rights protection,” said Duke law professor Huckerby, “but a broader concern that, in a post-reconciliation phase in Afghanistan, women’s rights will be bartered away, will be part of what gets dropped off the table, in an attempt to promote a cohesive government structure.”
Warned Huckerby, “There’s a lot of concern about what a drawdown looks like, what the support will be, and who will be the remaining advocates for women’s rights in Afghanistan in that event. ”
Speaking to the escalation of violence against women and girls and their increasing insecurity, she not only mentioned attacks by the Taliban insurgency on female officials, including assassination attempts, but also said women were coming under increasing threat from their own government.
“When I talk to my colleagues in Afghanistan, it’s like we’re fighting on both fronts,” she said.
She and Hodge both drew attention to what the international community would call backsliding on women’s rights in recent weeks and months.
Women’s rights efforts have lately gone both toward “maintaining existing gains,” Huckerby said, “whilst also trying to advance laws.”
For example, parliament recently sought to abolish a quota law, Huckerby said, that had secured women’s representation at 25% in provincial councils. Women’s advocates directed their attention to keeping that law, and did end up saving it but with the quota reduced to 20%. (Provincial Council elections will be held concurrently with the presidential elections on April 5)
Huckerby described another two laws that were recently introduced in parliament (seemingly “out of nowhere”); one that gives fathers a greater role in terms of arranging child marriages, and a second one — a proposed amendment to the domestic violence law that would ban family members from giving evidence in cases of domestic violence abuse, “essentially making it impossible to pursue any prosecution for family based crimes.”
Karzai has sent the proposed amendment back to parliament with a request to look at it again, so the law’s ultimate fate remains unclear.
“The fact that it was even introduced and the gravity of what it sought to do is a really bad indicator of where women’s rights protection are in Afghanistan,” said Huckerby.
Ward of the International Community? Nation Building…and Breakdown
Keeping US troops in Afghanistan beyond the deadline is seen as “very important” to Afghanistan’s political elite who are anxious and concerned about what will happen if in fact the zero option (the full and total withdrawal of US troops) is exercised, Hodge said, not least because an extended military presence “comes with strings attached, that is – money.”
“Afghanistan is still a ward of the international community,” he said, explaining that Afghanistan depends on international aid to fund the operations and pay the salaries of the government, the military and the police.
Ordinary citizens are also worried.
A good chunk of the economy of the past 10-12 years has grown up around the “delivery of aid and the provision of services to the US military and its allies,” said Hodge, and that aid is slowly starting to wind down. “Some of the biggest businesses you have here in Afghanistan are people delivering food and fuel to the US military, who were constructing bases, or doing US military funded reconstruction projects and internationally funded reconstruction projects. So that’s going to shift. And its unclear really what the model will be for Afghanistan to sustain itself as a state.”
Aid to Afghanistan— whether implemented directly by governments, militaries, or NGOs (funded by governments or private donors or institutions) — has gone towards a wide range of projects including not only support for the national government and provincial governments (which already have trouble extracting money from the center) and police and military training, but the building and re-building of roads, infrastructure, schools, and medical clinics, and other initiatives including legal and media training, women’s and human rights advocacy, and a host of other projects.
If Afghanistan itself is “a ward of the international community,” Huckerby said, women’s rights advocacy, particularly, “is a ward of the international community in a sense that pretty much all funding for women’s rights groups comes from international donors.”
Jeff Gustafson, a Masters of Environmental Management candidate at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, has been looking at how the military has used environmental intervention and agriculture development as a tool for counter insurgency.
“Given the withdrawal promise, I would imagine that development aid and development reach in Afghanistan is going to shrink dramatically,” he said, asking Hodge during the panel discussion, “I wonder what you think of the footprint of the development work that’s gone in. We’ve poured billions and billions of dollars into Afghanistan with murky results. What do you see as the future of this important development work and what will be left behind?”
Hodge, whose 2011 book — Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders — covers armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti, spoke to the scale of development work both by the military and aid agencies:
“It’s really been an extraordinary experiment in what I would call armed state building, which is the US military has gotten involved in doing development work on a scale that really hadn’t been seen since the Vietnam War. If we look at just the raw numbers I think it’s over 90 billion has been spent on reconstruction and development work in Afghanistan and a good chunk of that money has been spent by the traditional aid agencies, like the US Agency for International Development (USAID)… What the military though, I think as you rightly pointed out, has learned is that aid is not easy. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t necessarily fix things. It very often causes new problems. If you’re a commander, for instance with a base and you’re building a road, to win the loyalty or support or just discourage a local community from having people lay mines or improvised explosive devices, you might find that there’s another community that’s been left out of the equation.”
Military aid is indeed a tricky business, and has drawn fire for a number of reasons, especially from the humanitarian aid and development community and women’s rights advocates.
Huckerby said she has spent a lot of time talking to USAID, the State Department and the Pentagon about these kinds of issues, through research she’s done in Kenya and Pakistan.
“I think it’s very important when we talk about the move to have development as a countering violent extremism (CVE) tool, that that actually has huge consequences for women’s rights, which we don’t talk about enough. When you have the military being involved in aid distribution, the military do not have the attention to a gender perspective in the ways in which you are trained to do in development 101.”
The Drug War: A Losing Battle?
Poppies
One example of what Hodge called “a fire hose of dollars” is international efforts to shut down opium production.
All kinds of aid from various quarters, including the military, has been poured into trying to find alternative livelihoods/crops for opium farmers – people who depend on growing the poppy to make a living.
“None of this has really changed the basic fact that a good chunk of the GDP here is through the illicit economy that’s been growing opium. It hasn’t weaned farmers away from what’s a very good and durable crop; one that is a great hedge against uncertainty,” Hodge said.
It’s also, of course, a lucrative source of income for the Taleban and other insurgencies as well as for criminal groups.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reports that opium cultivation rose 36 % and production rose 49% in 2013; record highs.
“As we approach 2014 and the withdrawal of international forces from the country, the results of the Afghanistan Opium Survey 2013 should be taken for what they are – a warning, and an urgent call to action,” said the UNODC chief back in November when the report was released.
According to UNDOC, “the link between insecurity and opium cultivation observed in the country since 2007 was still evident in 2013” and “almost 90 % of opium poppy cultivation in 2013 remained confined to nine provinces in the southern and western regions, which include the most insurgency-ridden provinces in the country.”
“Especially in Helmand, the opium growing heartland — which has one of the most violent districts in the country (Sangin) — it’s been difficult for the Afghan National Army and police to keep charge of security operations,” said Hodge, “and they sustained heavy casualties last year as a result of a renewed push last summer by the Taleban to push them out.”
Battling the Insurgency; Can Afghanistan Go it Alone?
“Afghanistan still faces a pretty resilient insurgency, and the worry is of course that Afghanistan’s army and police won’t be able to hold the line (against the Taleban and other insurgencies),” Hodge noted, “if international money and support dries up.”
“Since mid-Summer of last year,” he added, “the Afghan army and police have been bearing the brunt of the casualties (as opposed to foreign troops).”
The Taleban are not the only threat to a lasting peace in Afghanistan; there’s more than one insurgency engaged in armed opposition to the government — including the Pakistan-based/Taleban affiliated Quetta Shura, the Hakkani Network, Gulbaddin Hekmatyar’s group Hezb I Islami, and others — with some of these groups more reconcilable than others.
Smriti Sharma, an MIDP (Masters of International Development Policy) candidate at the Sanford School of Public Policy, observing that the Taleban doesn’t have nearly the level of popular support they enjoyed in the 90s, asked Hodge just how much “political leverage” the Taleban has now?
“With the Taleban killing 21 soldiers while they were asleep (Feb. 23, eastern Kunar Province) and those kinds of atrocities being committed, why is it that Karzai is so interested in engaging with them? Do they have that sort of political hold on people that they still remain relevant?” she added.
The Feb. 23 killings had prompted a wave of popular anger against the Taleban; a public funeral and small rally was held in Kabul to show support for the troops who were killed in that raid on their military outpost. The Taleban ended up releasing two Afghan army personnel captured during that raid, after the military agreed to hand over to the Taliban the bodies of their colleagues left behind on the battlefield.
“Afghanistan does have a new sliver of what you could call a middle class which is online and very connected, and people were basically saying (on social media) things like ‘why is it that Karzai addresses the Taleban as brother Taleban,” Hodge said. “This is his (Karzai’s) way I think of trying to reach out to the insurgency in hopes of reconciliation. But that’s the kind of rhetoric that angers a lot of people, certainly among what you would say this kind of urbanizing class of Afghans.”
Hodge elaborated on the status of peace talks: “We have a situation here where there was an attempt to bring the Taleban to formal negotiations mid-summer of last year around the time that there was also this security transition going on, but the entire enterprise fell apart over, in part, President Karzai’s outrage over the opening of a Taleban office in Qatar which seemed to have the trappings of a government in exile or a government in waiting. There was this moment where they raised the Taleban flag over their office and this infuriated president Karzai.”
Then last month it appeared there was perhaps a new opening; former Taleban ministers, field commanders and diplomats in the UAE, who are willing to talk peace, but the Taleban disavowed them.
“One of the talking points that we get, the Presidential Palace says well if the government of Pakistan was able to at least try to initiate some kind of dialogue or talks with the TTP, the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan), then why can’t the Afghan government talk to the Afghan Taliban? But we’ve also seen in Pakistan that the efforts to bring dialogue between the government in Islamabad and the Pakistani Taliban have really faltered because of lots of attacks and violence, and so it makes it a lot harder to be optimistic that there can be an immediate end and happy outcome here.”
Hodge stressed, “The Taleban is a military organization that’s very committed to fighting the government, not participating in the political process.”
The Future of Counter-Terrorism Efforts
Despite the financial bottom line that military support brings, it can also be argued that Afghans have grown weary of the foreign military presence; angry over the deaths of innocent civilians — whether by airstrikes on checkpoints, targeted drone strikes, raids, bombs, or battles; whether due to mistaken identity, wrong-place-wrong-time scenarios, or other reasons.
“There’s no doubt that the US and its allies have caused a lot of civilian harm… Hamid Karzai has presented himself as the defender of Afghan sovereignty. He said that he wants to be the one who makes sure that Americans can’t kick down doors at night in Afghan homes… round up, or arrest or kill Afghan citizens. He’s sort of staked his claim on this,” said Hodge.
Post-2014 will Afghanistan continue to be a platform for drone strikes or anti-terrorism strikes ?
Former US Ambassador to Afghanistan and former soldier Karl Eikenberry, in a talk at Duke in early March, argued that while it’s time for the US to reduce its presence in the country, a small US military force would be needed there for some time to come.
He layed out two remaining “critical missions” in Afghanistan.
“One is counterterrorism. We need a military presence, and even more importantly we need the military infrastructure to enable the Central Intelligence Agency to keep after its intelligence operations across the border. That’s what enabled us to locate Bin Laden,” Eikenberry said. ”Secondly, we need U.S. military forces and NATO allies to help Afghanistan continue to build its army and police forces. They still need a lot of advising and mentoring.”
A “zero option” would of course mean the closure of US bases — including the “mini-American-town” north of Kabul that is Bagram Air Base. (though the Afghans could certainly take them over)
Without US or NATO bases in Afghanistan, anti-terrorism strikes, never mind even a limited military training mission, could be logistically challenging, Hodge argues.
“In order to have drones and special operations groups and all these other things you need to have a base and it’s not just as simple as having a piece of land, an airstrip that you can you can launch things from. You need to be able to protect and defend that base and that means you have to have a contingent that is dedicated to force protection, perimeter defense and then you need to have the resupply that’s safe… So it’s kind of like the self licking ice cream cone, to use my favorite military term, you can’t just have a limited number of special operations troops. They’re not totally self-sufficient. They need either some kind of conventional support or some kind of base to operate from. That leads to friction in communities where the bases are. That creates targets.”
These kinds of operations also demand some kind of intelligence behind them.
“If the intelligence is bad, the target is probably going to be wrong and you may end up killing somebody, you may end up killing civilians, you may end up killing a family,” Hodge said.
Regional Stakeholders
While relations between Washington and Kabul have been frosty these past few months and much of the discussions around Afghanistan of late have revolved around the future of American aid and security, it’s also important not to neglect or discount Afghanistan’s relationship with regional stakeholders, especially Pakistan and India.
“I do think that a lot of what happens in Pakistan impacts Afghanistan and vice versa,” said Duke professor Lawrence (who was last in Pakistan four months ago) addressing the larger regional issue. “Can there ever be a stable government, I won’t call it a peace, lets say an ongoing durable government in Afghanistan as long as India’s a threat?”
“I know many Pakistanis who have been educated in the US or Canada who still say, without being pressed really hard, our real enemy is India, and as long as India’s a threat, Afghanistan has to be controlled for Pakistani interests,” said Lawrence. “The difficulty is structural. There is a huge asymmetry between the populations, the economies, and also the military capacities of these two neighbors in the Asian subcontinent. Pakistan always feels like the Avis, the number two. Not taken seriously by Western powers, it therefore courts China, the historical and strategic adversary of India. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, plays out here.”
In response to Lawrence’s query, Hodge noted that “Pakistan…has a military and an intelligence apparatus that sees Afghanistan as part of a strategic depth, a place that they can fall back on when confronting their main traditional adversary which is India.” He noted that Iran could “potentially also play a very important role in Afghanistan.”
“What we haven’t seen is any kind of effort to really fix Afghanistan’s largest problem which is that it is landlocked and it doesn’t really have a way to trade with the outside world without cooperating with its neighbors. So this really complicates matters and transportation routes. There’s sort of an idea or maybe a vision that Afghanistan could be the heart of some kind of new communications network that links Central Asia with South Asia but that’s going to involve railways, roads, infrastructure … billions of dollars which haven’t been spent there,” said Hodge.
Hope?
As literacy slowly improves, aided by access to many more sources of information (through TV, radio, print, internet) and increased cell phone and internet penetration, people have “more information available to them about what the world outside looks like,” concluded Hodge, “and that leaves me a little bit more optimistic that there’s not just going to be a version of the 1990s take 2, (that) it’s going to be doom and gloom.”
With this caveat – that “there’s going to be some really difficult problems ahead, and we’ve seen in other countries how quickly things can unravel even in a situation where you’ve got a developed economy and educated populations. Syria would be a really good case in point.”
“I think that Afghanistan will probably be studied for a long time, for better or for worse as a laboratory of all kinds of failed experiments in nation-building and counter insurgency…. To use the military term, there will be other contingencies, there will be other Afghanistans… but one would hope there’s some kind of serious study and all of the lessons of how to deliver aid in these kinds of complex circumstances aren’t just going to be thrown out the window,” said Hodge, as part of his concluding remarks to a very interested group of Duke professors, students and the public. “It’s very heartening that there are people out there actually still looking at these kinds of problems and hopefully drawing some of the lessons from the past 12 years of involvement here in Afghanistan. And hopefully figuring out ways to do it better and to do it right.”
“At the very least, Americans of all generations, but especially those who do not recall either the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the nearly 10 year war there (December 1979-February 1989), have to realize that in-between- zones like Afghanistan can shape the destinies of those on their borders,” said Lawrence after the talk. “They can also affect the world order, and all those, including the US, with a stake in its preservation. Whatever the outcome of the imminent elections, the US cannot afford to do what it did in 1989: turn its back on Afghanistan and allow it to revert to the status of a rogue state.”
For profiles of the presidential candidates (posted before Abdul Rahim Wardak and Qayyum Karzai dropped out, see these Institute for War & Peace Reporting candidate profiles)
Nathan Hodge is a Kabul-based correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders (Bloomsbury, February 2011) , a book about the American experience in nation-building. He is also co-author of A Nuclear Family Vacation, a travelogue about nuclear weaponry. He joined the Wall Street Journal in 2010 after a decade covering military affairs and national security, reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places around the world. His work has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Jane’s Defence Weekly and Wired. In 2012, he received the National Press Club’s Dornheim award for coverage of U.S. defense policy. He was a Pew Fellow in International Journalism in 2004, and holds a B.A. from Rutgers and an M.A. from Yale.
Jayne Huckerby is Associate Clinical Professor of Law and director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Duke University School of Law. Prior to joining Duke Law, she was a human rights consultant with UN Women on gender equality and constitutional reform; women in conflict prevention, conflict, and post-conflict contexts; and gender and human rights indicators in national security policies. She was previously Research Director and Adjunct Professor of Clinical Law at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law, where she directed NYU Law’s project on the United States, Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism. Huckerby has led multiple fieldwork investigations, provided capacity building to civil society and governments in five regions, and frequently serves as a human rights law expert to international governmental organizations and NGOs, including the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. She also has extensive domestic, regional (Africa, Americas, Europe) and international litigation and advocacy experience. She has written and co-authored numerous articles, book chapters, and human rights reports, and is most recently the co-editor of Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives (Routledge 2012). She has a BA.LLB (Hons 1) from the University of Sydney and a LL.M. from NYU School of Law.
Bruce Lawrence earned his PhD. from Yale University (1972) in the History of Religions: Islam and Hinduism. He served as the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of the Humanities at Duke University and is currently Professor Emeritus of Religion at Duke University. His research ranges from institutional Islam to Indo-Persian Sufism and also encompasses the comparative study of religious movements. He was founding director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center and currently serves on the DISC Advisory Board. He was a Carnegie Scholar of Islam from 2008-2010. His recent books have included On Violence – A Reader (with Aisha Karim); Messages to the World, The Statements of Osama Bin Laden; The Quran, A Biography; and, with his spouse, miriam cooke, Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop. His forthcoming book will be “Who is Allah?” (UNC Press, 2015).
*Julie Poucher Harbin is Communications Specialist at the Duke Islamic Studies Center and Editor, ISLAMiCommentary and TIRN. She worked as a journalist for more than 20 years, including as a journalist trainer (2004-2005) with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s “Afghan Recovery Report” in Kabul, Afghanistan, which included covering the run-up to the 2009 elections. She also reported on Afghanistan business opportunities for the San Diego Business Journal in Winter 2005, and on the US police training missing in Afghanistan for Workforce Management Magazine in June 2005.