The Super Bowl and Afghanistan

Bettors favored the Carolina Panthers (though I saw the headline to one story that claimed a late load of lucre poured in on Denver, evening things out), as I did, only to be disappointed by the performance of the false idol of the Zeitgeist, Cam Newton. The Panthers star QB's fourth quarter cowardly refusal to dive into a pile to regain his own fumble might prove to be a Fisher King type wound from which his career will never recover. The Broncos defense dominated Carolina like no other team has this season, proving once again the truism that defense wins championships.

The media seems to be going apeshit over Lady Gaga's singing of the national anthem. At one point during her performance, CBS cut away to troops watching the game in a mess hall somewhere in Afghanistan. The picture of course was meant to convey that our men and women are abroad in a savage land so we can sit safely in front of our flat screens and be entertained by athletes sustaining chronic brain injuries. But the CBS cutaway to the troops in Afghanistan, even more so than the Blue Angels flyover after Lady Gaga belted out the last lines of the Star Spangled Banner, struck me as awkward and not anchored in reality.

At the end of 2014 Obama announced the end of combat operations in Afghanistan, except for trainers and special operators to conduct counter-terrorism attacks, meaning, presumably, operations against Al Qaeda. Those pictured during the Star Spangled Banner looked more like support staff, cooks and forklift operators, than Navy SEALs or Army Delta Force.

Along with "ending" combat operations, Obama promised the removal of all troops by the end of 2016. So when Super Bowl LI is televised next February whatever network is hosting the event will have to cut away to a different U.S. theater of war, possibly Iraq, another place where Obama had declared an end to of combat operations; possibly Poland or Bulgaria, where the U.S. is embarked on a reboot of the Cold War; possibly Libya; maybe even Haiti. The only boundary to the U.S. military footprint is the globe itself.

But wait. Not so fast. After Kunduz fell this past September Obama extended the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan past when he leaves office in 2017. The Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police were decisively outperformed by a much smaller Taliban force; it took U.S. A-10 Warthogs (the aircraft responsible for killing the medical staff and patients at the Doctors Without Borders hospital) and special forces to take Kunduz City back from the Taliban in October.

The problem for the U.S. is even though Obama has committed U.S. troops to Afghanistan through 2017, making them available for a cutaway shot during the next Super Bowl performance of the national anthem (Miley Cyrus?), more and more it is becoming a topic mentioned in the mainstream press that Afghanistan -- at least American/NATO political entity by that name -- might not be around past 2016.

For instance, a story by Najim Rahim, David Jolly and Ahmad Shakib, "Kunduz Residents Live in Fear of Taliban’s Return," spells out clearly that Kunduz Province, for all intents and purposes, is already controlled by the Taliban:

“You can see the white flags of the Taliban along the road as soon as you step out of Kunduz City,” said Mr. Azyanfar, 20, who travels back to his district outside the provincial capital several times a week. The area controlled by the government extends “only to the buildings in which they are based,” he said. “As soon as you step outside, it is totally a different picture: The Taliban’s presence and influence are much larger than the government’s.”

It has been more than four months since the Afghan forces crumbled as Taliban fighters overran Kunduz. But there has been no improvement in the conditions that made the two-week Taliban takeover of the city possible. Disillusionment with the government has only gotten worse; the Afghan forces are still overstretched and demoralized; and the Taliban still control much of the outlying areas and roads.

Now, the worry in and around Kunduz is that it is inevitable that the insurgents will return, strengthened this time by weapons, ammunition and vehicles looted during their capture of the city. 

For a national government already strained by territory losses and infighting, another loss of a provincial capital — whether that is a repeat in Kunduz or a new setback in Helmand or another contested province — is an alarming prospect. 

The initial loss of Kunduz was a national trauma. Many Afghans began fleeing neighboring provincial capitals and district centers. An already huge wave of emigration accelerated after the assault. And, worrisomely in a country torn by warring strongmen in the ’90s, local warlords were threatening to remobilize and settle scores in the absence of a capable government defense. 

The repercussions of Kunduz’s fall were felt all the way to Washington, where President Obama abandoned his goal of ending America’s involvement in the Afghan war this year and instead extended the United States military mission beyond 2016.

The litany of woe for Afghanistan is stunning. Islamic State is on the rise in Nangarhar Province in the east. In the north, in Kunduz and Baghlan, the Taliban is on the march. While in the south, the Afghan government is struggling to maintain a toehold in Helmand Province, the richest region for poppy cultivation. Army and police casualties are at record highs. And there are murmurings of an impending split or coup in the Ghani/Abdullah government in Kabul.

Don't take my word for it. Read Carlotta Gall's think piece, "Pakistan’s Hand in the Rise of International Jihad," in yesterday's paper. It is a breath of fresh air, particularly as it appears in what is basically a government organ, The New York Times. So I quote it whole:

TUNIS — PRESIDENT ASHRAF GHANI of Afghanistan has warned in several recent interviews that unless peace talks with Pakistan and the Taliban produce results in the next few months, his country may not survive 2016. Afghanistan is barely standing, he says, after the Taliban onslaught last year, which led to the highest casualties among civilians and security forces since 2001. 

“How much worse will it get?” Mr. Ghani asked in a recent television interview. “It depends on how much regional cooperation we can secure, and how much international mediation and pressure can be exerted to create rules of the game between states.”
What he means is it depends on how much international pressure can be brought to bear on Pakistan to cease its aggression. 

Critics of the Afghan leadership say it’s not Pakistan’s fault that its neighbor is falling apart. They point to the many internal failings of the Afghan government: political divisions, weak institutions, warlords and corruption. 

But experts have found a lot of evidence that Pakistan facilitated the Taliban offensive. The United States and China have been asking Pakistan to persuade the Taliban to make peace, but Afghanistan argues that Islamabad has done nothing to rein in the Taliban, and if anything has encouraged it to raise the stakes in hopes of gaining influence in any power-sharing agreement. 

This behavior is not just an issue for Afghanistan. Pakistan is intervening in a number of foreign conflicts. Its intelligence service has long acted as the manager of international mujahedeen forces, many of them Sunni extremists, and there is even speculation that it may have been involved in the rise of the Islamic State. 

The latest Taliban offensive began in 2014. United States and NATO forces were winding down their operations in Afghanistan and preparing to withdraw when Pakistan decided, after years of prevarication, to clear Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from their sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal area of North Waziristan. 

The operation was certainly a serious endeavor — Taliban bases, torture chambers and ammunition dumps were busted, town bazaars were razed and over one million civilians were displaced. 

But the militants were tipped off early, and hundreds escaped, tribesmen and Taliban fighters said. Many fled over the border to Afghanistan, just at the vulnerable moment when Afghanistan was assuming responsibility for its own security. Ninety foreign fighters with their families arrived in Paktika Province that summer, to the alarm of Afghan officials. 

Further along the border in Paktika Province, Taliban fighters occupied abandoned C.I.A. bases and outposts. A legislator from the region warned me that they would use the positions to project attacks deeper into Afghanistan and even up to Kabul. Some of the most devastating suicide bomb attacks occurred in that province in the months that followed. 

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the Haqqani network, the most potent branch of the Taliban, moved from North Waziristan into the adjacent district of Kurram. From there it continues to enjoy safe haven and conduct its insurgency against American, international and Afghan targets. 

Pakistan regards Afghanistan as its backyard. Determined not to let its archrival, India, gain influence there, and to ensure that Afghanistan remains in the Sunni Islamist camp, Pakistan has used the Taliban selectively, promoting those who further its agenda and cracking down on those who don’t. The same goes for Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters. 

Even knowing this, it might come as a surprise that the region’s triumvirate of violent jihad is living openly in Pakistan. 

First, there’s Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani network, and second in command of the Taliban. He moves freely around Pakistan, and has even visited the Pakistani intelligence headquarters of the Afghan campaign in Rawalpindi. 

Then there is the new leader of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who has openly assembled meetings of his military and leadership council near the Pakistani town of Quetta. Since he came to power last year, the Taliban has mounted some of its most ambitious offensives into Afghanistan, overrunning the northern town of Kunduz, and pushing to seize control of the opium-rich province of Helmand. 

Finally, Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, enjoys sanctuary in Pakistan — one recent report placed him in the southwestern corner of Baluchistan. He has been working to establish training camps in southern Afghanistan. In October, it took United States Special Operations forces several days of fighting and airstrikes to clear those camps. American commanders say the group they were fighting was Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, a new franchise announced by Mr. Zawahri that has claimed responsibility for the killings of bloggers and activists in Karachi and Bangladesh, among other attacks.

Pakistan denies harboring the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and points out that it, too, is a victim of terrorism. But many analysts have detailed how the military has nurtured Islamist militant groups as an instrument to suppress nationalist movements, in particular among the Pashtun minority, at home and abroad. 

Perhaps most troubling, there are reports that Pakistan had a role in the rise of the Islamic State. 

Ahead of Pakistan’s 2014 operation in North Waziristan, scores, even hundreds, of foreign fighters left the tribal areas to fight against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Tribesmen and Taliban members from the area say fighters traveled to Quetta, and then flew to Qatar. There they received new passports and passage to Turkey, from where they could cross into Syria. Others traveled overland along well-worn smuggling routes from Pakistan through Iran and Iraq.

The fighters arrived just in time to boost the sweeping offensive by ISIS into Iraq and the creation of the Islamic State in the summer of 2014.

If these accounts are correct, Pakistan was cooperating with Qatar, and perhaps others, to move international Sunni jihadists (including 300 Pakistanis) from Pakistan’s tribal areas, where they were no longer needed, to new battlefields in Syria. It is just another reminder of Pakistan’s central involvement in creating and managing violent jihadist groups, one Pakistani politician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity when talking about intelligence affairs, told me.

This has been going on for more than 30 years. In 1990, I shared a bus ride with young Chinese Uighurs, Muslims from China’s restive northwest, who had spent months training in Pakistani madrasas, including a brief foray into Afghanistan to get a taste of battle. They were returning home, furnished with brand-new Pakistani passports, a gift of citizenship often offered to those who join the jihad. 

Years later, just after Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan, I interviewed a guerrilla commander from the disputed region of Kashmir who had spent 15 years on the Pakistani military payroll, traveling to train and assist insurgents in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir and Afghanistan. 

In 2012 I came across several cases where young clerics, fresh graduates from the Haqqania madrasa in Pakistan, returned to their home villages in Afghanistan, flush with cash, and set about running mosques and recruiting and organizing a band of Taliban followers. 

I visited that madrasa in 2013. It is the alma mater of the Afghan Taliban, where many of the leaders of the movement were trained. The clerics there remained adamant in their support for the Taliban. “It is a political fact that one day the Taliban will take power,” Syed Yousuf Shah, the madrasa spokesman, told me. “We are experts on the Taliban,” he said, and a majority of the Afghan people “still support them.” 

The madrasa, a longtime instrument of Pakistani intelligence, has been training people from the ethnic minorities of northern Afghanistan alongside its standard clientele of Pashtuns. The aim is still to win control of northern Afghanistan through these young graduates. From there they have their eyes on Central Asia and western China. Pakistani clerics are educating and radicalizing Chinese Uighurs as well, along with Central Asians from the former Soviet republics. 

No one has held Pakistan to account for this behavior. Why would Pakistan give it up now?

U.S. Project in Afghanistan Looking Very Wobbly

Two stories emanating from Afghanistan in the last two days -- "Afghans Protest After U.S. Forces Carry Out Raid on Strongman" by Mujib Mashal; and "In Afghanistan, Suicide Blast and Angry Crowd Target American Soldiers" by Joseph Goldstein and Ahmad Shakib -- highlight the duplicity of the Obama administration's public declaration that U.S. combat operations have ceased in that country.

The first story describes a raid by U.S. military on a local militia (non-Taliban) leader in Parwan Province, home to the U.S. mega-base Bagram Airfield, to destroy a weapons depot. The raid sparked a significant protest:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Protesters in the northern Afghan province of Parwan blocked the main highway there on Monday after American forces raided the village of a local strongman and blew up a weapons depot belonging to him, officials and residents said. 

The raid on Monday morning demonstrated that American troops in Afghanistan, months after President Obama declared their regular combat mission over, are engaged beyond their publicly stated role of advising the Afghan forces and carrying out targeted counterterrorism operations. 

It also highlighted how, despite a lengthy campaign to disarm illegal militias, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, armed groups that have no apparent ties to Al Qaeda or even the Taliban are still considered by American forces to be a significant threat.

The target of Monday’s raid was Jan Ahmad, a local commander who fought the Soviets and then the Taliban. Hours after the raid, shops in Charikar, the capital of Parwan Province, just north of Kabul, remained closed as Mr. Ahmad’s supporters shouted, “Death to America” and “Death to the enemies of Islam.” They expressed outrage at the manner of the raid, saying it was a matter that the Afghan authorities, not foreign forces, should have handled.

“The protesters burned a lot of tires to show their rage,” said Mahmood Hamidy, 20, who runs a private school in Charikar, “and that, if the issue is not taken seriously, they are ready for violence.”

While the American military described the raid as force protection, former commanders and local elders in the north leveled accusations that the raid had been politically motivated and possibly a settling of scores from last year’s election crisis.

Mr. Ahmad has supported Abdullah Abdullah, who was President Ashraf Ghani’s rival in the bitterly contested presidential runoff. At the height of the crisis, Mr. Ahmad was among a group of commanders who threatened to use force to support a breakaway government led by Mr. Abdullah.

Echoing his calls for restraint during the election crisis, Mr. Abdullah, who is now the chief executive in a power-sharing government with Mr. Ghani, called on the protesters Monday to remain calm as he appointed a fact-finding mission and asked Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of United States forces in Afghanistan, to provide further information on the raid.

The gist of the story is particularly troubling for the U.S.-backed Ghani-Adbullah government. Militias are stockpiling weapons and gearing up for battle in anticipation of a coming collapse of authority in Kabul, and Ghani is using American troops to beat them down.

The second story, filed yesterday by Goldstein and Shakib, describes a suicide attack on a U.S. military convoy moving through Kabul that ended up in an anti-American protest after it appears troops fired on people trying to come to the assistance of those injured by the blast:

KABUL, Afghanistan — A convoy of American troops survived a huge suicide bomb attack in Kabul on Tuesday afternoon, only to find themselves struggling against a gathering crowd of Afghans who were trying to tend to civilians wounded in the bombing. 

The confusing scene left one American soldier wounded, possibly by a knife, as Afghans shouted, “Death to Americans,” and accused the soldiers of opening fire on them in the frightening seconds after the suicide attack, witnesses said.

The episode hinted at a lingering wellspring of anger against American troops even as the United States’ military presence in Afghanistan is receding. Convoys of heavily armored troop carriers are still spotted routinely in Kabul making shuttle runs between bases and embassies and the airport.

Around 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, in the hot midday hours, a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb amid one such convoy, on Airport Road. The blast did not kill or seriously injure any of the soldiers, but it wounded at least 22 Afghans, including passing motorists and roadside shopkeepers, and killed at least one, officials said.

What happened next is still being pieced together. But at some point, a member of the crowd attacked and most likely stabbed an American soldier who had exited one of the vehicles to form a cordon, witnesses said. A soldier opened fire, although it was unclear whether the shots came before or after the crowd member’s attack. Some witnesses said the American soldiers, along with Afghan security officials who were nearby, had fired only warning shots.

These stories follow a week where there was a suicide attack on the Parliament in Kabul while Afghan lawmakers were trying to confirm a defense minister. The ministry has gone leaderless since the extra-legal Ghani-Abdullah coalition government assumed power from Hamid Karzai last September. Parliament's term has expired; it is in session based on presidential fiat. The Taliban is taking territory in the north.

Joseph Goldstein and Rod Nordland reported last week in "Taliban Strike Afghan Parliament as Lawmakers Meet" that things are dire for the U.S. project in Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban attacked the Afghan Parliament on Monday [June 22] just as lawmakers were convening for their third attempt to confirm a defense minister, while in northern Afghanistan a second district fell to Taliban insurgents. 

At least two bystanders died in the attack on Parliament and more than two dozen were injured, but government officials said that all members of Parliament had been taken to safety with at most only minor injuries. 

The seizure of the Archi district, which was confirmed by an Afghan Local Police commander, deepened concern that an attack on neighboring Kunduz, the capital of Kunduz Province, was imminent. Archi was the second neighboring district to fall in two days. On Sunday, the Ministry of Defense and other officials confirmed Taliban claims that the Chahar Dara district had fallen to the insurgents that morning.

The Parliament attack was an embarrassment to the government, apparently timed to coincide with the appearance of the acting defense minister, Masoom Stanekzai, in an effort to win confirmation. The attack was initiated just as Mr. Stanekzai and the country’s second vice president, Sarwar Danish, arrived at the hall in southwestern Kabul.

The country has been without a confirmed defense minister for nearly 10 months, since the coalition government of President Ashraf Ghani was inaugurated in September. Mr. Stanekzai was Mr. Ghani’s third choice for the post; his other candidates were rejected by Parliament.

The term of the Afghan Parliament expired Sunday, with no arrangements yet agreed upon between Mr. Ghani and his coalition partners for new elections. Mr. Ghani extended its term in office until new elections are held, although it is unclear whether such a move was constitutional.

As the Ghani-Abdullah government wobbles, the Taliban is softening its image, reaching out to women ("Taliban Are Talking Peace, Though Not With Afghan Government" by Mujib Mashal). One wonders how close the Kabul-based U.S.-dependent government of the former Johns Hopkins professor is to experiencing its own helicopter-on-the-U.S.-embassy-in-Saigon moment.