a rare voice of reason

The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid is well known internationally as an expert on the Taliban, of course. But his latest book, "Descent into Chaos", is much more than a brilliant overview of the problems that the Taliban are posing to Afghanistan and Pakistan these days. It is unique as he is equally scathing in his criticism of the Bush and Karzai administrations, and at the same time very open about the shortcomings of Pakistan's policies towards Islamist militants.
Rashid is very clear that he supported the invasion to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but that almost everything went wrong after that: The US administration wasn't interested at all in nation building, also because it wanted to "move on" quickly to invade Iraq next. The weak Karzai government failed to curb the warlords' influence and drug trafficking.
Whereas these shortcomings have been openly discussed in the international media many times, Rashid's book is most interesting when he exposes the double-dealing of Pakistan's president Musharraf - who openly supported the war against the Taliban, but continued to help them behind the scenes. Intriguing for example Rashid's account of the evacuation of Pakistani officers (and Taliban as well as al-Qaeda leaders) from the beleaguered Afghan city of Kunduz in November 2001:

For Pakistan, the stalemate in Kunduz was turning into a disaster as hundreds of ISI officers and soldiers from the Frontier Corps aiding the Taliban were trapped there. They had been ordered to quit Afghanistan after 9/11 and had two months to escape, but instead they had stayed on to fight alongside the Taliban. Musharraf telephoned Bush and asked for a huge favor - a U.S. bombing pause and the opening of an air corridor so that Pakistani aircraft could ferry his officers out of Kunduz. Bush and Vice President Cheney agreed, but the operation was top secret, with most cabinet members kept in the dark.

This tells a lot about how naive the US were in dealing with Musharraf. He was encouraged, says Rashid, to grant the Taliban a safe haven in Waziristan and let the Afghan Taliban leadership operate out of the capital of Balochistan, Quetta.

To what extent the Pakistani secret services, in particular the ISI, have continued their support for the Taliban and other "jihadi" groups after 9/11, has been a much debated question. Rashid concludes, based on the information he received from retired Pakistani intelligence officials, that the ISI found it too dangerous to cooperate openly with the Taliban, but instead chose to "outsource" this support to a new, clandestine organization:

Former ISI trainers of the Taliban, retired Pashtun officers from the army and especially the Frontier Corps, were rehired on contract. They set up offices in private houses in Peshawar, Quetta, and other cities and maintained no links with the local ISI station chief or the army. Most of these agents held down regular jobs, working undercover as coordinators for Afghan refugees, bureaucrats, researchers at universities, teachers at colleges, and even aid workers. Others set up NGOs ostensibly to work with Afghan refugees.

The question is: How can this double-dealing be ended? Certainly not by increasing pressure from the outside, argues Rashid in a recent article (with Barnett Rubin in "Foreign Affairs")...

the concept of "pressuring" Pakistan is flawed. No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal. The Pakistani security establishment believes that it faces both a U.S.-Indian-Afghan alliance and a separate Iranian-Russian alliance, each aimed at undermining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan and even dismembering the Pakistani state. Some (but not all) in the establishment see armed militants within Pakistan as a threat -- but they largely consider it one that is ultimately controllable, and in any case secondary to the threat posed by their nuclear-armed enemies.

The reactions to recent Indian accusations following the Mumbai attacks would seem to prove him right: Pressure from abroad only reinforces the feeling of isolation in Pakistan. The only practicable approach would be, therefore, a foreign policy that takes into account Pakistan's security concerns.

dissenting voices on afghanistan

With a parliamentary debate and decision about the extension of the mandate for German troops coming up in October, the situation in Afghanistan and the German role there are being debated in the German public. The CDU-SPD coalition government plans to increase German troops in Afghanistan by 1,000 to 4,500. But a worsening security situation and shock about German soldiers killing Afghan civilians recently have made the mission controversial again. The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine thinks the issue will definitely play a role in the election next year, and it says Chancellor Merkel's CDU is nervous that the SPD might try to attract voters with an anti-war campaign (just as Gerhard Schröder won the 2002 elections by opposing the Iraq war). For the time being, only the Left Party is clearly against the war, with the Greens split on the issue and support of the war in the SPD waning. But even the conservative CDU has its share of dissidents: The party's defence expert Willy Wimmer, a former secretary in the defence ministry, is calling for a unilateral withdrawal of German troops saying, "this is not our war." Wimmer has over the years become very critical of the United States and complains that there is no German foreign policy worth the name on many issues; instead, he claims, Germany tends to blindly follow the US. 

The German media, too, are being criticized. Former ZDF star reporter Ulrich Tilgner quit the public television channel in February after reporting for years from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. In a recent interview with the newspaper Tagesspiegel, he repeats previous criticism of the ZDF, suggesting that it is not critical enough of the German government on Afghanistan. In contrast, he is very positive about his new working environment at Swiss television where there is "more readiness to acknowledge mistakes in Western policies" and "editorial teams tend not to be dominated by colleagues with only limited knowledge, as has become common in Germany." Martin Gerner, a journalist who has been working regularly as a trainer and consultant in Afghanistan since 2004, in an article for the journal message, points out that too many German reporters in Afghanistan are traveling with the German troops, the Bundeswehr, which influences their coverage. He thinks there are many taboos in the German media: There is hardly any reporting about the difficult psychological situation the soldiers face, nor about the parallel worlds foreigners and locals inhabit in Kabul, highlighted by signboards such as "No Afghans in this restaurant".

But Gerner also thinks that withdrawing German troops would be wrong. In a recent commentary, he writes:

A premature withdrawal would leave behind a power vacuum that would be filled by the Taliban, criminals and former warlords. It would be the opposite of the "sustainability" that donor countries like to use as a catch phrase. Sending thousands of reinforcements, as is currently being discussed, would be just as wrong. The Soviet Army didn't manage to get the country under control with 200,000 soldiers. So the 1,000 additional German troops envisaged in Berlin's new Afghanistan mandate don't make much sense. What's needed is a strategy from the West that emphasizes politics over military. It's a fallacy to believe that, under the current circumstances, the military can pave the way for civilian reconstruction in all areas.

bbc presenter criticizes afghanistan coverage

Veteran BBC correspondent and presenter Lyse Doucet has criticized the coverage of the Afghan war on British TV. According to the Daily Mail, Doucet told the Edinburgh International Television Conference:

What's lacking in the coverage of the Afghans is the sense of the humanity of the Afghans... You knew that the bombs were dropping in that direction and the guns pointing in that direction but you never got a sense of how Afghans are as a people.

In what turned out to be a controversial statement, Doucet called on her colleagues to also show the "humanity" of the Taliban. You just need to read the "comments" column to find out that this proposal does not get down well with at least the Daily Mail readership... which doesn't change the fact that she has a point there, of course. Just consider that even in "Lions for Lambs" which was widely regarded as an anti-war movie, there was no attempt at all to understand the Afghans in the story. It was all about the US discussion about the war in Afghanistan, but without any Afghanistan actually shown...