Talk of the Nation, NPR
What's The Truth About
The War In Afghanistan?
GUESTS: Jim McGovern,
Jonathan Landay, Tom Donnelly. Feb. 9,
2012
Lieutenant Colonel
Daniel Davis spent the last year in Afghanistan, where he hoped to find
conditions matching the cautious optimism he heard from U.S. commanders. But in
a recent piece in the Armed Forces Journal, he wrote that what he saw bore
no resemblance to rosy official statements, and the American people
deserve better than what they've gotten from their senior uniformed leaders
over the last number of years. Colonel Davis concludes simply telling the truth
would be a good start.
Congressman Jim
McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, one of four members briefed by
Lieutenant Colonel Davis, and he joins us now from his office on the Capitol,
and nice to have you with us.
JIM MCGOVERN: what he's asking for is more of an honest
discussion, and he also expressed concern about the fact that more and
more information about Afghanistan is being considered classified. So the Congress and the American people aren't
getting as much access to what's really happening there.
NEAL CONAN: Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti, who
said that the lieutenant colonel's view is one person's view and said Afghan
forces will be good enough to take over from the American-led coalition as we
pull out over the next couple of years.
JIM MCGOVERN: By the accounts that I've heard when I've been
over in Afghanistan and from accounts that I've heard from, soldiers who
have returned don't have a lot of trust in the Afghan armed forces or security forces. And they don't have a lot of trust in
the Afghan government.
President Karzai is a
crook, that the corruption is so deep in that country that, you know, it's not
salvageable and that Americans are putting their lives on the line basically to
defend a government that's not worth defending.
purpose
we went there to go
after al-Qaida. We got Osama bin Laden, not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan.
What is the mission? And to imply that
somehow the Afghan security forces are ready to take over and have achieved an
amount this professionalism is just plain wrong
People ought to know
why we're spending billions and billions of dollars over in Afghanistan,
nation-building and supporting a corrupt government. People ought to know the
facts because their sons and daughters are the ones who are being sent over
there to risk their lives on behalf of this policy.
we should be talking
about this policy. We should be talking about the realities on the ground. But
this kind of knee-jerk reaction that every time somebody within the military
stands up and tells the truth that all of a sudden they're subject to an
investigation, and their character is questioned. This is just wrong-headed.
Taliban still in Afghan
waiting for the US to pull out
JONATHAN LANDAY: I went down south to Kandahar, which is one of
the two provinces where the U.S. surge went into. how the Taliban have purposely not engaged the
United States, they're not fighting face-to-face. Their leaders have gone to
Pakistan to wait out the clock that President Obama himself set in December,
2009.
Tribal elders who are
unable to go back to their villages, and as they drive down the main street,
they see the Taliban dressed - obviously without their weapons.
But one of them said
to me I know that they're Taliban, it's just the Americans don't..
NEAL CONAN: If they're
just waiting for the American forces to leave, does that not give the Afghan
forces, and indeed the Afghan government, as corrupt and as inefficient it
might be, time to start becoming less corrupt, less deficient and more trusted
by the people of Afghanistan?
Non-military part of the
war
JONATHAN LANDAY: This
is the non-military part of the war. The government is ridden with corruption.
You have an army that does not reflect the geographical dispersion of the
ethnic groups in Afghanistan. It reflects
the ethnic proportions, but a lot of the Pashtuns, which is the dominant ethnic
group from the south, are not joining the army because they are simply waiting.
They know, first of all, that they risk their lives doing that, and they risk
the lives of their families, but also they're waiting - sitting on the fence
because they know what's coming.
And what's coming is,
in fact, a reversion to the civil
war that the United
States interrupted in 2001 when it went in. Only this time, as another observer
said, on - Somalia on steroids, given the amount of weaponry the United States
has poured in there. And it risks turning into a proxy war between Pakistan,
which backs the Taliban, and its foe for the last 67 years, India.
That threatens regional instability, and this is
something that the Obama administration and the U.S. military refuse to talk
about publicly.
NEAL CONAN: And I
wonder: There are two levels of which Lieutenant Colonel Davis writes about
that are significant, one of which is his assessment that where he went,
and that was a lot of different places, the tactical situation was from bad
to abysmal. And the other was that we're not getting the truth from U.S.
military commanders.
TOM DONNELLY: Not
immediately. The civil war of the 1990s between the departure of the Soviets
and the attacks of 2001 was a bit of a unique beast. It's certainly the case
that, of the ethnic groups in Afghanistan, the Tajiks and the Uzbek and the
Hazara and, actually, a good slice of the Pashtuns - and when we treat the
Pashtun as though they're kind of monolith and that's hardly the case - have no
interest in Taliban rule and influence from Pakistan et cetera, et cetera. So
there is a fairly solid anti-Taliban base that really accounts for the majority of the population and, actually, a majority of the country.
That said, in the
southern and southeastern parts of the country, there are unreconstructed
Taliban, with Pakistani help and under the directorship of the Quetta Shura
or people like the Hakanis, for example, there are plenty of people who can
make life in Afghanistan miserable for Afghans. Their ability to generate a
large-scale civil war, I think, one should be somewhat skeptical about,
at least in the foreseeable future.
What I would really be
worried about is that they will become a fight amongst a whole host of
interested parties. Your caller mentioned the Indians. The Iranians
will be the same. The Uzbek and the Tajiks across the border would naturally
support their brethren. So the
potential is there, but
one should not think that it
will immediately go back to a
late-'90s kind of situation where you have shelling of Kabul, for
example.
JONATHAN LANDAY: I
think it depends a great deal on Pakistan and what it wants and to a great deal
on the - on what the Americans and the Afghan government are talking to the
Taliban about in terms of a political settlement of the war. If that settlement
ignores the deep concerns and redlines of the minorities, the formerly - the
leaders of the former Northern Alliance, then I think that Afghanistan could
see a resumption of that civil war. If there is an agreement among the Americans
and the Karzai government to talk to the former Northern Alliance, find out
what their concerns are about bringing the reconciliation and address those
concerns, then I think the chance for civil war is a great deal diminished.
Unfortunately, that is not happening right now.
NEAL CONAN: Jonathan
Landay, thanks very much for your time. Our thanks as well to Thomas Donnelly
of the American Enterprise Institute's Center for Defense Studies. We were
talking about an article called "Truth, Lies and Afghanistan" in the
Armed Forces Journal by Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis
==========================
DEB RIECHMANN and RAHIM
FAIEZ 02/25/12
KABUL, Afghanistan — A
gunman killed two American military advisers .. inside a heavily guarded
ministry building, and NATO ordered military workers out of Afghan ministries
as protests raged for a fifth day over the burning of copies of the Quran at a
U.S. army base.
The Taliban claimed
responsibility for the Interior Ministry attack, saying it was retaliation for
the Quran burnings, after the U.S. servicemen – a lieutenant colonel and a
major – were found dead on the floor of an office that only people who know a
numerical combination can get into, Afghan and Western officials said.
The top commander of
U.S. and NATO forces recalled all international military personnel from the
ministries, an unprecedented action in the decade-long war that highlights the
growing friction between Afghans and their foreign partners at a critical
juncture in the war
======================================
======================================
The International
Herald Tribune
Kabul's stealth attack
on human rights
PATRICIA GOSSMAN, December
27, 2011 Tuesday
Sadly, not rocking the
boat has been the American mantra for the past decade, and has only worsened
insecurity. From the outset, the military campaign in Afghanistan reflected the
narrow U.S. objective of defeating the Taliban and Al Qaeda and creating a
government able to maintain stability following a troop withdrawal. Washington
chose its allies among anti-Taliban forces, mostly comprising
Northern Alliance warlords and their militias. The Pentagon consistently
rebuffed concerns that these commanders, most with long records of war
crimes, might prove to be a destabilizing factor. Ten years later,
stability in Afghanistan is still an elusive goal.
But the past is not
just the past in Afghanistan. In October, the United Nations published a
report on rampant torture in Afghan government detention facilities. As a
Western official who investigated torture under the Communist regime told me,
just ''replace 2011 with 1979 and guess what?'' Things have barely changed. It
is no surprise that the National Directorate of Security is known today by it's
acronym from Soviet times, Khad. The practice of torture is the same, though it
is not yet as pervasive.
That the past is
repeating itself is no surprise to Afghans: When I was in Kabul in the late
1990s, people told me time and again that the only thing they feared more than
the Taliban was that the warlords of the Northern Alliance might return to
power.
The U.S. promise to
build a democratic Afghanistan with respect for human rights seems all but
forgotten, but it is still possible to salvage some measure of human rights
protection. To start, the Obama administration and its European allies should
raise concerns immediately with the Karzai government about the termination
of the Human Rights Commissioners' appointments, and express strong support
for the work Nadery and his colleagues have done.
