The Afghan conundrum

BASING its assessment on Afghan reports, the Associated Press says that coalition forces killed 203 Afghan civilians in the first five and a half months of 2007. It puts the number of those who died at the hands of the Taliban at 178.

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan says that the figure for those killed by the militants and coalition forces is 213 and 207 respectively for the first five months of the year.

Most observers agree that these are conservative estimates and that the death toll among civilians is far higher. In an incident on Friday, Afghan officials confirmed that a bombing raid on a Taliban hideout killed 45 civilians along with 62 Taliban.Suicide attacks, earlier unknown in Afghanistan, have surged. In the first five months of 2006, 11 suicide attacks took 63 lives while in the same period this year there were 42 attacks in which 171 people were killed. There are media stories that the suicide bombers are being trained in camps in the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan by Arab veterans of the Afghan jihad and the Arab Brigade created by Osama bin Laden during the Taliban era.

The trainees are, for the most part, Afghans or recruits from other parts of the Muslim world. The Arabs themselves have apparently not carried out any suicide attacks. Suicide bombings and the means of indoctrinating volunteers have been learnt from the experience of insurgents in Iraq and were probably brought to Afghanistan by the Al Qaeda.This is not all. There are indications that the insurgents have now started the manufacture of the same sort of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that have become the bane of the American army in Iraq.

The statements from leaders of the coalition partners all suggest that they are committed to staying the course in Afghanistan and that unlike in Iraq they believe that the battle in Afghanistan against the Taliban is a “noble cause” and an essential element of the war against terrorism.

Actions on the ground, however, belie these assertions. The Germans are now talking of withdrawing the 100-strong contingent of special forces that are fighting alongside the American special forces as part of Operation Enduring Freedom and there is speculation that the German Bundestag will not renew permission for the deployment of German Tornado fighter planes to fight support missions in southern Afghanistan.

The Canadians who provide a genuine fighting force are hard pressed in the face of domestic opposition to retain their forces. The French, the Italians and the other “old” Nato members are all facing opposition within their coalitions and among the voters.

All observers are agreed that the battle against the insurgency cannot be won from the air, but “boots on the ground” are pathetically few. The Americans have had no success in persuading their Nato allies to send their troops to battle zones in Afghanistan. Their own army is badly overstretched with the deployment in Iraq. There is little success, therefore, in pursuing the avowed objective of “winning the hearts and minds” of the people.

In Afghanistan, there is increasing nostalgia for the Taliban era which the Pashtuns recall as a period of security in which they were not harassed by corrupt officials or suffered indiscriminate air raids killing Taliban and innocent civilians in almost equal numbers.

This year the opium harvest in Afghanistan is expected to top last year’s record-breaking production of 6,600 tons. Afghanistan will contribute about 92 per cent of the total world production, with Helmand province alone producing more opium than the rest of the world. Unlike past years, UN officials estimate that the bulk of the opium, perhaps as much as 90 per cent, will be processed in Afghanistan and exported as heroin or other derivatives.

Given this addition, the narcotics industry in Afghanistan will be worth more than the three billion dollars that it generated last year and will certainly be more than one-third of Afghanistan’s GDP. The farmer gets only a third of this amount and corrupt officials get much of what traffickers have to offer. But there is no doubt that a part of the bribes the traffickers pay goes to the Taliban to finance their insurgency.

It should be noted as a significant aside that heroin consumption in the West is estimated at 170 tons annually. The balance of Afghanistan’s production is, therefore, available for the four million addicts in Iran and an almost equal number in Pakistan. As supply grows so will efforts to encourage further use in these two countries as well as in the Central Asian states.

The Taliban recruits in Afghanistan get paid about $10 a day. In a region plagued by the lack of employment opportunities such concrete inducements — far more than religious fervour — make for a plentiful supply of volunteers.

In contrast, little in terms of development or employment opportunities has been generated by the $13 billion which is estimated to have been spent by the international community in Afghanistan, particularly in the south and east of the country.

The famous offensive launched in Helmand to clear the area and to allow the reconstruction of the hydel power station at Kajaki has, after more than four months, yet to achieve its objective. The area is partly under the control of coalition forces but villagers in the area testify that such control lasts only as long as the coalition forces are present.

The road along which the heavy earth-moving machinery and turbines are to be moved has yet to be built. The repair of pylons and transmission lines is still on the drawing boards. Local officials have little hesitation in contradicting coalition forces’ claims of control over the area.

Observers agree that while the insurgency is an issue, the main grievance and source of insecurity is the corruption of Afghan officials and the poor governance provided by administration officials, most of whom are ill-trained and owe their appointments to the influence of the local warlords to whom they kowtow. The judicial system is weak and the prosecution system poorer still.

As I write this, an international conference is being held in Rome, with President Hamid Karzai and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in attendance, to devise programmes to improve the law and order situation in Afghanistan.

The new UN secretary-general on his first visit to Afghanistan a few days ago made this the principal theme of his visit, and his representative in Afghanistan said that in the last five years little progress had been made to end the “era of lawlessness, corruption, unprofessional police and an unreliable justice system”.

While the conference will probably bring pledges of fresh technical assistance and training programmes, past experience shows that implementation on the ground will be poor.

An American commander has claimed that 60 of the 83 districts in southeastern Afghanistan now owe their loyalty to the Karzai government while last year only 19 districts could be so classified. On the other hand, the World Food Programme has suspended its food aid programme in this area because of the frequency with which its trucks are being looted. According to their statistics, the WFP’s vehicles were attacked 85 times in the last year and in 25 of these incidents (13 of them in the past three months) the WFP lost 200 tons of wheat and $400,000 worth of cooking oil.

Since the WFP ration has meant the difference between life and death for the poor of the area, the distress and despair this suspension will cause needs no emphasising. The poverty-stricken people will now turn to the Taliban and offer their services for whatever succour they can get from that quarter.

Political developments have been just as disquieting. The United National Front, largely a collection of leaders of the former Northern Alliance, formed in March this year has recruited as member Mr Gulabzai, the interior minister in Najibullah’s cabinet and an arch enemy in those days of the so-called Mujahideen who made up the Northern Alliance. It is incongruous but perhaps to be expected that even this former enemy of the stalwarts of the United Front is welcomed in their ranks because he, like them, is opposed to Karzai.

It is also perhaps uniquely Afghan that most of the prominent members of the Front are members of the Karzai government holding what are theoretically important positions. Most observers believe that the Front is a bid by these warlords to restore their regional spheres of power — Dostum in Mazar-i-Sharif, Ismail Khan in Herat, Fahim in Panjshir and so on. They cannot dislodge Karzai while he retains US support but they can and have added to the instability in Afghanistan.

Within the government there are divisions best exemplified by the alleged attack on the attorney-general by a former interior ministry official and by unsuccessful raids conducted by the interior ministry (presumably at the behest of the attorney-general) on the house of a former Kabul police chief, currently the security adviser to Karzai.

It has been generally believed that the Taliban have been receiving, in addition to the recruits from madressahs, much of their arms and ammunition from Pakistan. Recent reports, however, suggest that a substantial quantity is being supplied from Iran.Whether this is with or without the Iranian government’s support is not yet clear, although the western media and some western officials maintain that given the quantity and quality involved it could be presumed that the Iranian government is a party to the supply.

The Karzai regime, anxious to maintain its relations with Iran on an even keel, has been categorical in denying that any evidence exists of Tehran’s involvement in arms smuggling from Iran, but regional officials are less reticent.

The Taliban are, of course, the elements in Afghanistan that the Iranians most abhor. But in the twisted politics of the region, it is possible that elements in the Iranian government regard assistance to the Taliban as a means of discomfiting the coalition forces and keeping Afghanistan unstable so that communication routes through Iran to the Central Asian states acquire an irreversible permanence.

Iran, however, is not the only other source of arms for the Taliban. The northern warlords have surrendered only some of the arms that they had accumulated during the jihad. It is estimated that after the DIAG (Disarming of Illegal Armed Groups) had collected some 70,000 weapons more than one million still remained in the arsenals of the warlords.

Now reports suggest that large quantities of such arms are being transported from the north to the Taliban in the south and are earning a neat profit for the arms dealers. While the Karzai government is aware of this it lacks the means to put an end to it.

All in all, Afghanistan is a mess and is likely to remain so for many years to come. It is against this backdrop and with the full realisation that this mess has perilous consequences for Pakistan that Pakistan’s policy towards Afghanistan has to be framed. What that policy should be will be the subject of my next article.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Little stress on women’s health

MORE appalling than the state of the reproductive health of women in Pakistan is the ignorance shown by our policymakers and leaders of opinion about the silent suffering of women.

Dr Shershah Syed, the president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Pakistan, who is one of the most outspoken critics of the government’s health policy, recalled the other day his encounter with political leaders before the 2002 elections. The PMA had arranged a meeting with party representatives to brief them about women’s health. Thus the doctors hoped to enlist the cooperation of the prospective parliamentarians in health matters after the election.

He was shocked when most leaders refused to believe the statistics he gave about maternal mortality. They rejected promptly the grim picture he painted as a lie. They alleged that he was exaggerating when he told them how women were suffering due to the inadequate facilities available for maternal and neonatal health.

The fact is that reproductive health has been a subject that has been shoved under the carpet. Until recently it was not even discussed openly – thanks to the prudishness and hypocrisy of our society – and there was little public awareness about it. The situation changed somewhat when Benazir Bhutto in her second term as prime minister set up the National Committee on Maternal and Neonatal Health (NCMNH) in 1994 with Dr Sadiqa Jafarey as the president. It was mandated to “analyse the problem of high maternal mortality and morbidity in the country and develop and demonstrate workable approaches with the objective of lowering the high rate of maternal deaths.”

This proved to be an uphill task. Dr Sadiqua Jafarey, the president of NCMNH and one of the most senior gynaecologists in the country who has devoted her entire working life to the cause of women’s health, says it is difficult to say whether the committee has made any impact on the maternal mortality rate (MMR) because there is no benchmark for it to follow. The National Institute of Population Study, Islamabad, has now conducted a survey the results of which are awaited.

“Our experience has been that the MMR in all major tertiary care hospitals has remained unchanged. But that could be due to growing awareness and more women with complications being brought to hospitals which neutralises any drop that might have occurred.”

Dr Jafarey feels that the NCMNH’s greatest achievement has been to create public awareness of the importance of women’s reproductive health in Pakistan. At least the issue is now being discussed and last week her committee focused its consultation on unsafe abortions, which are one of the major causes of maternal mortality after haemorrhage, sepsis, eclampsia and obstructed labour.

The NCMNH has shown the courage and foresight to bring the problem of unsafe abortions into the open since nearly a tenth of maternal deaths in the country take place as a result of the complications caused by the dangerous termination of pregnancies by unskilled dais.

Thanks to the NCMNH’s efforts the government announced in April 2005 the National Maternal and Child Health Policy and Strategic Framework (2005-2015) and an implementation programme last year.

This document focuses on the health interventions which are essential to save the lives of expectant mothers. Recognising the fact that most babies in Pakistan are born at home without any skilled supervision, the government seeks to train midwives, birth attendants and lady health visitors who work in the community. It has also been realised that inadequate emergency obstetric and neonatal care facilities in hospitals is also responsible for a high MMR – estimated to be 500 per 100,000 live births in Pakistan by the UNFPA’s State of the World Population, 2007.

The government has earmarked Rs31.5 billion to be spent in five years on this programme. Will this amount be forthcoming? The policy acknowledges that Pakistan spends too little on health – only 0.65 per cent of GDP. The internationally recommended figure is two per cent of GDP.

Another important factor that has been recognised but has not been addressed is the socio-cultural and economic causes of maternal mortality. The poor reproductive health of women in Pakistan reflects their abysmal status. When resources are scarce – be it in the national exchequer or in the family budget – it is taken for granted that the cuts will be exercised on the spending on women, be it their healthcare or education.

Closely linked to maternal health is the performance of the population programme. It may be designed primarily to prevent births and thus reduce the population growth rate, but the population programme has a direct bearing on maternal health by regulating the family size and the spacing of children. For it is now known that a woman’s reproductive health is determined to a large extent by the number of pregnancies she has had and the gaps between them. These are in turn influenced by the availability of contraceptives.

The contraceptive prevalence rate in Pakistan is dismally low (a paltry 20 per cent) and as a result there is a high unmet need. In other words, there are far too many women who are burdened with unwanted pregnancies because they have no access to birth control measures. It is a myth that people’s religious beliefs come in the way of planned parenthood.

Denying them contraceptive choices and facilities is at the root of our failed population programme which should be integrated closely with the maternal healthcare strategy – as Dr Nafis Sadik, the previous executive director of the UNFPA, never tired of recommending.

All these interrelated factors play on each other and multiply the impact of every factor. The need is to break the vicious cycle. This would explain why countries which show a low MMR also have a high contraceptive prevalence rate and a high literacy rate among women.

Will our policymakers respond to the challenge they face? They will have to show their commitment to women’s rights by translating it into better maternal and child health as laid down by the millennium development goals.

Joy rides in staff cars

WITH Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz appealing to all concerned to exercise moderation in state expenditure, do you think the senior bureaucrat will ever give up his penchant for the staff car which he takes as a symbol of his official importance?

It seems that China too was about to reach the stage that we of the Third World know so well in which amenities get provided to bureaucrats but the turn of the common man never comes. Inexorable progress towards that stage was halted some time ago by withdrawing 2,300 staff cars from party office-holders in Shansi province alone, said a recent report from Beijing. One should say, “just in time!”

But even so some harm was done. The seed was sown by first giving them the staff cars. You see, if you don’t extend a concession to a government official in the first place it is all right. He doesn’t mind. If you don’t give him too many perks to start with, he’ll adjust himself within the salary.

But once a facility has been provided it becomes a sort of right. And if the government is foolhardy enough to withdraw it then it will earn the silent odium of the bureaucrat. He may even stop working, since he has no other means of protest at his disposal.

You will say, how can that be? How can a government servant stop working and get away with it? I don’t know about China but it happens in Pakistan quite frequently. In fact it’s going on all the time. It’s only a question of being found out or not being found out. Only those who are addicted to work get found out and are given more work as a punishment. The silent majority in the bureaucracy hardly ever works.

In some ways the car-happy bureaucrats of Shansi left their Pakistani counterparts behind. Ignoring a ban imposed by the party on the purchase of staff cars, many of them acquired vehicles out of funds meant for education and natural disasters. Maybe they believed the cause of education would be better served with luxurious mobility, and natural disasters would go back where they came from if staff cars were placed in their way.

Anyhow the state has now gone ahead and sold all the cars. One hopes the new buyers are not the departments of education and natural disasters of other provinces. A researcher on administration has calculated that senior public servants in Pakistan spend something like one-fifth of their office time in staff cars. Therefore, with conferences and tea sessions outside and running errands on behalf of the begums, there’s hardly any time left for file work. No wonder the poor chaps have to take files home.

Our government is so stingy with staff cars that, with some exceptions, it will allow only one per every senior officer. I don’t know how it expects the children to go to school and the wife to go to coffee parties. Any yet it wants that one solitary car to meet the demands of official engagements also.

The officers then take recourse to the principle of maximum utilisation of available resources and commandeer the vehicles of subordinate departments. That is why you see the staff cars of agencies like the Board of Superfluous Education or the Sand Dunes Research Institute making official trips to Bara Bazaar and to the picnic spots around Chhattar.

I once asked a top-of-the-drawer bureaucrat if he ever misused his staff car as is so often alleged by newspapermen with whom this is a favourite topic. His reply was an emphatic no, and this is how he explained it: “To misuse something,” he said, “is to employ it for a purpose other than it is meant for. If I were to use my staff car as a fridge or a kennel for my pet Alsatian, that would certainly amount to misuse. I never do that. It is always used to drive me or other people around.” You will agree that that is one way of looking at a staff car.

Another way, for those who are not entitled to one, is to look at other people’s staff cars longingly and feel deprived, enviously noting down the off-beat places where the car was seen for the purposes of shopping or eating ice cream. This goes on till one day the long-awaited promotion order is issued and the PA smilingly brings the magic news, “Sir jee, staff car aa gaee hai.” The magic news is at once conveyed to the family.

Once a friend had a biggish Ford van for a staff vehicle. In the winter months when it was parked at his residence after office hours the family used to have their afternoon tea in it. His wife found it warm and cosy. Another information chap used to run his office van on hire between Hyderabad and Hala. One day a magistrate protested when the fare was arbitrarily raised and reported the matter. His objection was not to the commercial use of the vehicle since it was doing a public service but against the fare hike which he thought was unjust.

Later he once made an effort to meet part of the loss by “hijacking” a donkey on a deserted road, putting it in his office Land Rover and selling it in the next town. The poor fellow again got found out. Anyway I heard some years ago that he had retired from service without a blemish on his record.

If by chance the party bureaucrats of Shansi province can manoeuvre to get back their staff cars they should send a study group to Pakistan to see how the thing is properly done. It is only in this country that the occupant of a staff car flying the national flag on it can be seen buying vegetables in Sabzi Mandi or haggling over the price of a second-hand coat in Landa Bazaar.

The link with Iraq

WHEN it argued for the invasion of Iraq, the British government placed the national interest at the centre of its case. Not only would the invasion contribute to international order, Tony Blair said, but it would cut off at its roots the threat of terrorism in the UK. Many disputed the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and pointed out that war and occupation might assist extremist organisations recruiting British Muslims, giving terrorism a spurious (but, to the wrong-headed, compelling) moral justification. When, following the invasion, it was suggested that Britain had been made a more obvious target for Islamist terrorism, Tony Blair accused those who made this case of appeasement. He pointed out (rightly) that non-participants in the war were also targets, and that 9/11 was one of several attacks Al Qaeda staged before Iraq. Those who warned that the war would antagonise Muslims were accused of indulging – and even stoking up – disaffection.

The prophecy that occupying Iraq meant attacking Al Qaeda has proved grimly self-fulfilling. Osama bin Laden's network has become associated with resistance to British and American involvement in Iraq – either directly, or by using the fate of Iraqis as supposed proof of the west's malign intentions towards Muslims. Can it be denied that the invasion encouraged a growth in Al Qaeda's threat and influence?

It is time for a new prime minister to revisit these arguments. The daily carnage in Iraq is perhaps hard to acknowledge for members of the cabinet involved in the chain of events that led finally to this hellish instability. Each and every day ordinary Iraqis are victims of the sort of mayhem planned for London and Glasgow last week. Most civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are at the hands of non-western forces, yet it is still the west that gets the blame – and, indeed, it has some responsibility for the context in which they happen. That techniques from Iraq – petrol and gas canisters placed in cars – seem to have been exported to the UK is more than symbolic. It is not proof of a direct link with Al Qaeda, nor should it absolve the would-be bombers from condemnation. Yet it is wrong to claim there is no link to Iraq. Indeed, this past weekend there appeared to be some striking, if grotesque, parallels.

Today, a refusal to acknowledge that the much more lethal carnage in Iraq is in part a consequence of western actions is damaging the national interest. It would be wrong to think that Britain either could or should sue for peace. At its core, Islamist fundamentalism is irreconcilable with western values. It must be confronted, as it was before Iraq. But in the ease with which extremists may recruit disaffected European Muslims lies softer, human territory. It is here that the government might increase domestic security by disproving the arguments the extremists use and giving the lie to the false picture they paint of Britain.

Gordon Brown's new government has to find a form of words that acknowledges Britain's role in creating – unintentionally – the conditions for instability, civil war and mayhem. It has to find not just the will to disengage over time (such a will already exists) but the language to convince listeners that this is now the government's settled purpose. Such an approach would not extirpate the terrorist cause in Britain, but it would be a start in altering the conditions in which terrorists recruit. It would also be morally and historically right.

––The Guardian, London