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PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CIRCULATE
The Aspen Institute Germany and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung wish to thank the Robert-Bosch-Stiftung, Daimler AG,
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2012 Aspen European Strategy Forum
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CONTENTS
ABOUT ASPEN
05
13
SESSION II:
1. Christine Fair
U.S.-Pakistan Relations: Ten Years after 9/11
SESSION III:
25
2. Keith Crane
The NATO Drawdown: Implications for Afghanistan and Pakistan
SESSION IV:
33
3. James Dobbins
Launching an Afghan Peace Process
SESSION V:
45
4. Anthony Cordesman
Transition in the Afghanistan-Pakistan War and the
Uncertain Role of the Great Powers
SESSION VI:
59
5. Sumit Ganguly
Militant Islam in South Asia: Past Trajectories and Present Implications
139
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SESSION VII:
6. Thomas Ruttig
Afghanistan between Democratization and Civil War: Post-2014 Scenarios
149
7. Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh
APPENDIX I:
Scenarios for Afghanistan & for the Region & Political Options for the
International Community
163
ACRONYMS USED
177
BIBLIOGRAPHY
179
183
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ABOUT ASPEN
THE MISSION OF THE ASPEN INSTITUTE IS
TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF LEADERSHIP
THROUGH DIALOG ABOUT THE VALUES AND
IDEALS ESSENTIAL TO MEETING THE
CHALLENGES FACING ORGANIZATIONS AND
GOVERNMENTS AT ALL LEVELS.
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The Topics:
Reconciliation in the Western Balkans
Regional cooperation
NATO and EU integration
Economic development and energy security
A stable security architecture for Southeast
Europe
The events are organized in cooperation with Southeast European governments and are complemented
by high-level guest speakers from the respective
host country.
The Goals:
Establishing transatlantic networks that in
clude Southeast European leaders;
Contributing to the political and economic
stabilization of a region that remains
important for future European and
transatlantic security
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Programs to address current complex policy challenges faced by society. Conferences and seminars
on complex political and social developments: these
are analyzed in confidence and together viable solutions are developed. The institute mediates between
conflict parties with the aim of using a holistic approach to defuse or solve the most difficult challenges arising in international relations.
An unofficial, confidential Track II meeting of senior government officials from the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and former senior policy
makers and North Korea experts from the United
States of America.
A strategy forum for top international and transatlantic leaders from business, science, politics, diplomacy and culture, convened to discuss strategic
challenges openly and in depth behind closed doors.
Kickoff presentations by international experts
Feedback and dialogue with policy makers
Search for an international consensus
Development and publication of constructive
suggestions that can be implemented, are
relevant and are of practical value to policy
makers
The Topics:
2008 International State Building and
Reconstruction Efforts: Experience Gained
and Lessons Learned
2009 Russia and the West: How to
Restart a Constructive Relationship
2010 The Strategic Implications of the
Iranian Nuclear Program
2012 Sustainable Strategies for Afghanistan
and the Region after 2014
The Goals:
Exploring the envelope of possible solutions
to the North Korean nuclear crisis
Making a contribution towards renewed
DPRK-U.S. contact in official channels
The Topics:
Denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula
Conventional Armaments Reductions
International Economic Cooperation with the
DPRK
Normalization of DPRK-USA relations
Concluding a peace treaty by which to end
the Korean War.
Strengthening Near-Eastern Civil Society
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Public presentations by and discussions with highprofile speakers. A platform at which differing opinions can be exchanged and debated and new ideas
can be introduced.
Representatives of German business, science, politics, diplomacy and culture founded the Friends of
the Aspen Institute (Verein der Freunde des Aspen
Institut e.V.) in 1989 in order to support the mission
and goals of the institute.
The institutes work can be supported via a tax deductible membership contribution to the Friends of
the Aspen Institute, as a Corporate, Private or Junior
member. The revenues generated in this manner
cover the core operating costs of the Aspen Institute
Germany. This financial support permits the institutes staff the freedom to execute the institutes
mission.
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In cooperation with:
Gesellschaft
fr Sicherheitspolitik und
Rstungskontrolle
After foreign troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan in late 2014, the future stability of the country, neighboring Pakistan, and the general regional neighborhood will be open to question. A renewed civil war and an
eventual return of the Taliban to power cannot be ruled out. Pakistan itself may continue to be characterized
by growing instability. The surrounding region will be the subject of great power competition involving regional and extra-regional actors. Given the importance that the Afghanistan-Pakistan area has for the stability
of the wider region, for the fight against Islamist terrorism, and for future nuclear non-proliferation, the strategic challenges that NATOs withdrawal from Afghanistan pose for the international community are
enormous. The 2012 Aspen European Strategy Forum will tackle this challenge by seeking to address a number of related questions.
Welcome Cocktail
19:00 22:00
Welcoming Remarks:
Dr. Gerhard Wahlers, Deputy Secretary General,
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin
Prof. Dr. Joachim Krause, Aspen Institute Germany, Berlin
09:15 11:00
Session i:
Chair:
Panelists:
11:00 11:30
11:30 13:00
Session ii:
Chair:
Paper:
Panelists:
13:00 14:30
14:30 16:00
Chair:
Paper:
Panelists:
16:00 16:30
16:30 18:00
19:30 22:00
Chair:
Paper:
Panelists:
Session V:
Chair:
Paper:
Panelists:
10:30 11:00
11:00 12:30
12:30 13:30
Chair:
Paper:
Panelists:
13:30 15:30
Session Vii: Scenarios for afghanistan and for the region and Political
options for the international Community
Chair:
Papers:
Panelists:
15:30 16:00
16:00 17:00
Session Viii:
17:00
Concluding Session
Chair:
Paper:
Panelists:
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
name
affiliation
Head of the Policy Planning Department, German Federal Foreign Office, Berlin
Paul Berkowitz
Friedericke Bge
Freelance Journalist
Thrse Delpech
Judy Dempsey
Carl Douglas
Christoph Erhardt
Director, Team Asia & the Pacific / European & International Cooperation,
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin
Hamid Gailani
Louie Gohmert
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
Deutschlandradio, Berlin
Eric Gujer
Jeremy Haldeman
Hekmat Karzai
Hasnain Kazim
Steve King
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the 5th District of Iowa
Patryk Kugiel
Nader Nadery
Major General (ret.) Pan Zhenqiang Professor, Institute of Strategic Studies, PLA National Defense University,
Senior Research Fellow, China Institute of International Studies, Beijing
Dr. Hartmut Philippe
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
Dana Rohrabacher
Thomas Ruttig
Loretta Sanchez
Martin Schuldes
Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh
Karsten D. Voigt
Tinko Weibezahl
Jack Wheeler
Consultant, Washington DC
observers
Paul Behrends
Lance Domm
Stefan Hansen
John Lenczowski
Jan Losemann
Johannes Marten
Ambassador (ret) Dr. Gunter Mulack Director, German Orient Institute, Berlin
Andrew Noble
Robin Schroeder
Adrian Seufart
Serap Ocak
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Pakistans problems are as well-known as they are numerous. Pakistan is both the source of terrorists operating throughout the region and beyond (some of which
enjoy explicit state sanction) and increasingly the victim
of terrorist groups that have emerged from its erstwhile
proxies. Despite its mooring as a parliamentary democracy, the state has been dominated by the army, which
has governed Pakistan directly or indirectly for most of
the states existence. While democracy has never fully
taken root, authoritarianism has never garnered widespread legitimacy. Thus the army always comes to
power through the connivance and acquiescence of the
broad array of civilian institutions and personalities
necessary to provide a patina of legitimacy to its seizure
of power.
The army enjoys a generally accepted right to intervene due in part to Pakistans origins as an insecure
state and the intractable security competition with India,
which first centered on the disputed disposition of
Kashmir but now derives from Indias ascent as an
emerging global power. The army believes itself to be
the only institution capable of protecting Pakistan, and
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Over the last ten years, the United States has pursued
relations with India and Pakistan under the rubric of
de-hyphenation. That is, Washington has interacted
with New Delhi and Islamabad without regard to their
long-standing and intractable security competition. 1
Proponents of this policy tend to advocate vertically integrating U.S. policies towards India and Pakistan while
minimizing the real collateral effects that engaging either India or Pakistan has on the other. While this has
been an elegant rhetorical argument motivating foreign
policy, its practicality has been belied by the zero-sum
nature of Indo-Pakistan competition itself.
While the United States has sought to cultivate Pakistans support in the struggle against violent Islamist extremism, at a significant cost to the Pakistani state, the
United States has also pledged its support to help India
become a global power, including military assistance
and the infamous Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. Equally problematic, the United States has encouraged Indian involvement in Afghanistan without regard to Pakistans
concerns and often without any genuine consideration
much less assessmentof what India is actually doing
apart from its stated activities.
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Since 2005, with the resurgence of the libn in Afghanistan, U.S. focus has slowly but surely moved from
Al-qidah in Afghanistan to the libn, if for no other
reason than that Al-qidah has largely moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan. While the United States in late
2005 finally acknowledged that Pakistan was indeed
supporting the Afghan libn, it did not pressure Pakistan to act against the libn because it remained focused on Al-qidah. As the U.S. concentrated more on
the libn, it became increasingly insistent that Pakistan do more to disable that group. However, in the
same period, Pakistan redoubled its commitment to the
Afghan libn while sustaining its long-term commitment to the Haqqni Network.
It should be forthrightly conceded that from Pakistans
point of view the developments in the region were deeply injurious to Pakistans security interests. India, under
the U.S. security umbrella and with U.S. approval and
encouragement, had re-ensconced itself in Afghanistan.
The U.S. strategic partnership with India signaled to
Pakistan that Americas long-term partner in the region
was India. Implicit in Washingtons pursuit of New
Delhi as a partner is the recognition of India as the regional hegemon and a growing extra-regional power of
some consequence. The United States has simply failed
to grasp that Pakistan will not, in any policy-relevant future, accept Indian hegemony. To do so would be to
concede defeat for Pakistans expanding revisionist
goals, which first focused upon changing the territorial
status quo over Kashmir and which increasingly involve
undermining Indias expansion in the region.
In the face of the emerging recognition that Pakistan
and the United States have divergentif not actually
conflictinginterests, the United States deepened its
military posture in Afghanistan. Proponents of Counterinsurgency (COIN) argued for a larger footprint and
eventually prevailed upon the Obama administration to
surge U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Opponents of this approach (such as this author) were doubtful that U.S.
COIN efforts in Afghanistan could ever fructify given
the limited numbers of combat troops available, the
niggard contribution of combat troops of our allies and
their less than robust capabilities, a broken U.S. aid
agency, a surprisingly shallow understanding of the region, persistent lack of language skills, and an Afghan
partner that seemed more vested in securing its own
corrupt patronage networks than in providing any semblance of governance that could displace the libn
and allied network of militant commanders.1
services.senate.gov/statemnt/2011/09%20September/Mullen
%2009-22-11.pdf
1 For a useful debate on these two positions, see Gilles Dorronsoro,
Fixing a Failed Strategy in Afghanistan (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2009) and Ashley J. Tellis, Reconciling With the libn?: Toward an Alternative
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The United States should move aggressively to counter Pakistans militant networks outside of Pakistan. I
1 Human Rights Watch, We Can Torture, Kill, or Keep You for
Years Enforced Disappearances by Pakistan Security Forces in
Balochistan, New York, 2011. http:// www.hrw.org/sites/ default/files/reports/pakistan0711WebInside.pdf.
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10.0
34
8.0
6.0
4.0
2.0
0.0
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
cation services. Motor vehicles were few and far between in Afghanistan prior to the fall of the libn.
They are now ubiquitous: motorized transport is available virtually everywhere in the country. Growth in
cellular telephone services has been explosive, including among lower income Afghans. In 2001, outside of
a few satellite telephones owned by wealthy individuals, senior libn government officials, and Alqidah, Afghanistan had no cellular telephone services. By 2011, cell-phone subscribers numbered 17.2
million.2
However, much of Afghanistans economy is rooted in
the past. Licit agriculture, excluding opium poppy and
cannabis, remains the most important source of employment: about seventy percent of Afghanistans population works in agriculture. Yet it accounts for just a
third of GDP. Most Afghan farmers are primarily subsistence farmers; wheat is the most important licit crop,
followed by milk, meat and fruit.3
Services like trade, transportation, and construction also employ substantial shares of the Afghan working
population, often on an itinerant basis. The security
forces have become large employers as well. Most Afghans engage in a variety of economic activities: they
farm and work day jobs. Many spend part of the year
working in cities or abroad. The combination of greater
ownership of motor vehicles, which has expanded access and introduced more competition into the transit
market, and lower levels of violence, has made it easier
for Afghans to migrate abroad for work. Large num2 CIA, World Factbook, 2011, https://www.cia.gov/
brary/publications/the-world-factbook/.
3 FAO, FAOSTAT database accessed on September 22, 2011.
li-
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Drug exports are an important component of Afghanistans balance of payments. Exports of opiates are substantially greater than exports of licit products. In 2008,
for example, exports of opiates were estimated at $3 billion; all other exports, $2.2 billion.6 As most large cash
transactions involving drugs take place outside Afghanistans borders, the economic effects of the drug trade on
consumers can be measured primarily through imports
of goods rather than financial flows. Drug financing of
imports shows up in the form of trade deficits. Afghanistan has been running very substantial trade deficits
(Figure 2, overleaf). Most of these deficits have been
financed by foreign assistance, but earnings from illicit
drugs are another important source of import finance.
The Afghan government does not restrict exports of
capital; individuals or institutions that wish to take currency out of the country only have to register the
amount. In 2010, Afghans officially reported roughly
$1.7 billion in bulk cash transfers out of Afghanistan
through Kabul International Airport, or roughly $5 million per day, primarily by Afghan hawalas or money
transfer agencies.7 Most of this cash was being carried
to Dubai. In contrast to their role in financing imports,
earnings from narcotics do not appear to be a significant source of capital exports out of Afghanistan. Interviews with government personnel in Kabul involved
in monitoring financial flows out of Afghanistan revealed that most of transfers were from Afghan revenues associated with foreign activities within Afghanistan, be those payments for purchases of imported
goods, or earnings from construction contracts or foreign assistance projects, not earnings from illicit drugs.
Funds transferred into Afghanistan from narcotics exports are a small share of total revenues from narcotics
and are used to pay growers and smaller scale traders.
Payments for larger traffickers are generally made outside the country.
The Drawdown and the Afghan Economy
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36
Billion $'s
2.000
0.000
-2.000
-4.000
-6.000
-8.000
-10.000
2002
2003
2004
Licit Exports
2005
2006
Exports of Opiates
2007
2008
2009
Total Imports
Sources: International Monetary Fund, 2010, UNODC, various years, and RAND estimates.
Note: We were unable to find estimates of exports of opiates for 2006 and 2007.
World Bank, Issues and Challenges for Transition and Sustainable Growth in Afghanistan, Presentation presented at Wilton
Park, United Kingdom, June 7, 2011, Slide 5.
World Bank, Issues and Challenges for Transition and Sustainable Growth in Afghanistan, Presentation presented at Wilton
Park, United Kingdom, June 7, 2011, Slide 11.
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force are very high, the force should shrink rapidly if recruitment is halted.
Providing continued support for the Afghan government is more challenging. Donors need to focus on
working with the Afghan government to ensure that
government operations are not so large that they cannot
be supported by likely future levels of assistance. Donors also should focus on mechanisms to improve the
efficiency, transparency, and accountability of the Afghan government. When the Afghan government fails
to meet standards of accountability and efficiency, cuts
in foreign assistance may need to be the consequence.
According to the World Bank, Afghanistan could
greatly benefit from additional investments in roads,
bridges, and irrigation systems, as well as other infrastructure. Although new investments may have high
rates of return, the international community should focus on working with the Afghan government to ensure
that what has been built is used effectively: schools and
clinics, once built, need to be staffed by qualified
teachers and health care workers. Donors and the Afghan government also need to ensure that systems to
maintain infrastructure and levy and collect appropriate
charges have been set up and operate properly. After
all the resources invested in Afghanistan, both donors
and the Afghan government need to ensure that what
has been built will be maintained. Afghanistan may be
better off waiting before embarking on major new investments in infrastructure, such as further extensions
of the railroad from Uzbekistan, new trunk roads, or
large investments in electric power, until systems for
maintaining and collecting revenues are in place and
functioning well.
In this regard, Afghanistan would be well served if the
international community worked with the Afghan government to sell off or close state-owned enterprises.
These have primarily been a source of patronage and
graft. Afghanistan is too poor to afford the luxury of a
loss-making, state-owned airline or power companies
designed to enrich government employees.
On a final note, the draw down may also have economically beneficial consequences. Over the past few years,
the rate of growth in Afghanistan has become close to
unsustainable. The large demand for services on the
part of the international community and substantial expenditures on foreign assistance have created an environment in which corruption and graft have flourished.
Fewer funds should contribute to fewer opportunities
for corruption and perhaps a sharper focus on government and contractor accountability and performance.
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Average Annual %
8.0
7.0
6.0
5.0
4.0
3.0
2.0
1.0
0.0
1970s
1980s
1990s
Pakistan
Bangladesh
2000-2007
2008-2011
India
Sources: International Financial Statistics, International Monetary Fund, online at: www.imf.org;
Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2011: Update, Manila, Philippines, 2011.
Implications of the Drawdown for Pakistan1
Foreign security and economic assistance play a smaller role in Pakistans economy than they do in Afghanistans. Afghanistans GDP was estimated at $16 billion
in 2011; Pakistans, at $204 billion, yet Afghanistan
receives more foreign assistance than Pakistan.2 Nonetheless, the drawdown will have significant economic
repercussions for Pakistan as well as for Afghanistan.
Since 2001 the value of economic assistance to Pakistan from international donors, especially the United
States, has been substantial. It has been an especially
important source of funds for Pakistans government
and military.
Pakistans Economy
Between 2000 and 2007, economic growth rates in Pakistan rose from an average of 3.9 percent in the 1990s to
5.3 percent (Figure 3). Pakistan participated in the acceleration in economic growth that took place across
most of the developing world in the last decade, including on the Indian subcontinent. Better macroeconomic
management, trade liberalization, and some progress on
reducing microeconomic impediments to economic
growth were key factors in spurring faster growth. Sales
of state-owned assets to private investors helped improve the productivity of capital, reduced drains on the
1
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Insurgencies are never good for an economy. In Pakistan, increased levels of violence and risk associated
with the insurgency have contributed to capital flight,
disruptions in commerce, and higher costs of capital,
retarding economic growth. Although much of the difference between growth rates in India (and more recently Bangladesh) and Pakistan are due to better micro and macroeconomic policies and more investment
in infrastructure and human capital, the violence associated with the insurgency spanning Pakistans border
with Afghanistan is also greatly to blame, especially as
violent groups have extended their activities into Pakistans major cities.
Although the insurgency has slowed growth, the counterinsurgency has provided some economic benefits to
Pakistan. Foreign assistance related to Pakistans sup1
port for the counterinsurgency that has gone for development and security has been substantial. Pakistani
firms have benefited from the sale of transport and other services to supply ISAF. Pakistani companies have
also enjoyed increased sales of goods to Afghanistan
due to the growth in incomes in that country.
Non-Security Assistance. Pakistan receives a substantial amount of foreign assistance: According to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD), between 2007 and 2009 Pakistan received between $1,539 million and $2,816 million in development assistance annually, making it one of the largest
such recipients in the world.2 The largest contributors
were the International Development Association of the
World Bank, followed by the Asian Development Fund
of the Asian Development Bank. The United States has
been the most important bilateral donor, followed by
the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany. In my view,
of these sources, U.S. assistance is the most likely to be
cut as foreign forces draw down in Afghanistan. Consequently, I confine the discussion below to a discussion of U.S. assistance.
Total post-9/11 U.S. assistance to Pakistan has been
substantial. The United States provided $20.137 billion
between FY2001 and FY2010 (Table 1). Nonsecurity assistance ran $6.746 billion or about a third of
this total. Most U.S. funds for economic and development assistance have been disbursed through the Economic Support Fund (ESF). Development assistance
through this fund has been focused on education, health
care, financial stability, and general economic development. U.S. funds have been provided on a project
basis and as cash transfers to Pakistans budget. Because of concerns about the effectiveness of budget
support and the possibility that funds will be lost due to
corruption, the United States has put more development assistance into projects than budget support.3
The United States has targeted a substantial amount of
development aid to FATA in an effort to tamp down
militancy in that region. In 2006 Pakistan authored a
FATA Sustainable Development Plan 2006-2015 to
which the United States allocated $750 million over
five years.4 USAID also administers several other programs specific to FATA in education, health care, and
2
Table 1: U.S. Assistance to Pakistan in Nominal Dollars from Fiscal Years 2001 to 2010
2001
Coalition Support
Funds (CSF)
Foreign Military
Financing (FMF)
Pakistan Counterinsurgency
Fund (PCF/PCCF)
Other Security
Total Security
Economic Support
Fund (ESF)
Food for Peace
(Food Aid)
International Disaster Assistance
(IDA)
Other Economic
Total Economic
TOTAL
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
Total
$0
$1,169
$1,247
$705
$964
$862
$731
$1,019
$685
$1,499
$8,881
$0
$75
$225
$75
$299
$297
$297
$298
$300
$294
$2,160
$0
$0
$0
$0
$0
$0
$0
$0
$400
$700
$1,100
$77
$102
$33
$38
$50
$101
$99
$219
$289
$242
$1,250
$77
$1,346
$1,505
$818
$1,313
$1,260
$1,127
$1,536
$1.674
$2,735
$13,391
$3
$625
$188
$200
$298
$337
$394
$347
$1,114
$1,292
$4,798
$91
$41
$30
$22
$32
$55
$10
$50
$55
$124
$510
$0
$0
$0
$0
$0
$70
$50
$50
$103
$232
$505
$17
$45
$68
$95
$72
$91
$229
$144
$93
$79
$933
$111
$711
$286
$317
$402
$553
$683
$591
$1,365
$1,727
$6,646
$188
$2,057
$1,791
$1,135
$1,715
$1,813
$1,810
$2,217
$3,039
$4,462
$20,137
Source: Susan B. Epstein, K. Alan Kronstadt, Pakistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance, Congressional Research Service, July 28, 2011, pp. 19-20.
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CSF accounted for two-thirds of U.S. security assistance to Pakistan between FY2001 and FY2010. The
remainder was provided through a number of other
programs, the largest of which is FMF; spending for
Pakistan under FMF was $2.16 billion between
FY2001 and FY2010 (Table 1). FMF has funded purchases of U.S. military equipment and training above
and beyond that provided through the International
Military Education and Training (IMET) grant program.
Most of the training funded through FMF is supposed
to be for counterinsurgency. The U.S. Department of
Defense has characterized many of Pakistans major
acquisitions under FMF, like F-16 fighters and P-3C
patrol aircraft, as having significant anti-terrorism applications. The U.S. Department of State claims that,
since 2005, FMF funds have been solely for counterterrorism efforts, broadly defined.5 But some of these
weapons are not very useful for counterterrorism purposes, potentially contravening U.S. statutory requirements that FMF only be used for counterinsurgency
training and equipment.
Sales of Services to Afghanistan and ISAF. Pakistan is
Afghanistans largest export market. Although Uzbekistan and China are more important sources of supply,
Pakistan is also one of Afghanistans top five sources
of imports. Pakistan is Afghanistans most important
transit country. For businesses and consumers in Kabul,
Kandahar, and Jalalabad, Pakistan is the cheapest route
through which to import goods. According to Pakistani
data, 1,500 trucks a day pass through the Torkham
Gate crossing point in the Khyber Pass.6 In addition to
the trucks crossing at Torkham Gate, large numbers of
trucks cross the border at Spin Boldak, Gholam Khan,
and other crossing points along the border. The volume
of truck traffic at Spin Boldak has been estimated at
700 trucks per day.7
As noted above, the volume of this transport used to
haul goods for ISAF has fallen sharply since 2009. ISAF has concluded that the political risks of periodic
halts to trucks hauling goods for ISAF on the part of
Pakistans government, the destruction of fuel trucks
and supplies, and bribes paid to groups associated with
the insurgency for passage make the route through Uzbekistan preferable to that through Pakistan despite the
additional costs. By 2011, seventy percent of supplies
for ISAF transported by ground come through Uzbekistan, even though that route remains more expensive
than shipping through Pakistan.
See U.S. Department of State, Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs, On-The-Record
Briefing on U.S.-Pakistan Relations, Web site, December 21,
2007; cited by Kronstadt, Pakistan-U.S. Relations, pp. 60-61.
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India, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, available at http://milexdata.
sipri.org/result.php4 accessed on December 23, 2011.
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fact, it would probably be in the United States best interests to cut back on this assistance without a better
meeting of the minds on what ends and means should
be with regard to Afghanistan.
In contrast to security assistance, the United States and
other donors would be well advised to continue to provide assistance to improve education, health care, and
other public services in Pakistan. However, the United
States should carefully evaluate the efficacy of current
programs to facilitate economic development. Pakistans
governments, military and civilian, have repeatedly
avoided making policy decisions that challenge the interests of the economic elites. To some extent, foreign
assistance has facilitated this behavior. Because these
decisions have not been made, tax revenues are inadequate to provide universal elementary school education
or staff public health clinics. Electricity is often not
available, because rates do not cover costs and theft is
rampant. A reduction in bilateral grant aid for economic
development coupled with greater reliance on the development banks and, hopefully, a role for the International
Monetary Fund, could result in creating substantially
better conditions for economic growth as foreign forces
draw down in Pakistans Western neighbor.
So wrote Rudyard Kipling of a Victorian age confrontation between an English soldier and a Pashtun horse
thief. The poems conclusion belies its opening lines, as
the two men do bond, and the Pashtun joins the Englishmans regiment.
East and West continue to meet today on much the same
ground and in much the same manner. Here is where
American and European soldiers combat (and seek to
recruit) the descendants of Kiplings horse thief. Here is
the epicenter of global terrorism, the font of nuclear proliferation, and the most likely locus for the worlds first
war between two nuclear powers. Here is where a rising
China and India share a common border.
The Great Game thus continues. But if the playing
field is familiar, the number of contestants has increased
to include most of the worlds major powersthe United States, Europe, Russia, China and Indiaalong a
number of neighboring states that did not even exist in
Kiplings day.1
Afghanistans long running civil war is largely a product of this global and regional competition and the resultant external involvement. Unlike Yugoslavia, a
strong state divided by even stronger ethnic antipathies,
Afghanistan is a weak polity that has been torn apart by
its near and more distant neighbors. Question a Serb,
Croat or Bosniak regarding the basis of their mutual antagonisms and one gets an historical narrative dating
back a millennium or more. Ask the same of a Tajik,
Pashtun or Uzbek, and one will find that their grievances only seem to go back a few decades, anterior to
which they recall, however erroneously, a golden era
when everyone lived together in peace. Even today, despite the antagonisms bred of thirty years of civil war,
Afghanistans Uzbek population does not want to live in
Uzbekistan, its Tajiks in Tjkistn, its Pashtuns in Pakistan, or its Hazara in Iran. Among Pashtuns, the major
tensions are with each other, across tribal lines, not ethnic or linguistic. The vast majority of Afghans accept
that theirs is a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic country. At
the same time, they all feel entitled to a greater share in
its governance and the patronage that flows from it than
the others are prepared to accord them. Theirs is thus
more a conflict over power sharing than national identity.
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Afghanistans neighbors and the other powers promise not to allow their territory to be used to interfere in
Afghanistan;
The effect of the above pledges would be to declare
Afghanistan permanently neutral, and commit all others to respect that neutrality;
Afghanistan recognizes its border with Pakistan (the
Durand Line);
The United States and NATO promise to withdraw
their forces once these other provisions had been give
real effect;
The donor community promises to support the delivery of public services roads, schools, health clinics,
electricity and security to the disadvantaged communities on both sides of the Af-Pak border.
Such a package would give all the participants something
of value. Pakistan would secure Afghan recognition of its
long contested border and assurances that India would not
be allowed to use Afghan territory to destabilize Pakistans own volatile frontier regions. Afghanistan would
gain an end to cross border infiltration and attacks from
Pakistan. Pashtuns living on both sides of the border
would get access to improved public services. Iran, Russia and China would get assurances that the United States
and NATO troops would leave. And the United States
and its allies would get to leave.
Such an exchange of pledges could have effect, however,
only if Pakistan and Afghanistan have sufficient control
of their respective border regions to deliver on the mutual
promises of non-interference, something neither state is
currently capable of doing. Thus an international accord
on Afghanistan would have meaning only if it buttressed
an internal, Afghan process of reconciliation.
For some time Afghan President Hmid Karzai has
sought to initiate such an internal Afghan process. The
United States, even under the Bush administration, was
not opposed in principal. Until 2011, however, Washington had preferred to concentrate on detaching lowlevel fighters from the insurgent cause, a process labeled reintegration, arguing that any top down effort
at reconciliation should await improvements on the battlefield.
The attractions of reintegration are evident. Each insurgent brought over weakens the enemy while it correspondingly strengthens the government forces. In Iraq
such a process broke the back of the Sunn insurgency,
resulting in the massive defection of enemy fighters,
who in 2007 moved more or less overnight from killing
U.S. soldiers to working for them. This shift was
achieved without the U.S. or the Iraqi government having to make any concessions affecting the nature of the
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gain that position. We do not know how much consistency there is regarding the priority of these objectives within the insurgency leadership, either horizontally or vertically, nor which objectives are hard and
which ones might be compromised on or traded off
against other goals. As noted earlier, the libns primary goals are:
Remove foreign forces from Afghanistan; no residual foreign military presence other than as part of
temporary peacekeeping forces;
Relaxing the imposition of some Wahhb-style Islamic cultural rules (such as banning music and kiteflying) and some Sunn-centric legal rules, particular-
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Sharing leadership; Mullah Omar may not necessarily be interested in running Afghanistan again as
its supreme leader, although he probably wants to
influence or reform the constitutional structure.
The Government of the Islamic Republic and Afghanistan: the Kabul government is fragile, relatively new, in
a very poor, war-torn country, with uneasy relations
with its neighbors and foreign patrons alike, resembling
a congeries of overlapping patron-client networks in uneasy coalition rather than a modern nation-state. This
makes the Kabul government a difficult partner in counterinsurgency operations, and frustratingly incoherent
with regard to a peace process.
Polling reveals very strong support throughout the Afghan population for peace negotiations. Seventy percent
of the total population, and ninety percent of Pashtuns
living in Kandahar and Helmand favor such a process.
Afghans value what has been achieved over the past
decade and have no intention of giving it up to return to
life under the Islamic Emirate, but they also regard the
libn as an inescapable and not necessarily illegitimate part of the national fabric and one that should be
brought back into the fold, although not at any cost.
These positive views of a peace process are not fully
shared by those who might have the most to lose in such
an accommodation, to include elements of the old
Northern Alliance leadership and much of civil society,
particularly womens representatives. President Karzai
knows he must reach out to his (non-violent) political
opposition to include former Northern Alliance factions
and negotiate with them over his shoulder as he hammers out the terms of a possible deal with the libn
across a table. He has historically exhibited considerable
skill and finesse in this consensus-making, allocation of
patronage, and finely-tuned log-rolling, thereby building
up his power from an originally very narrow base and
making the best of the weak hand he was dealt in 2002.
His choice of former Northern Alliance president
Burhnuddn Rabbn to head the High Peace Council
charged with spearheading the reconciliation process
clearly intended to coopt at least some of the opposition
into this process, and Rabbns assassination represents
a serious setback in this effort to broaden the basis of
political support among non-Pashtun leaders for the
reconciliation process.
The international community provides a peacekeeping force for a limited period after an accord,
backfilling behind ISAF;
Pakistan: There are two competing narratives about Pakistans role in Afghanistan. Which one turns out to be
true will have a profound impact on the negotiating process and ultimate outcome of any peace talks. If both
are true, i.e. the government is divided, as seems most
likely, then the role Pakistan will ultimately play in any
such process is even more unpredictable.
The first narrative, favored by many observers in Kabul,
New Delhi, Washington and even Islamabad has Pakistans security establishment viewing Afghanistan almost entirely through the prism of the Indian threat. In
this narrative, Islamabads principal objective in Afghanistan is to limit Indian influence, the risk of encirclement and of Indian-supported subversion within Pakistan fomented from across the border in Afghanistan.
In other words, Pakistan fears the Indians doing to them
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tion. Top Indian political figures are upset by the timeline for NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan and by
what they consider to be a failure of U.S. resolve, fearing a retreat that will leave India holding the bag, as
one senior diplomat told the authors.
Indias goals in an Afghan peace process include, approximately in this order of priority:
A friendly or at least neutral Afghan government that is
not dominated by the libn or other Pakistani proxies;
Elimination of Al-qidah and other Islamist terrorist
groups sanctuaries in Afghanistan although it is
Pakistani terrorist groups targeted on India that are of
primary concern to New Delhi;
Preservation of an Indian presence in Afghanistan, including political and military intelligence capability
partly as a mechanism for ensuring that objectives (1)
and (2) are enforced over time, but also to maintain
Indias broader influence in the Central Asia region;
Expansion of trade and investment in Afghanistan,
including access to transit routes through both Pakistan and Iran;
Preservation of basic human rights for Afghans;
Maintain and strengthen the growing strategic partnership with the United States;
Much to the discomfort of Indian diplomats, Pakistan
plays the key role in delivering on four of these five objectives. India will press for some acknowledgement of
its security interests in any accord and insist that the result not facilitate Pakistans ability to support terrorist attacks on India in Kashmir and beyond. This could well be
the subject of a parallel side agreement between New
Delhi and Islamabad, either public or private.
On this score, some observers suggest that the United
States should attempt to promote an Indian-Pakistan
rapprochement on Kashmir as part of an Afghan settlement strategy. This is a highly desirable objective, but
an unrealistically ambitious short- to medium-term undertaking, analogous to solving the Israeli-Palestinian
problem. At the end of the day, statesmen in Islamabad
and New Delhi will have to arrive at some conclusion or
at least a modus vivendi on their own terms; encouragement from Washington should be continued, but is
unlikely to have more than a marginal effect on the behavior of either party.
India has traditionally allied with the former Northern
Alliance against the libn and has close ties with
many of its senior members, both in the Kabul government and in the opposition. At the end of the day, if Indias leaders believe that negotiations imperil either of
Indias top two objectives, they could derail the process
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may be necessary to ensure the execution of the counter-terrorist undertakings of a peace accord.
This suggests that Russia could be marginally helpful or
marginally obstructive in any peace negotiations, although Moscows seat on the UN Security Council gives
the Kremlin a veto on UN-related actions as part of a
settlement. The Russians have been willing to provide
temporary transit accommodations to ISAF in order to
blunt Pakistani threats to the ISAF logistical supply
lines, and have temporarily suspended their efforts to
limit American access to Central Asian basing and
transit. But at the end of the day, one of the primary
benefits to Russia of a successful peace process is the
exit of U.S. military forces and the reduction of Washingtons political influence throughout Central Asia.
Turkey: The Republic of Turkey has multiple interests
that would be served by a successful peace process, and
it could well play a central role in helping to bring such
an accord about. Ankaras relations with the parties to
the conflict and its understanding of the context are extensive. Turkey is the only country that has maintained
reasonably good relations with all of the potential parties to a peace process. Ankaras relations with the Kabul government and with various leaders of the former
Northern Alliance are close. Yet Turkey also had reasonably good relations with the libn when it was in
power. Even now Ankara can probably activate personal
ties with some libn leaders, which is pretty remarkable for a NATO member that has from the beginning
contributed troops to ISAF.
Ankaras proxies in the Afghan conflict include the Uzbeks, notably General Dostum, and the Junbesh movement, as well as close ties with the Turkmens and a few
other former Northern Alliance affiliated groups.
Through these proxies Ankara exerts a modest degree of
control based on suasion, trust, intercessions with the
Karzai government and some financial support.
Turkeys goals in Afghanistan include:
Fighting terrorism. Turkey is a front-line state with
numerous terrorist attacks and casualties from Alqidah-related attacks;
Expanding commerce. Turkish firms are major participants in construction and development contracts in Afghanistan, and Turkey is a large foreign investor in the region;
Promoting Turkish political influence and prestige
throughout Central Asia;
Protecting the interests of Turkic ethnic groups such
as the Uzbeks and Turkmens;
Strengthening Turkeys role in NATO. A leadership
role for Ankara in stabilizing Afghanistan would contrast with the slack of several other NATO members.
Saudi Arabia: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabias influence and interest in Afghan stems from Riyadhs long
association with the mujhidn in the anti-Soviet conflict and its relatively warm relationship with the IEA
when the libn controlled most of Afghanistan. There
was a notorious falling-out when Mullah Omar allegedly promised to hand over Osama bin Laden and then reneged, but the libn still rely heavily on private donations from wealthy Gulf individuals to conduct the war,
and the House of Sad has influence with the libn
as Keeper of the Two Shrines.
The Kingdoms goals in the country consist of countering both Al-qidah and Iran, and contributing to the
stability of Pakistan, an important Saudi ally.
Al-qidah is a sworn enemy of the Saudi state, and of the
Al-Sad family, which amount to virtually the same
thing. migr Saudi terrorists cycling through Afghanistan and Pakistan pose a continuing threat to Saudi Arabia, as well as its neighbors in the Gulf and Yemen. The
Saudis will have no objection to the extension of
sharah law or the imposition of conservative religious
practices as the price for a peace settlement. On the contrary, Saudi public opinion (at least male Saudi opinion)
likely favors a settlement in Afghanistan that includes extensive Islamicization, more conservative social policies,
backward steps from popular democracy, possibly full
sharah law, and rehabilitation of the libn as part
of power-sharing arrangement. Riyadh is also likely to
favor the eventual withdrawal of Western forces. The
military presence of the United States in Afghanistan
continues to feed the perception of a war against Islam, a
narrative that animates anti-Americanism and strains
U.S.-Saudi security relationship.
The Saudi leadership has no particular time pressure with
regard to Afghanistan and its relationship with Washington has suffered recently as a result of the Arab Spring.
The regime nevertheless has little to risk and possibly
modest gains to achieve by hosting peace negotiations.
They would likely be willing to exercise their moral suasion and perhaps a limited amount of checkbook diplomacy to nudge Kabul and the libn towards signing an
agreement.
Although less consequential than Saudi Arabia, Qatar has
been playing an increasingly active diplomatic role of late
in a number of spheres, to include Afghanistan. It has reportedly hosted exploratory talks between U.S. and
libn representatives, and is a quite plausible local for
any formal peace process, should such be launched.
China: Like Russia, China would be unhappy with any
significant long-term U.S. military presence in Central
Asia. On the other hand, China, unlike Russia, has not
traditionally been a major player of the Afghan "Great
Game". It has no strong ties with any of the Afghan factions, it is not embittered by a previous defeat, and its
primary objectives are to limit the spread of Muslim
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The United States and its ISAF coalition allies are obviously central parties to the war. The future presence or
absence of foreign military and intelligence forces will be
one of the main issues at the heart of any peace negotiation, so they too need to be represented. And finally there
is the wider circle of countries, to include Japan, China,
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as well as the Central Asian republics on Afghanistans Northern borders Uzbekistn,
Tjkistn, and Kyrgyzstn which could be expected to
contribute economically to sustaining any peace settlement and should accordingly be given some role in its
elaboration. Although only the Afghan parties should participate formally in negotiation of the core issues regarding their countrys future, some role and access needs to
be arranged for all the major external stakeholders. If excluded, these governments will certainly become spoilers.
If included and engaged, there is some prospect that they
may be persuaded to exercise convergent influence on the
Afghan parties.
Location: Security, ease of access and neutrality are the
three criteria for choosing a location. Insurgent representatives are not going to feel safe anywhere in Afghanistan. The insurgents are very reluctant to negotiate
inside Pakistan, and no other party would regard that as
either a secure or neutral locale. Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
one of the other Gulf States or Turkey are also possibilities, although Iran and elements of the legal Afghan opposition would probably object to the former, while
Turkey is a combatant as part of the ISAF coalition, and
thus possibly unacceptable to some of the insurgents.
The Germans would certainly like to host such a conference. Geneva, Switzerland offers a neutral site combining most of the above attributes.
Agenda: The main topics for negotiation among the Afghan parties at the core of the negotiations will be security arrangements, acceptance of the libn as a legitimate
political force, distribution of power and patronage, constitutional revision, the role of Islam in government and
law, and the presence of foreign forces.
In parallel there will also need to be discussions between the Afghans and their neighbors about the latters
role in sustaining peace and denying support or sanctuary to spoiler elements, as there will also need to be
talks between the Afghans and the broader international
community about the levels of external economic, political and perhaps even military support the latter are prepared to provide in the context of an agreement.
Format: These considerations suggest the need for a
multi-layered process, one with the Afghan parties at
the center, surrounded by several wider circles, the first
involving the United States and Pakistan, the second
adding India, Russia and Iran, and the third involving
other ISAF troop contributors and large financial donors.
These distinctions need not be, and as a practical matter
cannot be formalized. India, Russia and Iran would nev-
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to tolerate, indeed seek to broker, the inclusion of former insurgents into an enlarged coalition government
and into its local and national security forces. Second,
NATO will have to promise to go home, to withdraw its
remaining combat forces on a fixed, mutually agreed
schedule. Third, Western governments will need to remain heavily engaged in implementation of whatever
accord is reached.
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The U.S. and ISAF have put a rising emphasis on peace negotiations, and some form of serious talks may begin with a
new libn entity to be established in Qatar. The U.S. has
also signaled that it does not see the libn as an enemy if
it accepts a peace where it rejects violence and joins the Afghan government. The libn, however, has continued to
attack peace negotiators and killed former Afghan President
Burhanuddin Rabbani, the lead Afghan government negotiator, on September 20, 2011.
The insurgents may come to treat talks as a delaying tactic, or a means of winning a war through political means,
but they do not feel that they are being defeated and have
reason to believe that all they have to do is outwait
NATO/ISAF in a battle of political attrition. They may
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There are major political, security, and governance challenges in creating any effective form of transition. It
seems highly unlikely that insurgent groups like the
libn and Haqqn network will reach any form of political reconciliation with the Afghan government before the
U.S. and other allied forces leave unless they feel they can
use such agreements to win. It seems equally unlikely that
Pakistan will cease to seek its own objectives in Afghanistan and put an end to insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan.
Tactical gains against the insurgents matter but it is far
from clear what level of security they can win on a political level, and sustain once U.S. and allied forces leave. The
quality of Afghan governance at every level is critical to
popular support as transition takes place.
The most critical immediate challenge that outside powers face, however, is to support a transition plan that
will allow the Afghan government to function as aid and
outside spending are cut, and to sustain the progress being made in developing and sustaining Afghan national
security forces.
Studies by the World Bank and Afghan government
and ongoing studies by the IMF, the U.S., and key European governments show that transition requires major
levels of continuing aid to avoid triggering major security
and stability problems.
Afghan President Hmid Karzai requested some $10 billion a year through 2025 at the Bonn II Conference in
December, 2011 for a program that set ambitious goals
for both security and development, called for equally
ambitious reforms and improvements in governance, and
called for the Afghan government to achieve full independence from outside support in 2030:1
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will only receive support consistent with all other least developed nations. A robust and growing extractive industries sector
will have developed. Through effective development and, improved delivery of Government services, the root causes of insurgency will be reduced and, in consultation with international partners, plans will have been put in place to reduce the size
of the ANSF.
By 2030 Afghanistan will be funding a professional, highly effective ANSF. Achievements in development and governance
will see Afghanistan emerge as a model of a democratic, developing Islamic nations.
These Afghan requirements seem to be based on assumptions about future security, the pace of reform and improvements in governance, increases in economic development and activity, and increases in government revenue
that are optimistic to the point of being unrealistic.
One of the critical problems in many civilian aspects of
transition plans is that they do not take account of the
probable level of security in given areas as outside military
and aid workers depart and of the question who can provide
security for domestic and internal ventures. Such planning
efforts border on the absurd. There are few prospects of anything approaching local security in much of Afghanistan until long after 2014 barring some peace arrangement that
gives insurgents de facto control over high threat areas. No
aid or economic plan that ignores the fact that the nation is at
war and that key areas are likely to remain so long after
2014 has the slightest value or credibility.
As a result, the level of outside aid need to achieve Afghan
goals are almost certainly understated. Aid levels of roughly $120 billion over the entire period are almost certainly
too low to both cover the cost of funding the Afghan National Security Forces during transition and beyond, and
give Afghanistan the resources to cope with the loss of U.S.
and ISAF military spending during 2012-2014 and the
probable forthcoming cuts in donor civil aid.
U.S. and European Realities
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The U.S. and its key European allies also face a more
critical strategic challenge. The U.S., European aid donors, and NATO/ISAF have focused on Afghanistan and
dealt with Pakistan largely in terms of its role in the Afghan conflict. They must now define a credible set of
goals for the strategic outcome they want in Pakistan.
This must involve dealing with Pakistans impact on Afghanistan. Pakistan will complicate U.S. and European
efforts in helping Afghanistan move towards transition.
Even if U.S. and ISAF relations with Pakistan do not
continue to deteriorate, or remain so tense as to be nearly
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Afghanistan and Pakistan both have the capability fundamentally to change this assessment through better leadership, better governance, better security, and policies that
focus on development and incentives to outside donors and
private investment. No amount of international conferences, regional plans, and outside efforts will, however,
help either nation unless it becomes far more effective in
helping itself a level of reform that simply does not seem
credible in the near to medium term.
Speaking bluntly, and from the viewpoint of realpolitik,
this means that outside powers are likely to play the following roles through 2014 and beyond:
Russia
1 Congressional Research Service, Direct Overt U.S. Aid Appropriations and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2012.
Distributed to congressional offices, August 9, 2011
2 http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_active/pakistan/numbers
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Since April 2010, more than 30,000 U.S. containers have been
delivered to Afghanistan via the [Northern Distribution Network
(NDN)]. The United States continues to explore expanding surface transit cooperation agreements with Russia and other countries in the region.
Since the U.S.-Russia-Afghanistan Air Transit Agreement entered
into effect in July 2009, more than 1,400 flights have transited Russian airspace, ferrying approximately 221,000 U.S. personnel to and
from Afghanistan. The Air Transit Agreement allows for up to
4,500 military flights and unlimited commercial flights to transit
Russian airspace en route to Afghanistan each year, and significantly reduces aircraft transit times and fuel usage.
Also of note, with Russias assistance, the U.S. Air Force Air
Mobility Command completed two historic firsts in U.S. efforts
to resupply forces in Afghanistan. In early June, a USAF C-5 cargo aircraft flew from the United States over the Arctic Circle,
then South through Russian and Kazakh airspace to Afghanistan.
Later in the same month, a USAF KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft
flew the same route from Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington,
to the Manas Transit Center, Kyrgyzstan. It was the first time U.S.
Air Force aircraft have ever flown this Arctic route.
In May, the U.S. Army and the Russian Federations military export agency concluded a $375M agreement for the acquisition of
21 new Mi-17V5 military transport helicopters for the Afghan Air
Force, along with a comprehensive initial support package that
includes spare parts, ground support equipment, and engineering
support. The first nine aircraft will be delivered by the end of
2011, and the remaining aircraft will be delivered over a two-year
period. The new aircraft will augment the existing fleet of 52 Mi17s already in operation with the Afghan Air Force and the Afghan Ministry of Interior. The establishment of a NATO-Russia
Council Afghan Helicopter Maintenance Trust Fund will assist in
maintaining Afghanistans growing fleet of helicopters by funding spare parts, tools, and training for the Afghan Air Force. To
date, Russia has pledged $3.5M towards the trust fund and is
planning to provide intermediate level maintenance training to 10
Afghan Air Force maintainers beginning in September 2011 at a
helicopter maintenance training facility in Russia.
The NATO-Russia Council will also expand its Central Asian
counter-narcotics program, which trains counter-narcotics personnel from Central Asia, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, in
Russia, Turkey, and via mobile training teams.
In addition to security assistance and counter-narcotics cooperation,
Russia continues to support economic development in Afghanistan.
Following up on President Karzais first official state visit to Russia
in January 2011, Russian and Afghan officials met this summer and
pledged to further boost economic ties between the two countries.
During the latest round of talks, Russia pledged to build one million
square meters of affordable housing in Kabul, and also agreed to
provide Kabul with 500,000 tons of petroleum products a year beyond what it currently provides.
Based on a commitment made at the November 2010 NATO
Summit in Lisbon, Russia continues to expand the types of cargo
shipped by rail via the NDN and also permits the reverse transit
1 Department of Defense, Report on Progress Towards Security
and Stability in Afghanistan, October 30, 2011, p. 124.
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like the TAPI (Turkmenistn- Afghanistan-PakistanIndia) gas pipeline project and the Central Asia South
Asia Electricity Trade and Transmission Project (CASA
1000) that will benefit states in Central Asia.1
Russia has supported Afghanistans role in the SCOAfghanistan Contact Group that was established in 2005,
and provides a forum for all of the SCO member states
jointly to provide aid for development and stability in
Afghanistan. Perhaps because of U.S. statements about
withdrawal, Russia announced that it would support Afghanistans becoming an observer state in June 2011, and
the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan announced that
Russia would support Afghanistan in becoming a full
member state in October 2011.2
These steps are more political gestures, however, than a
sign that Russia has a desire to resume a major role in either Pakistan or Afghanistan. The Shanghai Cooperation
Organization focuses on Central Asia, and not the role of
peripheral states. It focuses on East-West and Northern
trade, development, and energy projects on a regional
level. It has not been a source of major flows of aid versus loans and investment projects.
China
Once again, the U.S. government takes a relatively optimistic official view in public. In its October 30, 2011 report to Congress, the U.S. Department of Defense described of Chinas role in Afghanistan as follows,3
The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) seeks a stable Afghanistan
to mitigate the need for a long-term U.S. presence on China's
Western border. It continues to seek improved relations with, and
stability and security for, Afghanistan, devoting diplomatic efforts to develop an economic relationship focused more on future
raw material access and extraction.
To promote stability in Afghanistan while it sustains its own economic development, Beijing pursues natural resource exploitation,
infrastructure development, and trade based on an outbound model already practiced in Africa and Latin America: gain political
influence, provide an alternative development model that places
higher value on domestic stability than political liberty, and adhere to an official policy of noninterference in the host country's
internal matters. Beijing's interest in Afghanistan and its untapped
mineral wealth is likely to grow, particularly if the security situation continues to improve. However, for the foreseeable future,
China will continue to rely on coalition forces to provide security
to support Chinese projects, as Beijing has no plans to commit security personnel to Afghanistan.
Since 2002, China has committed over $180M in aid to the Government of Afghanistan, and in 2009, China announced it would
provide an additional $75M over the next five years. Further,
PRC companies will likely continue to invest in Afghanistan,
most notably in the development of Afghanistans mines and infrastructure. For instance, China is currently involved in bidding
for the rights to develop iron ore deposits at Hajigak in Bamiyan
Province. However, progress remains slow and security concerns
persist, stalling existing projects such as Aynak copper mine
while impeding other investments. In order to further develop the
trade relationship, Afghan and PRC delegations continue to cooperate under the umbrella of the Afghanistan-China Joint Economic Commission. Beijings extension of this invitation underscores
its goal of returning stability to Afghanistan by boosting Kabuls
export market and access to international trade.
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veloped in the late 1960s, but aside from production tests, oil
production was intermittent, with daily outputs averaging 500 b/d
or less.
Northern Afghanistan has proved, probable and possible natural
gas reserves of about 5 Tcf. This area, which is a Southward extension of the highly prolific, natural gas-prone Amu Darya Basin, has the potential to hold a sizable undiscovered gas resource
base, especially in sedimentary layers deeper than what were developed during the Soviet era. Afghanistans crude oil potential is
more modest, with perhaps up to 100 million barrels of mediumgravity recoverable from Angot and other fields that are undeveloped.
Outside of the North Afghan Platform, very limited oil and gas
exploration has occurred. Geological, aeromagnetic, and gravimetric studies were conducted in the 1970s over parts of the Katawaz Fault Block (eastern Afghanistan along the Pak border)
and in the Helmand and Farah provinces. The hydrocarbon potential in these areas is thought to be very limited as compared to
that in the North.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has conducted preliminary surveys that put total possible Afghan reserves
of oil as high as 1.8 billion barrels. This could have a major impact in the years after 2020 if anything like these
reserves prove to exist and can be exploited at competitive prices. The former Soviet Union, however, only
found a total of some ninety-five million barrels of reserves during its efforts in Afghanistan, and these were
estimated rather than proven reserves.
The BP Statistical Review of Energy for 2011 does not
list any proved oil reserves for Afghanistan or Pakistan,
although small reserves do exist. 3 The CIA World
Factbook estimates Afghan proven oil reserves are too
small to count, and puts Afghan proven gas reserves at
49.55 billion cubic meters a figure too small to be of
more than local interest.4 The CIA World Factbook estimates Pakistani proven oil reserves at a negligible 313
million barrels, and puts Pakistani proven gas reserves at
840.2 billion cubic meters a figure that will be needed
to meet future growth in domestic consumption.5
The EIA World Energy Outlook for 2011, the IEA World
Energy Outlook for 2011, and the BP Energy Outlook
2030, all ignore Afghanistan and Pakistan as sources of
future meaningful oil and gas production and key transit routes through at least 2030.6
Like the mining potential discussed later in this study,
possible oil and gas reserve options are worth exploring
if Afghanistan can make the necessary changes in security, commercial law, and governance over time, but major
economy changing -- development is a prospect for
2020 and beyond. Moreover, such changes are likely to
be of more interest to China than oil-and-gas-rich Russia,
and many pipeline projects depend as much on Pakistani
changes in security, commercial law, and governance as
changes in Afghanistan.
Chinas Regional Priorities
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has since claimed to obey the limits on technology transfer imposed by the Missile Technology Control Regime
(MTCR), U.S. experts feel that China continues to provide technology for Pakistani missile systems ranging
from the short-range Hatf to the Saheen (a 600 km range
system that seems to be a version of the Chinese M-9),
and that Beijing may be supporting the development of
longer range systems.4
Rather than provide economic aid, China has steadily expanded its volume of trade with Pakistan, but on a commercial and not preferential basis. It has helped to finance
some two hundred and fifty projects like Pakistans Thar
coal project, the Bhasha Dam, the widening of the Karakoram Highway, the Gwadar deep sea port and the Saindak gold and copper project. Beijing also has helped finance Pakistans development of a deep-sea port at the
naval base at Gwadar on the coast of Pakistans
Balchistn province that some experts believe China
will eventually use as a deep water port for its navy, and
will become a major energy route once a pipeline is built
to Xinjiang. The real world economics of such a pipeline
do, however, remain highly questionable.5
Afghanistan is on Chinas borders and any sanctuary for
the operations and training of Islamist extremists and
Chinese dissidents in either Afghanistan or Pakistan will
pose at least a low level potential threat and Afghanistan
could become a center for Uighur and other Muslim dissidents. Russia, China (and the world) also share the
problems created by Afghan drug exports although these demand driven problems are unlikely ever to be
changed through efforts to cut off the supply of natural
and synthetic drugs.
4 For a good summary analysis of the issues involved, see the Nuclear
Threat Initiative (NTI), NTI, China's Missile Exports and Assistance
to Pakistan, http://www.nti.org/db/china/mpakpos.htm and NTI,
China's Missile Exports and Assistance to Pakistan,
http://www.nti.org/db/china/mpakpos.htm.
5 For an opposing view, see Dr. Rashid Ahmad Khan, The PakistanChina Strategic Partnership, China.org.cn, http://www.china.org.cn/
opinion/2011-05/20/content_22605398_2.html: The port will allow
China to secure oil and gas supplies from the Persian Gulf and project its power in the Indian Ocean. China has financed 80 percent of
the $300 million cost, and is also funding the construction of a railroad network connecting China with the port through Central Asia
and Pakistan, turning Pakistan into an energy and trade corridor for
China. The oil and gas supply line through Pakistan is a safer, shorter
and cheaper alternative route to the Malacca Straits, which is vulnerable to attacks by pirates and passes through a region dominated by
the United States. The importance of Gwader for China can be
gauged from the fact that China is the largest consumer of oil after
the United States. Its consumption is expected to double by 2025
with 70 percent coming from the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
Gwader offers the closest access point to these regions for China.
Gwader will provide an overland energy corridor to the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, shortening the journey by 12000 miles. The
route will also bring substantial benefits to Pakistan, making it one of
the region's largest energy players. According to one estimate, Pakistan will be earning $60 billion a year in transit fees in 20 years time.
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5 http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_active/pakistan/ numbers
6 Department of Energy, Energy Information Agency, World Oil
Transit Chokepoints, December 30, 2011, www.eia.gov.
Iran
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http://www.unhcr.org/4dfa11499.html
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about ten percent of Irans conscripted armed forces remain deployed along the Afghan border.1
Afghanistans relations with Iran have fluctuated over the
years, punctuated by periodic disputes over the water rights
of the Helmand River. Iran opposed the 1979 Soviet invasion and supported the Afghan resistance, providing financial and military assistance to rebel leaders who pledged
loyalty to the Iranian vision of Islamic revolution. Foremost among these was Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the
Northern Alliance.
Following the emergence of the libn and their harsh
treatment of Afghanistans Hazra Shah minority among
whom Iran had built up major influence Tehran stepped up
its assistance to the Northern Alliance in terms of money,
weapons, and humanitarian aid.2 The Northern Alliances
arms deals with Iran led many U.S. diplomats to view Massoud as a tainted force.3 For Tehran, relations with the
libn deteriorated further in 1998 after libn forces
seized the Iranian consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, executed
eleven Iranian diplomats, and massacred thousands of
Shahs. The subsequent fallout led Iran to mass as many as
300,000 troops along the border, and threaten war. Ultimately Iranian commanders decided against the intervention.
After the 11th of September 2001, the United States
launched a war against the libn regime that had sheltered Osama bin Laden. Supreme Leader Seyed Ali
Hoseyni Khmenei persuaded conservatives in the establishment that assisting the coalition war in Afghanistan
would be in Irans best interest: it would remove the hated
libn, strike a blow against one of Pakistans proxies,
and extend Irans regional reach.
As has been noted earlier, Iran has been a major aid donor
by regional standards. In an arrangement negotiated by UK
Foreign Secretary Jack W. Straw, Iran provided additional
assistance to the Northern Alliance and played a constructive role at the post-war negotiations in Bonn.4 In December 2002, Iran signed a Good Neighbor Declaration, in
which it pledged to respect Afghanistans independence
and territorial integrity. At the time, U.S. action in Afghanistan furthered Irans interests. Since then, U.S. reluctance to deal with Iran, and Irans concern that it is now
surrounded by U.S. bases and allies, not only in Afghanistan but also in Central Asia, has led to steadily rising tensions between the two countries.5
Iran has been active in Afghan reconstruction efforts, particularly in the Western portion of the country in the provinces of Herat, Farah and Nimruz. Tehran is primarily focused on supporting Shah political parties, mobilizing
1
2
3
4
5
Amir Bagherpour and Asad Farhad, The Iranian Influence in Afghanistan, PBS Tehran Bureau, August 9, 2010.
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan
and Bin Laden, New York: Penguin (2005), p. 345
Coll, p. 431
Ansari, p. 182
Keddie, p. 330
Shah mullahs, and influencing the Afghan media. According to the Afghan Chamber of Commerce, an estimated 2,000 private Iranian firms are active inside Afghanistan, 6 and the Iranian government has funded several
transportation and energy infrastructure projects, including
building roads and railway links, building schools and
funding scholarships at universities, as well as building infrastructure such as Herats electricity grid.7 The Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is also believed to
train some units of the Afghan security forces.8
Iran provides aid and investment which is focused on the
Turkmen minority in the Northwest (3% of the population)
and on Afghanistans Hazra minority (9% of the population. 9 Iran also provides main transit routes for the UN
World Food Program, whose aid is critical to some 30% of
the Afghan people, and where such shipments would otherwise have to compete with military shipments through Pakistan and the countries north of Afghanistan. Iran has good
reason to fear a libn/Haqqn/Hekmatyr resurgence in
Afghanistan, or any major increase in the Sunn Islamist extremist presence in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
On the other hand, Iranian government officials routinely
encourage members of the Afghan parliament to support
anti-U.S. and NATO/ISAF policies and to raise anti-U.S.
talking points during debates. They have sought to increase criticism of civilian casualty incidents caused by coalition forces, convince the Afghan parliament to legalize
foreign forces, and promote Shah rights (including a separate judicial system). To this end, the Iranian embassy has
cultivated relations with members of opposition groups
(such as the United Front), Tajk Sayeds, Hazra MPs, and
MPs from Herat and other Western provinces.
Iran has also used its fuel shipments as a source of leverage
over Afghanistan. It temporarily blocked shipments of fuel
in early 2011, causing significant shortages and price
spikes inside Afghanistan, reportedly instigated by worries
that Iranian supply was being diverted for use by U.S. military forces inside the country.10 Despite this, some analysts,
including the authors of a study conducted by RAND, conclude that the net effect of Iranian influence in Western
Afghanistan has been largely positive, has helped establish
stability and prosperity in the area, and has facilitated the
transfer of control to Afghan security forces.11
According to some sources, including senior U.S. and
ISAF military officials, Tehran still provides some mate6
7
8
9
10
11
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/
2011/RAND_OP322.pdf
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/13/world/la-fg- afghanistaniran-20101114
Amir Bagherpour and Asad Farhad, The Iranian Influence in Afghanistan, PBS Tehran Bureau, August 9, 2010.
CIA World Factbook, updated November 14, 2011,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/.
http://www.economist.com/node/18014604
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers
/2011/RAND_OP322.pdf, pg. 8
Iran and India have sought to counter Pakistani dominance of Afghan trade routes through the construction of
a 220-kilometer road from Delaram in Nimroz to Zaranj
in Iran, which will connect to Irans Chabahar port along
the Indian Ocean. The road, which is entirely financed by
India, will provide an alternate route to Pakistan for overland trade upon completion.5 Iran and India have also
engaged Afghanistan in trilateral initiatives to discuss its
future, in an effort to recover the influence they lose by
being shut out of other discussions due to U.S. and Pakistani sensitivities.6 However, Indo-Iranian cooperation in
Afghanistan has been restrained by U.S. pressure on India, and damaged by Indian support for U.S. sanctions on
The Stans
2
3
4
5
6
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/petraeus-doesn't sweat-irans-rockets-in-afghanistan/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-24/iran-must-notmeddle-in-afghanistan-u-s-says-after-bag-of-cash-reported.html
http://www.insideiran.org/media-analysis/iran-uses-karzai-visit-toshow-regional-support/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/18/us-iran-afghanistan- visit-idUSTRE75H1FN20110618
http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/india-iran-afghanistan- corridor
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/now-an-indiairanafghanistantrisummit/684954/
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9
10
11
12
13
http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2010/07/06/in-scramble-forafghanistan-india-looks-to-iran/
http://www.cfr.org/iran/afghanistans-role-irans-drugproblem/p11457
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/world_drug_report.html
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,USDOS,,IRN
,,4c1883eb32,0.html
http://www.pajhwok.com/en/2011/02/07/iran-expels-thousandsafghan-refugees
http://www.aei.org/docLib/2010-11-MEO-g.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8679336.stm
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Scaling up cross-border electricity projects, such as Pamir Energy. This public-private partnership supplies electricity to an
estimated 85 percent of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous
Oblast in Tajikistan as well as to several districts in Northern
Afghanistan;
Expanding joint training sessions between Afghan and Tajik
military and law enforcement officials at the U.S.-funded facility in Khorog and the National Border Guard Academy in
Dushanbe, as well as considering similar programs between
Uzbek officials and their Afghan counterparts;
Implementing cross-border community border guarding programs, including more targeted training for populations living
on the border, organizing joint training study tours, focusing
on community policing and cross-border training of border
guards and Ministry of Interior police in the region on vehicle
inspection best practices, crime scene evidence gathering,
emergency response, human rights, and interrogation and interview techniques;
Promoting cross-border working groups with provincial governments in Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and
Tajikistan, strengthening sub-national governance on both
sides of the border;
Funding cross-border initiatives to tackle multi-drug resistant
and extensively resistant tuberculosis (TB). The Central Asian
states have some of the highest rates of TB in the world.
Cross-border initiatives could help control TB infection rates
and spur innovative and sustainable programming;
Encouraging cross-border health programs by facilitating the
exchange of medical professionals;
Facilitating exchanges between women-led Tajik and Afghan
non-governmental organizations. Tajikistan has experienced
civil war in the recent past and its people are familiar with the
challenges and opportunities of reconciliation. Women, in particular, can play a critical role in laying the groundwork for a
comprehensive peace process;
Integrating Afghanistans youth into existing programs in
Central Asia that promote economic development, such as
Junior Achievement programs, and expanding vocational
training opportunities to teach vocational and agricultural
skills to populations on the border to provide economic opportunities and help stabilize the region; and
Supporting American-style summer camps for Afghan and
Central Asian youth similar to the successful Camp America
model in the Isfara and Rasht regions of Tajikistan. The curriculum can include sports, English language, leadership, critical thinking, and team building, with a focus on addressing
the roots of terrorism before they take hold in regions vulnerable to extremism.
The Senate study did not find any major near-term benefits
that would help Afghanistan during transition, and raised
questions that cast doubt on the near-term merit of any proposals for a New Silk Road, and concepts like the CACI,
or the Central Asia Counter-narcotics Initiative,3
Some countries like Turkmenistn might benefit from
pipeline projects like the TAPI gas pipeline project that
would run through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.4
3 Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate, Majority Staff
Report, Central Asia and the Transition in Afghanistan, December
19, 2011, pp. 9-11 and 11-12
4 AFP, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan sign energy, transport deals, Apr
28, 2008; Institute for the Study of War, Turkmenistan and Afghan-
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Opportunismstan
Whatever happens after 2014, the primary weight of international action during transition in Afghanistan and Pakistan will fall upon the U.S., individual European states,
and major outside aid donors and do so at a time when
they all face economic crises that seem unlikely to end before 2014.
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Sources: Work by the CRS, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. October 2008 report, p. 140;
various press announcements. Figures include funds pledged at April 2009 NATO summit and Japans October 2009
pledge of $5 billion over the next five years.
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During 2011, the U.S. altered its approach to strategy by effectively abandoning conditionality in maintaining its troop
presence. It has focused on steadily hardening deadlines,
and will reduce its troop presence from a peak of 98,000 to
101,000 (depending on the definition) to 91,000 by the end
of 2011, and to 68,000 by September 2012.1 Most European members of ISAF are equally involved in seeking to
withdraw their troops and cut back their role in Afghanistan.
The broad loss of conditionality (tying force and spending levels to the actual conditions on the ground) has had a
growing impact on the role that the U.S. and Europe can
play during 2012-2104 and beyond.
Regardless of ministerial meetings and political rhetoric,
the U.S. and its allies are now in a race to determine whether they can find some credible approach to transition in
Afghanistan and Pakistan before the coming cuts in troops
and money reshape the Afghan war.
U.S. actions will shape the outcome of this race, and determine how much of a transition actually occurs, as distinguished from a de facto rush to the exit. The U.S. also has
little time in which to act. The Afghan conflict is steadily
dropping in terms of U.S. domestic support, and support
within the U.S. Congress. There are divisions within the
White House over the priority of the war and the priority of
President Obamas reelection campaign and domestic
spending. The U.S. Department of Defense cannot really
plan its FY2013 budget submission until the outcome of the
Budget Act is far clearer, and the U.S. Department of State
and USAID are already cutting their future funding levels
for civil programs.
TALK WITHOUT HOPE?
The challenges that the U.S. and its European allies face in
carrying out an effective transition are reinforced by the
current focus on negotiations with the insurgents. When the
new strategy was adopted in 2009, there was little emphasis
on political negotiation with insurgent leaders versus the
hope that tactical victories and improved governance would
lead many fighters and less ideological insurgent leaders to
reconcile with GIRoA and return to civilian life.
1 http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/06/23/infographic-troop-levelsafghanistan-and-iraq.
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Political settlement has now become a key goal for transition, but one with very uncertain credibility and prospects
for success. It is all very well for the U.S. and its European
allies to try to shift the focus from war fighting and aid to negotiation, but the prospects for any success that really produces a stable and secure Afghanistan seem limited. U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stated the goal at
the Kabul Conference in November 2011,
...we can pursue three mutually reinforcing objectives: Were going to continue fighting, were going to be talking, and were going
to continue building Now, some might say, How do you do all
three of those at the same time? And my answer is, under the circumstances we must do all three at the same time. So we want a
very clear message to the insurgents on both sides of the border that
we are going to fight you and we are going to seek you in your safe
havens, whether youre on the Afghan side or the Pakistani side.
They must be dealt with.
It later became clear that the Afghan government, Pakistan, U.S., and NATO were seeking to set up a libn
office in Qatar, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia that might act as
a point of contact. Vice President Joseph Biden went on
to make statements in an article in Newsweek that, Look,
the libn per se is not our enemy. Thats critical. There
is not a single statement that the President has ever made
in any of our policy assertions that the libn is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.
Karzai formally welcomed these statements on December 31,
2011, I am very happy that the American government has
announced that the libn are not their enemiesWe hope
that this message will help the Afghans reach peace and stability. A senior U.S. official followed up on background by
stating that the U.S. planned to continue a series of secret
meetings with libn representatives in Europe and the Persian Gulf region next year.1
Yet, it is far from clear that the Afghan government can
bring the libn, Haqqn network, or any other major
group of insurgents to the negotiating table on any serious
basis. The September 20, 2011 assassination of
Burhnuddn Rabbn, the Chairman of the High Peace
Council, is just one highly visible sign of the risks involved.
Even if the major insurgent groups do come to the table,
it is unclear why the insurgents would negotiate any
agreement that favored the Afghan government or served
U.S. and allied goals in Afghanistan when they have every reason to hope that they can outlast the U.S. and ISAF.
And, it is unclear why the insurgents would not try to use
such negotiations to their own advantage, and violate any
agreements the moment it is convenient to do so.
This is what libn insurgents have done in the past
with the UK in Helmand and the Pakistanis. It is what
North Vietnam did in the Vietnam War, what the Maoists
1 Afghan president welcomes US remarks that Taliban not necessarily
Americas enemy. Associated Press, Updated: Saturday, December 31,
10:29 AM
Moreover, there is no clear unity in the Afghan government about such negotiations, and Pakistan will seek to
use them to its own advantage. Secretary Clinton raised
this issue in her remarks in Kabul, and made it all too
clear that success not only depends on the willingness of
the threat, but that of a very uncertain Pakistani ally:
were going to be expecting the Pakistanis to support the efforts
at talking. We believe they can play either a constructive or a destructive role in helping to bring into talks those with whom the
Afghans themselves must sit across the table and hammer out a
negotiated settlement to end the years of fighting.
We will be looking to the Pakistanis to take the lead, because the
terrorists operating outside of Pakistan pose a threat to Pakistanis,
as well as to Afghans and others. And we will have ideas to share
with the Pakistanis. We will certainly listen carefully to the ideas
that they have. But our message is very clear: Were going to be
fighting, were going to talking, and were going to be building.
And they can either be helping or hindering, but we are not going
to stop our efforts to create a strong foundation for an Afghanistan
that is free from interference, violence, conflict, and has a chance
to chart its own future.
So this is a time for clarity. It is a time for people to declare themselves as to how we intend to work together to reach goals that we
happen to believe are in the mutual interests of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region.
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TACTICAL SUCCESS?
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Figure 2: Enemy Initiated Attacks (Monthly Year over Year Change) Part I
Source: Department of Defense, Report on Progress Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan, October 30, 2011, p 2, 74.
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Figure 2: Enemy Initiated Attacks (Monthly Year over Year Change) Part II
Source: Department of Defense, Report on Progress Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan, October 30, 2011, pp. 77, 75.
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Figure 2: Enemy Initiated Attacks (Monthly Year over Year Change) Part III
The Most Striking Tactical Gains Are in the South -- Security Incidents by Regional Command (April 2011 September 2011)
Source: Department of Defense, Report on Progress Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan, October 30, 2011, pp. 77, 75.
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Figure 2: Enemy Initiated Attacks (Monthly Year over Year Change) Part IV
As a result of ANSF-ISAF operations, violence in RC-SW continues to decrease, particularly in central Helmand
Province, which was the first area to receive surge forces last year. In the districts of Marjeh, Nad Ali, and Garm
Ser, violence during the summer fighting season dropped by approximately 70 percent in comparison to the same period last year.
Violence in RC-SW during the last three months of the reporting period was 27 percent lower than last year at this
time, and continues to drop. Violence levels in RC-S appear to be following a similar pattern to RC-SW, likely reflecting the later flow of surge troops into the region.
These trends, however, remain nascent. Violence in RC-E remains 16 percent higher for the summer fighting season
compared to 2010, with the most notable changes in the provinces of Ghazni (11 percent increase in violence), Logar
(76 percent increase), and Wardak (19 percent increase) due to ongoing clearance operations.
The availability of safe havens in Pakistan has enabled this increase in violence, and violence levels are expected to
remain high throughout the remainder of 2011. More than 68 percent of nationwide indirect fire attacks are reported
in RC-E.
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Neither the U.S. Department of Defense nor ISAF, however, have made a convincing case that such gains can
achieve a meaningful, lasting form of tactical victory. The
unclassified reporting to date leaves a long list of critical
issues unaddressed many of which reinforce the points
made earlier about the lack of a credible strategic objective
for post transition Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Coming troop cuts: The report notes that, during the reporting period, President Obama announced that recent
security progress and the increasing capacity and capability of the ANSF have allowed for the recovery of U.S.
surge forces. Ten thousand U.S. troops will be redeployed by the end of the 2011, and the entire surge force
of 33,000 personnel will be recovered by the end of Sep1 Department of Defense, Report on Progress Towards Security and
Stability in Afghanistan, October 30, 2011, p. 2 .
tember 2012. Approximately 68,000 U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan after September 2012, but no further
details of the cuts are available until the deadline of removing all troops by the end of 2014. ISAF is currently
developing a recommendation for future force levels.
Although force levels will gradually decrease, the United
States remains committed to the long-term security and
stability of Afghanistan, and negotiations are progressing
on a long-term strategic partnership between the United
States and Afghanistan. 2 U.S. troop cuts are no longer
conditions-based; they effectively are open ended. They
also are being accompanied by allied troop cuts.
Displacement of insurgents and U.S./ISAF influence is
not a basis for lasting victory. The data issued by ISAF
and the U.S. Department of Defense focus on tactical
clashes between insurgent forces and those of the
U.S./ISAF/ANSF. They do not reflect the level of insurgent activity directed toward control and intimidation of
the Afghan populace or lower levels of violence like assassinations, kidnapping, extortion, night letters, and other measures used to weaken Afghan forces and governance and control of the population. The U.S. National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), UN, and Afghan NGO
Safety Office (ANSO) show serious increases in insurgent activity and violence and in the threat to aid teams
and NGOs.
ISAF data also show that the number of IED incidents totaled 15,968 in 2011. This was up 322% over 2008 and
eight percent over 2011. The effectiveness of such attacks did not increase and the number of U.S. killed
dropped to 417 the second highest year in the war, but
ten percent below 2010. U.S. wounded, however, rose to
5,004 in the first eleven months of the year a slightly
higher figure than in 2010.3 The insurgents may not be
attacking U.S. and allied troops as often, but they are
clearly still there.
The validity of these different counts is uncertain, and the
NCTC figures have not been released in detail for 2011 it
is press reports that say the NCTC figures are higher for
2011 than 2010. However, the Secretary General of the UN
reported to the Security Council on September 21, 2011 that,
both violence and casualties had increased in 2011 an assessment that may be more accurate in reflecting the impact
of operations on the Afghan people than the tactically oriented counts by ISAF,4
There were fewer security incidents in July (2,605) and August
(2,306) than in June (2,626). As at the end of August, the average
monthly number of incidents for 2011 was 2,108, up 39 per cent
compared with the same period in 2010. Armed clashes and improvised explosive devices continued to constitute the majority of inci2
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/06/23/infographiclevels-afghanistan-and-iraq.
troop-
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1 http://www.ngosafety.org/index.php?pageid=67
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Figure 3: Over-Ambitious Goals for 2012 Given Progress in 2011 & Coming Troop Cuts
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The ANA development effort is being rushed, funding is being cut, there are trainer and partner shortfalls, and the
end result may be unsustainable. The ANSF are making
progress, particularly the ANA. There are sharp differences, however, as to how much progress is really being
made, and no agreed plan as yet exists for shaping and full
force development through 2014 or afterwards. Major cuts
have already been made in future near term funding. There
are important ethnic differences in the ANA that could affect its future loyalties, and there are serious problems with
loyalty to powerbrokers, corruption, and in leadership.
These could all be corrected with time, the needed number
of foreign trainers and partners, and adequate funds but
none may be available at the levels and duration required.
The total current revenue generating capability of the Afghan government is also only about one-sixth of the U.S.
and allied spending on the ANSF in 2011. ISAF and
NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A) reporting
sharply downplay these problems, but they are all too real.
The Afghan Air Force will not be ready until 2016-2020, and
will then have very limited combat and IS&R capability.
The ANP are not supported by the effective rule of law
in terms of courts, detention and the rest of the legal system. The most effective element, the ANCOP, has an unacceptable attrition rate. Other police units have major
problems with leadership and corruption. The border police are particularly corrupt. The Afghan Local Police
work as long as they are supported by large elements of
Special Forces, but these forces are not large enough to
meet current expansion goals, and it is unclear what will
happen when SOF advisors leave.
Political Restrictions Imposed by Afghan Politics. The
build up of Afghan forces has not ended ties to local
power brokers and the current equivalent of warlords,
and promotion, force allocation, and loyalty in office
have strong ethnic ties. Moreover, president Karzai has
taken measures that potentially limit the success of ISAF
security efforts like demanding an end to the night raids
that have been critical to successful actions against insurgents as a precondition for agreeing to future bases and a
Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) with the U.S.3
Karzai has also sought to end all private security operations, without creating the conditions for effective substitutes, and to abolish local infrastructure and police elements in the non-Pashtun areas within the North while
tolerating unofficial local police in areas with power brokers loyal to him.4
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94
As has been touched upon earlier, these problems are only part of the story. The U.S. and ISAF analyses of tactical success focus on significant acts of violence and casualties, not the overall impact of the fighting. The same
report that described the progress listed above also notes
that,
...the Taliban-led insurgency remains adaptive and resilient with a
significant regenerative capacity. As insurgent capacity to contest
ANSF-ISAF gains erodes, insurgents have turned to asymmetric
efforts in order to avoid direct engagement with ISAF and ANSF
forces, including the increased use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), high-profile attacks, and assassinations of Afghan Government officials.
These tactics require less infrastructure in Afghanistan and do not
need the support of the Afghan people; however, they do require
command and control, training, and logistics support from safe havens, which the insurgents have in Pakistan. For example, IED material storage and construction facilities formerly based in Afghanistan have now been moved to Pakistan, specifically in the border
town of Chaman, Baluchistan Province. The assassinations and attacks directed from the safe havens in Pakistan especially the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas of North Waziristan and the
settled area of Chaman while reflecting the weakness of the Taliban in Afghanistan, have the potential to have a significant political effect in Afghanistan as well as coalition countries. With the
continued disruption of key insurgent safe havens in Afghanistan,
safe havens in Pakistan has become the most important external
factor sustaining the insurgency, and continues to present the most
significant risk to ISAFs campaign.1
Graphic estimates of the differences in these reports, as well as in estimates of casualties are summarized in a report entitled Afghanistan:
Violence, Casualties, and Tactical Progress: 2011, which is available
on the CSIS web site at: http://csis.org/ files/ publication/111110_AfghanViolence_n_CivCas.pdf This report shows that
estimates of the security impact of US and ISAF tactical victories in
given areas is very different from the patterns in major attacks.
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ropean, and other existing countries that already have forces or donate significant aid to Afghanistan.
The success of such U.S., European, and donor efforts is
highly uncertain. Studies by the World Bank, and ongoing studies by the IMF, the U.S., and key European governments show that transition requires massive levels
of continuing aid to avoid triggering major security and
stability problems. President Karzai requested some $10
billion a year through 2025 at the Bonn II Conference in
December 2011, or roughly $120 billion over the entire
period.4 This total seems minor compared to a total cost
of the war to the U.S. and ISAF which reached some
$140 billion in FY2011. It also is almost certainly is too
low to both cover the cost of funding the Afghan National Security Forces during transition and beyond, and to
give Afghanistan the resources to cope with the loss of
U.S. and ISAF military spending during 2012-2014 and
the probable cuts in donor civil aid.
Yet, many U.S. and European actions have already begun
to look like a cover for an exit strategy from Afghanistan.
Development aid from U.S., the largest aid donor,
dropped from $3.5 billion last year to about $2.0 billion
in 2011. Aid to support democracy, governance and civil
society dropped by more than fifty percent, from $231
million to $93 million. Aid for rule of law dropped
from $43 million to $16 million.5 Many aid agencies and
NGOs are already making major cuts in their programs,
and some are already having to eliminate programs or
withdraw from the country.6
While U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
joined her European colleagues in pledging continued aid
at the Bonn II Conference in December 2001, no longterm pledges were made in concrete terms. The conference which Pakistan did not attend and the libn
stated would further ensnare Afghanistan into the flames
of occupation focused on vague calls for aid and regional cooperation.
The speeches at the conference also called for Afghan reforms, and reductions in corruption, in ways that implied
new conditions for aid that Afghanistan may well not be
able to meet. They discussed continuing past security and
economic aid, but did not deal with the massive impact of
ending U.S. and European military spending in Afghanistan as each ISAF countrys forces depart spending
4 Karen DeYoung, Afghanistan says it will need outside aid until
2025, Washington Post, December 4, 2011, http://www. washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/afghanistan-says-it-will-needoutside-aid-until-2015/2011/12/04/gIQAZtp6TO_print.html.
5 Julian Borger, Afghanistan conference promises support after troop
withdrawal, The Guardian, 5 December, 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/05/afghanistanconference-support-troop-withdrawal.
6 Ibidem; Rod Norland, Aid Agencies in Afghanistan Fear Reversals
New York Times, December 6, 2011, p. A1; Steven Lee Myers and
Rod Norland, Afghans Say Assistance Will Be Needed for Years,
New York Times, December 6, 2011. P. A14.
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which totaled $4.3 billion for U.S. military direct contracts with Afghans in FY2011 which was only a small
portion of U.S. military spending in the country.1 At the
same time, president Karzai called for continued aid and
promised vague reforms without any clear plan for using
such aid or justifying his request. As Louise Hancock,
Oxfam's Afghanistan policy officer, put it, Its been another conference of flowery speeches: big on rhetoric and
short on substance.2
Moreover, the U.S. has never provided a credible set of
goals indeed any goals at all for the strategic outcome
it wants in Pakistan. Unless the U.S. and Europe do far
more to show they can execute a transition that has
lasting strategic benefits in Afghanistan and Pakistan
well after 2014, the U.S. all too likely to repeat the tragedy of its withdrawal from Vietnam.
The situation in terms of improvements in Afghan governance, economics, and rule of law lags far behind the
uncertain tactical gains being made in the field. The U.S.,
its European allies, and all other donors face the reality
that military spending and aid efforts to date have not
brought anything like the expected benefits and level of
progress, and are unlikely to do so in the future. At the
same time, outside aid will be critical to the Afghan government if it is to maintain security and stability, and will
be equally critical to any hope that Pakistan can make the
progress it needs.
The problem since 2001 has been that a U.S., allied, and
UN effort, with little or no real world capacity for nation
building on the scale required, failed to help the Afghans
restore an Afghan government on Afghan terms. A fragmented international effort with no effective UN coordination instead attempted a sudden, comprehensive transformation of Afghanistan into a unitary state with a
flawed, over-centralized constitution and system of government that was to operate according to U.S./Western
values of representative democracy, human rights, and
rule of law.
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Sustainable
for Afghanistan
Objective
1: Total
PublicStrategies
Expenditures
European 1
and the Region After 2014
Strategy Forum
3 Domestic Revenues
Objective 3:
Note: For SY 2010 expenditures derived from OECD Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC) data, last quarter estimates are based on last quarter actuals in SY 2009. See enclosure II.
Source: GAO analysis of data from Afghanistan Financial Management Information System, Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (includes contributions from Afghan National Army Trust Fund, including in-kind contributions), Law
and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, OECD Development Assistance Committee (includes data for Commanders Emergency Relief Program and Provincial Reconstruction Teams), India Development Assistance, and U.S.
Department of State (State) International Military Equipment and Training (IMET). See Enclosure II for further information.
Source: GAO, Afghanistans Donor Dependence, September 21, 2011, pp. 5, 8. 9 , 18.
Note: For SY 2010 expenditures derived from OECD Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC) data, last quarter estimates are based on last quarter actuals in SY 2009. See enclosure II.
Notes: Total
Public Expenditures Funds spent to provide public services to the Afghan population; the sum of on-budget and off-budget expenditures. We
Source:
GAO analysis
of data from expenditures,
Afghanistan Financialnot
Management
Information
System, Afghanistan
Security
Forces Fund
(includes contributions
from Afghan
National Armythat
Trust Fund
in-kind contributions),
based our
analysis
on reported
on budget
estimates.
On-Budget
(Core)
Expenditures
Public
expenditures
are including
in GIRoAs
budget Law and
Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, OECD Development Assistance Committee (includes data for Commanders Emergency Relief Program and Provincial Reconstruction Teams), India Development Assistance, and U.S.
funded byDepartment
domestic
revenue
and donor
contributions,
such(IMET).
as donor
contributions
for wages and salaries of government employees. Off-Budget (External)
of State
(State) International
Military
Equipment and Training
See Enclosure
II for further information.
Expenditures Public expenditures that are outside of GIRoAs budget and are 100 percent donor funded, such as infrastructure projects.
18
Objective 2
2: Donor Funding
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99
3 Domestic Revenues
Objective 3:
Source: GAO analysis of data from Afghanistan Financial Management Information System, Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (includes contributions from Afghan National Army Trust Fund, including in-kind contributions),
Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, and U.S. Department of State (State) International Military Equipment and Training (IMET). See Enclosure II for further information.
13
Note: For SY 2010 expenditures derived from OECD Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC) data, last quarter estimates are based on last quarter actuals in SY 2009. See enclosure II.
Source: GAO, Afghanistans Donor Dependence, September 21, 2011, pp. 13-14
Source:
GAO analysis
of data from Afghanistan
Information
Afghanistan
Security
Forcespopulation;
Fund (includes contributions
Afghan Nationaland
Armyoff-budget
Trust Fund including
in-kind contributions),
Notes: Total
Public
Expenditures
FundsFinancial
spentManagement
to provide
publicSystem,
services
to the
Afghan
the sum from
of on-budget
expenditures.
We Law and
Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, OECD Development Assistance Committee (includes data for Commanders Emergency Relief Program and Provincial Reconstruction Teams), India Development Assistance, and U.S.
based our
analysis
on (State)
reported
expenditures,
notand
onTraining
budget
estimates.
On-Budget
(Core) Expenditures Public expenditures that are in GIRoAs budget
Department
of State
International
Military Equipment
(IMET).
See Enclosure
II for further information.
funded by domestic revenue and donor contributions, such as donor contributions for wages and salaries of government employees. Off-Budget (External)
Expenditures Public expenditures that are outside of GIRoAs budget and are 100 percent donor funded, such as infrastructure projects.
18
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Source: SIGAR, Quarterly Report to U.S. Congress, October 30, 2011, pp. 46-47.
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Development
04#Feb#10
6
16
47
40
10
3
29#Apr#10
7
19
46
41
7
2
Governance3Assessment
Development
Assessment
Sustainable3Growth
Dependent3Growth
Minimal3Growth
Stalled3Growth
Population3at3Risk
Not3Assessed
estimated that 90-95% of the security aid actually
reached Afghanistan but substantially less than 70% of
the civil aid. The study stated that the,1
cumulative U.S. spending for the Afghanistan mission is estimated to be as high as $444 billion ($118.6 billion in FY2011
alone)But most of that spending does not reach Afghanistan because it primarily funds salaries of international soldiers, purchases
of military hardware, and the likeAnd not even all aid spent in
Afghanistan feeds into the domestic economy, as it goes out in imports of goods and services, expatriated profits, and remittances.
1 World Bank, Transition in Afghanistan Looking Beyond 2014, November 21, 2011, pp. 6-7.
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Figure 9: Proportion of Afghan Civil Service Positions Vacant in Selected Provinces (in Percent)
Source: SIGAR, Quarterly Report to U.S. Congress, October 30, 2011, p. 89.
It is now the eleventh year of the war and the UN, the
U.S. Department of State and USAID, other donor nations, the World Bank and the Afghan government have
never published a meaningful assessment of the total
flow of aid to Afghanistan, the overall impact of the civil
and security aid programs, an assessment of how aid and
outside spending have impacted on the trends in the Afghan economy, and how to develop credible measures of
the effectiveness aid efforts.
The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) does make some assessments of U.S.
effectiveness. Unlike its Iraqi counterpart (SIGIR), however, SIGAR focuses almost exclusively on U.S. spending and makes little effort to validate plans and requirements for civil and security aid efforts versus traditional
audits which can do little more than document past failures.
Figure 6 shows the cumulative appropriations for U.S.
aid efforts to date. It shows just how massively the flow
of aid has increased in recent years increasing Afghan
dependence and the problems in transition along with
each years increase. These data which only cover U.S.
spending provide a grim warning of the sheer scale of
the spending and the erratic funding patterns that have
taken place in the past. They warn how drastic the impact
could be of sudden funding cuts for the ANSF and civil
sector before Afghanistan can adapt to the loss of donor
aid that is some nine to fourteen times its current revenue
earnings, and spending on military operations in inside
Afghanistan which is at least another twenty to thirty
times the revenue earnings of the Afghan government.
Moreover, while ISAF has stopped reporting progress in
development by Afghan district, Figure 7 shows that past
trends are anything but reassuring. As has been described
earlier, UN reporting indicates that security for both aid
activity and Afghanistan governance is still lacking in
many of Afghanistans 403 districts, and the aid reporting
that does come from individual districts is often based on
the success of limited projects in a small part of the district or city grossly exaggerating the impact of aid.
It is far from clear how the withdrawal of U.S. and ISAF
forces and aid teams in the field will impact on security
in many Pashtun and border areas, as well as key urban
complexes and lines of communication like the ring road.
Many current development models tacitly assume that
Afghanistan will be both secure on a nationwide basis by
the end of 2014, that the impact of criminal networks and
power brokers will not place critical limits on governance
and development, and that Pakistan will be a willing and
secure economic partner.
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ment has yet to develop a comprehensive economic growth strategy or plan for private sector-led economic development.
Beyond security concerns, governance and development capacity
remain the most challenging aspects of Transition. The first
tranche of provinces and municipalities to Transition has been
slow to develop the necessary service delivery and governance
structures to underpin security gains, yet arguably these are the
most difficult capacities to develop and grow. Efforts by the Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development,
and PRTs are focusing on the development and expansion of Afghan capacity in governance, rule of law, and service delivery, as
well as linkages between national and sub-national governance
structures. The development of these sectors will reinforce longterm stability and ensure that Transition is irreversible, as well as
encourage the Afghan people to rely on the Afghan Government,
rather than Taliban shadow governments, for necessary services.
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Figure 10: Post Crisis Aid - Killing the Golden Goose As Soon as Possible
cial and local level, corruption and reliance on power brokers make this questionable. These problems are not solvable, however, unless the U.S. and its allies are willing to sustain high levels of civil and security aid through 2014 and
fund very significant aid from 2015 to at least 2020 and
more probably 2024.
Corruption, weak institutions and a lack of economic development pose a fatal threat to the viability of Afghanistan. It is
increasingly becoming part of the political dynamic of the
country and entwined with organized crime. This threat has
been consistently and seriously underestimated, both by the
Afghan government and the International Community" stresses
Mark Pyman, Director of the Defense and Security Programme
at Transparency International UK. At the same time, weak and
dysfunctional political institutions, lack of respect for the Afghan constitution and a slow economic process are posing major risks for Afghanistans future development.
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The aid effort and the ability to conduct joint civilmilitary efforts in the field seem likely to be a major
casualty of transition. The civilian surge that was
supposed to be part of the new U.S. strategy has lagged,
had uncertain organization and quality, and already
faces funding cuts in FY2012. The DoD October 30
report notes that major cuts are already planned in key
aspects of the civil effort like the Provincial Reconstruction Teams: Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) led
by coalition partners have made a significant contribution to Afghanistan's peace and stability. However, the beginning of the Transition
process and the Afghan Government's assumption of its full responsibilities country-wide requires the evolution and ultimate dissolution
of these entities. In June 2011, PRT-contributing nations reaffirmed
that as a part of the transition process, and in recognition of Afghan concerns regarding parallel structures, PRTs would evolve and
phase out based on a set of six guidelines, which include:
1. Evolve, reinvest, and phase out. By the end of their provinces
transition period, PRTs will methodically hand-off their functions and phase out. Each PRT's evolution plan will depend on
Afghan priorities, the unique circumstances in its province,
and the PRT's capabilities and structure.
2. Incentivize Transition. PRTs should support governance and development efforts that promote the transition's sustainability.
3. Set the conditions to make Transition irreversible. PRTs
should focus on supporting and building capacity.
4. Shift to technical assistance, build capacity, and improve national and sub-national linkages.
5. Network and reach back. PRT nations should exchange information and share expertise amongst one another to meet needs
in Afghanistan.1
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Strengthening public financial management systems, improving budget execution, and increasing revenue collection, including phased implementation of a value-added tax;
The World Bank is necessarily polite about the limit to Afghan central government capacity to use outside funds and
aid, but a November 2011 analysis notes that,1
Creating a strong enabling environment for private sector investment, including public-private partnerships in social and
economic development, supported by adequate regulatory and
institutional reforms and a robust financial sector; and Working closely with the International Community to develop strategies to reduce overall security costs.
To maintain and increase on-budget spending and service delivery, urgent action is needed to build the core capacity of line
ministries, and ensure that skilled staff can be recruited and retained by the government in the medium term.
While large amounts have been spent on capacity building, it
has created a fragmented second civil service of an estimated 7,000 skilled Afghan consultants managing projects,
without building sufficient government capacity.
In nine ministries, externally funded staff (EFS) make up only 5% of positions but 40% of payroll costs. Reductions in
EFS positions in transition would compromise service delivery as the burdens on government increase.
Donors should support efforts to reduce inflated salary
scales and build government capacity in a strategic and targeted manner by transferring capacity from the second civil
service to the core civil service. This would be more costeffective and provide greater stability.
Development budget execution increased in absolute terms, but
flattened out at below $1billion over the last four years, largely
due to capacity constraints, unrealistic budget formulation, and
donor earmarking and funding delays.
While the execution of the operational budget has been historically high, Afghanistan does not have capacity to handle
large O&M expenditures (O&M only accounts for roughly
$335 million, or 10% of total core expenditure), which are
expected to increase to $4.8 billion by 2015/16.
There are problems with efficiently allocating funds from
the center to provinces/districts and considerable weaknesses
in government capacity at sub-national levels.
Investing in government capacity in budget management
therefore remains an important priority.
1 World Bank, Transition in Afghanistan Looking Beyond 2014, November 21, 2011, pp. 14.
2 Towards a Self-Sustaining Afghanistan, An Economic Transition
Strategy. Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and
dated November 29, 2011.
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...Successful implementation of this strategy will be a gradual process and the Government of Afghanistan seeks continued support
from the International Community in both security and nonsecurity assistance to achieve shared objectives in governance
and development. This will involve implementing existing commitments and directing diminishing international resources towards
the most effective and efficient channels for expenditure of aid
funds. The Government, therefore, urges the International Community to fully implement best practices in aid effectiveness as
agreed at the London and Kabul Conferences.
More broadly, Figure 12 shows that the U.S. has abandoned any real world hope that the U.S., Europe, and
other donors can finance the ambitious aid plans called
for in the Afghan Compact and Afghan Development
Plan. The U.S. did so early in 2011 long before the current budget crisis began to force major changes in U.S.
aid plans and help speed the pace of US military withdrawal. It is a warning on just how decoupled past and
ongoing aid and development plans were from reality before the current focus on transition.
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12
Requested ANDS
Resource
Ceiling**
US Dollars Billions
10
8
GIRoA Estimated
Total
Spending*
(On
Budget
NOT
INCLUDING
ANSF
Spending)
6
4
FY2010
Civilian Assistance
FY2011
Senate
Level
0
2008/09
40%
GIRoA Revenues
2009/10
2010/11
2011/12
20%
2012/13
2013/14
2014/15
Source: Source: GAO, 10-655R, June 15, 2010 and USAID, USAID Afghanistan: Towards an Enduring Partnership, January 28, 2011
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Figure 13: Domestic Revenues Projected to Increase, but Spending Likely to Grow Faster
(Total Budget Expenditure and Revenues)
Source: World Bank, Transition in Afghanistan: Looking Beyond 2014, November 21, 2011, p. 9
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Source: World Bank, Transition in Afghanistan: Looking Beyond 2014, November 21, 2011, p. 11
Other working level studies indicate that foreign spending will total some forty to seventy-five percent of Afghan GDP in 2011. No one can currently predict just
how serious the drop in outside spending will be by
2014, or in the year beyond, but estimates of the cut in
current military spending in Afghanistan range from
seventy to ninety percent.
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the fact that the Afghan government must fund a presidential election in 2014 the same year U.S. and ISAF
troops are to withdraw.
There is broad agreement at the working level in the
World Bank, IMF, and donor governments that most of
the growth in Afghan GDP since 2002 has come from military spending and donor aid, and not from sustainable
growth in the Afghan economy. Some experts believe that
cuts in foreign spending could reduce Afghan GDP by
some fifteen to forty percent during transition the same
year that combat troops will be gone and a presidential
election is schedule to take place.
It should be stressed that the ability to conduct such analysis suffers from the fact that the UN, U.S., other donors,
and other international institutions never created a truly
credible model of the Afghan economy during ten years of
war, estimates of the size and impact of all forms of outside spending, or models that examined the situation that
given groups of Afghans faced by sector, region, and class
of employment and income distribution. They never based
their aid programs on an effective model of the economy,
the impact of existing levels of aid, or the impact of outside nationals and NGO aid.
Similarly, UNAMA failed in its mission of coordinating
the overall aid effort, and has never produced a meaningful public analysis either of the economy or of the
aid effort. The World Bank has largely operated from
outside the country. While it has attempted to produce a
recent analysis of the economy, this analysis is not currently available to outside researchers.
Moreover as has been noted earlier the U.S. Department of Defense, ISAF, and other ISAF member
countries do not have reliable estimates of the portion
of total military spending that is actually spent in Afghanistan. And, these problems are further compounded
by the inability to know how much domestic revenue
collection actually comes directly or indirectly from activity that is only possible because of vast foreign
spending. The World Bank also warned in March 2011
that only about thirty percent of the Afghan budget was
actually discretionary, and that some seventy percent
was non-discretionary carry forward and new expenditure.2 These rigidities will further limit Afghan ability
to respond to outside funding cuts.
In spite of these uncertainties, however, it is all too
clear that the Afghan economy could plunge into recession and depression if U.S., ISAF, and donors make
sudden, crippling cuts to their military and aid spending.
It is also clear that efforts to disguise this fact by focusing on optimistic estimates of the direct impact of
spending cuts that ignore the total direct and indirect
impact of cuts in aid and military spending are misleading to the point of being actively dishonest.
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This is clear both from recent working studies by individual governments, work now in progress by the IMF,
and work that has been published by the World Bank.
The World Bank notes how dependent Afghanistan is
on aid for growth as well as for security and stability:
The extremely high level of current annual aid (estimated at $15.7 billion in 2010) is roughly the same dollar amount as Afghanistans GDP and cannot be sustained. Aid has funded the delivery of essential services
including education and health, infrastructure investments, and government administration. There have been
substantial improvements in the lives of Afghans over the
last 10 years as a result of this effort. But these inflows,
most outside the Afghan budget, have been so high that
inevitable waste and corruption, aid dependency and use
of parallel systems to circumvent limited Government
absorptive capacity have impeded aid delivery and the
building of a more effective Afghan state.
The level of public spending -- both on and off budget -that has been financed by such high aid flows will be
fiscally unsustainable for Afghanistan once donor
funds decline. Lesser amounts, matched by more effective aid delivery could, in the end, lead to some more
positive outcomes. The key issue is how to manage this
change and mitigate the adverse impacts, and put aid and
spending on a more sustainable path for the longer-term.
International experience and Afghanistans history after
the Soviet military withdrawal in 1989 demonstrate that
violent fluctuations in aid, especially abrupt aid cutoffs,
are extremely damaging and destabilizing.
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Source: World Bank, Transition in Afghanistan: Looking Beyond 2014, November 21, 2011, p. 20
Source: World Bank, Transition in Afghanistan: Looking Beyond 2014, November 21, 2011, p. 2
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The Afghan government acknowledged the risks inherent in such dependence at the Bonn II Conference in
December 2011, and outlined a potential transition plan
for the Afghan civil sector in broad terms, 1
Afghanistans fiscal gap is significant, and unless it is addressed
the good work of the past ten years will come undone. The Government and the World Bank have examined the financial position of Afghanistan as it moves beyond Transition and the results, shared in the joint World Bank - Government report, show
that even under ideal conditions the Government will not be able
to cover spending pressures4. In the preparation of this document Government closely examined the costs associated with
delivery of its planned strategy. It used the same economic
models as the World Bank, but made slight modifications in the
fiscal assumptions.
Government chose to exercise additional restraint on forecast spending on recurrent costs, incorporated modest increases in minerals related revenue and invested the proceeds in development. The prima1 Towards a Self-Sustaining Afghanistan, An Economic Transition
Strategy. Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and
dated November 29, 2011.
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ry difference between World Bank and MoF models is that the MoF
forecasts continued projections to the future, to understand what
would be required to achieve sustainability.
This internal analysis has not been independently reviewed by
donors, but calculates the estimated cost of continued nonsecurity related on-budget development through the NPP
framework is equal to 14% of GDP in 2015, with an estimated
9% of GDP coming through off-budget channels. The total cost
of security is 26% of GDP. The civilian wage bill, O&M and
other recurrent non-security Government costs is equal to 13%
of GDP. The total forecast for required on budget spending is
therefore equal to 53% of GDP in 2015 and 62% when projected
off-budget development spending is considered. Substantial
funding cuts in any of these areas undermine our ability to
achieve our shared goal of a secure, sustainable Afghanistan.
Included in these estimates are the costs of absorbing the results
of more than ten years of generous external budget assistance
programs. Of the estimated $57 billion spent on Afghan reconstruction only $6 billion has been channeled through the national development budget, with the full ownership of Government.
In spite of this, the Government will ultimately need to absorb,
utilize and maintain much of this infrastructure. It realizes that it
must face difficult decisions about which assets can be accepted.
Further, Government will inherit funding responsibility for externally funded technical advisors that are essential to the delivery of donor-funded programs. Long-term success in Afghanistan requires that the anticipated shortfall in security and development spending be met.
The Governments strategy to address this involves a recommitment by the Afghan Government to economic growth,
key reforms and increased efficiency in revenue mobilization.
The IMF forecasts that Afghanistan will collect $2.0 billion in
revenue in fiscal 201112, corresponding to just over 11% of
GDP. By fiscal 2016 we believe that a 15% revenue to GDP ratio is achievable. This is comparable to Nepal (15.7%), the Philippines (13.4%), and Sri Lanka (14.6%) and well above many
other post-conflict, least developed nations where data is collected7. Succeeding would mean that the Government would
collect $4.4 billion in 2016, and would reflect an average revenue growth rate from 2009 of more than 30%.
It is important to note, however, that the Afghan government did not provide a clear plan for using aid and
for Afghan economic development, and did not address
the future shape and costs of the Afghan National Security Forces which have been by far the most expensive aspect of donor aid to date. The government instead focused on the past hopes of the Afghan national
development plans and its National Priority Plans
(NPPs), although it stated that the status of such efforts
was highly uncertain, warned that aid costs might rise,
and it made no attempt to assess their impact on the Afghan economy,1
More than 60% of development activities in the NPPs are currently underway. They are 35% funded with existing, programmed money. The unfunded portions of the NPPs are
aligned with donor priorities, reflect the experience of the donor community shared with us in extensive consultations and
are already being considered for funding by our partners. The
NPPs are our national priorities and will form the basis of government programming well beyond transition, implemented in
a way that is sustainable with available resourcesAnalysis of
the long-term costs of continuing implementation of these programs is ongoing.
1 Towards a Self-Sustaining Afghanistan, An Economic Transition
Strategy. Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and
dated November 29, 2011.
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Most transition models do not account for demographic factors that the World Bank and U.S. working
studies have shown will be critical:
Growth: With a current population of about 29-31 million,
population growth will be roughly 2.5% annually.
o US Census Bureau estimates that the Afghan population has
grown from 8.2 million in 1950 to 26.1 million in 2010 in spite
of 30 years of crisis and war.
o Growth is estimated to reach 32.6 million in 2015, 36.6 million
in 2025, and 41.1 million in 2025.
Urbanization:
o About 76% of the population lives in rural areas with an annual
urbanization rate of 5.4% due in large part to job availability
and internal displacements.
o Note: Kabuls population is about 3 million (500,000 during the
Taliban era).
Unemployment:
o With a labor force of 15 million people, unemployment will increase from its current level of about 35-40% (31% in agriculture, 26% in industry, 43% in services).
o The World Bank estimated in November 2011 that unemployment and especially underemployment in Afghanistan
respectively estimated at 8% and 48%are already high, even
with todays rapid economic growth. Roughly 610% of the
working population has benefited from aid-financed job opportunities, most of these in short-term employment. Declining aid,
therefore, can be expected to exacerbate underemployment levels (with fewer casual labor opportunities and lower pay for
skilled employees).1
o Almost 43% of the population is under 15 years of age, leading
to a bulge in employable people.
o The lack of jobs, resulting from slowing economic growth, will
cause flight from Afghanistan.
o Annual population growth will outpace job creation.
o Best case for full implementation of the New Silk Road and
other new aid efforts is creating 150,000 jobs over next three
years.
o CIA estimates annual increases in labor force may outpace best
case impact of NSR over three years. 2010 Estimate is growth
of 392,116 males and 370,295 females
Literacy: 28% literacy of population over 15 years of age (43%
male, 12.6% female)
The WFP also notes that aid cuts are already having a
major human impact: Starting this month, WFP is cutting school meals, food-for-training activities and foodfor-work programs in about half of Afghanistans thirty-four provinces. WFP hopes to resume these activities
in the near future, if funding becomes available. WFP,
which is one hundred percent voluntarily funded, had
originally planned to feed more than seven million people in Afghanistan in 2011, but a shortage of donor
funds means the agency will now only reach about 3.8
million people this year.1
These reports are supported by the recent reports of the
UN Secretary General and by the CIA World Factbook,
which states:
Despite the progress of the past few years, Afghanistan is extremely poor, landlocked, and highly dependent on foreign aid,
agriculture, and trade with neighboring countries. Much of the
population continues to suffer from shortages of housing, clean
water, electricity, medical care, and jobs. Criminality, insecurity,
weak governance, and the Afghan Government's inability to extend rule of law to all parts of the country pose challenges to future economic growth. Afghanistan's living standards are among
the lowest in the world. While the international community remains committed to Afghanistan's development, pledging over
$67 billion at four donors' conferences since 2002, the Government of Afghanistan will need to overcome a number of challenges, including low revenue collection, anemic job creation,
high levels of corruption, weak government capacity, and poor
public infrastructure.2
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It does not make sense to assume that transition is going to encourage broader reform of the economy in
ways that allow planners to ignore the impact of narcotics, the gray and black economies, the roles of power
brokers and criminal networks, and the inevitable flight
of some rich Afghans and Afghan capital out of the
country.
There will be obvious incentives for Afghans to seek
larger earnings from narcotics, and there already are
some shifts in this direction. UNDOC reported on October 11, 2011, that:4
Opium poppy-crop cultivation in Afghanistan reached 131,000
hectares in 2011, 7 per cent higher than in 2010, due to insecurity and high prices, said the 2011 Afghan Opium Survey released by the Ministry of Counter Narcotics (MCN) and the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). "The
Afghan Opium Survey 2011 sends a strong message that we
cannot afford to be lethargic in the face of this problem. A
strong commitment from both national and international partners is needed," said the Executive Director of UNODC, Yury
Fedotov.
Farmers responding to the Survey cited economic hardship and
lucrative prices as the main reasons for opium cultivation. In
2011, 78 per cent of cultivation was concentrated in Helmand,
Kandahar, Uruzgan, Day Kundi and Zabul provinces in the
south, and 17 per cent in Farrah, Badghis, Nimroz provinces in
the west, which include the most insecure provinces in the
country. This confirms the link between insecurity and opium
cultivation observed since 2007.
In 2010, opium yields fell sharply due to a poppy blight,
which was a major factor behind the price rise. In 2011, however, yields were back to around 45 kg per hectare, potentially
raising opium production to 5,800 tons - up 61 per cent from
3600 tons produced in 2010. Buoyed by higher speculative
prices arising from volatile security conditions, the farm-gate
income of opium farmers rose markedly. With dry opium costing 43 per cent more today than in 2010, the total farm gate
value of opium production is set to increase by 133 per cent:
from $605 million to $1,407 million in 2011.
It does not take much vision to calculate what will happen to narcotics, criminal networks, and corruption if the
Afghan economy is driven towards recession or depression as part of the transition process. Moreover, power
brokers may well shift to a regional and ethnic effort to
exploit aid, and the gray and black portions of the economy to their benefit. It is also all too likely that many
Afghans will not stay and investthey will take their
wealth and leave the country.
The U.S., ISAF, and Afghanistan Cannot Rely on Mines and
the New Silk Road for Transition
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Figure 17: Hopes for a Rich Future are Not a Plan: Mining Potential
A CENTCOM summary of some of the key data involved is shown in Figure 18. CENTCOM recognizes
the need for extensive additional analysis to determine
the cost-benefit of such concepts, and the new timeline
and funding conditions created by transition. It sets
forth the following needs for planning and analysis:
ISAF and its training mission, NTM-A, have made major progress in developing Afghan forces since 2009,
and this progress has accelerated over time. It may be
possible to expand all the different elements of the
ANSF to over 352,000 men during the period of transition. Successful transition will depend, however,
on whether the U.S. and its allies are willing fully to
fund the necessary development effort through 2014
and for as long as it takes after this time to achieve lasting security and stability a truly massive funding effort that so far has dominated total aid expenditures in
Afghanistan.
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Key Projects
Success will also be dependent on creating major training and partnering efforts that last well beyond 2014
and possibly to 2020. This is critical to give Afghan
forces quality as well as quantity, limit the impact of
corruption and power brokers, create an Afghan Air
Force that is not scheduled to have even basic force size
and equipment before 2016, and give the Afghan Army
the time necessary build up its overall structure, command and control capability, infrastructure and sustainment capability, maintenance and other services.
As the U.S. Department of Defense Report on Progress
Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan for October 30, 2011 makes clear , however, there are still
many limitations to the ANSF and force development
effort for the Afghan Army and Air Force:
Even with this progress, the growth and development of the
ANSF continues to face challenges, including attrition above
target levels in the ANA and some elements of the ANP,
leadership deficits, and capability limitations in the areas of
staff planning, management, logistics, and procurement. The
ANSF continues to require enabling support, including air
(both transport and close air support), logistics, ISR, and
medical, from coalition resources to perform at the level
necessary to produce the security effects required for Transition. The influence of criminal patronage networks on the
ANSF also continues to pose a threat to stability and the
Transition process. Further, the drawdown of U.S. and international forces increases the risk of a shortfall of operational
partnering resources, which could reduce the ANSF-ISAF
operational partnership and may impede ANSF development
(p. 12).
Successful Transition of the lead for security responsibilities
to the ANSF is heavily dependent on a healthy, sustained
partnering and advising relationship. These security assistance relationships create the conditions by which ANA and
ANP forces can develop and become effective in defeating
the insurgency, providing security for the local population,
and fostering legitimacy for the Afghan Government. These
relationships provide the ANSF with the ability to operate in
a complex, counterinsurgency environment while also
providing operational space and timing to man, equip, and
absorb critical training. As the ANSF continues to grow and
the U.S. and coalition forces begin to draw down, the gap between the requirements for partnering and available resources will grow. This gap threatens to undermine force development and may pose a risk to the Transition process. As
a result, IJC is currently reviewing all partnering relationships to align with projected force levels and ensure resources are used to the greatest effect in the areas where they
are most needed. As of September 30, 2011, there are seven
critical shortfalls for the ANA and 88 shortfalls in the ANP
in focus districts (31 AUP, 22 ANCOP, and 35 ABP). These
shortfalls do not account for U.S. forces departing theater
without backfills due to the ongoing surge recovery, and
shortfalls are expected to increase as U.S. and coalition forces continue to draw down (p. 40).
As of September 2011, the MoD is assessed as requiring
some coalition assistance to accomplish its mission (a rating
of CM-2B, a status it achieved in October 2010). Overall,
NTM-A/CSTC-A anticipates the MoD moving to CM-1B by
early 2013, with full Transition of most offices and functions
to CM-1A by mid-2014 (p. 16).
Although progress is being observed and assessed in a number of areas across the MoI, challenges remain that must be
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addressed. Civil service reform, both in personnel management and pay, is a recurring deficiency, both in the MoI and
the MoD. The September 3, 2011 Ministerial Development
Board recommended that Public Affairs be held in the CM1B testing phase until civilian pay reform is achieved. The
MoI Civil Service Department remains behind schedule
largely because it lacks a permanent director and empowerment to effect change, as well as adequate office space, logistical support, office equipment and Internet connectivity
needed to accomplish its basic functions. The Civil Service
Department also requires support from the MoI senior leadership to implement the Afghan Government Public Administration Reform Law and to include conversion to the reformed pay scale. A strong partnership with provincial governors is required to improve hiring at the provincial level.
The challenges surrounding civil service reform have already
impeded Public Affairs advancement and could obstruct
overall MoI capacity, progress, and sustainment (p. 18).
Shortfalls in the institutional trainer requirements set forth in
the CJSOR still exist and continue to impede the growth and
development of the ANSF. CJSOR v11.0 is the current document supporting trainer requirements. As of the end of the
reporting period, the shortfall in institutional trainers is 485,
a decrease of 255 from the March 2011 shortfall of 740, with
1,816 deployed trainers currently in-place against the total
requirement of 2,778. The United States currently sources
1,331 non-CJSOR trainer positions. In order to temporarily
address the NATO CJSOR shortfall and fill the U.S.-sourced
non-CJSOR requirements as quickly as possible, the United
States has implemented a series of requests for information
from other coalition partners, including unit-based sourcing
solutions to address short-term training needs. (p. 18-19).
In order to maintain the accuracy of personnel figures, NTMA/CSTC-A continues to review and revise the end-strength
reporting process. During the reporting period, this constant
review process highlighted a failure to report training attrition, which has resulted in a large discrepancy between actual and reported ANA end-strength numbers. After agreeing
upon an accurate end strength for September, NTM-A and
ANA leadership implemented new policies and procedures
to ensure training base attrition is accurately reported in the
future. Strong leadership within the ANA Recruiting Command (ANAREC) and effective and mature processing within National Army Volunteer Centers, which induct recruits
into the ANA, has enabled adjustments to current recruiting
plans in order to prevent delays in achieving the objective
end-strength levels. NTMA/ CSTC-A continues to work
closely with and support the ANA in rectifying manning issues to ensure growth to the JCMB-endorsed ANA endstrength goal of 195,000 personnel by the end of October
2012 (p 22).
Although recruiting and retention are continuing at a strong
pace, if the high levels of attrition seen during this reporting
period continue, there is a risk that the ANA will not be able
to sustain the recruitment and training costs currently incurred to achieve the October 2012 growth goal. Historic
trends show that attrition is seasonal, rising in the fall and
winter and declining in the spring. The main causes of attrition in the ANA are poor leadership and accountability, separation from family, denial of leave or poor leave management, high operational tempo, and ineffective deterrence
against soldiers going absent without leave (AWOL) (p. 22).
Nevertheless, President Karzai issued a decree in April 2011
renewing the policy of amnesty for AWOL officers, NCOs,
and soldiers who return to their units voluntarily until March
2012. This extension has the potential to impede the ANAs
ability to decrease attrition.
The ANA is projected to still have only 57,600 NCOS to
meet a requirement of 71,900 in November 2012.
The AAFs long-term development strategy includes the cre-
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ation of an air force that can support the needs of the ANSF
and the Afghan Government by 2016. This force will be capable of Presidential airlift, air mobility, rotary and fixedwing close air support, casualty evacuation, and aerial reconnaissance. The AAF also plans to be able to sustain its
capacity through indigenous training institutions, including a
complete education and training infrastructure. The air fleet
will consist of a mix of Russian and Western airframes. Afghan airmen will operate in accordance with NATO procedures, and will be able to support the Afghan Government
effectively by employing all of the instruments of COIN airpower. This plan, however, is ambitious, and is indicative of
the tension between Afghan Government aspirations, necessity, and affordability (pp. 31-32).
In August 2011, the total number of reporting ANA units in
the field increased to 204, and the number of units achieving
an operational effectiveness rating of Effective with Assistance or higher was sustained at 147; alternatively, 37 units
(18 percent) of fielded ANA units are in the lowest assessment categories, Developing or Established, due to an
inability to perform their mission or the immaturity of a
newly-fielded unit. Even the ANAs highest-rated kandak,
2nd kandak, 2nd Brigade, 205th Corps, which achieved the
rating of Independent, remains dependent on ISAF for
combat support and combat enablers. In locations without a
large ISAF footprint, the ANA has exhibited little improvement and there is little reporting on their operational
strengths and weaknesses. These units are typically located
in the west and far northeast regions (p. 43).
Transition and the Police Forces
The Department of Defense Report on Progress Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan for October
30, 2011 also makes it clear there are far more serious
limitations to the development effort for the various
Afghan police forces:
Despite indicating positive developments in ANP force generation, NTM-A recently determined that 3,940 officers and
6,733 patrolmen were filling NCO billets; large numbers of
officers and patrolmen placed against vacant NCO positions
overstates the development of the NCO ranks. Removing officers and patrolmen from NCO-designated positions would
result in an actual officer strength at 102 percent, patrolmen
strength at 113 percent, and NCO-assigned strength at 66.7
percent against authorized positions. NTM-A and IJC, along
with ANP leadership, will focus on growing the NCO corps
by 12,700 in order to close this gap (p. 34).
Untrained patrolmen remain the biggest challenge for the
AUP and NTM-A/CSTC-A, and the MoI continues to push
the recruiting base in order to ensure all available training
seats are used. As of September 2011, the AUP had a total of
11,919 untrained patrolmen and NCOs. AUP attrition remains the lowest of all police pillars at 1.3 percent, and has
consistently remained below the monthly attrition objective
of 1.4 percent for the last 11 months (November 2010 September 2011) (p. 36).
As of September 2011, the Afghan Border Police (ABP) end
strength was 20,852 personnel. The ABP remains on schedule to meet all growth objectives for officers and patrolmen,
but remains short of NCOs, with only 3,800 of an assigned
total of 5,600. This shortfall, as well as the shortfall of untrained patrolmen, remains the primary focus for training efforts.
Although overall attrition in the ANP has remained near target levels for the past year, high attrition continues to challenge the ANCOP in particular, which has experienced an
annual attrition rate of 33.8 percent; although this has decreased significantly from 120 percent annual rate in No-
vember of 2009, it remains above the accepted rate for longterm sustainment of the force. As a national police force rotating from outside areas, it has avoided the corruption that
was once seen in other police pillars. Although ANCOP
units effectiveness initially suffered from runaway attrition
that stemmed largely from extended deployments and high
operations tempo, the adoption of a 12-week recovery and
retraining period between deployments has improved this
situation.
Building a capable and sustainable ANP depends on acquiring the equipment necessary to support the three basic police
functions: shoot, move, and communicate.
Accordingly, significant equipment uplift for the ANP began
during the reporting period, which is expected to increase the
ANPs on-hand equipment to approximately 80 percent by
the spring of 2012. Despite progress, however, the ANP remains underequipped as a result of fielding challenges. Due
to these shortages, the MoI has developed fielding priorities
based on operational requirements. To address the delay in
processing supply/equipment requests, the MoI Material
Management Center established a Customer Care Center in
April 2011. This single point-of-entry clearing house for
supply/equipment requests has been a success, significantly
reducing response times (pp. 37-38).
The ANPs logistics system remains particularly limited,
both in facility development and in assigned and trained logistics personnel. The biggest challenge in developing logistics support to the ANP is the hiring and training of civilian
personnel, as civilians make up 50 percent of the logistics
workforce. Civilian hiring will continue to be a challenge until the MoI institutes civil service reforms (p. 39).
Successful Transition of the lead for security responsibilities
to the ANSF is heavily dependent on a healthy, sustained
partnering and advising relationship. These security assistance relationships create the conditions by which ANA and
ANP forces can develop and become effective in defeating
the insurgency, providing security for the local population,
and fostering legitimacy for the Afghan Government. These
relationships provide the ANSF with the ability to operate in
a complex, counterinsurgency environment while also
providing operational space and timing to man, equip, and
absorb critical training. As the ANSF continues to grow and
the U.S. and coalition forces begin to draw down, the gap between the requirements for partnering and available resources will grow. This gap threatens to undermine force development and may pose a risk to the Transition process. As
a result, IJC is currently reviewing all partnering relationships to align with projected force levels and ensure resources are used to the greatest effect in the areas where they
are most needed. As of September 30, 2011, there are seven
critical shortfalls for the ANA and 88 shortfalls in the ANP
in focus districts (31 AUP, 22 ANCOP, and 35 ABP). These
shortfalls do not account for U.S. forces departing theater
without backfills due to the ongoing surge recovery, and
shortfalls are expected to increase as U.S. and coalition forces continue to draw down (p. 40).
In August 2011, the total number of reporting ANA units in
the field increased to 204, and the number of units achieving
an operational effectiveness rating of Effective with Assistance or higher was sustained at 147; alternatively, 37 units
(18 percent) of fielded ANA units are in the lowest assessment categories, Developing or Established, due to an
inability to perform their mission or the immaturity of a
newly-fielded unit. Even the ANAs highest-rated kandak,
2nd kandak, 2nd Brigade, 205th Corps, which achieved the
rating of Independent, remains dependent on ISAF for
combat support and combat enablers. In locations without a
large ISAF footprint, the ANA has exhibited little improvement and there is little reporting on their operational
strengths and weaknesses. These units are typically located
in the west and far northeast regions (p. 43).
And as the analysis of tactics has stated the entire police development effort is limited by the lack of progress
in governance, creating the other elements of the rule of
law, the permeating climate of corruption, interference
by power brokers, and the impact of criminal networks.
Moreover, political pressure is already growing that can
divide the ANSF by ethnicity and may be a prelude to
post withdrawal power struggles.
These are not casual issues, and here the present compartmentalization of the police development effort, and
efforts to improve governance and the rule of law may
be fatal. Police forces cannot operate in a vacuum. They
need a successful government presence and popular
governance to win the support of the people and support for their justice efforts. There must be prompt justice of a kind the people accept and find fair enough to
support or tolerate. Incarceration must set acceptable
standards and jails must not become training and indoctrination facilities for insurgents and criminal networks.
The present systems for reporting on progress in the police are almost solely oriented towards force generation
and support of counterinsurgency. They are not tied to
the weak, ineffective, and/or corrupt patterns in governance and the justice system in far too many of Afghanistans 403 districts.
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Fund and support the ANSF plan in something approaching its current character for as long as it
takes to defeat the insurgents, if as now seems
almost totally unlikely this proves possible.
Act immediately to reshape the ANSF plan to create more realistic goals and costs without false optimism, and seek U.S. Congressional and allied
support for a smaller, cheaper, and still effective
force.
Go on to force NTM-A and ISAF to downsize resources while keeping the current force goals, and
create a hollow force that will be unsustainable after transition repeating the mistake made in Vietnam on a very different level.
ISAF has made real progress in selected areas in combining efforts to create local police that do respond to
1 SIGAR, Quarterly Report to the U.S. Congress, July 30, 2011
It should be stressed that the same DoD report also provides a long list of areas of progress, and that all the critical problems in the ANSF may well be solvable with
time and funds. Figure 19 shows, however, that past
funding levels and plans are grossly unsustainable in to-
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Source: SIGAR, Quarterly Report, July 2010, pp. 92-93, and Quarterly Report, October 2011, p. 48
the regular police and government, and where the creation of such security forces is part of a broader effort to
create civil governance and economic aid efforts. As a
U.S. official report indicates, this effort goes far beyond
simply creating a militia, and potentially offers a key
way to address the critical transition problems in
providing effective security and reasons to be loyal to
the central government at the local and district levels.1
The Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A) began conducting Village Stability Operations (VSO) in February 2010. VSO is a bottom-up COIN initiative that establishes security areas around rural villages to
promote local governance and development. VSO uses Afghan
and ISAF Special Operations Forces embedded in the community full-time to help improve security, governance, and development in more remote areas of Afghanistan where the ANSF
and ISAF have a limited presence.
Each VSO consists of a 12-man team that embeds in a village
and regularly engages local Afghans, enabling a level of situational awareness and trust otherwise unattainable. VSO teams
are supported by a Village Stability Platform (VSP), which includes a range of enablers and supporting elements. Along with
medical, air, civil affairs, and military information teams, VSPs
also include units focused on linking the district and provincial
levels of governance and development to the national government. Further, Provincial
Augmentation Teams, in partnership with Provincial Reconstruction Teams, help VSPs to build local governance and improve development. In districts with VSO, Afghan satisfaction
with access to essential services has uniformly increased over
the last three months. Further, analysis of attack levels before
and after a VSP is established indicates, after a brief increase in
insurgent attacks, a steady improvement in security conditions
throughout the community. The VSO initiative has resulted in
such noticeable improvements in security, governance, and development that Taliban senior leaders have identified the VSO
initiative as a significant threat to their objectives.
Significant success has prompted the program to expand. The
VSO initiative began with five VSPs covering 1,000 square kilometers; as of this report, CJSOTF-A has 6,000 personnel in
103 locations throughout Afghanistan, covering approximately
23,500 square kilometers. To support this growth, the VSO initiative now supplements Special Forces with conventional forces. Currently, the 1-16th Infantry and the 1st/505th Parachute
Infantry Regiment are augmenting Combined Forces Special
Operations Component Command Afghanistan (CFSOCC-A)
presence to enable the expansion of VSO sites across the country.
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President Karzai has reinforced the problem of ethnic divisions within Afghanistan by disbanding another force
called the Critical Infrastructure Police that was set up by
ISAF in Afghanistans four Northern (and largely nonPashtun) Balkh, provincesKunduz, Jowzjan and Faryab provinces. Elements of these forces were certainly
corrupt and supported Northern leaders like the governor
of Balkh Province that had little loyalty to Karzai. They
had some 1,200-1,700 members per province and were
paid as much to not to extort the population as to give it
security. Nevertheless, the net effect was to compound
ethnic tensions particularly as Karzai did little to deal
with the corruption and abuses of regular and local police
that were Pashtun or more directly under his control.1
Karzai has created another, potentially greater problem by
trying to rush the disbandment of private security forces in
ways that seem more oriented toward enhancing his power
over security contracting and key aspects of government,
military, and aid spending than security. The U.S. Department of Defense reported in October 2011 that Private
Security Companies (PSCs) in Afghanistan are responsible
for securing ISAF sites and convoys, diplomatic and nongovernmental organization personnel, and development
projects. ISAF and diplomatic missions, along with their
development partners, employed some 34,000 contract security guards from PSCs, of which some ninety-three percent were Afghans.2
http://www.scribd.com
/doc/73041739/Wartime-Contracting-inAfghanistan-11142011.
1 Matthew Rosenberg and Alissa J, Rubin, Afghanistan to Disband
Irregular Police Force Set Up Under NATO, New York Times,
December 26, 2011.
2 Department of Defense, Report on Progress Towards Security and
Stability in Afghanistan, October 30, 2011, pp. 66-67
3 Ibidem
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A further set of incidents after that report led to Pakistan expelling U.S. advisors, and closing a U.S. Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV) base on Pakistani soil, and limiting U.S. UCAV flights over Pakistan. An incident on the Afghan Pakistan border on November 26th where U.S. forces killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers, and a Pakistani civil-military crisis,
dubbed memogate, over claims the president of Pakistan sought U.S. aid to avoid a military coup all combined to transform long-tense U.S. and Pakistani relations into near hostility.
At present, Pakistan and especially the Pakistani military shows few signs of restoring full cooperation
with the U.S. Even Pakistani willingness to allow the
U.S. to use Pakistani supply routes and air space is uncertain although Pakistani need for U.S. aid may preserve at least the faade of some aspects of cooperation.
1 Department of Defense, Report on Progress Towards Security and
Stability in Afghanistan, October 30, 2011, pp. 68-69 .
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Source: U.S. Congressional Research Service, Direct Overt U.S. Aid Appropriations and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2012. Distributed to congressional offices, August 9, 2011
U.S. aid does give the U.S. some leverage, and Table
shows that the U.S. authorized a total of $14.615 billion
in security assistance from FY2002 to FY2011, and requested another $1.6 billion in FY2012.1 It authorized a
total of $7.72 billion in security assistance from
FY2002 to FY2011, and requested another $1.1 billion
in FY2012. The U.S. Congress also passed the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009 or Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill which provides up to $1.5 billion a year more in economic aid, or $7.5 billion over
five years.2
An analysis by the U.S. Congressional Research Service shows that Pakistan has gotten major arms transfers through this aid:3
Major post-2001 defense supplies provided, or soon to be
provided, under FMF include:
- Eight P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft and their refurbishment (valued at $474 million);
- About 5,250 TOW anti-armor missiles ($186 million; 2,007
delivered);
- More than 5,600 military radio sets ($163 million);
- Six AN/TPS-77 surveillance radars ($100 million);
- Six C-130E transport aircraft and their refurbishment ($76 million);
- Five refurbished SH-2I Super Seasprite maritime helicopters
granted under EDA ($67 million);
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1 Congressional Research Service, Direct Overt U.S. Aid Appropriations and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2012.
Distributed to congressional offices, August 9, 2011
2 http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_active/pakistan/ numbers
3 K. Alan Kronstadt, Major U.S. Arms Sales and Grants to Pakistan
Since 2001, Congressional Research Service; CRS Report
RS22757, U.S. Arms Sales to Pakistan, and CRS Report RL33498,
Pakistan-U.S. Relations http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/pakarms.
pdf, and Federation of American Scientists,
ttp://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/pakarms.pdf.
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Figure 20: The Flow and Ebb of U.S. Aid to Pakistan: 1948 to 2011
Source: Global Center for Development, Aid to Pakistan by the Numbers, http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_active/pakistan/numbers;. Nancy Birdsall, Wren Elhai, Molly Kinder, Beyond Bullets and Bombs, Fixing the U.S. Approach to Development in Pakistan, Report of the Study Group on a U.S.
Development Strategy in Pakistan Center for Global Development, June 2011, p. 18
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CONCLUSIONS
There still is a case for the U.S. and Europe to use aid
to focus on the future stability of Pakistan. This would
mean using aid, and trade and investment incentives, as
part of a carefully planned and managed effort to support Pakistani civil government and enhance Pakistani
economic stability, rather than use a military aid dominated program as a de facto bribe to influence Pakistani
policy towards to Afghanistan or seek regional solutions that ignore Pakistans needs and deep internal
problems in using aid.1
1 See the analysis in Nancy Birdsall, Wren Elhai, Molly Kinder, Beyond Bullets and Bombs, Fixing the U.S. Approach to Development in Pakistan, Report of the Study Group on a U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan Center for Global Development, June
2011
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both tactical and strategic progress, and ANSF transition has been little more than political symbolism.
Spend Not Build? The latest U.S. Department of Defense, SIGAR, and World Bank reports do little to
indicate that U.S. and allied efforts to improve the
quality of government, the rule of law, representative
democracy, and economic development are making
anything like the needed level of progress. They are a
warning that Afghanistan and the Afghan government may face a massive recession as funding is cut,
and that the dreams of options like mining income
and a New Silk Road are little more than a triumph
of hope over credible expectations. Once again, the
very real progress being made in the development of
the ANSF is being rushed as future funding is being
cut, and it is unclear that current gains will be sustained or that the U.S. has sufficient time left in
which to find credible answers to these questions,
build U.S. Congressional, domestic, and allied support, and then to begin implementing them. The U.S.
is now entering the eleventh year of a war for which
it seems to have no clear plans and no clear strategic
goals. The new strategy that President Obama outlined in 2009 is now in tatters.
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Afghanistan, however, is only part of the story. A nuclear-armed Pakistan is both the real strategic center in
the Afghanistan-Pakistan war, and its most dangerous
wild card. Pakistan is slowly devolving towards the status of a failed state, and becoming progressively more
unstable regardless of U.S. aid and actions in Afghanistan. Any de facto exit strategy that suddenly cuts off
U.S. aid to Pakistan, or produces an even more serious
level of confrontation between the U.S. and Pakistan
during the entire transition process will make this future almost inevitable.
It is easy to talk about regional solutions, as decades of
previous efforts have shown. In practice, Pakistans internal problems are more likely to block any progress in
Indian and Pakistani relations than to push Pakistan towards a settlement.
As for the other Great Powers, Russia has little strategic interest in taking on Pakistans problems now, and
will have even less if Pakistan continues to devolve towards a failed state. China will take a more active interest, but will keep a careful distance.
Rhetoric aside, China has been careful to stay away
from any major aid effort or attempt to help a Pakistan
whose civil and military leaders seem so incapable of
helping Pakistan help itself. China will want to keep
Pakistan as a counterweight to India and to prevent it
from becoming a base for Islamist extremist threats to
China and its interests in the region, but China knows
all too well that any major Chinese intervention is unlikely to be any more successful than past outside aid
efforts.
Muddle, Uncertainty, and Unpredictable Future Great
Power and Regional Roles as a Non-End state
The U.S. and its key European allies also face a more
critical strategic challenge. The U.S., European aid donors, and NATO/ISAF have focused on Afghanistan
and have dealt with Pakistan largely in terms of its role
in the Afghan conflict. They must now define a credible
set of goals for the strategic outcome they want in Pakistan.
This must involve dealing with Pakistans impact on Afghanistan. Pakistan will complicate U.S. and European
efforts in helping Afghanistan move towards transition.
Even if U.S. and ISAF relations with Pakistan do not
continue to deteriorate, or remain so tense as to be nearly
dysfunctional, Pakistans efforts to advance its own interests in Afghanistan, and its inability or unwillingness
to deal with Afghan insurgent sanctuaries, will threaten
or undermine any successes inside Afghanistan.
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Waseem (2004) Origins and Growth Patterns of Islamic Organizations in Pakistan p.27
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one group could have on politics, but increasingly radicalizing Pakistani society as a whole.11 In the following
sections, we describe in more detail the trajectory of political Islam in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We pay particular attention to events after the September 11th attacks,
and ponder the impact of the planned U.S. military drawdown after 2014.
Militant Sectarianism in Pakistan
The increasing influence of conservative Islamic organizations, reflected in the growth of madrasas in the country, is
perhaps the most important consequence of Zias Islamization project.12 In Punjab province, from 1975 to 1996, the
number of madrasas connected with all Muslim groups
grew from about 700 to over 2,400, of which 750 were
considered aggressively sectarian.13 Zia had actively encouraged this development as a way to strengthen state capacity in rural areas by attempting to increase the reliance
of Islamic umbrella organizations on government funding.
These organizations welcomed state patronage, but resisted
state control over the management of madrasas, as they increasingly began to view their religious constituencies as
jagirs, or fiefdoms, that they needed to rely on as their involvement in Pakistani politics increased. As each sectarian organization sought to consolidate its authority over
various madrasa networks, the boundaries between them,
particularly across the Sunn - Shah divide, hardened.14
While sectarian agitation has a long history in Pakistan,
particularly against the Ahmadiyya minority, anti- Shah
militancy picked up only in the 1980s.15 This was partially a result of increased funding and propaganda from Saudi
Arabia and other state and non-state actors from the Persian Gulf seeking to make Pakistan into a Sunn wall
against an increasingly assertive Shah Iran. 16 It also
stemmed from domestic Sunn apprehensions that Pakistani Shah were becoming increasingly threatening, particularly after large scale Shah mobilization in 1980 to
protest Zias proposal to implement the Islamic zakt
tax.17 Increasing anti-Shah activity within Deobandi circles was brought to a head by a fatwa of Deobandi ulema
in Lucknow denouncing the Iranian revolution and declaring Shiism to be non-Islamic.18 In Pakistan, the Deobandi
Maulana Haqnawaz Jhangvi formed what would later become the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), aiming to vilify
Shah Muslims as oppressive and licentious economic
elites that form a fifth column in Pakistan, and advocating
11 Stern (2000) Pakistans Jihd Culture p.118
12 The much discussed Islamization of Pakistans legal system, on the
other hand, seems to have been largely cosmetic: see Kennedy (1990)
Islamization and Legal Reform in Pakistan.
13 Nasr (2000) p.142
14 Nasr (2000) p.155,166
15 Abou Zahab (2000) The Regional Dimensions of Sectarian Conflicts
in Pakistan p.115-118
16 Nasr (2000) p.157
17 Zaman (1998) Sectarianism in Pakistan p.693,694,
18 Nasr (2000) p.162,163
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Tankel (2009) Lashkar-i-Taiba: From 9/11 to Mumbai p.18. Interestingly enough, the Wahhabi organization in Kunar, Jami`at alDa`wa al-Quran wal-Sunna, was aligned against the Taliban and
supported Karzais bid for the presidency.
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India, not just Kashmir, and it was not interested in sectarian violence in Pakistan or in challenging the Pakistani
state itself, unlike the extremist Deobandi groups.9 Government officials regularly visited the Markaz headquarters and lauded the spirit of jihd and sense of sacrifice
among the students in their support of Kashmiri freedom
fighters.10 After September 11th, when the Pakistani government took measures to restrict the activities of other
extremist organizations, LiT largely escaped these sanctions. LiT was set to be banned by the government, but by
dissolving its political arm, MDI, replacing it with a preexisting charity, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and shifting official
LiT activity to Azad Kashmir, it protected its financial
assets, and was allowed to keep operating its Muridke
campus and various training camps across the country.11
This preferential treatment by the state allowed LiT to
grow at the expense of the Deobandi militant organizations, which had deeper social roots, leading it to become
the focal point of anti-Indian violence in Kashmir in the
last decade.12 The Musharraf government, not wanting to
give up its strategic asset in Kashmir, regularly arrested
LiT figures as a result of international, and particularly
U.S. pressure, but usually released them shortly thereafter.13
According to Hussain Haqqani, until recently Pakistani
ambassador to the U.S., the Pakistani government regularly pays severance money to Hafez Muhammad Saeed,
Fazlur Rehman Khalil, and Masood Azhar, in order to
keep them contented and quiet for the time being. 14
However, the combined effect of increased Pakistani restrictions on their activity in Kashmir, and the presence of
U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have increasingly
drawn their attention to involvement in the Afghan insurgency as well as terrorist attacks in India and beyond.15
Lashkar-i-Tayba, although it has a relatively narrow Ahli-Hadith social base, developed extensive popular support
after the 2005 earthquake in Northern Pakistan in which it
served as the lead actor to bring much needed relief support.16 This has made it more difficult for the Pakistani
government to crack down on it, if it so desires, even
though the attacks on Mumbai in 2008 have signaled its
espousal of global jihdism and a desire to strike at Western targets.17
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144
Pape To Beat the Taliban, Fight from Afar [op-ed], New York
Times October 14th, 2009
The Pakistani Taliban have risen to prominence for similar reasons as their Afghan counterparts. Tribal mechanisms that had previously been able to provide peace and
security have gradually been undermined by the militarization of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier during the 1980s,
the proliferation of madrasas during Zias Islamization
drawing in the local youth, and the lack of adequately responsive political institutions in the Federally Adminis1 Trives (2009) Roots of the Insurgency in the southeast p.92
2 Dressler (2011) "The Haqqani Network and the Threat to Afghanistan.
3 Jones (2011) Why the Haqqani Network is the Wrong Target.
4 Ruttig (2009) Loya Paktias Insurgency. p.72,88
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Waziristan.1 While TTP factions often patch up their differences after a significant fall-outs, the reduction in
Western military forces in Afghanistan could very well
exacerbate strategic differences between the various factions, as proponents of taking on the Pakistani state can
no longer be distracted by Afghan affairs. It may also
make it more difficult in general for the government to
manipulate tribal elements in the Taliban to its advantage.
The various groups united in the TTP have emphasized
unity with the Afghan Taliban and have at least nominally pledged loyalty to Mullah Omar, under whom many of
them served directly in the late 1990s. The Afghan Taliban, in turn, consider the TTP elements to be an extraterritorial entity of the same movement.2 After all, the
Taliban is not a disciplined and bureaucratic organization
where detailed central commands are carried out on the
ground. Rather, it is a decentralized ideological movement, ideally suited for the low-intensity guerilla warfare
it is now engaged in, which issues directives and advice
to relatively independent local commanders.3 Nevertheless, some key differences remain. The Afghan Taliban
largely focus on goals parochial to Afghanistan, maintain
crucial links to the Pakistani security apparatus, and have
gone to some length to reassure Afghanistans neighbors
of their limited territorial ambitions. On the other hand,
the TTP espouses global jihadist rhetoric aimed not only
at U.S. forces in Afghanistan but particularly at the Pakistani state, and regularly suggests that it might expand its
operations beyond the limited Af-Pak zone.4 This is not
surprising given the much larger numbers of surviving alqidah operatives, Central Asian militants, and Punjabi
extremists that find shelter on the Pakistani side of the
border. It remains to be seen how the TTP will continue
to handle the tension inherent in both loyalty to Mullah
Omar, who is connected to the Pakistani state apparatus,
and the al-qidah guests, who have repeatedly called for
an uprising against the political establishment.5
Conclusion: Pakistan as Nexus of Global Jihd
have also served to strengthen links between various factions, thereby internationalizing heretofore domestic sectarian groups while further entrenching international extremists in Pakistani society. To be sure, these links existed before 9/11 occurred. For instance, Sheikh Omar
Saeed, the Harakat-ul-Ansar operative who was responsible for Daniel Pearls killing, was connected to Jaish-iMuhammads Masood Azhar, al-qidah, and the ISI.6
Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, deceased leader of the wellknown Deobandi Binori town mosque in Karachi, had
previously hosted both Osama bin Laden and Mullah
Omar. He was a member of the Pakistani delegation that
travelled to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, ostensibly to
persuade the Taliban to give up bin Laden, but most
probably encouraging them not to give in to U.S. pressure. 7 Nevertheless, these interconnections have grown
stronger in the last ten years. Thus al-qidah elements,
fleeing the U.S. military in late 2001 and early 2002,
were aided by Pakistani militants in the tribal agencies.
Many of these figures then relocated to other parts of Pakistan with the help of militant Punjabi organizations,
moving to the settled districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa,
Punjab, and the messy metropolis of Karachi.8 Osama bin
Ladens stay in Abbottabad was most probably facilitated
by Harakat-ul-Ansar leader Fazlur Rehman Khalil, who
remains at large in Pakistan.9
That does not mean, however, that all of the militant
groups in the region are moving together to become a
bounded entity with one coherent guiding ideology. In
fact, they resemble a complex overlapping, at times even
contradictory, patchwork of connections and alliances.
Thus the Afghan Taliban, the TTP, and the Kashmiri
Harakat-ul-Ansar are connected through their common
ethnic Pashtun bond and underlying Deobandi roots. Deobandi Punjabi militant organizations, like the Sepah-iSahaba Pakistan, Jaish-i-Muhammad, and Lashkar-iJhangvi have made common cause with TTP elements,
particularly when Pakistani military pressure has forced
them to seek shelter in the tribal agencies.10 Lashkar-iTayba has strong ideological affinities and personal connections with al-qidah bin Laden reportedly spoke at
the annual Markaz-i-Dawat wal Irshad conferences over
the phone throughout the 1990s. 11 Lashkar-i-Tayba,
however, has had a fairly benign attitude towards the Pakistani state, in stark contrast to al-qidah.12
It is clear, however, that the Pakistani government cannot
control militant Islam for its own strategic purposes in the
same way it did before 2001. A drawdown of the U.S.
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The use of an i and then of an e for the same vowel in this Dari
word is difficult to explain.
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I. The Context
The Roots of the Conflict
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Today, the insurgency is active or present, albeit at differing levels, in all provinces of the country and influences the behavior of the population more intensely than
the forces opposed to it. The Taliban as the Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan have established parallel, quasi-state structures and present themselves increasingly as
a government-in-waiting that in their perception has
been pushed from power by an illegitimate foreign intervention. In this process, they have made use of increasing
self-de-legitimization by the Kabul government (due,
amongst other facts, to massively manipulated elections
and the failure to provide even basic social services to the
population) and by international troops (due to behavior
that often resembled that of occupiers).
Starting from their strongholds in Southern Afghanistan,
the Taliban managed to extend their influence gradually
and systematicallyincluding, for the first time, significantly beyond the Pashtun population. In the North and
Northeast, they profit from support from among the conservative Islamic clergy. The increasing foreign military
pressure, starting with the U.S. troop surge in early
2009 and the resulting escalation in fighting (particularly
SOF kill-or-capture operations) led to an asymmetric
backlash (suicide and IED attacks, and targeted assassinations) by the Taliban on the one hand, and to an ideological homogenization of the insurgency as a countrywide national Islamic anti-occupation movement on the
other. This has built bridges to and connected with sectors of Afghan society that do not sympathize with the
Taliban but have also started to oppose the Western military mission in Afghanistan.
At the same time, as mentioned above, the insurgency
developed in an environment that had been socially and
politically fragmented and polarized over more than thirty years of internal (and sometimes internationalized)
armed conflict. The Afghan population experienced eight,
sometimes extremely violent, regime changes from
monarchist to communist, Islamist and finally semidemocratic during which old elites were sidelined, partially eliminated (physically and by mass emigration) and
replaced by new elites. But the respective new elites
failed to lead the country out of war and into a period of
peaceful reconstruction. As a result, the social fabric and
social institutions including those of conflict resolution
were weakened and even disintegrated. The majority of
the people were traumatized, creating an atmosphere of
mutual distrust, deep into families and into political relations. The failure to address these issues after 2001 by allowing a culture of impunity to take root in the new institutions suppressed these conflicts but did not resolve
them.
Meanwhile, one can continue to doubt NATOs claimed
progress in degrading the insurgency. The alleged decrease in the number of security incidents is based on a
methodology that is not comprehensive, and the UN and
Afghan human rights institutions have come to different
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conclusions. And, in the Summer of 2011, leading U.S. generals admitted that the progress achieved is not yet sustainable. Key districts, which have reportedly been turned
around (Arghandab, Panjwai and Zhari in Kandahar, Musa
Qala, Sangin, Marja and Nawa in Helmand, Chahrdara in
Kunduz etc.), still have a wait-and-see Taliban presence and
are still vulnerable to Taliban attacks from their periphery or
from neighboring districts. Often, ISAF and government
control does not extend beyond district centers.
2. The Wests Lack of Cohesion and Strategy
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rative of relative success (Afghanistan is not Switzerland). This has resulted in the decline of pressure for reform by international actors, the encouragement of corrupt and predatory governance and in resignation vis-vis vital gaps in the political system, including the lopsided balance between the three state powers, the lack of
implementation of existing law and the creeping penetration of Islamist anti-democratic and anti-reform thinking
into state institutions.
3. The Role of the Neighboring Countries
Most of Afghanistans immediate or far neighbors (Pakistan, Iran, the Central Asian republics, China as well as
Russia, India and Saudi Arabia) do not currently play a
(fully) constructive role in Afghanistan. The position of
some of these countries vis--vis Afghanistan, and Western involvement there, has changed since the late 2011
Bonn II conference. Two factors have led to this situation:
first, long-standing and unalleviated bilateral problems that
make the Afghanistan issue secondary for these governments, and, second, the Afghanistan missions morphing
from an international to a Western one, from being UN-led
to being NATO-led. Most of them reject the deployment of
NATO troops in Afghanistan and the establishment of
NATO supply bases in neighboring countries.
Among the regional problems, and problems beyond, are
the following: the unresolved border dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan (the Durand Line), conflicts between India and Pakistan over Kashmir (accompanied by
a nuclear arms build-up), and the strained relations between the U.S. and Iran and Pakistan on the nuclear issue.
There has so far been no concerted political process to
manage regional disputes that have contributed to instability in Afghanistan. Consequently, there is still no formal practical framework, or forum for dialogue among
Afghanistan, key regional stakeholders, and the main international actors, by which to develop a political agenda
for constructive regional cooperation. The recent Istanbul
conference, organized by Turkey, whose aim was to rebuild confidence and, possibly, develop a regional mechanism to alleviate the Afghan situation, was only a first
step on this still long road. Hopes of bringing in China or
India to take over some political or even military responsibility are in the first case illusionary and in the second counterproductive. Beijing cannot be interested in
being associated with the NATO mission in Afghanistan,
and will not pull the Wests chestnuts out of the Afghan
fire. While an Indian military involvement, even in training, will raise Pakistans suspicions and might block any
constructive involvement on Pakistans part. Concepts
like the New Silk Road collide with current security
problems and, in case these are resolved, will be made
difficult to implement for reasons of topography alone.
The latest incarnation of the Western strategy for Afghanistan or the first coherent one, as some observers
sarcastically point out is called transition or, in Dari,
Afghanistans lingua franca, enteqal. This strategy
consists of handing over security and political responsibilities to the Afghan Government by 2014, thereby indirectly admitting that so far Afghan sovereignty has mainly existed on paper only. The handover includes as the
final statement of Bonn II stipulates the phasing out of
all Provincial Reconstruction Teams, as well as the dissolution of any structures duplicating the functions and authority of the Afghan Government at the at the national
and sub-national levels. Facing the unsustainability of
Afghanistans institutions, a post-2014 ten-year period of
transformation was added to the strategy during the recent Bonn II conference. In Bonn, assurances of further
financial and developmental support were secured from
the international community. They are supposed to be
spelt out further in a donor conference in Tokyo in July
2012.
In practice, however, the enteqal approach still overemphasizes of the military aspects of the problem and
takes a hands-off approach on governance issues. Focus
is on the further expansion of the ANSF while, with
PRTs being dismantled an expected result of the UNAMA mandate review (demanded by Kabul), is that instruments to watch governance, in particular on its subnational levels, will disappear. In fact, this is a capitulation
vis--vis undue Afghan demands and shows that enteqal
is the Western alliances exit strategy from the country.
To date, the West has failed to show what is supposed to
be transformed (beyond the form of Western engagement
in Afghanistan) and how this will happen after 2014.
Which of the scenarios laid out below will play out, finally depends on three crucial factors linked to the enteqal
strategy:
How the international community will really engage after the end of transition in Afghanistan.
On the political side, Afghanistan currently is characterized by an over-centralized presidential system in which
the executive, often using extra-constitutional mechanisms (the jihd leaders or the ulem councils, newly
formed judicial commissions), has subdued both the legislative and the judiciary and sidelined alternative social
and political actors, among them civil society and politi-
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7 Ibid.
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Despite overriding economic and profit interests, the ethno-political polarization intensifies to such an extent that
the army and the police collapse/split, followed by a
breakdown of the Karzai government. Local warlords and
insurgent groups fight each other, possibly on multiple
fronts and in shifting alliances, possibly accompanied by
crime spiraling out of control. Central power ceases to
exist even in nominal terms. This war everyone fighting
everyone might not see a winner over years and would
be a repetition of the post-1992 developments that were
only ended by the Taliban establishing their power.
Such developments could be fuelled by several tendencies towards the end of the transition phase in 2014: the
build-up of Afghan army and police by the United States
and ISAF proving unsustainable; the Afghan Local Police and other quasi-militias, which saw a massive expan-
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sion in 2010 and 2011, exercising arbitrary authority; political reconciliation with insurgent leaders failing. At this
stage a local power struggle would be enough to spark
widespread violence across Afghanistan. External actors,
including neighboring countries, might be prompted to
rearm their allies within Afghanistan, destabilizing the
entire region and leading to a repeated proxy civil war.
A scenario proposed by some observers in the West as
the best achievable, like Biddles delimited warlord
rule with a new set of bargains between Kabul and
provincial powerbrokers9, is rather a way to recognize
and institutionalize fragmentation and even quasipartition and might lead to civil war instead of toward
stabilization. An Afghanistan split into a number of warlord fiefdoms will be much more difficult to control because an increased number of sovereign statelets with
their own quasi-sovereign actors will not be more inclined to follow internationally accepted rules than those
currently part of the Kabul-centered system. (It also
needs to be said that such a scenario is only palatable for
non-Afghans since most Afghans are aware of and have
experienced in the 1990s what carte blanche for the warlord means. Their rule without any law which was more
unpredictable than even the rule of the Taliban brought
about the emergence of the latter.)
Scenario 3: Islamic Emirate of the Taliban Reloaded
(Emirate 2)
9 Stephen Biddle, Leaving Afghanistan to the Warlords An Unpalatable Prospect, But the Least Worst Option, 15 December 2011,
http://cpost.uchicago.edu/blog/2011/12/15/stephen-biddle-leavingafghanistan-to-the-warlords-an-unpalatable-prospect-but-the-leastworst-option/.
they continue to be supported by Pakistan during the attempt to take over power.
Freak Scenarios
Scenario 4: Military Coup
This is mainly a scenario proposed from outside Afghanistan. The most striking partition proposal came from U.S.
ambassador Robert D. Blackwill who, in 2010, proposed
handing over Afghanistans Northern and Western regions to a federation of non-Pashtun warlord-led militias
propped up by 40,000 to 50,000 [U.S.] troops and turning the predominantly Pashtun rest, i.e. Southern and
Eastern Afghanistan into a virtual free fire zone:
[T]he sky over Pashtun Afghanistan would be dark with manned
and unmanned coalition aircraft targeting not only terrorists but,
as necessary, the new Taliban government in all its dimensions [he
apparently foresees the Taliban taking over there]. Taliban civil officials like governors, mayors, judges and tax collectors
would wake up every morning not knowing if they would survive
the day in their offices, while involved in daily activities or at
home at night.
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This scenario was in the cards before the 2009 presidential elections when former U.S. special envoy and ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, who was born in
Afghanistan, sent messages of interest in running for
president. This was followed by a mobilization among
civil society and pro-democratic actors, some of whom
believed that direct rule by an American (even if he
would have had to renounce his U.S. citizenship to satisfy Afghan constitutional criteria to run) would be preferable to indirect U.S. rule, not least because a head of state
with excellent connections in the U.S. would find it easier able to mobilize the necessary resources for the country. Khalilzads final decision not to run caused consternation and disillusionment among those who had supported him. It is not conceivable that this episode could
be repeated in 2014, not least because the U.S. will probably not be persuaded to revoke its decision to disengage
in particular with a Democrat in the White House.
(Khalilzad is a Republican.)
Why No Best-Case Scenario?
Currently, there is little reason to conclude that the preconditions for a positive change of trend towards more stability in Afghanistan will occur in the medium term. E.g. a
cessation of the asymmetric warfare between the U.S.-led
ISAF and the insurgency as well as a transition to better
governance by means of serious reform of the current political regime. The premature announcement of the Western (partial) withdrawal has both emboldened the Taliban
(to wait out the current Kabul government) and reduced
the Kabul governments willingness to reform, which it
perceives as external interference, but many ordinary Afghans do not. The increasing re-militarization, both of the
legitimate ANSF and extra-constitutional militia forces,
coupled with the weakness of most civil society and politi-
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On the other side of the spectrum is the negative scenario, whereby civil war breaks out after NATO hands over
security responsibilities, with the Afghan police and army unable to avoid or contain it. Among coalition partners, predictions for civil war come from two fears: (i)
memory of the civil war that broke out when the Soviet
Union pulled out following its own less-than-successful
attempt to pacify the country in the late 1980s, and (ii)
the fear that, once withdrawal is complete, leaders of the
insurgency who are in Pakistan would return to Afghanistan and wage war against President Hmid Karzais
government.
False Assumptions
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Power politics among political parties and their coethnic constituencies mirror the highly centralized presidential system embodied in the constitution drafted with
the help of the international community. It was not as
much the presidential system that was imposed on Afghanistan in 2001, but its adaptation in the context of a
diverse country that had not yet healed from the injustice
perpetuated by different groups (and not just the
libn), as well as contradictory incentives provided by
external actors in their War against Terror that created a
system of impunity. Thomas Ruttig et al aptly recognize
today a system where political inclusiveness is limited
and where antransparent, small inner circle of former
warlords (Jihdi leaders) and presidential advisers have
become the core of consultation and decisionmaking.
Civil society has become dependent on donor-driven finances, political parties delegitimized and marginalized,
beginning with the ban of political factions in parliament
and on party lists during elections. So far, democracy
has been built on persons rather than institutions and
systems, and power is derived by positions and loyalty,
and not accountability.
It would be too easy, although it comprises the mainstream Western narrative, to blame the Afghan government for manipulating the democratic ideals laid out by
the Bonn Conference in 2001 to favor its own interests,
for instigating a debacle through corruption and capture.
What also needs to be examined is the way that the international community implanted democracy as an experiment, top-down and outside-in, with a set of check-
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full-scale reconciliation, political reforms, and sustainable mechanisms for broad dialogues, and not simply a
ritualistic, ad hoc and instrumentalized Loya Jirga.
More worrying, however, this simplification of the incapacity of the Afghan state and society bestows more responsibility on the international community to defeat the
libn or to integrate them as a benchmark before their
departure, and even to give assurances that key civil and
political rights will not be sacrificed in such a scenario.
In contradistinction, however, the reality is also simple:
the international community can negotiate but only Afghans can maintain a peace.
A more honest strategy would be for the international
community, instead of constructing and then dismantling
a liberal centralized state and democracy-cum-market
system, to engage in self-critical reflection on its own
position of power and the assumptions made in the drivers seat. In a listening mode, an Afghan order could
emerge that is less encumbered by idealistic prescriptions and more locally resonant. A post-2014 order in
Afghanistan needs to be renegotiated based on better understanding of a dynamic society, the root causes of its
resistance and the aspirations of ordinary Afghans. It
would mean investing the time and effort needed to
launch a genuine political process for national unity and
wide scale reconciliation, instead of deciding with whom
to negotiate over a local peace.
Undoubtedly, the international community is in a precarious position. Political reforms, a culture of democracy,
accountable institutions, mechanisms for dialogue, etc. all
are long-term goals that, ideally, take decades, and not
single digit years to implement. Yet, if the U.S. and
NATO coalition stay longer in Afghanistan, they will continue to fuel the fire of insurgency, because, after all, the
libn are mainly at war in reaction to the presence of
foreign troops in Afghanistan. According to a survey by
the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, sixty percent of Afghans
fear that the country will descend into civil war once
NATO forces leave, but over half see the Western alliance
as occupiers. More important, however, is that if they
stay heavily (and militarily) involved beyond 2014, they
also rob the Afghan state and society of the opportunity to
develop their own defense mechanisms. By this, we do
not mean building up the military and police in Afghanistan, which are already too expensive to sustain and contribute to the militarization of Afghan society beyond
global norms. The defense mechanisms are the inner
workings of what makes a state worthy of its name, not
only, as Weber would have it, with a monopoly on violence to protect its citizens, but also with the experience
necessary to provide for and empower them.
What It Takes:
Afghan-Led Political Process, Even if Conflictual
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tactical step-by-step recipes to follow before or even after 2014. In fact, it is precisely rushed timetables and illusions of the ability to build a state, in the midst of conflicted interests, that created the Afghanistan that we
have today. All benchmarks in the shape of international
conferences have come and gone, with pundits offering
guidelines of what to achieve before them, with the end
result being the same.
What Afghanistan needs, more than a political settlement
that brings the insurgents and key political and social
forces, including civil society on board, is a political process. Such a political process from which a nation-state
can be born, has at least three fundamental requirements:
(i) time, seen from a long-term perspective; (ii) ownership; and (iii) disputes and conflicts. Not all conflicts have
to led to fully-fledged civil wars. It might be worth reminding those worried that Afghanistan will fall into civil
war, as it did in the 1990s, of the contribution of the existence of arms, ammunitions, money and covert clientalism
left over by global powers in a proxy war that fueled the
fire. Political conflicts exist in all democratic societies of
the West and it would be short of racism to assume that
the Afghans would not be able to handle thorny political
questions without reverting to arms, if left alone. To do so
would also mean recognizing that the international community has been a bad parent in teaching about democracy for the past decade.
The political options ahead are therefore for Afghans to
decide on a number of remaining questions that are
grander than negotiations and integration of the libn
or even reconciliation between ethno-political groups, or
even the minimal red lines in terms of respecting womens rights and human rights. To name a few among the
more neglected areas:
1. How Much Space Should be Given to Ideology in Politics?
Turning now to the scenarios about the future of the region, the rest of the paper discusses the options ahead.
The most positive scenario was articulated by the demand of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
made of regional countries to respect Afghanistans
sovereignty, which means agreeing not to play out their
rivalries within its borders, and to support reconciliation
and efforts to ensure that Al-qidah and the syndicate of
terrorism is denied safe haven everywhere. She further
claimed, during testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, that the U.S.
is working to help secure commitments from regional
countries to respect Afghan sovereignty and territorial
integrity and to support Afghan reconciliation.
In the worst-case scenario, regional countries refuse to
cooperate and in fact interfere actively (overtly or covertly) in the political system and an eventual peace process by supporting various factions according to their
own interests. In the worst-case scenario, they enter
Afghanistan to fill the power vacuum once the U.S.,
NATO and their allies leave. They could also, as journalist Akmal Dawi writes, make Afghanistan pay dearly
The international community adopted two parallel initiatives to try to avoid the negative regional scenarios and
induce cooperation among regional partners in preparation for the Bonn II Conference: economic incentives for
cooperation through a New Silk Road strategy and a
political confidence-building measure unleashed at the
November Istanbul conference for Heart of Asia countries. The vision behind both projects was that cooperation was supposed to not only decrease the destructive
behavior of non-state actors (i.e. terrorist, insurgents /
extremists and drug traffickers from Afghanistan), but it
could also lead to positive externalities, such as economic dividends when Afghanistan was transformed into a
land bridge, a hub for trade and transit in the region.
Both initiatives, however, failed to obtain regional buyin at the Istanbul conference.
A New Silk Road Full of Bumps
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liberalization in the wider region, all as part of a sustainable exit strategy from Afghanistan. The New Silk Road
bag of goodies included, among other initiatives, the revival of the TAPI pipeline, a national railway system for
Afghanistan supported by CENTCOM, and the CASA1000 project to transfer electricity from Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan.
Nonetheless, the initiative has a number of limitations that
can prevent this vision from turning into reality. A first
practical hurdle for the realization of the project is the
question of financing. The U.S. positioned itself as not the
financer but the political broker for mobilizing risk guarantees, new investments and public-private partnerships
from the IFC, NATO, ADB, G-20 and private investors. If
the U.S. is not to finance this, there is skepticism by other
countries, including China, Russia, Iran and some Central
Asia countries of the benefits of a regional fund when bilateral projects can be more beneficial.
The idea of free trade in the New Silk Road vision has
also been challenged by every day practices in Central
Asia. Uzbekistan, the major transit hub, used a policy of
higher tariffs for trucks crossing its borders throughout
2010 and 2011, instigating a railway blockade and expanding its de facto trade embargo against Tajikistan.
That led to a chain reaction when Tajikistan upped the
charges for freight heading to Afghanistan. Kazakhstan
has been busy negotiating terms as part of a new Russian-led Customs Union/Eurasian Economic Community
gaining strength in the North. Trade barriers in the region are not likely to come down soon.
A more important challenge is that such a grand economic strategy fails to consider political impediments,
both in Afghanistan and around it. Transport and transit
issues in the region have long been the subject of
(geo)politics, not just economics, and no technocratic
project can escape that reality, even less so when it was
introduced by an external power. Political impediments
include the question of the long-term stability of Afghanistan, which has so far inhibited investments to
complete the TAPI project. The electricity import
schemes proposed in the CASA-1000 project are also
rife with political problems given the Central Asian
countries own crisis over water and electricity swaps
between upstream and downstream countries. Even
though the projects make economic sense, unless the
structural political issues are solved, the New Silk Road
will not likely reach its destination.
It came therefore as no surprise that the New Silk Road
initiative met objections during the Istanbul meeting and
did not feature as such in the final communiqu. China,
Russia and Iran preferred to see regionally initiated bilateral projects not coordinated from outside. Pakistan
came out strongly against regional projects in general.
The Uzbeks refused to sign the final declaration. For
skeptics, the New Silk Road may have been a way to
challenge the dominant position of China and Russia in
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Conceptual Problems
First, this approach underestimates the potential for noncooperation among states, even if they share a common
concern for dangers emanating from non-state actors.
Although many of Afghanistans direct and extended
neighbors view the existence of Al-qidah, the libn,
terrorism, extremism and criminal trafficking as critical
threats to their national interests, they are often locked in
various types of security competition with one another,
resulting in their larger rivalries subordinating the common interest in fighting threats from non-state actors.
Other scholars have also hinted at parts of this problem.
Ashley Tellis and Aroop Mukherji of the Carnegie Endowment have argued, for example, that while Afghanistan is important to many of its neighbors, its importance
usually derives from how it impacts other strategic goals.
Because these goals are often competitive, the success of
a regional approach is inevitably impeded.
Second, by assuming that there is a large region where
interests in cooperative security merge, the argument for
a Heart of Asia also neglects to break down the security
dynamics within sub-regions. Yet, it is within subregions that states form patterns of enmity or amity
based on their core security dilemmas. Relations / interactions between states within Regional Security Complexes (RSCs) dictate conflict and cooperation dynamics
in the region. The conceptualization of Afghanistan as a
Heart may have been indeed what Thomas Ruttig called
full of romantic but unrealistic Orientalism, and it may
have indeed made sense from an economic point of view
and from the perspective of the interests of U.S. and
NATO in Afghanistan. But it failed to recognize the existence of three different sub-regions around Afghanistan,
each with its own dynamic not necessarily related to
what happens in Afghanistan. The extent of the engagement of neighboring states in Afghanistan is primarily a
reflection of existential security concerns within their
own region, i.e. the South Asia Regional Security Complex, the Central Asia RSC and the Persian Gulf RSC.
Case in point is that much of what Pakistan objected to
was related to its discomfort about sharing benefits with
India. Central Asian countries were also curbing their
enthusiasm for full support to the U.S. (including for being part of the Northern Distribution Network) in consideration of their deference to Russia and China who in
turn provide for their security and provide economic
guarantees. For the these countries, like much of the others in the immediate neighborhood of Afghanistan,
trans-border threats do represent an area of concern, that
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The worst-case scenario, from the two immediate neighbors perspective, is in fact that the U.S. and NATO
troops stay in Afghanistan in order to use that territory to
launch attacks on Pakistan and Iran. Internal dynamics
within Afghanistan could threaten the countries neighboring Afghanistan in ways that they become engulfed
in them, but unlike the Talibanization scenario, it would
be the presence of U.S. and NATO troops permanently
stationed in Afghanistan that could pose a security threat
to the neighboring countries. The continued presence of
the U.S. military after 2014 may not only boost libn
propaganda that international forces are occupiers, but
it would also lead to more antagonism from regional
countries, even if it is a desired long term goal of Afghans interested in security guarantees from the U.S.
against their neighbors while continuing to benefit from
attention, aid, support to their armed forces, etc.
The argument for a long term U.S. presence seemed to
become more justified in the aftermath of the operation
that killed Osama bin Laden. The need for stealth and
speed dictated launching the operation from an airbase in
Afghanistan (Jalalabad). The potential need for similar
counter-terrorism operations after 2014 would require
bases for technical intelligence and warfare in Afghanistan, the only country in the region, which welcomes the
presence. The Afghan government and some Afghan
public opinion argue that although the U.S. may have its
own geostrategic and economic interests, the long-term
engagement of the U.S. military, as well as its government, is beneficial for Afghanistan. Their arguments appeal to the U.S.s moral responsibility not to abandon
Afghanistan once again, to contribute to capacity building and training of troops, and to eliminate the sanctuaries and bases that exist in Pakistan. The argument is
pragmatic as well: the U.S. is stronger and certainly
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kistan, with its four billion dollar investment in the copper mine at Aynak in Afghanistan, agreeing to take over
the operation of the port of Gwadar, and even expressing
a willingness to build the TAPI gas pipeline that it had
hitherto opposed. Although it has been wary of the New
Silk Road Initiative, Russia has also lent support to the
TAPI project and announced during the SCO summit in
Saint Petersburg in November 2011 that it would contribute $500 million to the CASA-1000 electricity project, both key projects of the initiative. By coopting the
projects of the New Silk Road away from financing by
Western private companies, the two giants could in fact
derail the U.S. vision to their own benefit.
Another instrument that can be used is membership in the
SCO, fast emerging as a giant regional institution, which
seeks a bigger role in Afghanistan, something that the
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reiterated during
the Bonn II Conference. Pakistan and India are expected
to soon gain membership, and Afghanistan is set to gain
observer status in the organization. The SCO further developed its position towards Afghanistan through the
adoption of a 2009 Moscow Declaration and an Action
Plan of SCO Member States and Afghanistan on combating terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime, and
the creation of a SCO-Afghanistan bilateral commission.
Pakistan is hoping that its close alliance with China will
allow it to gain favorable support for full membership in
the SCO, the same way that India is counting on its warm
relations with Russia as the legacy of the Indo-Soviet
friendship. Irans interest in the SCO is colored by its
search for ways to frustrate Washingtons policy of containment. It is therefore waiting eagerly for an upgrade of
its observer status into full membership, a move not likely
to happen in the near future given SCO rules that no
member should be under UN sanctions.
An expanded SCO could include cooperation in the region motivated by a number of mutual interests: eliminating the threat of extremism, terrorism and separatism
(the so-called three evils indoctrinated in the essence of
SCO) and combatting narcotics trafficking, which is also
a specific concern to Iran. The two global powers China
and Russia are also united in their interest in eliminating,
or at least diminishing the U.S. military presence, given
their common resentment against a unipolar system
dominated by the U.S. and their fear of encirclement. It
was under Chinese and Russian pressure that member
states of the SCO called on the U.S. and its allies to establish a timetable for withdrawing from their bases in
Central Asia in July 2005, which subsequently led to the
closure of the Khanabad base in Uzbekistan. Mutual interests warrant for now a marriage of convenience. In the
long-term, however, the potential for rivalry for influence over the region is high, especially with the more assertive entry of China into the pipeline politics of the region driven by its needs for energy resources. The rivalry, however, would most likely be of an economic nature.
Militarily, China is more cautious and is unlikely to engage in the region or allow the regional organizations in
At least one analyst, the Indian commentator Bhadrakumar, sees another possibility developing, that of a SinoU.S. alliance against Russia. His thesis is that the core
agenda of U.S. policy is to create a wedge between Russia
and China and it suits the U.S. regional strategy that China is increasingly competing with Russia in the energy
sector. His evidence lies in the U.S. (and Norwegian) supported construction of the Dusti Bridge over the river
Pyanj separating Tajikistan from Afghanistan in 2007. By
doing so, the U.S. is supposedly following up on a strategy to facilitate an efficient access route for China that
leads to the markets in South Asia and the Persian Gulf
while bypassing Russian territory. According to Bhadrakumar, the thrust of the U.S. regional strategy is to pull
Central Asia towards South Asia and away from Russia,
with Afghanistan acting as a hub. This strategy however
needs to appease the Chinese by providing incentives. The
U.S.-funded bridge in Tajikistan acts as such, allowing
China's Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region access to a
communication link with Karachi port through the newly
developed roads in Tajikistan, which the Karakorum
highway cannot provide. However, evidence against Chinese complaisance with any such U.S. plans was its official reaction to the New Silk Road initiative, which essentially rejected the idea in favor of bilateral economic developments in the region.
3. Enduring Indo-Pakistan Rivalry
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A final scenario to consider is the future of U.S.-Iran relations. A strike on Iran, orchestrated by the U.S. or Israel (or both), would transform regional dynamics as it
would potentially rally regional countries, with the possible exception of Afghanistan, together on the side of
Iran. Despite U.S. pressure, Central Asian countries,
Russia, China, and to an extent even Pakistan, have
maintained good relations with Iran. The countries of
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Central Asia are for example concerned about the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons especially given
their own commitments to nuclear disarmament. But a
more immediate concern is the possibility of hostilities
between the U.S. and Iran forcing them to choose sides
and be caught in a new conflict on their borders. For the
landlocked countries of the region, Iran also represents
the shortest route to the open seas, and hence access to
world markets, a factor that comes into the equation of
choosing sides. All therefore favor diplomatic means of
resolving the standoff between the U.S. and Iran over the
latters nuclear program.
Not to be dismissed as too unlikely is also the alternative
scenario, proving difficult to conceive today in the midst
of mounting rhetoric about imminent war, but proven
possible in the past, of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement,
whether overt or covert. Iran and the U.S. have much in
common on Afghanistan, a realization that led to cooperation when the Iranians provided logistical support to
U.S. troops during the initial stage of the intervention in
Afghanistan in 2001, only to be met with President
Bushs Axis of Evil label shortly thereafter. The shortest and the most practical route for U.S. and NATO supply remains via the Chabahar port, an option that has
been discussed with NATO in the past but abandoned
for now. Perhaps Tehran and Washington will realize the
importance of opening a new dialogue on regional security. For that, however, Iran needs reassurances that the
U.S. base in Shindan will not be used against it. Iran also seeks recognition for its regional leadership ambitions,
which, if granted by the West, would put it at odds with
the other regional powers, starting with Pakistan and
ending with Russia. Such a scenario, admittedly, is a
long way from realization, especially in the current hostile atmosphere, which is forcing Iran to lead the dissent
in the region vocally.
Regional Solutions
The different scenarios above all point to the fact that for
the next few years, the regional security situation will be
dynamic. But they also reveal that this this dynamism
has less to do with the instability within Afghanistan
than what happens in terms of rivalries and alliances between the states of the region and extra-regional powers.
By implication, the regional appetite for entering Afghanistan once the U.S. leaves is less than for insulating themselves from Afghan domestic politics and concentrating on other stakes. This, however, does not mean
regional powers are disinterested in a stable Afghanistan.
It means that state-to-state dynamics are going to be
largely dictated by their reaction to the U.S. long-term
presence in their midst.
Having examined the impediments to the failed regional
solutions proposed so far, as well as a number of scenarios, what political options lie ahead for the international
community to contribute positively to regional coopera-
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Both the internal and external negative scenarios outlined in this paper have two things in common. One is
that the root of spoiler behavior is marginalization. If
war is to be renewed in Afghanistan, it would be because
some groups feel marginalized in a narrow political process which puts over-emphasis on the reintegration of
the libn by any means. If regional countries do not
cooperate, it is because they feel that they are not consulted enough and that their security concerns are not
adequately addressed.
The second common factor is that in both cases, despite
international community avowals of Afghan-led and
Region-led processes, it is, in fact, the Western allies
who take the lead in deciding who needs to integrate for
what purpose and around which agenda. This creates inertia and insulation at best, and spoiler behavior at worst.
When robbed of their agency, actors, be they political
actors and groups in Afghanistan or regional states,
evaluate their engagement strictly on the basis of the
unilateral advantages that they may derive in the shortterm rather than what may benefit the nation and the region in the long-term.
Under these circumstances, even if a semblance of peace is
forged, it is hardly a noble peace and an exit with honor.
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IED
IJC
IMET
IMF
IMU
IRGC
IS&R
ISAF
ISI
JCMB
JI
JiM
JKLF
JUH
JUI
JUP
LiJ
LiT
LOC
MCN
MDI
MoF
MoI
MP
MTCR
NATO
NCO
NDS
NDN
NGO
NPP
NRVA
NTM-A
NWFP
O&M
OCAC
ODA
OECD
OEF
OIC
OMLT
PDPA
PIMI
PRC
PRT
RUSI
SCO
SIGAR
SIGIR
SIPRI
SNTV
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SOF
SSP
TAPI
TNSM
TOW
TTP
UCAV
UN
UNAMA
UNDP
UNHCR
UNODC
USAF
USAID
WJ
WFP
United Nations
UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan
UN Development Programme
UN High Commission for Refugees
UN Office of Drugs and Crime
U.S. Air Force
U.S. Agency for International Development
Wolesi Jirga
UN World Food Program
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