New York Times Editorial: Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai, Take Two/Distrust of Afghan Leaders Threatens U.S. War Strategy

New York Times Editorial: Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai, Take Two
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 12, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/opinion/13thu1.html?th&emc=th


After months of rancor, President Obama made nice to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Wednesday, and Mr. Karzai made nice back. At a White House press conference, the two men painted a sunny, improbable picture of cooperation and mutual respect. There was no mention of the many failings of Mr. Karzai’s government or his resentment of American pressure.

Confronting the Afghan leader head-on was not working. We just hope that Mr. Obama and his aides have a real plan — beyond lowering the temperature — for getting Mr. Karzai to do what is needed and for building up a minimally effective Afghan government.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has a clear military strategy. We are less certain about the administration’s political strategy.

The gap, and the danger, was on full display in Marja. February’s military offensive drove Taliban forces out of the area and secured the city center. American plans to quickly set up a competent “government in a box” faltered — either because there were too few qualified Afghans, or too few willing to take the risk, or Mr. Karzai’s government wasn’t really interested.

More than two months later, the Taliban are still active, and there is still no effective local government. Washington will need to do better with this summer’s far more important offensive in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai bears considerable responsibility for all that has gone wrong. He has refused to root out corruption. He prefers cronies to competent managers. He has wasted far too much time railing at his American protectors.

The problem is compounded by uncertainties about who is running the civilian side of Afghan policy. Richard Holbrooke was supposed to be the go-to guy. But his ties with Mr. Karzai soured, and now his clout — in Washington and Kabul — is unclear. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s publicized assessment that Mr. Karzai is not an “adequate strategic partner” has left lingering tensions with Mr. Karzai and General McChrystal.

The administration’s goals are rightly focused on building up Afghan government capacity — from Kabul to the local level. Until the government can been seen providing minimal security, jobs, water and electricity, Afghans are unlikely to take the risk of rejecting the Taliban. Progress has been frustratingly slow.

The State Department has deployed 1,000 civilian experts as of March (up from more than 300 last year) to advise Afghan ministries and oversee aid programs. Those numbers mask how hard it was to fill those jobs — and how hard it will be to replace them. Congress needs to fully finance the State Department’s request for $284 million to build a permanent corps of civilian experts to help in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, a new report by the Government Accountability Office said violence in Afghanistan is delaying implementation and increasing the costs of American aid programs and making them harder to monitor. This does not augur well for President Obama’s goal to start withdrawing American troops by mid-2011.

We hope all the hospitality does not leave President Karzai thinking he’s off the hook. We assume Mr. Obama was a bit blunter in private. We hope Mr. Obama is also having tough discussions with his own team.






Distrust of Afghan Leaders Threatens U.S. War Strategy
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 12, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/world/asia/13afghan.html?th&emc=th


JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Nearly a year into a new war strategy for Afghanistan, the hardest fighting is still ahead, but already it is clear that the biggest challenge lies not on the battlefield but in the governing of Afghanistan itself.

Afghan elders met Tuesday at a Marine base near Marja in Helmand Province, part of an American plan to build mutual trust.

That has been the early lesson of the American-led offensive in February in Marja, in Helmand Province, where most Taliban insurgents either were beaten back or drifted away. Since then, Americans and Afghans have struggled to establish a local government that can win the loyalty of the Afghan people, something that is essential to keeping the Taliban at bay.

The success of the far larger offensive in the coming weeks in Kandahar, the Taliban heartland, may well depend on whether Afghans can overcome their corrosive distrust of President Hamid Karzai’s government.

Mr. Karzai was confronted with that issue when he met with American officials this week, including President Obama on Wednesday. The two leaders seek to repair months of badly strained relations and come together at a crucial moment, both for the NATO countries involved in the fighting and for Afghanistan itself. Mr. Obama plans to begin withdrawing American forces a little more than a year from now.

If the timetable is not daunting enough, an April report by the Pentagon to Congress found that by most measures, the country is, at best, only a little better off now than it was a year ago. Progress so far appears well off pace to meet the American goals.

The insurgency has spread to some new places, notably the north and northwest of the country, although it has diminished in a few areas. It is now made up of more than half a dozen groups with different agendas, making it that much harder to defeat, or negotiate with, even if the Americans and Afghans could agree on a strategy for doing so.

In 120 districts that the Pentagon views as critical to Afghanistan’s future stability, only a quarter of residents view the government positively. And the government has full control in fewer than a half dozen of these districts.

Despite the commitment of more troops by Mr. Obama and a new strategy that has emphasized the protection of Afghan civilians, few in Afghanistan believe that a functional government that holds the country together can be created on the timetable outlined.

“It was very unrealistic to think that in 18 months they would be able, with the Afghan government, to secure a very large part of the country which is insecure today,” said Nader Nadery, a commissioner on the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, who travels extensively around the country. “Look at only Marja. It took such a long time just to secure that area.”

The timeline also leaves many Afghans reluctant to back the Americans and the Afghan government, because they fear that the members of the NATO coalition may be leaving soon, Mr. Nadery said. The point was echoed by European diplomats.

“I did not anticipate the increasing sense of uncertainty among Afghans that Americans and Europeans will pack their bags and leave the country in the coming weeks and months,” said Vygaudas Usackas, who recently arrived in the country to serve as the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan.

“We all understand we can’t succeed by 2011,” Mr. Usackas said.

Even as American troops clear areas of militants, they find either no government to fill the vacuum, as in Marja, or entrenched power brokers, like President Karzai’s brother in Kandahar, who monopolize NATO contracts and other development projects and are resented by large portions of the population.

In still other places, government officials rarely show up at work and do little to help local people, and in most places the Afghan police are incapable of providing security. Corruption, big and small, remains an overwhelming complaint.

“People are tired of the Taliban, but they also don’t want cops to shake them down, they don’t want power brokers who are so corrupt they impact their lives and livelihood,” said a senior officer who works closely with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the NATO commander for Afghanistan.

The challenges are clearly visible in eastern Afghanistan, where the military has come to recognize the limits of American power in this wild terrain. The United States abandoned two combat outposts in the east over the past year — one in Nuristan and the other in the Korangal Valley, in Kunar Province.

Col. Randy George of the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, who has responsibility for the four easternmost provinces, tries to build relationships with tribal leaders in most of his territory, at gatherings called shuras, although he has given up ground to the insurgents in some areas.

The strategy inevitably means allowing the insurgents some havens, as long as those are in sparsely populated areas where the insurgents are unlikely to have much impact. Colonel George said he hoped that if he could embolden Afghan citizens to combat corruption in the more populated river valleys and provincial towns in their areas, they would at least create a government they could support, rather than help the insurgents who attack it.

“We’re not worried about corruption in itself, but we are worried about governance,” Colonel George said.

“Part of that is making sure that we are continuing to connect the Afghan people to the Afghan government as a whole, and when you’ve got a rotten piece of that, the people don’t want to connect to it,” he said.
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Christoph Bangert for The New York Times

American soldiers observed a suspicious vehicle in the center of Kandahar city.

Over the past year, elders in the east banded together in three districts in Laghman Province to force out three corrupt police chiefs, and in Kunar and Nuristan, they forced out two district governors.

But entrenched officials, some of them Karzai allies, sometimes undercut the efforts, and tribal dynamics are infinitely complicated. In Nangahar, a major effort by the military to persuade a large tribe to sign on to a pact to keep out the Taliban drew criticism from the powerful provincial governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, who appeared to fear that the pact would undercut his power. Since then, no similar pact has been approved.

Such pacts and agreements to oust local leaders require multiple meetings with villagers and elders. Several days a week, Colonel George flies to remote districts to meet with tribal elders, listen to their complaints and try to cajole them into supporting the Afghan government.

This is retail politics; valley by valley, village by village. In a meeting earlier this spring in Asmar, a remote district near the border with Pakistan, elders berated him for giving money earlier in the year to corrupt district leaders — underscoring how difficult it is for the Americans to pick reliable local allies. And by the time the Americans know who is who, they are on the verge of rotating out of Afghanistan.

One village elder at the outdoor meeting looked at Colonel George and said: “You are giving the money to individuals and not to the community. Look at the directors of government agencies, look at the cars they are driving, look at the houses they build — where does that money come from? It’s our money.”

Diplomats who have spent years in the country working with Afghans give the Americans credit for trying, but they warn that it is easy to underestimate the complexity of Afghan tribal relationships and the profound antipathy for the government.

“One of my Afghan friends always says, ‘You want a shura, I can organize one for you in 24 hours,’ ” said Thomas Ruttig, a former German diplomat in Kabul and an expert on the country who founded the Afghanistan Analysts Network. “The problem is, do you have the right people?

“When you give out money, you might end up supporting one side in a local conflict — and not realizing that it’s roulette,” Mr. Ruttig said.