The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN)

The Independent Election Commission has set 20 October 2018 as the new date for Afghanistan’s parliamentary and district council elections. This comes after two earlier dates were missed. The Commission has also announced that it will start to register voters on Saturday, 14 April 2018. As AAN’s Ali Yawar Adili reports, though, the later date for the elections is problematic. Some areas could already be seeing heavy snowfall. It also means parliamentary and district elections would be held just seven months before the presidential poll is due, risking electoral congestion and political chaos.

This is part six of a series of dispatches about preparations for the parliamentary elections. Part one dealt with political challenges; part two with an initial set of technical problems, including the date, the budget and the use of biometric technology; part three with electoral constituencies; part four with controversies around the appointment of one new IEC member, after its former chief was sacked by President Ashraf Ghani; and part five with a demand by political parties to change the electoral system.

Setting a fallback date for the elections

Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) has now postponed parliamentary and district council elections for a third time. On 1 April 2018, it announced “to the people” (see its statement in Dari here and English here) that both polls would be held on 28 Mizan 1397 (20 October 2018). (We continue to write ‘parliamentary and district council elections’ as both are still officially due to go ahead. However, preparations for district elections, including drawing constituency boundaries, remain rudimentary. If district elections do go ahead, it will be for the first time. They are politically important because, according to the constitution, district councillors should elect one third (34) of Meshrano Jirga (Senate) members and the heads of the district councils should participate in any Constitutional Loya Jirga. Such a jirga is required by the National Unity Government agreement and for any changes to the constitution. A future dispatch will look at the district elections in detail.)

During previous electoral cycles, early October had been considered the latest possible time for elections – they have never taken place later than 9 October. (1) Setting the date at the end of that month pushes the elections into a season where snowfall is possible in certain areas of the country. For example, there was snowfall in Bamyan in October 2013 and in 2004, when the first presidential election took place. Heavy snowfall would hinder access to polling sites for officials, observers and voters and add to the accessibility problems to the electorate caused by the insurgency. Snowfall disenfranchising voters in a politically weak province like Nuristan would be bad enough, but if it occurred in Badakhshan or Hazarajat, with their highly organised and politically and ethnically conscious voters, there could be real trouble.

The late date also pushes the parliamentary and district elections into the period when Afghanistan and its electoral institutions should be preparing for the next presidential poll. According to rules set by the constitution, Afghans should be electing their president 30 to 60 days before 1 Jawza 1398 or 22 May 2019 (meaning no later than 22 April 2019). This being the case, the new electoral timetable envisages Afghanistan holding two elections within seven months of each other, with the same electoral institutions busy both counting votes and addressing complaints and disputes arising from the first election, and making preparations for the second.

Tolo News on 5 April 2018 claimed to have obtained a copy of the electoral calendar, which the IEC chair said would be made public on 21 April 2018. Reportedly, it says that the IEC will announce the final list of parliamentary election results on 15 January 2019 and final district council results on 4 February. Yet, for the presidential elections, according to article 71 of the Electoral Law (Dari version available here), the IEC should announce the election date and publish the electoral calendar 180 and 120 days respectively before election day. This means that if the IEC is to hold presidential election on the constitutionally latest date, 22 April 2019, it has to announce the date of the election by 22 October 2018, two days after the parliamentary and district council elections are held, and publish the electoral calendar on 22 December 2018, before it has announced the results.

Even if Afghanistan’s electoral institutions were effective, technically able and politically non-controversial, the country’s weather was kind and predictable, and there was no insurgency, it would still be difficult to keep to this election time-table. Yet past experience has shown that in Afghan elections, little does go to plan even in the best of circumstances.

For example, if finalising results (ie counting ballots and ranking candidates in order of the votes they received in each province) is protracted and especially if results are disputed, the impact on the presidential election could be dire. The experiences of earlier election cycles have shown that hiccups and delays should be expected. These have happened in public awareness campaigns, voter and candidates registration and procurement and transfer of election material (such as delays in printing ballot papers). It is also worth remembering that finalising the results of the last presidential election took more than five months from the first round election day. Disputes over winners and losers in the last parliamentary elections meant it took more than four months for a new parliament to be set up, with disputes rumbling on for almost a year.(2)

Exacerbating the looming election congestion are the continuing and as yet unfaced problems associated with holding district council elections. The IEC, the government and its international backers continue to insist that, this time, district council elections will be held. Holding district elections will require an operation far more massive than for the parliamentary poll, with the introduction and approval, after a probably more complex complaints procedure, of a much larger set of candidates.

As Yusuf Rashid, executive director of the observer organisation, Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA), alluded to in an interview with Etilaat Roz on 2 April 2018, the likely impact of delaying the parliamentary and district elections until October are either an eventual decision to hold them together with the presidential election in 2019, or a postponement of the presidential elections. A delay in the presidential poll, given the higher stakes – who runs the country – would potentially be more destabilising. This was hinted at by first deputy speaker of the Senate Muhammad Alam Ezadyar on 10 April 2018 when he said “the presidential elections must not be delayed under any circumstance.”

Elections already late

Yet these elections are long overdue. The term of the current lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, elected in 2010, expired on 22 June 2015. According to the constitution, the elections should have been held 30 to 60 days before then. By 20 October 2018, the current Wolesi Jirga will have served, extra-constitutionally, for almost three and half years.

This is the third time a date has been set for these elections. After several attempts by the IEC to set a date in 2015, it finally announced, on 18 January 2016, that elections would be held later that year on 15 October (24 Mizan 1395) (see AAN’s previous analysis here). The IEC was then in its former composition, that is to say, it comprised members who had overseen the disputed 2014 presidential elections.

Neither the government nor donors, however, took the October 2016 date seriously because most of the issues relating to electoral reform which Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah (now the president and the chief executive, respectively) had promised to deal with when they formed the National Unity Government remained unresolved. These issues included a demand for changes to the composition of both electoral commissions (the IEC and the Electoral Complaints Commission or ECC).

Then, on 22 June 2017, the IEC (in its new composition) announced a delay and set a new date for the elections, 7 July 2018 (16 Saratan 1397). However, as AAN wrote as early as November last year, the IEC had already come to the conclusion that this date was also unfeasible and was thus considering fallback dates as late as October 2018. The anticipated postponement was spawned by the great deal of time squandered debating President Ghani’s determination to introduce, not only biometric voter registration, but also electronic voting. In the end, the IEC’s unsuccessful procurement of this technology forced it to turn to a Plan B: a manual system for voter registration (see AAN’s previous reporting here). In its statement announcing the 20 October 2018 date, the IEC listed this as among the reasons for the delay. Other reasons included the appointment of a new IEC member (see AAN’s previous report on the controversies over this, here), insecurity and delays in getting assurances for the election budget from the government (and by extension, from the donors). (3)

Reactions to the new October date

While Afghan election observers such as FEFA’s Yusuf Rashid have been sceptical about the feasibility of the October election, various international parties have been more welcoming. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) in a statement released on 1 April 2018 welcomed what it called “the progress” made by the IEC in setting “a firm date for elections.” It said this was “a notably positive and important development in the work of the IEC, and will allow progress from the formal planning stages to implementation.” UNAMA had also called the earlier 7 July 2018 election date “realistic.”

European Union ambassador and head of delegation in Afghanistan Pierre Mayaudon also tweeted on 1 April 2018 that the 20 October date was now set and on that date elections which are “credible and with no further delay” must be held.

AAN has repeatedly heard from some members of the Kabul diplomatic community pushing to hold parliamentary and district council elections in 2018. However, the challenges are so formidable that other diplomats are questioning how realistic it is to expect an election in October, particularly one that is ‘inclusive’, ie where parts of the electorate are not excluded by weather or war. The challenges include unresolved issues surrounding electoral constituencies (see AAN’s report here and, most importantly, security constraints. As a forthcoming AAN dispatch will outline, the IEC has prepared a list of 7355 polling centres where voters will go to get registered and then cast their votes on election day. On 25 March 2018, senior Deputy Minister of Interior Murad Ali Murad gave a security assessment of those centres to the IEC. A little over half of them, 4,165 (56.6%), are in locations enjoying a ‘normal’ state of security, but the remaining 3,190 (43.4%), he said, were either in areas under medium or high threat, or completely outside government control.

Voter registration

The IEC has also announced that voter registration is to be launched this Saturday (14 April 2018) The need for fresh voter registration comes from the new provision in the 2016 Electoral Law (articles six and eight) that requires the IEC to prepare a voter list by tying each voter to a specific polling centre, ie a voter should only be allowed to vote in a polling centre where he or she is registered. The IEC provided the following basic information about voter registration to political parties and civil society organisations(also attended by the author) at a consultation meeting held on 6 December 2017. These are the steps to be followed.

Firstly, the IEC said the registration would be manual and the paper ID card (tazkera) would be used. A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between the IEC and the Afghanistan Central Civil Registration Authority (ACCRA) to issue tazkeras to around ten million eligible voters who had not obtained them previously, starting from the month of Hamal (starting 21 March 2018). This was, in fact, the IEC’s Plan B. It had to be adopted after its Plan A, which had envisaged biometric voter registration, was dropped, according to the IEC deputy chair for operations Wasima Badghisi, because it “was not supported sufficiently by international organisations and the government of Afghanistan” (see AAN’s previous analysis on the debate about introducing technology in elections here). Article six of Electoral Law says that voters should be registered based on their tazkeras or other documents specified by the IEC (the law was cautious because some Afghans, especially women in rural areas, do not have tazkeras). However, in a decision made on 26 November 2017, the IEC specified that “only” tazkeras could be used for registration. The MoU with ACCRA to issue around ten million tazkeras is apparently meant to include and franchise those who do not yet have them.

Second, the IEC told the meeting that, upon completion of the voter registration and the preparation of the voter list, all previous voting cards would become invalid. There has been a highly inflated number of voter cards in circulation as the result of massive over-registration in the past: a total of 21 million voter cards have been distributed throughout the various registration and top-up exercises, for an estimated maximum total voting population of 15 million people (see AAN’s previous reports here and here. This had allowed multiple voting, among other forms of manipulation, helped by the lack of a reliable central register. This remains one of the major obstacles for holding credible elections.

Third, the IEC said that it would recruit and train more than 33,000 employees to conduct voter registration and there would be one ‘registration book’ allocated for each batch of 600 voters.

Fourth, the IEC said that around 7,350 polling centres (now increased to 7,366 – AAN dispatch on the polling centre assessment and list is forthcoming), which would include one female and one male polling station, would be activated across the country to serve as voter registration centres. It said female employees would be recruited to handle female polling stations. IEC chair Gula Jan Abdul Badi Sayyad told the Wolesi Jirga during a briefing about elections on 4 April 2018 that 12,000 staff had already been hired to carry out the first phase of voter registration and another 20,000 employees would be recruited for the second phase. However, the IEC seems to have been struggling to recruit female staff; on 10 April 2018, Shahla Haque, the acting head of the IEC’s secretariat, in a meeting with civil society organisations admitted that the lack of female employees was a problem. A day before, on 9 April 2018, IEC member Hafiz Hashimi, blamed the delay in hiring female employees for polling centres on the ministries of interior and women’s affairs for their supposed dilatoriness.

The registration centres are to be open every day of the week, including Fridays, from 8 o’clock in the morning to 4 o’clock in the afternoon. In an effort to reassure potential voters, the IEC said that each registration centre would have an “adequate number” of security forces available, a hint at the adverse security situation in many areas. They will be stationed outside the registration centres to ensure the security of buildings, material and employees.

As with the announcement of the new election date (20 October), the announcement that voter registration would be launched was welcomed by some interested actors, including British ambassador Nicholas Kay who, on 1 April, praised this step in an interview with the Kabul daily, Hasht-e Sobh. He said it was very important for two reasons:

First is that with the start of the voter registration, I think, we sense and observe signs of holding the election – which will be held after the end of voter registration. We sense that elections are on the verge of being held. Another important reason that the voter registration is of paramount importance will be having a voter list for the first time in Afghanistan.

The fact that the IEC has begun a public awareness campaign to inform voters about the registration, is also a sign that it is pushing to meet the 20 October date. A Facebook post on 28 March said the registration would be conducted in three phases, with the first starting on 25 Hamal 1397 or 14 April 2018 and the last finishing on 22 Jawza or 12 June. (4) Voter registration procedure, the IEC is telling the public, will be as follows:

• Each eligible individual will go to a registration centre with their tazkera. The voter’s information is recorded on the registration and confirmation forms. With this, each voter is tied to a specific polling centre.
• The registration confirmation is then separated from the form and labelled on the backside of the voter’s tazkera. The confirmation includes security codes such as a hologram and a specific number (which, the author thinks, will identify the individual voter).
• The voter is then asked to use the same tazkera to exercise their right to vote. (5)
• The registration forms are scanned and transferred to the national data centre.
• The scanned data is entered into the database by IEC employees and at the end of the voter registration process, the voter list will be developed for all polling centres and stations. What are known as the ‘registration books’ will be kept in the provincial offices of the IEC and used as a voter list if needed.

During the 6 December 2017 consultation meeting, the IEC had already listed some of the challenges it would face when registering voters and which could cause delays. These include the lack of security in some regions as a major concern; the possibility that paper tazkeras were not, for any reason, distributed on time; the possible lack of cooperation by the security forces in transferring registration and election materials on time (a task often fulfilled in previous elections by international forces, they largely withdrew in 2014). The IEC also pointed out that the methods used to register voters this time will not prevent multiple registrations. It warned that if such cases were found, the perpetrators would be introduced to relevant authorities, but that was the case in earlier elections too, with little impact on vote-rigging. (According to the Electoral Law (article 98), registering more than once in the voters list is a violation for which a cash fine of between 12,000 and 50,000 afghanis will be imposed).

Conclusion: a messy dilemma

The Afghan government is the main party responsible for the mess is now finds itself in. Neither camp in the National Unity Government pushed for electoral reform immediately after they took office, as they had promised. Precious time was also wasted over the president’s ambitious, and some would say, fantastical, desire to introduce biometric voter registration and electronic voting. It was clear from the beginning that the introduction of this technology across the country was not feasible, given the many infrastructural weaknesses. However, the government overruled expert opinions and the recommendations of a number of feasibility studies, insisting, unrealistically, that the technology could be introduced. In the end, it had to accept that it could not be.

Those actors in the international community who have continued to stress that parliamentary and district elections must be held in 2018 in a largely still unreformed framework are also far from being free of blame. Some appear to be worried more about the appearance of a political process progressing ‘normally’ (despite the three years’ delay already in the parliamentary vote) than about qualitatively reliable elections. The repeated delays have already disrupted the practice of having regular, periodic elections, a requirement in normal democratic setting; international actors could have used their leverage to push for reforms earlier on.

Despite the many problems outlined here (and we will soon write about further aspects of election preparations still pending), it appears that the IEC is bent on trying to hold the elections in October 2018. Its launching of voter registration on 14 April will be a crucial step. However, it has yet to address several important questions, including:

Will the IEC be able to carry out voter registration, let alone the vote, in the large areas of the country controlled or threatened by the Taleban (and, to a much lesser extent, Islamic State of Khurasan Province or ISKP)? What will a possible failure to conduct the registration and voting in those areas mean for the inclusivity and thus legitimacy of the results, especially in multi-ethnic provinces like Ghazni? How will the IEC deal with the possible impact of an early winter, especially on politically ‘heavyweight’ areas such as Badakhshan and the Hazarajat? If the date set for the election so late in the year does disenfranchise voters in snowy areas, what will that mean for the legitimacy of the elections and the results?

There is still no guarantee that it is possible to hold parliamentary and district elections in 2018. If they are held, there is also no guarantee that this would not lead to further political chaos. At the same time, more delays to parliamentary and district elections would be dangerous to the legitimacy of the current government and parliament.

At this stage, the alternative course of action would be to sort out the electoral framework first and then schedule the elections. Parliamentary and district, and presidential elections could still be held separately, although a knock-on delay to the presidential elections would then seem inevitable. It would then be the National Unity Government lingering in power beyond its constitutional mandated term. All in all, holding all the polls together in 2019 might now be the most practical and least bad option.

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Kate Clark

 

(1) Since the fall of the Taleban, elections have been held on:

• 9 October 2004 (presidential)
• 18 September 2005 (parliamentary and provincial council)
• 20 August 2009 (presidential and provincial council). a second round planned for 7 November of that year did not happen
• 18 September 2010 (parliamentary)
• 5 April 2014 provincial council and (presidential, first round) and 14 June 2014 (second round)

(2) The 2010 parliamentary election was held on 18 September. On 29 November, the IEC approved and released the final election results for all provinces except Ghazni and the Kuchi constituency. Then President Karzai, based on the Attorney General Office’s open challenge of the results, refused to inaugurate the new parliament and ordered the establishment of a special tribunal. The new parliament finally sat only on 26 January 2011.

On 23 June 2011, the tribunal disqualified 62 members of parliament and announced new candidates to replace those who had lost their seats. The Wolesi Jirga refused to recognise the findings of the tribunal. In late August 2011, the IEC announced that only nine, rather than 62 sitting MPs should be disqualified and replaced. (See this NDI’s report here)

(3) In November 2017, donors pledged to fund up to 90 per cent of the 28.4 million USD voter registration budget, in addition to pledging ongoing assistance to the IEC and ECC (see here).

(4) There will be three phases:

25 Hamal 1397/14 April 2018 to 23 Saur/13 May provincial capitals

25 Saur/15 May to 7 Jawza 28 May district centres

9 Jawzja/30 May to 22 Jawza/12 June rural villages

(5) This will still only limit, not prevent multiple voting because there is no central registration of existing paper tazkeras, and voters could claim they had no tazkera or had lost theirs, so could then be issued with an (actually additional) paper tazkera. This would allow them to obtain multiple voter cards. On 27 March 2018, during the IEC’s consultation with political parties, former NDS chief Amrullah Saleh also expressed concerns about lack of statistics on how many tazkeras had been issued to the country’s population so far and possible over-issuance of tazkera with ten new million tazkeras targeted by the IEC in its MoU with the ACCRA. (see here).

Since the never completed withdrawal of NATO troops in Afghanistan, China has become more involved in one of its most conflictive neighbour’s affairs. It has offered to connect the country with its multi-billion dollar project, the Belt and Road Initiative, which includes the so-called Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor. AAN’s co-director Thomas Ruttig has found – after participating in a conference in Beijing, also appraising a public event with Chinese participation in Oslo, both in March 2018 – that, for economic and security reasons, Afghanistan is now higher up on China’s priority list but still far from being a top priority.

“China does not have a foreign policy. We only have a domestic policy, even in our relations with other countries”, said a Chinese scholar in the margins of a think tank conference the author attended in Beijing in October 2013. One aspect of it, he added, was to secure access to strategically important raw materials. He pointed to the copper deposits of Ainak, in the Afghan province of Logar, for which a consortium of Chinese state-owned enterprises had won a 30-year lease contract from the Afghan government in May 2008 (earlier AAN analysis here). The implementation did not go well, and the scholar blamed the Chinese state-owned companies. The companies, he said, take loans from the state to implement projects like these but do not expect that the state will demand that the loans be fully repaid. Such loans had accumulated and precipitated a small financial crisis. (See also these AAN dispatches about domestic Afghan problems within the project, here and here.)

“With my Afghanistan portfolio”, the scholar added, “I cannot even get close to the Zhongnanhai”, referring to the seat of the Communist Party and the government near Beijing’s Forbidden City. Afghanistan was only a fourth or fifth-rank problem, he said.

China forced into action

China’s foreign policy and the role it ascribes to Afghanistan have changed substantially since 2013. This became clear both during a conference in Beijing in late March 2018 in which the author participated, again as a member of a delegation of European think tankers, and on a panel some days earlier in the same month in Oslo. The first event was organised by the Asia programme of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the second one, titled “Chinese perspectives on Afghanistan“, was a part of the Afghanistan Week 2018, a collaboration between the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), all from Norway (you can hear a full podcast here). (1)

China sees itself developing into a “responsible regional power […] which moves closer to a position of global influence,” as Ji Zhiye, the president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), the influential think tank of the Ministry of State Security described in an article for his institute’s journal. (2) China does not yet call itself a “global power,” neither does it see itself matching the US on all levels. Ji calls his country a “world major country.” Other authors say that, at least in part, China is still “a developing country.” They also pointed out certain practical weaknesses that stand in the way of becoming more active on the world’s diplomatic scene. Insufficient “diplomatic capacity” was one example, as well as a lack of “understanding of the external world” that “think tanks should improve.”

The changing geopolitical situation has forced China to become more active, including in Afghanistan. In Oslo it was stated that this was “with some caution, in helping Afghanistan in reconstruction and peace and reconciliation, but in general under the UN framework and working together with other global and regional powers – in the hope that would help the Afghan people to work out a formula they feel that suits them the most.”

US scholar Barnett R Rubin said at the Oslo event, a “major reason for the China’s involvement in Afghanistan was its desire in identifying some common interest and potential cooperation with the US.” This motive has even become more important now with Beijing’s concerns about the ways in which a more isolationist US has started looking under President Trump. It is also clearly angered about new anti-Chinese measures, such as the new trade tariffs the US has imposed on certain export goods, a measure Beijing fears could result in a fully-fledged trade war harming everyone (see for example the Wall Street Journal here). The Chinese scholars participating in the Beijing conference said they were hoping the US “would not become a total trouble-maker”, also referring to the possibility that Washington might tear up the nuclear deal with Iran.

When it comes to Afghanistan, the scholars said “China wants to play a constructive role in Afghanistan.” Beijing became wary when the – never fully implemented and partly reversed – withdrawal of NATO soldiers from Afghanistan was announced while the security situation in the country was still far from resolved (this situation continues, see AAN analysis here). Urged by Washington under President Barack Obama to become more involved with Afghanistan, China joined the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) with Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US soon after President Ashraf Ghani took office in 2014 and visited Beijing on one of his first trips abroad (AAN analysis here). His aim was to pressure Pakistan into coercing the Taleban to the negotiating table. This initiative faltered, however (AAN analysis of this process here).

Since then, Chinese concerns have grown further. The scholars bluntly criticised the new US South Asia and Afghanistan strategy as “exclusive”, “misleading” and including “dangerous changes”, with its “increased emphasis on military means, less economic support and less nation-building”, despite lip-service to a “regional strategy.” It was “not smart […] to neglect the interests of regional countries” – a remark that could be both read with a view on Pakistan, on which the US is increasing pressure – and China itself. Also, as Rubin pointed out in Oslo, Pakistan itself is China’s “closest and most important ally, and this relationship is key to how China understands Afghanistan.” And likely also how China’s understanding of Afghanistan in the regional context and on its list of priorities should be understood. At the same time, as Prof. Wang Xu from Peking University’s Center for South Asian Studies added in Oslo, “we encourage the two countries to have at least crisis management” in their conflictive mutual relationship.

China’s security worries: “overspill”

The features of China’s Afghanistan policy are not so much dominated by the situation in the country itself, but of the potential for “overspill” of security problems in a number of neighbouring countries. (3) Officially, the government and the scholars speak of the threat of the “Three [Evil] Forces,” namely a combination of violent terrorism, ethno-national separatism and religious extremism. As laid out in another article in the CICIR journal, co-authored by Zhao Lei and Xu Huiying, professors at the Institute for International Strategic Studies associated with the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee, this includes South Korean Christian missionaries proselytising among China’s Korean minority, an overspill of illegal drugs from North Korea and of ethnic conflicts from Myanmar and northeast India, some of which are also spawning drug trafficking.

China’s gravest concern is Central Asia, including the five ex-Soviet republics and Afghanistan. This region is described in the CICIR article quoted above as “the forward position to launch separatist activities against China, to infiltrate into Xinjiang” – the region in China’s far west that has historically been dominated by Muslim ethnic groups – and “the frontline to split China.” (4) “Ideological infiltration” had intensified from “religious extremist forces of such Islamic countries as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran as well as the Taliban terrorist groups from Afghanistan.” The local East Turkistan Independence Movement (ETIM), the article said, had extended its “scope” to other parts of China where it had carried out a number of terrorist attacks (see AAN’s recent analysis here). The movement’s headquarters and recruiting hub was located in Istanbul.

But, as two western scholars wrote in a report for the Carnegie Endowment (see here),

… China mostly appears concerned with addressing direct threats to Xinjiang province [by creating] a zone of stability around it, (…) rather than increasing its security presence in Central Asia more broadly. (…) Part of this policy obviously also includes gaining leverage in neighboring countries to help Beijing influence their approaches to Xinjiang and the diaspora Uighur minority populations across Central Asia. In fact, regional governments across Eurasia have become loath in recent years to resist Beijing’s requests to monitor local Uighur diaspora communities, to restrict activities of local Uighur civil society groups, and to extradite Uighurs suspected of links to extremist or secessionist groups.

Economic mega-projects and regional connectivity

Economics also play a central role in Afghanistan’s increasing importance for China. Since 2013, China has pushed forward an intercontinental economic connectivity strategy that is officially called the Belt and Road Initiative or Yidaiyilu in Chinese. (5) It consists of a land corridor and even digital connectivity networks linking China and Europe through Central Asia, a network of maritime trade routes through the Indian Ocean into the Mediterranean, as well as free trade areas with several countries, with the aim of supporting Chinese export flows. This is a Chinese version of the US idea to establish a ‘New Silk Road’ in order to solve the Afghan problem through regional economic integration and development. While the US version never really took off beyond diplomatic meetings under the ‘Heart of Asia’ label (AAN analysis here), China has allocated vast financial resources to it. The so-called Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor – only one of six planned corridors linked to the OBOR [One Belt, One Road] initiative – is a 62 billion USD project alone (media report here.

Of late, Afghanistan has come into sharper focus. After a first trilateral meeting between the foreign ministers of China, Pakistan and Afghanistan in Beijing in December 2017, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that “China and Pakistan are willing to look at with Afghanistan, on the basis of win-win, mutually beneficial principles, using an appropriate means to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to Afghanistan.”

The Chinese scholars who met in Beijing were less optimistic. According to them, Pakistan was not really in favour of connecting Afghanistan to this initiative, given the strained ‘Af-Pak’ relations (see report about recent Pakistani cross-border shelling here), and was resisting Chinese ideas of expanding regional trade routes leading through Pakistan such as the road links via the two official border-crossings at Torkham (between Peshawar and Jalalabad) and Spin Boldak (between Quetta and Kandahar). Beijing is now planning to access Afghanistan’s northern border by roads and railroads leading through Central Asia all the way to Europe, forking off from a main connection leading through Tehran and Istanbul (media report here). This includes projects for a Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Turkmenistan (TAT) railway line (more here) and road links with Kyrghysstan and Uzbekistan which, according to Wang Xu speaking in Oslo, “would be perfect for Afghanistan.”

At the same time, the problem with Chinese state-owned enterprises seems to have been overcome, as they are apparently “better positioned to invest in Afghanistan as there was no need for “immediate returns.” (6)

Beijing’s Afghanistan policy and the economy-security link

According to the scholars, “stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan is regarded by China as a crucial issue for the future.” But it is seen more as a regional problem than an ‘Afghan’ one. “How does China rate Afghanistan as a problem?” one of the scholars asked, rhetorically. “We first are concerned about an overspill from Afghanistan to Pakistan, then about one from Afghanistan to Central Asia, and only then about Afghanistan itself. […] “If the Afghan government collapsed, this would be a problem; but if the Pakistani government collapsed, this would be a catastrophe.” The new US strategy vis-à-vis Pakistan was simply “wrong.” China would like to impress the view on Europe that “Pakistan does not want to be cornered by the US” and that “the EU should help on this, vis-à-vis the US.”

The scholars in Beijing formulated two main aims for China’s Afghanistan policy: “preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for international terrorists again, for example from those coming from Syria and Iraq” after the partial defeat of IS there; and to “stop terrorist financing.” The latter might indicate some doubts about the Taleban’s role in it, also with respect to what is left of al-Qaeda.

“The bottom line is: to prevent the worst-case scenario” – ie a collapse of the Afghan government and the disintegration of Afghan government forces – a repetition of the events after the Soviet withdrawal in the 1990s. “That’s why our foreign minister was in Islamabad and Kabul the last time” in June 2017 (media reporting here).

On aiding Afghanistan, the Chinese scholars opined that “although there is assistance fatigue, assistance to Afghanistan must be kept up. There cannot be a turning the back to Afghanistan.” China was ready to help, and now “follows the US and EU in its aid model.” In tandem with the Belt and Road Initiative, it has established financing institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and, more recently, a new National Development and Cooperation Agency (background here and here). Furthermore, “military pressure [on the Taleban] is still needed.” Therefore China has a more favourable view of NATO’s presence in Afghanistan. But a political solution was key, and that “needs to include the Taleban.”

The scholars saw three levels of dialogue necessary for a peaceful solution: between the Afghan government and the Taleban, between the US and the Taleban, and between the Afghan and Pakistani governments. But a “lack of consensus on peace on three levels on peace” stood in the way “within the Taleban, within the National Unity Government, and among the regional and international players.” The challenge was “how to reach minimal commonality” between them. And “if the Taleban insist on talks with the US first, why not?”

Any agreement reached between the Taleban and the Afghan government should be “endorsed or guaranteed by the US, the EU and/or China.” It was “not the time to bring on new actors,” but the Trump administration, with his new South Asia strategy, had given a stronger role to India.

There was clear scepticism about the feasibility of attempts to start peace talks being successful: “Without a capable Afghan government, there is no use to any initiative. […] How can a peace process be Afghan-led, when the Afghan government can’t provide for itself” and “only reacts” to proposals after it consulted with the US?” The scholars noted that “everything is controlled by the US from behind. […] We need to tell the Afghan government that it is time to stand on their own feet.”

At the same time, in Oslo, the Chinese scholars spoke about the country’s “advantage” that it never has “supported any specific group in Afghanistan to oppose another specific group. That gives China leverage… The main factions in Afghanistan do not view China as an enemy, and so China was in a position “to provide a platform for different factions to sit down” for talks.

There was also scepticism about another domestic Afghan policy issue. In the short-term, the scholars saw another “challenge in making the forthcoming elections more accepted” to the main players, “so that history does not repeat itself and there is no winner or loser” as was the case in the 2014 presidential poll. They were also sceptical about the possibility of parliamentary elections still being held in 2018 although the Afghan election commission had just postponed the date to 20 October, what is seen as the last feasible date before the onset of winter. They also stressed that efforts were necessary to prevent tensions between President Ghani and (former-) Balkh Governor Atta Muhammad Nur from “developing into a disaster.”

The scholars also raised some points shared by certain colleagues in the West and in Russia, but which over-emphasise the ethnic factor, for example about “tribal federalism” as an “Afghan tradition” and that “Afghanistan never had a strong central government since 1747.” The latter overlooks the relatively successful development-oriented, foreign aid-financed rule between 1953 and 1978. The scholars also suggested that Afghanistan should recognise the Durand Line as a “ground reality.” This reflects less understanding of Afghan sensitivities than of those of Pakistan.

The issue of “border management” was mentioned repeatedly, signalling China’s worries about Uyghur militants resident in border areas or (possibly) returning from the Middle East. The Syrian ambassador to Beijing claimed in mid-2017 that there were 5,000 Uyghurs fighting alongside the regime’s opponents (AAN is unable to say whether this is an accurate number), and China is concerned about their possible return to the Central Asian region “through different countries.” Allegedly, some had travelled through Tajikistan up until 2007, later through Pakistan and then through southeast Asian countries; an “Iran corridor” was also mentioned, which might lead through Afghanistan and Pakistan or directly through Pakistan.

The Chinese scholars were sure there were between several hundred and a thousand Uyghur militants in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province (a number which might include family members). But they said they were “lying low” and not involved in fighting. (At least two districts in Badakhshan are under Taleban control – Warduj and Jurm – as well as others, although only in part. There are also conservative madrassas in other parts of the province which could provide support (more AAN background here). The scholars added that Chinese activity in Badakhshan, which had generated some media attention, was linked to this perceived threat: “this is about counter-terrorism cooperation.” They said they did not think that China would send troops to Afghanistan permanently or establish a base of their own. This activity was about “capacity building of the Afghan government – even of the local government – and part of our military diplomacy.” Similar measures had earlier been reported in Tajikistan (see one media report here).

China has signed a number of bilateral security agreements with both countries (see here and here). The International Crisis Group reported a Chinese “security presence” and the existence of “an installation in a remote corner” of Tajik Badakhshan.

At the same time, they confirmed recent AAN analysis that direct infiltration of Xinjiang from Afghan Badakhshan was unlikely: “The Chinese-Afghan border [in the Wakhan] is very difficult to cross. There is only a narrow road. The Wakhan is not a corridor.” The scholars confirmed that some Uyghur militants had earlier crossed from Xinjiang into Pakistan (where subsequent leaders were killed in 2003 and 2010, see here) but not the other way around. (7)

All in all, “China’s ambitions in Afghanistan are very limited.” The country “should choose its own way of development. We do not care who rules Afghanistan.” But, as Rong Ying, Vice President and Senior Research Fellow, China Institute of International Studies (CIIS) said in Oslo, China also thinks that outside powers “should not impose [on], not dominate and not manipulate Afghanistan.”

On the Taleban and Pakistan

The Chinese assessment of the general security situation in Afghanistan widely concurs with that of the West. The scholars summarised it by saying that despite the latest decline in the figure of civilian casualties and the fact that the Taleban had been unable, once again, to capture provincial centres in 2017, the situation was still “deteriorating.” They cited reports by UNAMA, the US Special Inspector of the Government for Afghanistan Reconstruction (better known by the acronym SIGAR) as well as the latest BBC research.

But China seems to be less concerned about potential threats to its current economic interests in Pakistan and its potential ones in Afghanistan by the Pakistani and the Afghan Taleban movements. One scholar remarked “We recognise now that there are some differences between the Afghan and the Pakistani Taleban” – the Afghan Taleban are allies of the Pakistani government, while the Pakistani ones want to topple it – “although there is some cooperation between them.” Another added, “the Afghan Taleban are no threat [for China], even the Pakistani Taleban are no threat.” If there was a security threat to China’s interests in Pakistan, then it would emanate from the Baloch movement in Pakistan. But even that threat was limited: altogether, they said, there were 320 terrorist attacks in Pakistan in 2017, with only five directed against Chinese interests or citizens. With respect to Afghanistan they said, “there are Taleban and Taleban; some Taleban are terrorists, some are a political entity,” even “an important political group in Afghanistan.” This overlaps with Pakistan’s position, and might even be the result of China’s view on Afghanistan shaped by what they described as “information sharing mechanisms with Pakistan.”

China’s interests are different from those of Pakistan, though: “We will do everything to prevent the Taleban from taking power by force, but if they gain power by political means, we would welcome this.” The scholars also described the Taleban as the lesser of two evils: “The Islamic State is the common enemy of the Taleban and the Afghan government. We should encourage the Taleban to defeat IS. There is a difference between the civil war [with the Taleban] and the anti-terrorism fight [against IS] in Afghanistan.” In Oslo, Peking University’s Wang Xu said “we should not exaggerate the Daesh factor” although it still was “a potential threat.” CICIR’s Li Wei wrote in an article on the tendencies of international Islamist terrorism after the defeats of the IS in the Middle East and its quasi-state “entity disintegrating,” that a reunification of IS with al-Qaeda was possible.

However, information sharing with Pakistan does not mean, according to the scholars, that China could easily influence Pakistan. “We have a leverage over Pakistan, particularly since [the large investments linked to] the OBOR initiative” but “China needs to be sensitive about Pakistan. Pakistan does not want China to become directly involved in Afghanistan.” Therefore, “China’s role [in persuading the Taleban to hold direct talks with the Afghan government] is overestimated.” At the same time, the scholars made no secret of the fact that China has maintained relations with the Taleban and continues to meet their representatives. No detail was provided but it seems that Xinjiang’s capital, Urumchi [Urumqi in Chinese], was a hub for such meetings.

Regional mechanisms: from multi- back to bilateralism?

The Chinese scholars were all but optimistic about existing multilateral regional mechanisms and peace initiatives. The latest Russia-initiated Moscow process “is not acceptable to US” while the US-China-Pakistani-Afghan Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) “has made Russia and India feel sidelined.” They even repeatedly called the QCG “a dying process,” despite latest attempts to revive it and China seeing “some potential” in it. (8) They also wondered whether it made sense to have Pakistan “representing” the Taleban in the group. The Istanbul Process (AAN analysis here) with its “confidence-building measures” was all “declaration, but no implementation.”

The same went for the Chinese-initiated Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) established with Russia and the five Central Asian Republics in 2001 in order to create a joint regional security architecture independent of the West. The scholars said “China would like to promote the SCO’s engagement in Afghanistan, particularly in economic cooperation and the integration of Central Asia and Afghanistan” but “different perceptions on the US presence in Afghanistan” stood in the way. While China pragmatically considers it necessary to keep up “military pressure” on the Taleban, Russia was less positive, and since – on Russia’s initiative – rival south Asian powers India and Pakistan were brought in in 2017, all work has stalled as the organisation is based on the consensus principle and there was none on Afghanistan between the member-countries.

China also has pushed to create the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism (QDDM), a counterterrorism organisation consisting of Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, and Tajikistan—the first meeting of which occurred in Urumqi, Xinjiang in 2016 (see here). The scholars confirmed that joint Chinese-Afghan (also Chinese-Tajik) border patrols have taken place, but “not related to the Wakhan”, ie apparently elsewhere in Badakhshan. There was also “very good information sharing with Afghanistan on certain [militant] groups, such as the TIP [the Turkestan Islamic Party]”, and that they hoped “to extend this.” In Oslo is was said that China also has given Afghanistan “counter-terrorism equipment” since 2014.

Conclusion: A more important non-priority

Given the altered global balance of power, China sees itself on its way from regional to global power and, in its regional policy, moving “from the principle of non-interference to constructive engagement.” But, as one scholar put it: “What does this [constructive engagement] mean concretely, we don’t know.”

Bu Zhao Lei and Xu Huiying, quoted above, suggested that “[a]lthough China should abide by the basic principle of non-interference with other countries’ internal affairs, it must actively play the role of a major power [and] shoulder more international responsibilities.” But when it comes to peace initiatives, “for the most part, it only calls for restraint on both sides of [a certain] conflict and seeks resolution through peaceful means, rather then getting directly involved.”

The scholars confirmed that China’s role in Afghanistan has increased, but insisted at the same time that its “ambitions in Afghanistan are very limited.” In Oslo, it was stated that China still sees the US as the leading power in Afghanistan. They also said that it needed “some leverage in countries where it is investing.” This view will likely become more powerful when Afghanistan really becomes linked to the OBOR corridors through Central Asia. But the relationship with its ally Pakistan remains much more important than that with Afghanistan, and it will continue to look at Afghanistan from this angle.

For the time being, with what China sees as the failure of multilateral political stabilisation efforts, bilateral diplomacy on border management, security cooperation and information sharing is taking practical precedence again. Economic interests still dominate the agenda, both as an end for domestic development and a means, hopefully, for furthering regional integration and stabilisation.

Some hope and interest were expressed about concerted action with the EU, which had a “more realistic strategy” for Afghanistan than the US. China and the EU, as the “two forces to maintain world peace” as CICIR’s Feng Zhongping noted in another journal article, should work to “influence and persuade the US to modify its Afghanistan strategy. […] We want to work China and the EU in parallel, not jointly – then we sit together bilaterally [and compare notes].”

Edited by Sari Kouvo

 

(1) In the main text of this dispatch, the author focusses on the event he participated in himself (which was under Chatham House rules), with a few additional quotes and footnotes from the Oslo event and from Chinese think tank journals.

You also find the list of participants in the Oslo panel under the link given above.

(2) The article was published in the November/December 2017 of the journal of Contemporary International Relations (CIR) issue and is not available online.

In Oslo, the Chinese participants informed that a reorganisation of China’s think tank landscape was under way, so attributions of institutes to institutions given above might change or have already changed.

(3) China has 14 neighbours, and its border with Afghanistan is shortest with any of them, under 100 kilometers. The Chinese scholars in Oslo also stated that there were no bilateral problems between both countries, after the border was demarcated in a 1965 treaty.

(4) The largest of these ethnic groups are the Uyghur (who have, at various times in the past, declared independence for East Turkestan). Other, smaller groups such as the Kazakh, Kyrghyz and Tajik also live there, apart from the Han Chinese Muslims, called Hui. Due to China’s development and population policies, ethnic Chinese Han now constitute a majority in Xinjiang, which has contributed to tensions.

A (Mountain) Tajik Autonomous County is situated to the immediate east of the Afghan Wakhan corridor. It has less then 30,000 inhabitants, 84 per cent of whom are Ismaili Mountain Tajiks, mainly of the Sarikoli ethnic group. (Afghan Mountain Tajiks in Badakhshan include the Wakhi, Shughni, Munjani and others.) The ‘Afghan’ scenes of the movie The Kite Runner were shot in its administrative centre, Tashqurghan (Chinese: Taxkurgan). The Hui have their own autonomous region, Ningxia, in northern central China.

(5) Formerly also known as One Belt One Road (OBOR).

(6) Reportedly, China expects to lose up to 30 per cent of its investment in Central Asia, a margin that could also be assumed for projects in Afghanistan (quoted in this Carnegie paper).

(7) A new leader of the group in Pakistan vowed to take revenge in 2014 (read here).

(8) The rendering of this issue was somewhat more positive at the public events in Oslo where it was stated that the QCG had made “some kind of progress”, that there was an attempt to draft “a road map for a settlement” and that China was “still trying” on this front.

 

 

The International Criminal Court has announced a delay in deciding whether or not to authorise an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity by American and Afghan government forces and Taleban and other insurgent groups in Afghanistan. A decision had been expected during the last month, but a routine changeover of the Court’s judges means a new panel of judges now has to start sifting through all the material gathered on Afghanistan before it can come to a decision. As AAN’s Kate Clark reports, Afghans will have to wait weeks or even months to hear what will happen.

The decision by the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on whether or not to authorise an investigation in Afghanistan will be political dynamite whichever way it goes. If authorised, the main task of the team of investigators would be to collect victim and witness statements and other evidence to build cases against specific individuals that could lead to their prosecution. (The ICC prosecutes individuals, not governments or armed groups or organisations.)

The most powerful country potentially under the spotlight, the United States, has robustly asserted that the Court has no jurisdiction over its citizens. (1) The Afghan government, as a party to the Rome Statute has said it will cooperate with the Court, but has consistently argued that now is not the time for an investigation because “stability” is the overriding need of the moment (see for example Ambassador Mahmoud Saikal’s speech to the UN General Assembly in late 2017. Kabul also does not want ICC actions to discourage US forces from staying in Afghanistan and helping fight the Taleban.

At the same time, the ICC, criticised for only ‘going after’ African countries (see for example, here), while avoiding the powerful nations of the world, would suffer further damage to its prestige if it was seen to be shying away from investigating Afghanistan, given the allegations against the CIA and US military. This could be particularly the case in Afghanistan itself where, as the ICC has admitted (AAN analysis here), it’s outreach had been considered poor and it, with no presence on the ground, has had not managed to have a “clear voice” in the Afghan media.

Whichever way the Pre-Trial Chamber decides will have political repercussions. However, there is nothing to suggest that the delay in making a decision was caused by anything other than for bureaucratic reasons. The three judges from the Pre-Trial Chamber had failed to come to a decision before routine personnel changes were due three weeks ago.

The ICC has eighteen judges, each of whom serves for nine years, and on 16 March 2018, six judges who had finished their terms left the Court and six new judges were sworn in. The Court had to re-assign the decision on Afghanistan to a new panel of judges (see details here). The new panel has had to start from scratch, wading through and considering all the material gathered on Afghanistan over the last decade. An ICC press release warned “it cannot be determined at present how many more weeks/months this process will take.”

The delay has come at a critical stage in proceedings. On 3 November 2017, ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had requested (AAN report here) that the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber authorise an investigation into alleged perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan and three other countries which she said had a ‘nexus’ with the Afghan conflict, Lithuania, Romania and Poland. The CIA had black sites in these three countries and Afghanistan, rendering detainees between the sites and torturing them. Bensouda had earlier reported, in November 2016, that the use of torture by Afghan and American forces and a wider range of war crimes by the Taleban and other insurgent groups, including murder and intentionally attacking civilians, did pass the thresholds set by the Court to determine whether an investigation was merited.

After Bensouda’s November 2017 request for an investigation, the Court sought the views of victims. They were given just two months, December 2017 and January 2018, to make their views and experiences known to the Court and, overwhelmingly, called for an investigation. They spoke about having suffered murder, rape, forced disappearance, pillage and attacks against themselves as civilians. They told the Court they wanted an investigation to end to impunity, prevent future crimes, to find out about the forcibly disappeared and for victims’ voices to be heard (see AAN analysis here and a redacted version of the victims’ responses published in February, here).

The old panel of judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber had then spent the weeks after the victims’ responses were collated weighing up whether or not to authorise an investigation. It had been hoped their decision would come by the start of March. It did not come in time, so that task has now fallen to the new panel. It is made up of the following three judges:

• Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua (Presiding Judge) from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who joined the ICC in 2015. He served as a legal officer with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania (1996 to 2001) and as a trial judge in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague (2006 to date) (see his biography here).
• Tomoko Akane, a Japanese judge with extensive prosecuting experience (see media reporting here and her official biography here). She has just joined the ICC.
• Rosario Salvatore Aitala, an Italian, also newly selected. According to his biography, he has specialist experience prosecuting cases of corruption against the Mafia and crimes against vulnerable persons, of transnational and financial investigations and international cooperation on criminal matters. Aitala has worked in Afghanistan as coordinator of the Italian Judicial Programme for Afghanistan (Italy was the ‘lead nation’ on judicial reforms in the early years of the post-2001 administration). The Italian Newspaper of the United Nations reported that he “drafted criminal legislation and established Sections for crimes against women and children in the Office of the General Prosecutor in Kabul and in Herat.” The Italian justice programme was not well regarded, but Aitala will, at least, bring his personal knowledge of Afghanistan to this task. (2)

If the new panel does not reach a decision by 20 July this year when the Court goes into its summer recess, there will be a further delay until it resumes work on 13 August. Sooner or later though, whether after weeks or months, the judges will come to a decision, to authorise an investigation in Afghanistan – or not. Either way, there will be both criticism and applause.

Edited by Thomas Ruttig

 

(1) The US is not a state party to the Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court. However, according to the Rome Statute, the ICC has jurisdiction over individuals not only if the “person accused of the crime is a national” of a state party to the Rome Statue, but also if “the conduct in question occurred” on the territory of a state party. In other words, because Afghanistan is a signatory to the Rome Statute, the Court has jurisdiction over citizens of any nationality who commit war crimes or crimes against humanity on its soil (quotes from Article 12 (2) of the Rome Statute).

(2) There are two Pre-Trial Chambers. This one, known as Pre-Trial Chamber II is also responsible for considering the following situations:

• Central African Republic I
• Central African Republic II
• Republic of Uganda
• Darfur, Republic of the Sudan
• Republic of Kenya
• Republic of Côte d’Ivoire
• Republic of Burundi

Pre-Trial Chamber I is considering the situations in :

• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Libya
• Republic of Mali
• Georgia
• Gabonese Republic
• Registered Vessels of Comoros, Greece and Cambodia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afghan refugees in an Indonesian detention centre have been protesting for over two months. As is the case for most Afghan refugees in the country, they must live in centres scattered across the 16,000 or so islands, although they have been granted refugee status by UNHCR. AAN guest author Amy Pitonak (*) spoke to Afghan refugees at a detention centre in Balikpapan on the island of Borneo. Since mid-January 2018, their demands have included being released, quicker resettlement and better treatment from immigration officials. She describes the conditions in which they live and examines Indonesia’s policy towards refugees.

Since 16 January 2018, a group of 150 refugees – most of them Afghans – have gathered daily in the yard of the Balikpapan Immigration Detention Centre to protest the years they have spent in indefinite detention. Balikpapan’s residents are aged between 14 and 60 and comprise 147 Afghans, two Somalis and one Iranian. All of the Afghan residents are Hazara, an ethnic minority group that has often been targeted by extremist groups for their Shia faith. The refugees are demanding release from detention, quicker resettlement and better treatment from immigration officials.

The protest at Balikpapan is not an isolated event. Afghan refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia – the world’s fourth most populated country – went on a hunger strike in 2012 at Tanjung Pinang detention centre on Bintan Island between Sumatra and Singapore, as well as in a detention centre on the island of East Nusa Tenggara and in the city of Makassar on Sulawesi island  in 2016. Balikpapan is only the latest example of collective action taken by Afghans in Indonesia.

The district of Balikpapan is located in the province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. Tourists come to the province for its white sand beaches, while international companies are drawn by the oil and gas reserves off its coast (see here). The detention centre itself is located near Lamaru Beach, one of Balikpapan’s most popular tourist attractions.

Ehsanullah Sahil is the protestors’ unofficial spokesperson and administrator of their Twitter account through which they document their situation. He told AAN that he had worked as an interpreter with the US Army for three years before threats to his life forced him to flee Afghanistan in 2014. His journey took him first to India, then Malaysia, and finally to Indonesia. After registering with UNHCR in Jakarta he was transported by plane to Balikpapan, where he has been detained since 18 December 2014. In a video interview he describes the conditions of the former prison-turned-immigration detention centre: bars on the windows and doors, high voltage wire surrounding the periphery, men sleeping on mats in overcrowded rooms, and laments “For years we’ve been here, and now we just want to be free.”

The detainees pass their time trying to construct a semblance of normalcy; they bake Afghan naanin the centre’s spacious yet bare kitchen and hang their laundry in neat rows from the bars on its windows. However, Sahil says that most of the detainees are suffering from depression, insomnia or PTSD, and adds that some need surgery for untreated medical conditions. “Everyone is lost mentally.” The centre’s youngest resident, a 14 year-old who has been detained in Balikpapan with his older brother since 2015, adds that there are no activities at all in the centre, emphasising that at the very least, he wants to be able to study.

These are not the ‘economic migrants’ or ‘failed asylum seekers’ that are so often derided in the Western press; all but two of them (one Afghan and an Iranian) have been granted refugee status by UNHCR (more on this below).

However, over the course of their protest many of them relinquished their refugee cards, which are carried by refugees in Indonesia to prevent them from being apprehended by the police for being in the country illegally. One protest organiser explained there was no point in having them while they were being detained.

UNHCR officials have not commented on the protest publicly. However, inside the detention centre, they have informed residents that if they continue their protest, they will not be resettled to a third country or placed in a community house, which is a more comfortable form of accommodation. The use of indefinite detention to punish refugees for participating in a non-violent, peaceful protest goes against UNHCR’s standards. IOM Indonesia have not responded to the author’s queries on this, or indeed for other details, either.

Despite UNHCR and IOM’s stated goal of eliminating the detention of refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia, the protesting refugees’ spokesman, Sahil, estimates that only 65 refugees have been transferred from Balikpapan to a community centre since 2014. As single men, they are far more likely to be kept in detention than women or families. However, as the presence of a 14 year-old boy at Balikpapan demonstrates, male minors also run the risk of being held indefinitely. UNHCR has voiced its concerns over the regular occurrence of unaccompanied children being detained with unrelated adults in Indonesia, citing instances of abusive behaviour towards minors by prison officials, as well as their lack of access to education (see here).

Afghans in Indonesia and Jakarta’s refugee policy

As of December 2016, Indonesia hosts 14,405 refugees and asylum seekers (see UNHCR’s factsheet here), around half of whom, or 7,154, are Afghans. The majority of them are thought to be Hazara, although there are no definitive statistics on the ethnicity of protection seekers in Indonesia (see this journal article).

Most Afghans come to Indonesia via India or Thailand, often using tourist visas, with the intention of reaching Australia – which has a very restrictive refugee policy, generally preventing newcomers reaching the country’s mainland (see this New York Times Magazine story about Afghan and Iranian migrants crossing the Indian Ocean on their way to Australia). In order to prevent this onward migration, 13 immigration detention centres have been constructed on all the main Indonesian islands, including Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan (Borneo) and Sulawesi, alongside 20 makeshift detention centres. Although Australia does not fund these centres directly, it has funnelled millions of dollars through IOM to provide “care and maintenance” to intercepted irregular migrants, which includes maintaining operations in detention centres (see here and this article on the IOM’s “blue-washing” – ie the use of humanitarian language and branding to mask more controversial projects–of immigrant detention in Indonesia, here). UNHCR has stressed the importance of providing alternatives to detention. To this end, it has helped build 42 community houses based in six of the 34 Indonesian provinces.

Despite the gradual increase in numbers of those seeking protection, Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 Geneva Convention or its 1967 protocol. Rather, the Indonesian government insists that Indonesia is only a temporary place for refugees to wait for resettlement. In countries such as Indonesia that are not signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention, the UN often serves as a substitute for the state in determining the status of refugees. Asylum seekers in Indonesia must register with UNHCR upon arrival, after which they undergo a registration interview and receive an identification card that allows them to stay in the country while awaiting their refugee status determination interview. Those who are recognised as refugees receive a UNHCR refugee ID card, which allows them to stay in Indonesia until they are resettled to a third country. This does not entitle them to additional legal rights or assistance from the Indonesian government, however. As such, they must rely on services provided through IOM or other NGOs.

From 2013 to 2017, 2,387 Afghans were resettled from Indonesia to a third country, with 423 resettlements in 2017. The majority of them went to Australia, followed by the United States. However, since 2014, Australia has not resettled any refugees from Indonesia who arrived after 1 July 2014 (see here).

In December 2016, the Indonesian government passed a presidential decree to better regulate refugee and asylum policies on the islands (see here). In addition to establishing procedures for the rescue of refugees found at sea, the decree also aims to standardise detention facilities and shelters in terms of ensuring that they meet refugees’ basic needs by providing adequate food, clean water, clothing, and access to healthcare and religious facilities. The decree also provides an official definition of a refugee in line with the Geneva Convention’s definition,(1) and formally recognises as refugees and asylum seekers those who have received their status through UNHCR.However, the individual heads of centres and shelters remain in charge of standard operating procedures, and the decree does not include any provisions that address refugee integration (article 26 of the decree stipulates that shelters for refugees should be located in the vicinity of a medical facility and religious faculty, however education facilities and other social services are not mentioned).

Moreover, while the decree mentions ‘temporary shelters’ as alternatives when shelters such as community housing are unavailable, it does not specify what exactly constitutes a ‘temporary shelter’, nor the length of stay. In practice, immigration detention centres appear to function as temporary shelters for refugees awaiting placement in community housing, although the head of Jakarta’s immigration detention centre was quoted in the Jakarta Globes saying “The immigration detention centre is created as a temporary shelter for foreign nationals who break our immigration rules, not to accommodate asylum seekers or refugees” (see here).

Community housing facilities

A little over two-thirds of Indonesia’s total refugee population (4,344 refugees), live outside the detention centres, either independently or in community housing facilities ran by IOM (see UNHCR’s factsheet here). Community houses are required by the 2016 presidential decree to be in the same regency as a detention centre, but the reverse is not always true in practice. For example, Borneo has two detention centres, but there are no community houses on the island (see here for a list of community house locations).

Some refugees in Balikpapan detention centre have stated that community houses are better than detention centres, as they believe that the proximity of community houses to various embassies gives them a better chance at resettlement. Moreover, community houses provide them with food and shelter in a country where they are not allowed to work legally. Refugees who cannot get into a community house are forced to live off remittances from family and friends. Those who do not have the savings to support themselves risk becoming homeless, with some sleeping outside UNHCR offices on cardboard and foam mats. An article by the news website VICE documented the plight of young Hazara refugees who live on Jakarta’s streets at the mercy of mosquitos, heavy rains and older men who proposition them for sex. Many of them resort to self-harm in order to cope with their situation (for more information, please see this article by VICE on homeless Hazara teenagers in Indonesia).

Since each Indonesian island has its own resources and rules governing community housing, conditions in each facility vary. All of the refugees the author spoke to named Jakarta as having the best community housing facilities, with more services and fewer restrictions on refugees’ freedom of movement. Refugees in Jakarta’s community housing are allowed to have visitors in their rooms and can travel outside of the island. They also have access to vocational and language courses provided by IOM.

In Makassar, further east in southern Sulawesi, the arrival of a new head of community housing in early 2018 marked a deterioration in the treatment of refugees living there. They are no longer allowed to have visitors in their rooms. A resident at a community house in Makassar who did not want to be named recounted an incident in February during which a resident who was caught with guests in his room was beaten by security guards, and transferred to a detention centre. Although IOM used to offer vocational and language courses in the city, these programmes were cut in 2017, with only Bahasa Indonesia language courses remaining. Many Afghans at the centre report verbal abuse from staff, who tell them they are ‘like animals’ due to their perceived lack of rights in the country. UNHCR has told residents that they have no control over how refugees are treated at the centre, as this falls under the jurisdiction of the Indonesian immigration authorities. This led to groups of refugees protesting outside the UNHCR office in Makassar to ask for quicker resettlement or better treatment, although both demands have gone unheeded so far.

Refugees in both Makassar and Jakarta have said that access to medical care is subpar. Although they have access to free treatment for serious health problems, they must pay out of pocket for routine illnesses. There is also a lack of mental health treatment in community houses.

Anti-Shia sentiments and Hazara self-organisation

The relationship between Afghan refugees and host communities in the Muslim majority country Indonesia was reported as being positive overall. A community housing resident in Jakarta said that since the centre was far from the city, interactions between locals and refugees were cursory but friendly. An Afghan resident in Makassar reported that the local community was very welcoming at first. However, he says that things have changed since the increase in negative media coverage fuelled by disparaging comments about refugees made by the head of the housing facility on local TV and large signs on the door of the community house identifying it as a ‘detention centre’. As a result, he says that local people in Makassar have begun to think of Afghans as criminals, and avoid them.

Although the refugees’ relations with their host community are generally peaceful, this peace is maintained on the basis that the Hazara keep their religious practices to themselves. Hazara refugees cannot freely practice Shia religious ceremonies such as Muharram for fear of reprisals from the majority-Sunni host community.

This anti-Shia sentiment has been exacerbated by the National Anti-Shia Alliance (ANNAS), a group made up of various Indonesian fundamentalist groups such as the Majelis Mujahidin and the Council of Islamic Dawah Indonesia. In Makassar, ANNAS has hung banners proclaiming “Shiism is not Islam” and distributing pamphlets accusing the Shia of spreading homosexuality and perversion. The refugees in Balikpapan detention centre also suspect that ANNAS’s activities have contributed to their lengthy detention. After one of the group’s affiliates spread a rumour that the residents of Balikpapan had been brought there by international organizations in order to ‘slaughter Sunni Indonesians’, some IOM staff told the Hazara residents in Balikpapan that they were being kept in the centre because locals do not want them in the community.

This need for secrecy has caused Indonesia’s community of Hazara refugees to withdraw into itself, creating intense solidarity between community members as well as bolstering relative isolation from locals (see this journal article here). Members of Indonesia’s small native Shia population  – approximately 1.2 million out of a population of 261.1 million – also try to be as inconspicuous as possible. A Hazara refugee in Makassar said that even local Shia are afraid of openly practicing their faith, while a Hazara in Jakarta said the province’s only Shia mosque was too far away for refugees to access.

Instead, over 3,000 Hazara have congregated around the Puncak Pass in West Java, an area known for its clean air and sprawling greenery, where they have developed a wide range of initiatives to improve their situation. One prominent example is the Cisarua Refugee Learning Centre, a school founded by Hazara refugees that functions as a school for the area’s children while offering English classes and extracurricular activities for adults. Positive representations of the Hazara have also begun to appear in Indonesian society, such as a photo exhibition entitled “Living in Transit: Refugee life through the Eyes of the Afghan Hazara Community” hosted at the University of Indonesia.

IOM’s voluntary return programme

UNHCR cites three “durable solutions” available to refugees in Indonesia: resettlement to a third country, integration into the host community, or voluntary repatriation. The likelihood of the first solution is slim; the resettlement rate for Afghans in Indonesia is between three and five hundred per year since 2014 (see here). UNHCR warns that many refugees in Indonesia may never be resettled (see here). However, many Afghans in Indonesia are not satisfied with the remaining two options, citing the lack of integration opportunities available to them and a fear of returning to their home country.

While UNHCR and IOM present the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration programme as an alternative to detention, it is doubtful whether any decision to return made in this context can be truly voluntary. IOM claims that this programme helps migrants return safely to their country of origin, but it is hard to imagine a safe return for at-risk minority groups such as the Hazara. As well as being fully informed and not physically coerced, having at least one option that ensures a reasonable level of welfare is an important aspect of a voluntary decision (see this study, pp 631-45). For Afghans kept in indefinite detention in Indonesia, none of the options presented to them provide a level of welfare that would generally be considered as acceptable.

According to IOM Afghanistan figures, 1,478 Afghans returned from Indonesia via the AVRR programme between 2003 and 2016. By August 2017, IOM had registered 58 voluntary returns from Indonesia for that year. In the case of Balikpapan, Sahil recounts the pressure that centre residents face from a return to Afghanistan, stating that when they complain about their detention, IOM employees tell them “The resettlement process is too long. If you can’t endure it, you can go back to your country.” Both Sahil and another centre resident said that since 2014, 44 detainees in Balikpapan have accepted this offer. One returnee said that he would try to flee Afghanistan again as soon as he had enough money, this time to Iran or Pakistan.

Other residents, when faced with a choice between detention and return, attempt to create their own alternatives. In 2017, five Afghans escaped from Balikpapan by using bed sheets to climb the six-metre high wall surrounding the enclosure and jumping past the high voltage and barbed wire to freedom (see here). A sixth man broke his leg during the attempt. Some committed suicide; a media report counted at least six such cases since 2016), at least two of which were Afghans. The most recent case was that of a young Hazara refugee in Medan, Sumatra who killed himself after a lengthy period of detention (see here).

Migration scholars have argued that the ‘voluntary return’ of rejected asylum seekers could be better described as ‘soft deportation’. (2) If so, the return of recognised refugees forced to choose between detention and a return to danger or persecution may be, in reality, no more than a mild form of refoulement (3), as this goes against international refugee law. Although the original cause of this situation is Indonesia not being a party to the 1951 Geneva Convention, IOM and UNHCR should not tacitly facilitate the host government’s violation of one of the Convention’s most basic tenets.

The refugees in Balikpapan say that a choice between return and detention is not a choice at all. Instead, they say they will continue their protest until they can gain, if not resettlement, at least their freedom.

 

* Amy Pitonak is a research fellow with Bosphorus Migration Studies, an independent think tank based in Istanbul, Turkey.

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Jelena Bjelica

 

 

(1) According to the 1951 Geneva Convention, a refugee is someone who has a ‘well-founded fear of persecution due to race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, and different political opinions, and does not wish to avail him/herself of protection from their country of origin’.

(2) Leerkes, A., van Os, R., and Boersema, E. (2017) What drives ‘soft deportation’? Understanding the rise in Assisted Voluntary Return among rejected asylum seekers in the Netherlands. Population, Space, and Place, 23.8.  (See here.)

(2) Refoulementis the forcible return of refugees or asylum seekers to a country where they are liable to be subjected to persecution.

The display of 72 paintings from the mid-sixteenth century Mughal period in Kabul as well as late sixteenth and seventeenth century Indian Mughal paintings opened in the Queen’s Pavilion of Babur’s Garden in Kabul on 31 March 2018. This, as well as an earlier exhibition in Herat’s Citadel in December 2017 showcasing fifteenth century Tîmûrid and sixteenth century early Safavid pictorial art, are extraordinary displays of some of the most outstanding miniatures in Islamic art. As AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Kate Clark report (with input from Thomas Ruttig), both exhibitions symbolise the long homecoming of Afghanistan’s extraordinary cultural legacy.

Royal courts in fifteenth century Herat and sixteenth century Kabul once sponsored some of the most magnificent pictorial creations in Islamic art. Despite wars and destruction in Afghanistan, many of these miniatures survived, albeit outside the country in public and private collections around the world. After the paintings were taken out of what is now Afghanistan in the second half of the sixteenth century and entered royal collections in Mughal India, Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey, many were sold on to European and North American private and public collections in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their enlarged reproductions were only brought together for the first time and put on public display in Afghanistan in 2017.

As AAN reported in December 2017 the exhibitions are taking place at carefully chosen sites – the Herat Citadel and Kabul’s Babur’s Garden. Both sites have been restored since 2001 by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture with funding from both the German and the US governments, and are now permanently open to the Afghan public (for the restoration of Babur’s Gardens see here and for the Herat Citadel, here). More importantly, these could have been the exact places where some of these miniatures were created. The restored Herat Citadel, also known as Qala-ye Ekhtiaruddin, is one of the most magnificent Tîmûrid monuments in Afghanistan.

Babur’s Garden, named after the first Mughal emperor (1483-1530), was established in the early sixteenth century when Babur gave orders for the construction of an ‘avenue garden’ in Kabul, described in some detail in his memoirs, the Baburnama (here an online English translation). It is also where he found his last resting place, according to his own wishes, after he died from illness on one of his campaigns to India. His description was used when the garden was renovated to find the exact tree species that had existed in his lifetime. The emperor’s description of Kabul in his Baburnama is famous and often quoted by Afghans:

It has a very pleasant climate; if the world has another so pleasant, it is not known.

The two exhibitions

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Professor Michael Barry, a global authority on Medieval Islamic art who located reproductions of these miniatures held in museums and private collections across Europe, Canada, the USA, Turkey, Egypt and India, the exhibitions are now on display in Afghanistan. Barry did not only locate and collect the works, he also made high-resolution images of the miniatures and conceptualised both exhibitions. In partnership with Boston University’s American Institute of Afghanistan Studies (AIAS) they then printed enlarged, high-resolution images onto metal, a material that supports shifts in both light and temperature. (1) These works are also easy to copy anew from electronic files that are kept at the Centre Dupont in Paris, should they ever be attacked or damaged, and allow for a meaningful regrouping of these widely scattered paintings by artist, date, theme, royal sponsor – in optimal conditions of display, as AIAS explained. It also allows Afghan visitors to view these masterpieces created by their ancestors in close detail, and, indeed, almost in the same privileged way that only princely owners once could in the past.

The first exhibition in Herat in December 2017 was such a success that the US Embassy in Kabul requested of Herat’s authorities that the panels – still technically the property of the US government, which paid for them – remain in the Citadel on permanent loan. On 23 February 2018, the Afghan government hosted a heads of state conference with Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India for the inauguration of the TAPI pipeline initiative framework within the grounds of the Herat Citadel, surrounded by the Tîmûrid art exhibition, which served as an international showcase of Afghanistan’s centuries-old cultural glory.

The exhibition in Herat displays reproductions of over one hundred miniatures. The paintings largely date from the fifteenth century, when the city was the seat of the powerful Tîmûrid Court. Artists, at the time, illustrated calligraphic texts of poems with meticulously painted scenes. They drew on the poets of the region for inspiration: Ferdowsi, who wrote the Shahname in Ghazni in the tenth century, Saadi, from Shiraz in modern-day Iran, and the Herati Jami. The most famous miniaturist of them all was Kamal al-Din Behzad (roughly 1450-1535) whose workshop in Herat attracted artists from all over the region. As in early Renaissance Europe, the wealth of artistry was also the result of enlightened patronage. Queen Gawharshad, wife of the Tîmûrid ruler Shahrukh, whose mausoleum is in the city’s famous Musalla area, was a key connoisseur of poetry and miniatures.

Nevertheless, the Herat school’s influence extended well beyond what is now Afghanistan. In 1545, when the Mughal emperor, Babur’s son Humayun, retreated from India to Kabul because of dynastic rivals, he was, said Michael Barry, “smitten” when he saw the miniatures that had been taken from Herat to Kabul forty years earlier. He invited the surviving artists from Herat and further afield, including Tabriz in Iran, to come to Kabul where a new academy was established. These artists would later follow Humayun back to India and train a generation of new artists. “So the Mughal style,” Barry told AAN, “is daughter of the school of Kabul and granddaughter of the school of Herat.”

The name of Herat persisted more broadly throughout Islamic culture. “The Mughals in India, the Ottomans in Istanbul and the Safavids in Iran,” said Barry, regarded Herat as the model of perfection, like Florence is for Europeans.” Even more recently, Barry said, when the French impressionist Henri Matisse saw Behzad’s miniatures for the first time in 1903 in Paris, he was overwhelmed by their beauty. “They completely changed his manner of painting and through Matisse and his colour and composition, the Herat school has influenced all modern art.”

Babur, though, was somewhat more critical. In his Baburnama, he wrote of Behzad:

His work was very dainty but he did not draw beardless faces well; he used greatly to lengthen the double chin; bearded faces he drew admirably.

The combined catalogue for the two exhibitions

The exhibitions’ catalogue (in five languages: Persian/Pashto/Arabic/English/French) to accompany these exhibitions is designed as a scholarly publication and a fundamental work of reference for Afghans and interested non-Afghans. In one large volume, the paintings that feature in both exhibitions are printed with detailed explanations, including their precise allegorical significance. Barry has been a pioneer in deciphering the allegorical codes of late medieval Islamic paintings in light of the literature they illustrate.

Furthermore, the catalogue will make supporting illustrations accessible from materials that are not displayed in the exhibitions but that are important for the surrounding discourse (eg, Sasanian and Byzantine, then Chinese and Venetian Renaissance influences on Islamic paintings, and, in turn, the influence of Islamic and notably Herati paintings on twentieth century art, notably on Matisse, and hence on global modern art) in all 200 illustrations. It will also offer a general introduction to the evolution of Islamic painting from the thirteenth and fourteenth century Baghdad schools to the flowering of art in fifteenth and sixteenth Tîmûrid and early Safavid Herat, and then in mid-sixteenth century Mughal Kabul, with a subsequent impact on India. An appendix will also offer an anthology of the most important fifteenth and sixteenth century eastern Islamic source texts on Islamic painting in their original languages (with facing translations), many penned in Afghanistan. This will be essential to all serious scholarship on the subject, which, until now, has been almost inaccessible to the Afghan public.

The catalogue will serve as a national Afghan educational resource, available to all Afghan institutions of higher education (including the American University of Afghanistan). It will hopefully also serve as a prestigious diplomatic gift on behalf of the Afghan government – to promote and increase global awareness of Afghanistan’s medieval Islamic cultural heritage. Other copies will be sold to university libraries around the world and displayed in international museum bookshops.

The exhibitions’ website can be accessed here. The Kabul exhibition runs until end of June 2018.

 

 

(1) The exhibitions have been supported by a grant from the United States Embassy in Kabul through Boston University’s American Institute of Afghanistan Studies (AIAS) – whose Afghan branch is housed on the campus of the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF). The French Embassy in Kabul, through the Institute de France en Afghanistan (IFA), contributed a major grant to sponsor the accompanying catalogue, making this a fully Franco-American educational project.

 

 

 

 

 

Figures for the 2018 Afghan budget are in the public realm and show that, despite government attempts to clean up its finances, Afghanistan’s Members of Parliament (MPs) were, once again, ‘given’ projects to persuade them to vote the budget through. The draft budget presented to parliament in November 2017 had been almost balanced; the one passed in January 2018 has a deficit of more than 200 million dollars. Even so, says AAN Co-Director Kate Clark, all is not lost. There are still many good elements in what was passed. Significantly, it is much more transparent than previous years, so citizens can see detailed spending plans for 2018 and data for earlier years. It shows, for instance, that Paktia province has been getting six times the per capita funding of neighbouring Ghazni province.

The way the national budget of Afghanistan has been determined over the last ten years was described by Integrity Watch Afghanistan in 2017, as “riddled with incompetence, corruption, and collusion among the Executive and the National Assembly.” The budget for this financial year – 2018/1397 – was supposed to change all that. It was ambitious, aiming to be transparent and accountable, to cut down on waste and opportunities for graft, focus resources on where they were needed and on government ministries and agencies that had spent money effectively, and to be realistic and balanced. In the words of Deputy Finance Minister, Khaled Payenda, speaking at a workshop attended by AAN in December 2017, its aims were “to disclose issues, create a debate on constraining [expenditure], and do some fixing.” What that meant, in practice, as AAN reported after the draft budget was presented to parliament on 8 November 2017 were some major reforms. Now we now that the budget only made it through parliament after a deal with MPs.

This dispatch assesses the 2018 budget:

• How the draft budget was different from earlier budgets;
• The passage of the budget through parliament
• What changes were made to get MPs’ approval;
• Reactions to the approved budget;
• Whether the 2018 budget ended up any better than earlier budgets;
• What else needs to happen to make sure the 2018 budget is the start of financial reforms, not the end of them.

What was in the draft budget?

For the first time, the Afghan national budget was written to ‘international standards’. (1) It disclosed far more information on 2018, earlier years and future projections, with detail at the level of ministry, project and province. The Ministry of Finance had tried to be realistic in terms both of Afghanistan’s revenue and spending. The budget recognised both the scale of Afghan dependence on foreign aid – uniquely large in the world (2) – and that this aid money is in decline. It sought to avoid Afghanistan falling off what it called a ‘fiscal cliff’ after 2020, when donor money is set to fall by almost half. (3) The budget also shifted away from using the previous year’s budget targets for budgeting to using the previous year’s estimated actual expenditure. Because targets are rarely met, this had meant inflated costs continuing from year to year. The new measurement was aimed at making the budget more credible.

The draft budget also tried to focus on the Afghan state’s chronic failure to spend its development budget (money for public investments and other development projects). The recurrent budget – money for running costs, including salaries – tends to get fully spent, but on average, only around half of the development budget gets spent each year (AAN reported this problem in 2012). Looked at another way, the Afghan state spends 75 dollars deploying every 25 dollars of actual development spending, a very poor rate indeed. The Ministry of Finance had hoped that various reforms in the 2018 budget would result in an execution rate of at least 95 per cent, with the knowledge that, as Deputy Finance Minister Khaled Payenda and former World Bank Afghanistan Country Manager Bill Byrd wrote in a piece for AAN in 2017, this “would help create jobs, build infrastructure, stimulate economic growth and over time generate more revenues for the government.”

The reforms in the draft budget included:

• Shifting money from under-performing to performing ministries;
• Ending automatic carry-overs of unspent funds for unfinished development projects from year to year, a practice which fosters inefficiency, delay and opportunities for graft; instead, instilling a ‘use it or lose it’ approach (4);
• Establishing the principle that if ministries wanted to propose new projects, they had to fund them from savings.

Such measures, the draft budget document said, were aimed at “lowering corruption and making the budget a much more effective tool for national development.”

Although the draft 2018 budget was better than those of previous years, it was far from perfect. There was only a minor reduction (eight per cent) in the use of contingency code budgeting, for example. Contingency funds, easily shifted to other uses and therefore vulnerable to bargaining, rent-seeking and corruption, still amounted to more than 50 billion Afghanis (more than 700m USD) in the draft budget.

Also, despite a serious portfolio review, with the Ministry of Finance using past disbursement performance to restructure or cancel some projects, not all the badly-performing ones were weeded out. Integrity Watch pointed to the many projects in the draft budget which had “amount and locations… not fixed, or programs whose individual components are not defined.” If there is room for manoeuvre as to where money is spent on a particular project, it is left vulnerable to political influence during its implementation, Integrity Watch said, because it enables “politicians to pressure a minister to allocate resources to their neighborhoods, or ministers to allocate resources to politicians as a form of patronage, after the enactment of the national budget by the parliament.” Integrity Watch found that 38 per cent of projects in the draft budget were prone to political influence, a fall from 50 per cent of the previous year’s budget, but said:

Although there has been some improvement in reducing vulnerability to political influence in development projects in the 1397 budget, it still leaves a lot of room for abuse. The majority of Members of Parliament (MPs) compel ministers to meet them throughout the year to pressure them to accept their projects and to give away contracts to their relatives and friends. Instead of addressing the issue, the [National Unity Government] has regulated this patronage by asking MPs to meet executive officials on a specific day of the week. (5)

Parliament and the budget

As AAN commented when the draft budget was presented to parliament, getting it past the MPs was always going to be tough. The constitution gives them important blocking powers. They can also put pressure on individual candidate ministers, who have to get MPs’ votes of confidence to be appointed (a procedure which took place most recently, on 4 December 2017) and on ministers, whom they can summon to parliament and give votes of no confidence, in a procedure known as estizah. The consequence of these powers has been a persistent record of deal-making on budgets.

In 2017, for example, the budget was only passed after the Ministry of Finance agreed to allow each MP to have ‘their’ projects included in the budget (cited in this report). These projects, which also featured in earlier budgets, are widely known as ‘the MPs’ projects’ and in 2016 and 2017 appeared in an annex to the national budget. When the Ministry of Finance started drafting the 2018 budget, it faced this historical legacy – two billion dollars’ worth of ‘development projects’ which had been introduced under parliamentary pressure in earlier years and agreed by the government without specific funding sources (more on which later). These had, said Finance Minister Eklil Hakimi, made the budget “unreliable and bogus.” One of the Ministry of Finance’s strategies was to end the practice of having an annex of projects. Rather, it brought all that it thought worthwhile and could be funded into the main budget document. “Our biggest struggle,” Deputy Minister Payenda told AAN, “was to reduce the number of projects.”

On 13 December 2017, MPs voted on the draft budget and rejected it (for the ninth consecutive year). They cited the ‘inadequate’ development budget for their constituencies in 2018 compared to 2017 and the way development projects which had not been implemented in 2017 were dropped. They pointed to the large amounts of money still being allocated to the offices of the president (Afs 3.43b/49m USD) and the chief executive (Afs 678m/9.8m USD). They also said the budget document was too complicated.

There were ongoing meetings between MPs and officials and the Minister of Finance responded officially to parliament on 30 December 2017 by explaining that the budget was written according to international standards and that it was realistic, taking into account that while domestic revenues had increased, the share of the budget covered by donors had declined.

MPs were adamant that they needed those development projects back in the planned expenditure, to show their constituents that their representatives were working for them. In some sense, this is legitimate, although one would want to look at whether projects were representative of the MPs’ provinces as a whole, or only benefited their district or indeed village.

Faced with questions about where the money to pay for the projects would come from, one MP who was at the workshop referred to earlier said it would be “very difficult for us to convince our people, the nation, civic society with regard to [the unamended] budget… We have heavy, hard work ahead.” His solution was for the “international community” to provide more funds. He also warned that if it and the Ministry of Finance were not “flexible,” it would “create a lot of mistrust.”

The budget was revised and presented again to parliament on 17 January at a plenary session. MPs passed it by 122 to 30 votes. It has now been published (read it here, in Dari and in English here). The scale of the additions are clear. Afghanistan has ended up with a deficit of more than two hundred million dollars. 

What was in the approved budget? New and re-instated projects 

The budget gives a list of ‘new projects’, which appear to be projects which did not appear in the budgets of earlier years: some were in the draft budget; others only appeared in the revised budget. However, they add up to just 5.6bAfs/84m US, so do not entirely explain the overall increase in expenditure. Other new projects, mostly schools and clinics which the Ministry of Finance told AAN it added to the approved budget (more on these below), also do not completely explain the new expenditure – they added up to costing 31m USD. Rather, the bulk of the increased spending appears to be made up of projects which had been approved in earlier years and which the Ministry of Finance had rejected from the draft budget and which it reinstated after the MPs’ outcry. The approved budget document is not explicit about which development projects have been ‘reinstated’, but Finance Minister Hakimi told MPs that 80 per cent of the development projects from fiscal years 1395 and 1396 had been added to the amended 2018 budget. (6) Naser Timory from Integrity Watch Afghanistan, calling them the “the MPs projects,” described them as “bogus.”

Of most concern to parliamentarians had been road-building. The cost of the roads that previous budgets had agreed to amounted to four times the total amount of the government’s discretionary funds. Because that is unaffordable and roads are not a government priority, the draft budget had featured almost no road-building from discretionary funds. However, the budget approved by parliament saw the reinstatement of all the road-building projects that had already been surveyed and procurement procedures finalised. (7) Chairman of the Wolesi Jirga Finance and Budget Commission Amir Khan Yar and member of the Wolesi Jirga Finance and Budget Commission MP Sediq Ahmad Usmani told MPs that projects whose procurement procedures had not been finalized would be given priority in next year’s budget. (8)

The result is a slew of underperforming projects brought back into the budget, fewer than in previous years, but, still, bad enough. Notably, those MPs who voted against the budget complained only about its ‘imbalance’, that not enough development projects from their areas had been included in the final list.

Returning briefly to the 200 small-scale projects introduced into the approved budget, the Ministry of Finance is happy about these. Deputy Minister Payenda told AAN that, under the previous system, the various ministries had proposed projects, but only drew up the list of locations after the budget had been approved by MPs, a system that was prone to misuse and political influence. For example, last year, he said the government decided to build 52 new mosques around the country; 16 ended up in one province, which had a very strong MP with good contacts. This year the ministry had tried to be more systematic:

“This year, we had requests from different ministries for over 1400 projects, costing more than half a billion dollars. We could not fund them all, so we set criteria, and the president tasked us with setting up a committee and prioritizing public health and education, and we also looked also at the geographical location. We said we have this much money – 30 million dollars – and selected 233 projects, mainly schools and clinics.”.

Altogether, the new and reinstated projects have created a budget deficit of 14 billion Afghanis (roughly 209m USD). The approved budget document says:

… in 1397 there is AFN25 billion deficit from which an amount of AFN10 billion will be funded from 1396 cash balances, AFN908 million from loans but for the AFN14 billion remaining amount is left without any specific funding source. (9)

One might ask why the MPs were so keen to get unfunded projects onto the books. Development projects in Afghanistan can be subject to a number of scams – and it is worth stressing here, as Integrity Watch’s Timory does, that this is not limited to the MPs’ projects. As soon as a project has an approved budget and number, one official said, people can start selling contracts and sub-contracts on it. Any MPs and corrupt officials who had already ‘auctioned off’ rights to contracts for projects that had been agreed in earlier years, which they then saw excluded from the draft 2018 budget, would have been under a lot of pressure to get them reinstated. Timory said it was the projects ‘belonging to’ the strongest, best-connected MPs, not the strongest projects, which would actually see money spent on them. There are many stages in a project which have ‘rent-seeking opportunities’, including: the feasibility study, design, procurement, contract and sub-contract management, monitoring and evaluation, and invoicing, when a ‘facilitation payment’ may be required for a payment to be released to the contractor.

“From beginning to end,” one official said, “there are multiple opportunities to steal. It’s one reason why not much gets constructed.” Other reasons for the poor execution rate of Afghanistan’s development budget centre on unrealistic or non-credible budgeting or planning, as Bill Byrd of the US Institute of Peace and Deputy Minister Payenda wrote as AAN guest authors in 2017:

Although a common perception is that poor budget execution is due to low capacity in implementation of projects, in reality, budget execution issues in Afghanistan are more complex. One of the main reasons for low budget execution is the quality of project preparation. Currently, many projects get pushed into the budget that are poorly prepared, or in some cases are not prepared at all and in reality are little more than vague concepts. Also, no matter how well-designed and prepared, a project cannot achieve spending targets if the plan is not realistic.  

They added: 

Hence improving the front end of the budget process is important, including ensuring that the projects in the budget are fully costed, with a realistic spending timetable.

Worth mentioning are two other elements in the approved budget which were improvements. Firstly, there was a reigning in of the ‘special operations budget’, which is part of contingency funding. A government agency or ministry with such a budget does not have to give any sort of account for expenditure to the supreme audit of the Ministry of Finance. Last year, ten ministries or state bodies were given this type of budget which they could spend as they pleased. Under pressure from MPs – it was one of their twelve demands said Payenda – this was reduced to three: the defence and interior ministries and the National Directorate of Security (NDS) (with some room for transferring expenditure between codes given also to the National Security Council). Those no longer getting operative budgets are the Tribal and Border Affairs Ministry and the Independent Directorate of Local Government (IDLG), the Ministry of State for Parliamentary Affairs, the Supreme Court, the Directorate of Kuchi Affairs and the Attorney General’s Office.

Secondly, in terms of new information and analysis presented, a section appears in the approved budget which compares provincial spending. It is fascinating. It reveals, for example, that Ghazni has received less than a sixth of the per capita spending which neighbouring Paktia has seen over the last eight years – 313 USD compared to 50 USD. The budget document itself says, “This demonstrates a level of inequality that the Government will need to address in future budgets.” The top five receivers of per capita government spending have been: Paktia, Nimruz, Kandahar, Helmand and Nuristan. The bottom five were: Ghazni, Ghor, Faryab, Badghis and Sar-e Pul. The approved budget document goes on to say:

The top five and bottom five provinces in per capita Government spending by province have been quite stable in terms of their relative level compared to all other provinces over the last eight years. The rest, a majority, have seen a relatively high level of volatility in Government spending in their provinces. Some have seen one-off increases in a year associated with major projects, while the on-going security situation has meant that some provinces have moved back and forth between secure and insecure. 

This volatility reflects the relatively centralized nature of Government in Afghanistan over the period. There are no independent sub-national administrations and there has been no development of inter-governmental transfers to provinces aimed at fiscal equalization that are common in most countries.

Reactions to the Approved Budget 

The Afghan media reported on parliament passing the budget with few details and little comment (see for example, TOLO News and the Afghanistan Times; Pajwok reported the hike in ‘development spending’ approvingly. It was left to Integrity Watch’s executive director, Sayed Ikram Afzali, to describe parliament’s role as “distortive” and failing to “reflect the interest of the Afghan people.” Accusing MPs of rejecting the budget as a way to “negotiate their personal benefits,” he said parliament had “misused its oversight authority in the budget process.”

Given that donors’ money still makes up a large proportion of Afghanistan’s revenues, the donors have been remarkably quiet about all this. AAN could only find statements issued by the European Union mission and UNAMA (not a donor). Both ignored the deal-making. A day before the MPs’ vote in January, the European Union mission, speaking as a ‘strong supporter of democracy’, said, “A vote on a national budget is one of these pivotal moments when the pact between the citizens, their elected representatives and the Government can be renewed.” No comment was made after the vote, when the ‘pact’, in effect, excluded citizens’ interests. The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, Tadamichi Yamamoto, described the budget as having been “finalized after extensive collaboration between the executive and legislative branches of Afghanistan’s government, and following important civil society discussions.” He praised Afghanistan’s “commitment… to accountability and to its self-reliance strategy” and its “positive, realistic and concrete efforts to meet its financial reform obligations.”

Was the approved 2018 budget any better than previous ones?

After last year’s budget (2017), 70 million dollars’ worth of additional projects were introduced to get MPs’ approval. The deal-making this year, on the face of it, looks even worse, given the 200 million dollar deficit. However, because the Ministry of Finance had pre-emptively cut many bogus projects during their portfolio review, the eventual outcome is not as dire as it appears. Looking at the figures for 2017, the planned expenditure was 438 billion Afghanis, of which it is estimated that the government will have spent 381 billion. The new budget expenditure is 385 billion Afghanis, making a decrease in the ‘non-credible’ budget of 12 per cent. Importantly, the 2018 budget still envisages an increase in actual expenditure of seven per cent. This budget, in fiscal terms, is not contractionary and has reduced, to some extent, the room for corruption.

In other areas, the improvements are clearer. Measured in terms of Deputy Minister Payenda’s aims of ‘disclose, constrain and fix’, one can say that there is much fuller disclosure in the 2018 budget. Concerned citizens can see where money is being spent or supposed to be spent. Some constraint also made it through to the finished document, including, significantly, the removal of automatic carryovers and the ‘fiscal cliff’, the reduction in half of donor money between 2020 and 2021, being embedded in future revenue calculations.

What needs to happen next? 

Whether 2018 is the start of reforms or just a blip in ‘business as normal’ will start to become evident at the mid-year point when the Ministry of Finance is due to review all projects with “a full-scale supplementary budget process in mid-1397” with the aim of “finding efficiency savings in the operating budget and allocating more resources to high performing development programs.” Ministries and agencies will be instructed to prepare new policy proposals in line with national priorities, fully costed and with economic evaluations. Priorities for the supplementary budget are, according to the budget document: infrastructure, agriculture, urban development, and culture and development. Deputy Minister Payenda admitted, however, that it was “really difficult to do major changes in mid-year.”

At the end of the year, we will also be able to see what Payenda chose as the key indicator of the government’s performance, the development budget execution rate:

Compare the plan with the execution. In the past, there was huge variance…. Have we reduced the gap? Look not just at the headline figures though, but also at the details. For example, if we planned to build 200 schools around country, look at if they were built and whether they were in their intended locations. Last year, the development budget execution rate was 67 per cent. If that figure is higher, we are doing better and the 2018 [budget] was more credible.

If this year’s budget is to be just the first step towards increasingly aligning the annual budget with national priorities and reducing the space for those wanting to appropriate resources, more and deeper reforms will need to feature in next year’s budget.

Work remains to be done on restructuring or cancelling development projects which are not performing. This means another serious review of projects, both those paid for with discretionary funds (which the government controls), such as the MPs’ projects, and the far larger, non-discretionary funds (which are earmarked by donors). The rules governing the latter, such as the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) and other donor preference funds, are also resulting in blockages and inefficiencies. Under these funding mechanisms, once a project is approved, it gets a sub-account from which funds cannot be moved, even, as one person familiar with the process said, if a project is poorly designed or not being implemented:

For year after year, the money stays locked into that sub-account instead of being moved to some other place where it could be useful. This is also why you say so many ‘extensions’ in the ARTF portfolio; instead of just admitting that they are programmes that aren’t working out and re-allocating the funds to something more successful, they get extended over and over again or even brought into a ‘Phase 2’ to hide the fact that Phase 1 was a failure. This issue of ARTF rigidity is not just about locking away money; it is also about not building things that the country needs. In the past the Ministry of Finance has been party to this: even when projects weren’t working, they would still disburse ‘studies’, nonsense design reviews and other meaningless programmes that achieve nothing, but go to favoured firms.

Another way to improve budgeting would be something that Integrity Watch has been advocating for a long time: popular consultation on development whereby, instead of MPs and government officials deciding what gets built (where politics can skew decisions), local people get a chance to say what they need. “We have offered support in establishing ‘participatory budgeting’,” Nasser Timory told AAN. “They never came back to us. Let’s start with one province, see how we can engage the people and start making this a people’s budget, not an elites’ or politicians’ budget.” (Read about this in more detail, here.)

Contingency budgets – and note the scale of them, 700 million US dollars, which dwarfs the MPs’ deal-making – need to be slashed and rationalised. If MPs saw this being done they just might be happier seeing their own opportunities for graft reduced. Some contingency funding is necessary because of genuinely unforeseen circumstances. But in reality, much exists to create opportunities for making money illicitly or because systems are not working. Deputy Minister Payenda gave a couple of examples of the latter. Maintaining roads, he said, should not need contingency funding. The Ministry of Finance was now working with the Ministry of Public Works to get a better system for planning its maintenance schedule, so that it could be paid for out of normal funds. With the Ministry of Martyrs and Disabled, and with paying pensions, the Ministry of Finance is helping establish biometric systems, so that the government can know the exact number and identities of beneficiaries and the total money required, with benefits paid directly into individuals’ bank accounts.

Integrity Watch’s Timory says that getting a biometric data base of civil servants should reduce leakages from the operating budget. With the police, local police and army, this is already happening after pressure from the United States military, either directly or with other donors. Actions included withholding funds for salaries until ministries verified that individual police officers and soldiers did exist and were getting the salaries due to them. The motive here was to drive ghost soldiers and police from the ranks (ie those which only exist on paper, while others pocket their wages), in the face of the Taleban insurgency (see here and here for details). The problem of ‘ghosts’, including ‘ghost’ pensioners, teachers and others is thought to be widespread. However, not all ministries are reliant on a powerful, highly motivated player like the US military who can help leverage change. Reformers elsewhere with no strong backer – either from higher up in government or a foreign donor – can find themselves isolated and vulnerable to threats from those stealing systematically from the nation’s budget.

Conclusion

More support to budget reforms from donors would be helpful, with honest appraisals about bad practice on all sides. More scrutiny and better reporting from the media and focussed demands from citizens and civil society could also encourage greater accountability. Civil society, for example, could push for annual outcome reporting of all big projects and ‘MPs’ projects’ – how was money spent, what was achieved. They could demand ministry-specific annual reports detailing how projects had been delivered and giving reasons for budget execution rates. People from Ghazni and the other provinces languishing at the bottom of the per capita spending table could rightly take up their relative neglect by central government to those in charge. The increase in transparency in this year’s budget gives citizens, the media and donors information, evidence and tools to demand answers from the government. Given that MPs have proved unable to hold the executive to account over the country’s budget, pressure from these other quarters to support reforms and reformers will be needed.

 

Edited by Sari Kouvo

 

(1) International Standards are a set of rules that indicate good practice as reached through consensus by world experts. The 2018 Afghan budget used the Government Finance Statistics (GFS) system for financial statements. The GFS was developed by the International Monetary Fund in conjunction with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), European Union and United Nations) and sets the standards on how government revenue, spending, assets and liabilities are classified and reported. This is primarily to help ensure that GDP figures across countries are comparable through the linked standard for the System of National Accounts.

The budget was also informed by certain Public Expenditure Financial and Accountability (PEFA) performance indicators like medium term budgeting, classification standards, and disclosures. PEFA is the standard used most often around the world and basically grades every component of a government’s public finance system between D (bad) and A (good).

(2) Afghanistan, said the World Bank in 2016, “is unique worldwide in its extraordinary dependence on foreign aid.” It quoted a 2013 figure of aid amounting to 45 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The dependence on foreign aid has declined and the government’s own generated revenues have increased, but Afghanistan is still far ahead of other countries when it comes to aid financing government services and to its percentage of GDP.

(3) An earlier reduction in aid – from record highs – was seen as the US ‘civilian surge’ finished. American aid funds channelled through USAID alone shrank from 4.5 to 1.8 billion dollars between 2010 and 2012 (see here).

(4) This approach has been criticised in other contexts, when for example, the drive to spend funds at the end of the financial year so as not to lose out on matched funds the following year leads to inappropriate spending and waste. For the moment, that is the lesser risk in Afghanistan.

(5) ‘Pork-barrelling’ is also familiar in other countries, including the United States.

(6) It looks like details of these can be found in a table “Sub Projects Details of Development Projects: Details of Projects (1396 and 1397)” at the end of the approved budget. However, it is not entirely clear.

(7) Any road project that had already been contracted for reappeared in the approved budget. However, if the contracts were for only a section of the planned road, that was all that was reinstated.

(8) Hakimi told MPs that, while 80 per cent of development projects from fiscal years 1395 and 1396 had been included in the amended 2018 budget, the remaining 20 per cent that had not been reinstated – rural road building projects whose design and procurement processes had not been completed – would be included later in the budget of the Ministry of Rehabilitation and Rural Development after discussion with the World Bank. (The World Bank told AAN they did not know what this referred to.) Hakimi was deploying something of a sleight of hand. The contracted road-building projects did amount to 80 per cent, in terms of numbers, of the MPs’ projects. In terms of cost, though, they added up to only 20 per cent of the supposed expenditure.

(9) The Ministry of Finance had presented parliament with an almost balanced budget in November 2017 (the small deficit was financed from cash balances and some minor concessional borrowing).

 

 

 

 

After a cold winter, spring has finally arrived. By 1 Hamal 1397, in every corner of Kabul city, greenhouses are being reopened with a variety of trees and flowers on sale. AAN team would link to wish all our readers and friends a blessed and peaceful year. We wanted to brighten up your day (further) with some beautiful photos of flowers and greenery in Kabul city.

Read about Nawruz dishes, spring-themed poetry and arguments for and against the ‘lawfulness’ of Nawruz in Islam here.

(Pashto)

نوی کال مو مبارک شه

دافغانستان د تحلیلګرانو شبکه ټولو هیوادوالو ته د نوی ۱۳۹۷ لمریز کال مبارکی وايی او هیله لری چي دا کال به په هیواد کی د سولي او د ملت د هوساینی کال وي.

(Dari)

سال نو تان مبارک

شبکه تحلیلگران افغانستان سال نو ۱۳۹۷ خورشیدی را به تمامی هموطنان تبریک و تهنیت عرض نموده و سال صلح و صفا برای افغانستان عزیز آرزو  میدارد.

The Afghanistan Analysts Network wishes happy New Year for all its Afghan readers, friends and colleagues. AAN team wishes 1397 a peaceful and a blessed year for all Afghans.

Wheat growing ready to be harvested to make samanak, a kind of sweetmeal cooked once a year to celebrate Nawruz. Some families sing this song, while stirring the mixture, usually cooked for all of a day or a night:

Samanak dar jush ma kapcha zanem

digaran dar khob ma dabcha zanem

samanak nazr-e bahar ast

samanak sal-e yak bar ast

dokhtarha gerdesh khatar ast

sal-e digar ya nassib

 

Samanak is boiling and we stir it with spoons

The others are sleeping, we make our ladles resound

Samanak is the offering of spring

Samanak comes once a year

The girls are sitting around it

One more year of good luck (1)

 

Springtime is also associated with flowers. We visited this greenhouse in Kabul which Nurullah had just re-opened. With winter ending and the soil warming up and hopefully well watered after rain and snow, it is the time for Kabulis, lucky enough to have gardens, to plant flowers and trees. Prices for plants range from 200 Afs to 5000 Afs (USD 3-70), depending on the type of flower. “I grew up with flowers,” he told AAN. “My father is a farmer and I learned how to plant flowers from him.” It is, he said, a lovely business, “These beautiful blossoms and colourful flowers give me energy.”

 

Some Kabulis also want to buy grass. Naser brings in turf from outside the city and sells it in the capital for 30 USD a truckload. “Hamal [the first month of the Afghan calendar, 21 March–20 April],” he said, “is the month when people buy grass for their gardens.”

 

Apparently, too, a seller of goldfish told us, at the beginning of the year, people refurbish their homes and some people “love to have goldfish in their homes.”

Whatever you are doing this Nawruz, we hope it is just the start of a happy and peaceful year.

 

(1) In 2014, we gave readers more details about this special Nawruz dish:

Samanak is made in a very special ceremony and lots of effort: ten to 15 days are required to prepare it. First, families buy some top-quality wheat (the amount depending on the size of the family) and clean it well. Then they soak it in water for a few days until it gradually germinates and white roots become visible. The wheat is taken out of the water, laid on a tray and then covered with a white, clean piece of cloth. The tray is placed in a room with normal temperature where nobody has access or can see it. One member of the family takes responsibility for watering it daily, and that person should be in a state of ritual purity when touching the wheat. It is believed that if an unclean hand touches it or if it is accessible to anyone else, it will become mildewed or spoiled.  

In ten to 15 days, the wheat grows sufficiently to produce thick white roots and above them green blades. Then all the women and girls of the household (sometimes men or boys too) and often some neighbours, gather round the tray containing the germinated wheat. Everyone makes a wish in their hearts and starts to cut the green blades with scissors. If the number of blades he or she cuts is odd, it is believed that person’s wish will come true that year.

The wheat sprouts are cut until only the roots remain. Then the roots are further cut in seven pieces and these are passed one by one through a mincer three times until they release all their water and totally dry up. Once again, the remnants of the wheat roots are soaked in water and pressed in the machine so that all of their ‘sweet water’ comes out. The roots, now dry, are set apart, but not thrown away with ordinary rubbish. The water produced by the roots is in turn put in a very big pot (in Dari, pots are listed according to their capacity as yaksira, dosira, etc. Sir is a measurement unit, usually of about seven kilogrammes).

 Then flour, depending on the amount of sweet water, is added to the pot and mixed well. A fireplace is prepared and the pot – in the old days, at least – put on a fire of wood, its contents stirred continuously with a long spoon. Samanak takes a long time to cook, usually a whole day or night. In the past, the night time was preferred so that the all-family task of stirring the samanak could be accompanied by singing and dancing throughout

 During the cooking of the samanak, everyone takes part in stirring and mixing until it is ready. Sometimes the dish can become so thick that people use a long wooden stick instead of a spoon to stir. While cooking, they add whole walnuts to give it a brown hue. When the colour is achieved and the samanak cooked to the consistency of a pudding, they take it off the fire and put pieces of charcoal on the pot’s lid for one or two hours. After this, the samanak is finally ready, and is distributed among all who participated in preparing it as well as to visiting neighbours, relatives and friends. Go get your bowls ready!

 

 

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In early February 2018, US forces conducted airstrikes in Afghanistan’s north-eastern province of Badakhshan, supposedly targeting ‘support structures’ of the ‘East Turkistan Islamic Movement’ (ETIM), allegedly a group of Uyghur extremists hailing from China’s far west said to be focused on attacking the Chinese state. (1) United States Forces – Afghanistan claimed the strikes targeted direct cross-border threats to China and Tajikistan emanating from the ETIM in Badakhshan. AAN guest co-authors Ted Callahan (*) and Franz J. Marty (**) show that such US claims are questionable, as there is no evidence that the few Uyghur extremists in Badakhshan, about whom there is only scarce and ambiguous information, pose any direct cross-border threat.

Latest Airstrikes in Badakhshan

On 6 February 2018, US Forces–Afghanistan (USFOR-A) command stated that “over the past 96 hours” air assets operating under its authority had conducted “a series of precision [air] strikes” in the north-eastern province of Badakhshan. While US airstrikes in Badakhshan were not unprecedented (2), the intensity of the latest airstrikes was unusual and USFOR-A touted them as a demonstration of the stepped-up US air campaign in Afghanistan and its expansion to the northern parts of the country. (3)

The authors were unable to determine how many airstrikes were conducted and what exactly they hit. USFOR-A as well as the Afghan Ministry of Defence declined to comment. (4) US Air Force Major General James B Hecker, Deputy Commander-Air for USFOR-A, confirmed that a US B-52 conducted three strikes on three separate targets in Badakhshan on 4 February 2018, all in the same sortie, without giving exact locations. (5) However, there were reports of additional US and Afghan airstrikes in Badakhshan around the end of January and beginning of February (see below).

USFOR-A vaguely referred to having targeted “Taliban fighting positions” and “Taliban training facilities” that allegedly also supported “operations conducted by ETIM in the border region with China and Tajikistan,” “ETIM training camps” and “support networks,” “defensive fighting positions that [USFOR-A] have previously witnessed the Taliban and ETIM to utilize,” “other fighting positions” and “stolen Afghan National Army vehicles that were in the process of being converted to vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.” (6) But Major General Hecker later backtracked on the claim that they had hit the ETIM, saying USFOR-A “didn’t actually strike ETIM terrorists when we were doing this. We were strictly striking the training camps that both the Taliban as well as the ETIM use.”

Information (albeit not definitively confirmed) from various sources, including on the ground in Badakhshan, indicated the following strikes, locations and targets:

• On 15 January, some reports claim Afghan Airforce A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft conducted airstrikes, hitting insurgent positions in Khostak, a reported safe haven for foreign fighters in Jurm district, as well as in the area of Dara Khol in Yamgan district;
• On the night of 30-31 January, USFOR-A allegedly hit a target in Bashand village, located in central Warduj, a district that has been under complete Taleban control since 1 October 2015 and reportedly also hosts a significant foreign fighter presence. “Foreign fighter positions” and a captured Humvee were mentioned as possible targets. Local sources reported that a mosque located close to the home of the Taleban’s deputy provincial shadow governor, Mawlawi Amanuddin, was damaged in the strike;
• On 4 February, a US B-52 hit a target in Hawasah-e Yakhshira (also known as Bazparan locally), located near Chakaran, the district centre of Warduj. According to some accounts, the target was a former Afghan National Army base. This was reportedly the airstrike shown in a video USFOR-A released;
• On 4 February, the same B-52 hit a second target in Abjin, also near Chakaran. According to some accounts, the target was a former Afghan Local Police base and was shown in another video USFOR-A released;
• On 4 February, the same B-52 hit a third target also in Warduj. Details remain unclear; Sar-e Pul-e Ab-e Jal and Zer-e Chenar Chakaran were reported as possible locations;
• On 4 February, but around 20 hours after the US B-52 strikes, the Afghan Air Force reportedly hit a target near Abjin, with some accounts indicating that this strike only damaged some barns and did not cause any casualties;
• On 4 February, the Afghan Air Force reportedly hit more targets in Ab-e Raghuk and Furghamiro, both in the district of Jurm neighbouring Warduj.

While several sources indicated that the strikes destroyed at least two Humvees and other military vehicles and materiel (see here), the same sources also indicated that they caused no or only a few casualties.

US officials, in their prepared remarks and when specifically asked, declined to offer casualty figures. Major General Dawlat Waziri, spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defence, stated the airstrikes had killed six Uzbek nationals in Warduj. Major Nasratullah Jamshidi, Deputy Public Affairs Officer of the Afghan National Army’s 209th Corps also reported six fatalities, but referred to ‘Tajikistanis’. Asked about Uyghur casualties by the authors on 14 February 2018, Waziri explicitly said there were no reports of such casualties. Furthermore, no other source mentioned any Uyghur casualties.

All this raises questions about US allegations that Uyghur ETIM fighters are present in Badakhshan and that they pose a threat to neighbouring countries.

Presence of Uyghur Extremists in Badakhshan

Until 2014, most claims of foreign militant activity in northern Afghanistan referred to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which had a significant presence in the region during Taleban rule. There were few, if any, reports of Uyghur militancy in the north post-2001, though Uyghurs were sometimes mentioned as one ethnic group among many believed to have fighters in the IMU. A Reuters article from 2014, citing Taleban sources, claimed there were 250 Uyghurs in Nuristan and Kunar (the article made no reference to a Uyghur presence in any other Afghan province), in addition to another 400 in Pakistan. Speaking on background, an active-duty member of the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) with multiple deployments to Afghanistan, including in 2014, stated the number of Uyghurs in Afghanistan in 2014 was never more than 100 at any given time and often less as they frequently moved across the Afghan-Pakistani border to avoid US strikes.

With the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission due to conclude at the end of 2014, concerns appeared to increase among Afghanistan’s neighbours, including China, that foreign militants would take advantage of the expected security vacuum to move into Afghanistan and from there attempt to infiltrate into China or Central Asia. The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, visited Kabul in early 2014 to discuss security cooperation and was assured by his Afghan counterpart that Afghanistan “would never allow the ETIM to take advantage of the Afghan territory to engage in activities endangering China.”

As far as the co-authors of this report could determine, the only subsequent concrete incident involving Uyghurs in Afghanistan was the extradition of 15 Uyghurs to China in February 2015. But these individuals were reportedly arrested in Kabul City and Kunar, not Badakhshan. Furthermore, alleged links of the extradited men to violent extremists remained vague at best and were, in one case, not even mentioned. (7)

In general, Badakhshan did not host any significant population of foreign fighters until the latter half of 2014 following the displacement of several hundred Central Asian militants from North Waziristan as a result of the Pakistani Army’s Zarb-e Azb Operation launched on 15 June 2014. According to one former high-ranking Taleban member in Badakhshan, in autumn of 2014 the Peshawar Shura issued orders for Taleban groups across the north to receive and settle between 200 and 500 militants, most of whom were non-Afghan Uzbeks and Tajiks, with smaller numbers of Kazakhs and Uyghurs. It is unclear how these militants reached Badakhshan. Some reportedly crossed from Pakistan directly into Badakhshan, despite the more than 600 kilometres separating North Waziristan from Chitral, which borders Badakhshan on the Pakistani side. According to the same JSOC source quoted above, they had been tracking the movement of other such fighters as they came across the border in other places. But those militants started to disperse, travelling mainly by road in small groups, assisted by smugglers experienced in getting through Afghan government checkpoints.

At present, Afghan sources in Badakhshan estimate that there are around 250 foreign fighters and 60 non-combatant family members of such fighters in the province, almost all of them in Warduj and Jurm districts, where the latest airstrikes took place (a handful are allegedly in the district of Raghistan; see also earlier AAN research here). Most of these foreign fighters are apparently from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but Uyghurs are said to be among them. A former United Nations employee stated that, as of the end of 2016, between 50 and 100 Uyghur extremists were residing in Afghanistan or nearby Pakistani areas. Roughly 75 per cent of those Uyghurs were believed to be in Chitral or neighbouring Badakhshan. This source estimated that there are currently about 70 to 80 Uyghur fighters in Badakhshan itself (the rest of the tracked Uyghurs are reportedly the remaining extremists who were pushed out of Waziristan into Zabul in south-eastern Afghanistan, where many of them were killed in fighting with the Taleban in November 2015, according to the same source). (8)

Reliably identifying and tracking foreign fighters is virtually impossible though. Specific names obtained by sources on the ground could not be corroborated by the former UN employee. Although this might partly be due to constant changes of noms de guerre, the simplest explanation – that information is unreliable, if not incorrect – is also possible. Determining those fighters’ actual origins is equally difficult. For example, while a local source described one militant, Haji Furqan, as perhaps the most important Uyghur commander in Badakhshan, the former UN employee indicated that Furqan is originally from Kazakhstan (but possibly of ethnic Uyghur background).

No reliable information on ETIM

Although Afghan officials and local sources attributed the radicalisation of the insurgency (9) and the dramatic increase in successful insurgent attacks in Badakhshan in 2015 (particularly the capture of the district centres of Warduj on 1 October 2015 and Yamgan on 18 November 2015) to the presence of foreign fighters, there was never any specific mention of Uyghurs, let alone a separate Uyghur group such as the ETIM, being responsible for this shift. The former UN employee mentioned above asserted that whenever the Uyghurs in Badakhshan fight, they do so embedded in Taleban formations, not in exclusively Uyghur units. He also stated that the Uyghurs primarily serve as trainers for other insurgents and that, compared to the about 2,000 Taleban fighters in Badakhshan as estimated by local sources, Uyghur combat power is not a decisive factor on the battlefield.

Hence, allegations about the presence of a Uyghur extremist organisation in Badakhshan (whether ETIM or any other) are questionable. ETIM itself is shrouded in mystery. Though recognised as a terrorist organisation by some nations and organisations (including the US (10) and the United Nations), the situation is not as straightforward as this implies. In fact, the term ETIM is an external designation that was never used by the extremists themselves, who (at least originally) called themselves Shärqi Türkästan Islami Partisi (the East Turkistan Islamic Party or ETIP), which was later listed as an alias of ETIM by the United Nations). Some scholars also point out that reports portraying ETIM as a well-established Uyghur extremist group with links to other international terrorist organisations are dubious. They argue that such reports are based on biased Chinese government information, as there are indications that China deliberately designated any Uyghur opposition movements as ‘terrorist’ (11) and inflated alleged threats in order to garner international support – or at least acquiescence – to repress such groups and Uyghur dissent in general (see also endnote (1)). The US designation of ETIM was allegedly mainly based on the same questionable Chinese and similarly doubtful Central Asian intelligence (for more detail on scepticism about the ETIM, see here and here).

Other sources often cited as evidence of a militant Uyghur organisation are propaganda videos released by a group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP). According to the former UN employee, the name TIP was originally employed during Taleban rule as an umbrella designation encompassing various Central Asian Islamist movements, including the IMU in Afghanistan and Uyghurs organised under the banner of the ETIP. This incarnation of the TIP broke up during the initial phase of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan in November-December 2001. However, in 2006 some Uyghur groups using the name and logo of the TIP in their online messaging reappeared, which is why the current TIP is regarded as the successor of the ETIP.

Experts cautioned that it is often hard to substantiate where exactly these videos were filmed and whether they accurately depict actual ETIM/TIP capabilities. Furthermore, videos claiming responsibility for specific attacks inside Xinjiang (China) have often been contradicted by facts on the ground (see also here). However, the former UN employee cited above indicated that videos showing the training of fighters appeared genuine and to depict fighters who speak Uyghur Turkic. He added the footage, seemingly originating from Pakistan or Afghanistan, never showed more than two dozen fighters, which – as propaganda videos usually try to boast size and strength – corroborates the assessment that the number of such fighters in the region is relatively low.

Overall, the former UN employee acknowledged that the ETIM is rather a ‘legal’ umbrella term to refer to an array of Uyghur extremists who often and rapidly change the names of their groups.

Despite the terrorist designation, there has not been a single confirmed incident of an attack conducted or planned by the ETIM in or from Afghanistan. For example, while the “UN Security Council Committee pursuant to resolutions 1267 (1999), 1989 (2011) and 2253 (2015) concerning ISIL (Da’esh), Al-Qaida, and associated individuals, groups, undertakings and entities” (hereafter the UN Sanctions Committee) alleged that ETIM used bases in Afghanistan to launch attacks in China in May 1998 as well as February, March and May 1999, these claims were described as “impossible to confirm through other sources” and as dubious. (12) Perhaps tellingly, the summary of the UN Sanction Committee’s reasons for listing the ETIM as a terrorist group include only one unspecific reference to Afghanistan. Similarly, in the aftermath of their latest airstrikes in Badakhshan, USFOR-A cited only one concrete example: the extradition of just two alleged ETIM members from Kyrgyzstan to China in May 2002 who were accused of plotting to attack the US embassy in Kyrgyzstan; the case had no visible link to Afghanistan. USFOR-A declined to clarify how the attack in Kyrgyzstan was related to their claim that ETIM militants “enjoy support from the Taliban in Badakhshan and throughout the border region.” (13)

Researcher Sean Roberts has also corroborated the apparent lack of substantiated ETIM/TIP activity inside Afghanistan. He compiled a comprehensive list of 45 alleged Uyghur terrorist attacks conducted between 1990 and 2011, none of which had any visible Afghan connection. Additional research by Raffaello Pantucci and Edward Schwarck argued that prior to 2013 and the documented Uyghur involvement in the Syrian civil war, hardly any Uyghur terrorist activity could be confirmed worldwide, and none with a significant link to Afghanistan.

The former UN employee confirmed that ETIM has been fixated on Syria in recent years and most Uyghurs who went to Syria left China for Southeast Asia (where counterfeit identification documents are easier to get) and then travelled via Turkey into Syria. A much smaller number of Uyghurs reportedly left China via the Central Asian states or Pakistan. Despite the changes in Uyghur militancy, mainly driven by the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, there has been no corresponding rise in the number of Uyghur militants in Afghanistan. Nor has there been any evidence of Uyghur militants moving from the Middle East to Afghanistan following the recent ‘defeat’ of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

There is also no credible evidence that Uyghur extremists use Badakhshan as a training ground or a base to plan attacks. In March 2018, the TIP’s media branch, Islam Awazi, posted two videos, one dated December 2017 and the other dated February 2018, (14) showing Uyghurs, along with Afghan insurgents, involved in combat against Afghan forces. Much of the footage does appear to have been filmed in different parts of northern Afghanistan. The authors were able to confirm through local sources in Badakhshan that some segments show combat in Jurm and Warduj districts, and that one of the fighters pictured in the films is the reported Uyghur commander mentioned earlier, Haji Furqan. As in general with such videos, the exact source is unclear and it is difficult to say whether or to what extent it shows actual Uyghur/TIP capabilities and operations; in some sections, the fighting almost appears staged. Compared to TIP videos archived by the SITE Intelligence Group, this video appears to be the first TIP footage from Afghanistan or Pakistan since 2014, which corroborates the assessment that violent jihadist Uyghur activity remains focused on Syria, not Afghanistan. In this regard, it is also noteworthy that the topography and vegetation visible in almost all of the previous TIP propaganda videos from the region strongly suggests they were filmed in the Pakistani tribal areas or in the Afghan provinces of Kunar or Nuristan, not Badakhshan. Furthermore, well-placed sources requesting anonymity asserted there have been no signs of increased activity among Uyghur fighters in Badakhshan during the past two years, suggesting they use the area mainly as a safe haven rather than as a facilitation zone.

No cross-border threats

USFOR-A further claimed that the recent US airstrikes prevented “the planning and rehearsal of terrorist acts near the border with China and Tajikistan” and targeted “the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a terrorist organization operating near the border with China and Tajikistan.” However, there are no past or on-going insurgent or terrorist activities anywhere near the Afghan–Chinese border. The same is true for the immediate vicinity of the Afghan–Tajik border in Badakhshan (the closest the insurgents have got to the Tajik border in Badakhshan was an unsuccessful attempt to advance on the border village of Eshkashem at the beginning of May 2017). The Taleban, who are themselves accused of hosting transnational terrorist groups such as the ETIM, have reassured neighbouring countries on numerous occasions that their goals are limited to Afghanistan and that they will not allow Afghanistan to be used for cross-border attacks (see for example here). However, these claims have not mollified neighbours such as Tajikistan and China.

The short 76 kilometre Afghan–Chinese border runs along an almost impassable mountain range with peaks at 5,698 metres above sea level and is crossable only via two rarely-travelled mountain passes: the Tegermansu, 4,872 metres above sea level, and the Wakhjir, 4,927 metres above sea level, both of which are simple footpaths (the latter crosses a glacier). The border is located at the end of a sparsely populated area known as the Wakhan Corridor (the panhandle of Afghan territory wedged in between Tajikistan to the north and Pakistan to the south, abutting China to the east). The seasonal camps of approximately 600 semi-nomadic Kyrgyz living in the Little Pamir, a high-altitude valley at the end of the Wakhan, are usually a day’s walk or ride from the uninhabited border zone (there are no roads).

Aside from the remoteness and daunting physical geography of the Little Pamir, additional factors would make any attempt to cross into Xinjiang exceedingly difficult for Afghanistan-based insurgents. The only way east through the narrow Wakhan runs through or past dozens of villages inhabited by the Ismaili Wakhi, followers of the Aga Khan who are unlikely to be sympathetic toward Sunni militants. There are also at least three checkpoints manned by the Afghan Border Police. From the end of the only drivable road in the Wakhan, travellers would then have to start a four-day, 100-kilometre trek to the nearest cross-border pass, the Wakhjir, traversing areas patrolled by more border police and local Kyrgyz acting as a frontier constabulary. Finally, Chinese forces closely monitor their side of the border, where they have a nearby military base. They too employ the resident (Chinese) Kyrgyz to keep informal watch over the area, as one European discovered in 2007 when he and his Afghan guide were swiftly arrested by the Chinese after having strayed across the border – possibly the first foreigner to cross it since the British explorer Bill (HW) Tilman in 1947. (15)

In aggregate, these factors explain why there have not been any reports of any insurgent activity in the Wakhan Corridor and along the remote and inaccessible Afghan-Chinese border. The few security incidents that do occur are typically related to drug trafficking and criminality, and happen in the villages along the road, not the seasonal camps near the border. This further strains the credibility of USFOR-A’s claims that the insurgents targeted in the latest airstrikes in Badakhshan had any connection with the AfghanChinese border given that Bashand, the location of the airstrikes closest to the Afghan–Chinese border, is about 300 kilometres away in a straight line.

In contrast to the short Afghan–Chinese border, the 1,357 km Afghan–Tajik border (about 820 km of which is in Badakhshan) is Afghanistan’s second-longest international border after its border with Pakistan. Demarcated by the Panj River rather than a mountain range, the border has two characteristics making it an unlikely thoroughfare for insurgents. First, there is very little infrastructure on the Afghan side, making much of the border in Badakhshan logistically difficult to reach.

Second, like the Wakhan Corridor, the Afghan-Tajik border in Badakhshan is mainly inhabited by Ismailis, whose presence on both sides of the border acts as a sort of cordon sanitaire. Reinforced by the Tajik border police, who patrol most of the border, these Ismaili communities are alert to the presence of any outsiders. Though security on the Afghan side varies because of limited security capacity, difficult topography and a lack of infrastructure, the Tajik side is comparatively well monitored, as they have maintained the Soviet practice of vigilant policing and are especially suspicious of Afghans, mainly due to concerns about narcotics trafficking.

As a result, the few security incidents that occur usually involve clashes with armed smugglers, producing occasional casualties (see latest example from February 2018). However, such incidents pose a criminal – but not a terrorist – cross-border threat, and in any case would have been unaffected by the USFOR-A strikes. Various NGOs and a knowledgeable local source (previously a senior official in the Afghan Border Police) confirmed the absence of insurgent activity along the border. In the border districts of Afghan Badakhshan, such as Raghistan, insurgent presence and activity is limited to the mountainous central regions and not the riverine border areas.

Real, but exaggerated consequences of misperceived cross-border threats

Despite the absence of credible cross-border terrorist threats to neighbouring countries in northern Afghanistan, the official narrative of insecurity espoused by the Afghan government and its neighbours is often paranoid, credulous and replete with greatly exaggerated figures of active insurgents. Such narratives, typically involving a massive insurgent presence in border provinces such as Badakhshan, are often put forth by China and Russia with the apparent collusion of Afghan officials who are regularly quick to hype any supposedly destabilising threat posed by foreign militants. Afghan motives are not difficult to understand: the graver the perceived threat, the more funding they are likely to receive to address it. (16) But why neighbouring countries have come to accept the idea of a serious terrorism threat from Badakhshan is more puzzling.

For example, considerable media attention has focused on increasing Chinese involvement in Badakhshan. Despite official denials from both the Afghan and the Chinese side, there is evidence (including photographs) showing that Chinese forces were – at least during 2016 – conducting joint border patrols with Afghan forces in the Little Pamir. While such patrols were reportedly suspended in late 2016 after they became public, another article indicated that they resumed in 2017. Given the steadfast official denials, the circumstances that led to such joint border patrols remain unclear, but they were likely caused by unwarranted Chinese concerns about illegal border crossings and at least initially were based on informal arrangements between provincial-level officials.

Whatever the nature of this Sino-Afghan cooperation, Chinese patrols in the Wakhan have had no impact on security, according to local Kyrgyz sources. They have mainly been useful in coordinating efforts among Afghan, Chinese and Tajik forces (as the joint patrols include vehicles, they have to enter the Little Pamir via an old Soviet-era track coming from Tajikistan, as the Little Pamir can only be reached on foot or on horseback from the Afghan and Chinese sides; hence, some accounts assert that the patrols also include Tajik forces). However, different sources contradict each other as to whether these patrols are based on an existing border cooperation agreement; as the alleged agreement is not publicly available, this cannot be independently verified.

More recently, there have been reports about the construction of a Chinese-financed Afghan military base inside Badakhshan (which has sometimes been incorrectly portrayed as a Chinese base). As with the joint border patrols, these reports were denied by both Afghan and Chinese officials. However, there is a proposal for a Chinese-financed Afghan National Army mountain brigade that would also include a base. Unlike the joint border patrols, this proposal has not gone beyond the discussion phase and neither the location for a base nor the schedule for its construction have been agreed. This was explicitly confirmed by Major General Waziri, the spokesman of the Afghan Ministry of Defence, in an interview with one of the authors on 14 February 2018, as well as other sources. Hence, reports that “preparations for the construction of [such] a military base (…) have already begun” or that the base would be located in the Wakhan are incorrect, probably as a result of misunderstanding, misquoting poorly formulated official statements or unfounded assumptions. (17)

The idea of a Chinese-financed Afghan National Army mountain brigade in Badakhshan dates back to at least February 2017. According to several sources, there has been no visible progress on this front since then, which casts serious doubt over the plan’s viability. Although China’s supposed willingness to finance an Afghan mountain brigade is a clear indication of how concerned they are about purported cross-border threats, the amount of media attention the issue received misleadingly suggested something along the lines of an international Chinese base akin to the one in Djibouti, rather than mere funding for a base that would be manned by Afghan – not Chinese – soldiers.

Tajikistan, which, given its longer border with Afghanistan, is more vulnerable than China, sometimes expresses its concerns about deteriorating security (see for example here) and on several occasions has closed its official border crossings to Afghanistan. (18) However, such reactions usually have no broader impact, though they can cause serious problems for Afghans in the sparsely-populated border districts who depend on trade with Tajikistan. One explanation may be that Tajik reactions, unlike those of the Chinese, do not garner major headlines or have much effect upon external funding (19). But Tajikistan, though concerned about alleged Tajik extremists in Afghan Badakhshan, appears to assess unlikely cross-border threats more soberly and realistically than either Russia or China.

Conclusion

The impression given by USFOR-A press releases of airstrikes targeting a Uyghur terror organisation threatening to launch cross-border attacks from Badakhshan does not accord with reality and amounts to tilting at windmills. There is no indication that the latest airstrikes wounded or killed any Uyghurs. Furthermore, information about the few Uyghur extremists in Badakhshan, as well as whether they have any affiliation with either the ETIM, TIP or any other group, is scarce and ambiguous. But even if there is some organisational affiliation, given the near-impossibility of any insurgents making their way across the border into China and the absence of insurgent activity along the Afghan–Tajik border in Badakhshan, it is hard to take seriously any claims that they pose a credible cross-border threat.

Why USFOR-A nonetheless chose to adopt the narrative of striking ETIM remains unclear. In an e-mail from the Resolute Support Press Desk to co-author Franz J Marty, dated 13 February 2018, USFOR-A declined to comment. Several diplomatic sources in Kabul mused that it might have been to demonstrate that the US is addressing (empty) concerns of a spill-over from Afghan Badakhshan into western China and Tajikistan to pre-empt any possible Chinese or Russian meddling in Afghanistan. Or it might has been some quid pro quo move to gain Chinese or Russian support in other theatres. More cynically, it may simply have been an attempt to justify striking Taleban targets in a remote area few Americans have ever heard of (and where no US or NATO troops are deployed) by tying it into a narrative of transnational counterterrorism efforts.

Despite USFOR-A describing the latest operations as an expansion of their air campaign to Badakhshan and the north, there have been no reports about further airstrikes in Badakhshan. It therefore remains to be seen whether the latest US airstrikes were an anomaly or indeed the start of a broader campaign across the north.

 

* Dr Ted Callahan is an anthropologist and a Donald R Beall Fellow in the Defense Analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School. He has travelled extensively in the Tajik, Chinese and Afghan Pamirs, including nearly two years spent living in the Wakhan Corridor carrying out his PhD research. From 2014-17, he was based in Faizabad, Badakhshan as a risk management advisor to the German government.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the US Government.

** Franz J Marty is a freelance journalist based in Kabul, Afghanistan, and focuses on security and military issues. He has visited Badakhshan (on the Afghan and Tajik sides) several times, including a one-month stay in the Wakhan Corridor. He can be followed @franzjmarty on twitter.

 

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Sari Kouvo

 

(1) Uyghurs claim to be the original inhabitants of what is today the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the far west of China, which is sometimes referred to as East Turkistan. Uyghurs, speaking a Turkic language and being predominantly Sunni Muslims, are linguistically, ethnically and culturally distinct from the Han Chinese, the largest of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups (minzu, 民族). The fears of Han Chinese domination, combined with the strictures imposed by the Chinese state, have bred resentment and sometimes violence in Uyghur communities. However, labelling all such violent acts ‘terrorist’ would be an oversimplification, as researchers note that many violent incidents appear “to be spontaneous acts of frustration with authorities, rather than premeditated, politically motivated violence [ie terrorism].” The same researchers also state that disaffected Uyghurs inside Xinjiang and Uyghur jihadists who have left their homeland seem to be distinct groups. This dispatch solely focuses on Uyghur extremists in Afghan Badakhshan and not on Uyghur extremism in other places.

(2) According to one unpublished report, there were only two US airstrikes in Badakhshan during the whole of 2017, but already at least three such strikes alone as of early February 2018. There have also not been many Afghan Air Force strikes in Badakhshan in the past, with the mentioned report only indicating three such strikes during the whole of 2017.

(3) The mentioned communiqué released by USFOR-A stated that “[d]uring these strikes, a U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress dropped 24 precision guided munitions on Taliban fighting positions, setting a record of the most guided munitions ever dropped from a B-52. The aircraft has played a leading role in Air Force operations for decades, and was recently reconfigured with a conventional rotary launcher to increase its reach and lethality.” USFOR-A have significantly increased their air campaign in Afghanistan in the wake of the new US South Asia strategy that was announced in August 2017 (see here).

(4) E-mail reply from Resolute Support Press Desk to co-author Franz J Marty, dated 13 February 2018; Interview with Major General Dawlat Waziri, spokesman of the Afghan Ministry of Defence, conducted by co-author Franz J Marty on 14 February 2018.

(5) The US B-52 Stratofortresses are stationed at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

(6) USFOR-A press releases dated 6 February 2018 and 8 February 2018; e-mail reply from Resolute Support Press Desk to co-author Franz J Marty, dated 13 February 2018.

(7) Al Jazeera quoted sources as describing one of the extradited men, Israel Ahmet, as a honest businessman. An official of the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence service, reportedly said that Ahmet “was detained for lacking legal documentation and carrying counterfeit money.” Elsewhere the article states that Ahmet was “flagged as a spy,” though there is no information given that would link him to violent extremist.

(8) The majority of the Central Asian militants displaced from North Waziristan to south-eastern Afghanistan had reportedly joined Mullah Dadullah and the self-declared Islamic State (Daesh) in Zabul province, where most of them were swiftly crushed in fighting with the Taleban in November 2015 (for the fighting in general see here and AAN analysis here and for further information paragraphs 33 and 34 of the Seventh Report of the [UN] Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, dated 5 October 2016, found here).

(9) In one incident in April 2015, insurgents reportedly beheaded at least 28 members of Afghan government forces after they had been taken prisoner (see here).

(10) On 3 September 2002, the US State Department added the ETIM to the list of “foreign individuals and entities that commit, or pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism” and whose “financial support network” can therefore be targeted under Executive Order 13224. The ETIM is not designated by the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organizations; ie it is designated as a terrorist organisation that is subject to sanctions, which are, however, less strict than sanctions against Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

(11) In fact, after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, when China began to push for the designation of the ETIM as a terrorist organisation, it indicated an amalgamate of over 40 “Eastern Turkistan” organisations that “have engaged themselves in terrorist violence to varying degrees, both overtly and covertly,” but the same Chinese report mentions that only eight of them (one of which is ETIM) “openly advocate violence in their political platforms.”

(12) These examples all pre-date the US-led intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 and would have little, if any impact on the current situation. In this regard, allegations that ETIM militants had fought alongside al-Qaida and the Taleban during the initial phase of the US-led intervention in 2001 are ambiguous (see here and here).

(13) E-mail reply from Resolute Support Press Desk to co-author Franz J Marty, 13 February 2018.

(14) The mentioned videos were obtained by the co-authors; they are no longer online.

(15) See HW Tilman, “Two Mountains and a River”, Cambridge University Press, 1949. Tilman was also arrested as a ‘spy’.

(16) For example, a New York Times article from late 2014 noted that, given Chinese security concerns, “the Afghans have sensed an opportunity to secure a new, rich benefactor.” And indeed in October 2014 Afghan President Ashraf Ghani returned from China on his first official trip abroad as president with a pledge of 330 million US dollars in aid to the end of 2017 (in the previous 13 years, China had given a total of 250 million US dollars in aid to Afghanistan).

(17) For example, an AFP report stating that the alleged base will be built in the Wakhan does not give any specific source for this location but seems to speculate that because of the joint patrols and the temporary presence of Chinese patrol troops in the Wakhan, a ‘Chinese’ base will also be constructed there. Even if a Chinese-financed base should actually be constructed (which is, as explained in the main text, uncertain), it is unlikely that it will be in the Wakhan, as Major General Waziri and other sources confirmed that the base would be for a unit of the Afghan National Army (which has no presence in the Wakhan) and not the Afghan Border Police (which has a small presence in the Wakhan). Other unconfirmed reports suggested Zebak district, among others, as a possible location.

(18) For example, at the end of December 2017/beginning of January 2018, Tajikistan (at least partially) closed its main border crossing in Panj-e Poyon (in the Tajiki province of Khatlon) with Sher Khan Bandar (Afghanistan, province of Kunduz) (see here for the closure; and here for the re-opening) (it could not be determined, whether the closure also included other Afghan-Tajik border crossings). In general, Tajik border closings sometimes appear rather random with unclear or questionable reasons.

(19) Tajikistan is considered the poorest of the former Soviet Republics. As an example of its reliance on outside funding in security matters, reports from September 2016 indicated that China financed the construction of new border guard bases and outposts.

An intense battle is under way near the city of Maimana, the capital of Faryab. In this northern province, the Taleban gained control over a majority of districts over 2017, including all of those close to the provincial capital, which is practically under siege. They also threaten the national ring road and important provincial roads. Government and international troops are currently trying to push the insurgents away from the city, in order to deny them the propaganda victory of taking it over. Obaid Ali and Thomas Ruttig, looking at the situation on the ground, conclude that a lot of prestige is at stake for both sides on one of the major Afghan fronts.

Government forces and their international allies have started a counter-offensive against the Taleban in Faryab, one of the most contested provinces in the country. For the first time since 2014, those deployed, Janat Gul Karokhel, a spokesman of the local Afghan army corps, told the BBC Persian service included “dozens” of foreign soldiers. Karokhel said the first group already on the ground consisted of 60 soldiers but that their total number could soon reach 300. Those soldiers, he said, would both “take part in combat and advising.” This indicated that both forces under Resolute Support and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel are present. Karokhel also said that ten out of 15 district centres of Faryab were under “serious threat” from insurgents.

The counter-offensive came after alarm calls were sounded, including from the provincial council, which even warned that the provincial capital Maimana, whose population (according to several sources) is between 75,000 and 150,000, could fall to the insurgents. However serious the Taleban threat actually is, the fact that the Afghan government and NATO are rushing extra troops to Faryab is a sign that the general security situation in this Uzbek-majority province is critical and that they worry the capture Maimana – according to the Afghan government’s 2015 “State of the Afghan Cities” report one of the 12 most important urban areas in the country – could hand the Taleban a propaganda victory.

Current fighting

Fighting has been raging in various districts in February and early March, such as Shirin Tagab and Khwaja Sabzposh, both adjacent to Maimana, and along the road linking Maimana with Andkhoi, the second largest city in Faryab. Government forces claimed on 6 March that they had killed the Taleban shadow district governor of Shirin Tagab, to the immediate north of Maimana. At the same time, insurgent activity was reported as stepping up in Khwaja Sabzposh, Daulatabad and Qurgan districts. On 15 February, government forces recaptured several police posts outside of Qaisar district centre that Taleban had overrun earlier that day.

On 7 March, local government security officials and a spokesman for the provincial police claimed that Zabih Ghazi, the Taleban shadow governor for Faryab, had been killed during an operation in Shirin Tagab district. The Taleban quickly denied this statement on the same day.

At least since January 2018, the Afghan Air Force has intensified airstrikes in the province (see media report here). The province had already seen a large number of Afghan forces air strikes with significant numbers of civilian casualties in 2017 (more about this below).

How the Taleban spread in 2017

The Taleban have gained significant ground against the government in almost each of the 15 districts of the province over the past one and a half years. Currently, they control large parts of nine districts, according to local journalists: Shirin Tagab, Khwaja Sabzposh, Dawlatabad, Pashtun Kot, Almar, Qaisar, Belcheragh, Kohistan and Gurziwan. There, according to local journalists, government forces only control the district centres and a few nearby villages in each of these districts. A tenth district, Ghormach, which originally belonged to Badghis province, has been under their full control since August 2017. It has changed hands several times in recent years (see AAN reporting here). The remaining four districts in the province – Andkhoi, Khan Chahr Bagh, Qurghan and Qaramqul – are relatively calm and Taleban activities limited to far-flung areas. The fifteenth district is the contested provincial capital, Maimana. (1)

Shirin Tagab, Khwaja Sabzposh, Pashtun Kot and Belcheragh almost fully encircle the provincial capital Maimana, while to the east, Darzab and Qush Tepa districts in neighbouring Jawzjan province are fully controlled by a former Taleban and now self-declared pro-ISKP commander, Qari Hekmat (see the latest AAN update on him here). Hekmat’s armed group, however, has not shown any sign of planning to expand beyond Jawzjan’s borders.

Around the provincial capital, the Taleban have ousted the Afghan security forces from several strategic locations after intensive attacks from August 2017 onwards, according to local civil society activists. They say the Taleban presence is apparent just three kilometres outside the provincial centre. As a result, a large number of pro-government militia forces and Afghan Local Police (ALP) are under a quasi-siege in Maimana. This situation puts the city under immediate threat.

The largest Taleban presence is in Pashtun Kot, a district to the immediate south of the provincial capital. It is strategically important as it holds a hydro-electric power dam that also provides drinking water to Maimana. The presence of pro-government security forces – including commando forces – is limited to the area of Sar-e Hawz, which they have been besieged for the past two months. Afghan media reported that there were 40 commandos there who were without food and water (here).

The Taleban have also established a strong presence along the crucial northern highway that is part of the national ring road (see AAN report here), which connects Mazar-e Sharif in the north with Herat in the west. There, the insurgents regularly establish mobile check points searching vehicles and seeking out government employees and members of the security forces. In late November 2017, they blocked the highway in Khwaja Sabzposh district for several days, before local elders successfully persuaded them to reopen it. The road between Maimana and Andkhoi has also repeatedly been disturbed (see media report here). Local civil society activists said that the last time a Taleban checkpost was reported there was on 5 March 2018.

Some conflict history

Over the past two years, Faryab has become one of the most active fronts in the countrywide war between the Taleban and the government and its allies. However, the Faryab conflict has been brewing for more than a decade. Ingredients adding to the unstable mix include, initially, factional conflicts between Jamiat and Jombesh, later, conflict between Jombesh and the central government, and a rearming of local commanders; corruption and a lack of coordination among the local security forces; the growing influence of conservative local madrassas fostered by certain factions, particularly among the Uzbek population and; insurgent infiltration from Badghis, with Taleban commanders exploiting local land and water conflicts as leverage to try to persuade elements of the population to join them. As early as 2007, Taleban training camps and assassinations of pro-government figures were reported in Qaisar district.

More recently, according to an article by Deedee Derksen, who is watching irregular armed forces in Afghanistan, the Taleban have also found “willing recruits among Uzbek madrassa students and men that had fought with [the Taleban] in the 1990s.” According to her, the Taleban have been reinforced by commanders who were mobilised by First Vice-President Abdul Rashid Dostum in 2015 and 2016 for anti-Taleban popular uprising groups and whose funding dried up after he fell into dispute with President Ashraf Ghani (background in this AAN analysis). Derksen writes that “in five of Faryab’s districts, former Jombesh commanders reportedly fight in the Taliban’s ranks” and gives examples from Qaysar, Kohistan and Almar.

Civilians have, of course, paid a heavy price for this conflict. In its annual civilian casualties report for 2017, UNAMA ranked Faryab as the province with the fifth-highest civilian casualty rate. The total numbers killed and injured increased in 2017 compared to 2016, bucking a nationwide downward trend. UNAMA also reported that Faryab was among the three provinces that recorded “significant increases in civilian deaths and injuries from ground fighting“ (by 27 per cent, following an increase in 2016, again contrary to the trend nationally). UNAMA also said it was among the five provinces (no other ranking) with the highest total in this category (having been third-highest in 2016). It also suffered “the highest number of aerial operations by the Afghan Air Force causing civilian casualties” in 2017. UNAMA also recorded that “most of the civilian casualties attributed to pro-Government armed groups” occurred in Faryab in both 2016 and 2017.

In 2016, UNAMA had reported that Faryab was also among the three provinces most affected by conflict-related displacement and suffered the highest number of abductions of civilians by irregular pro-government armed groups.

In 2018, the suffering of Faryabi civilians continued. The Kabul-based Pajhwok news agency which compiles monthly statistics on the conflict said that in February it was among the six most badly war-effected provinces of the country and suffered the fourth-highest casualty rate (not specified, but apparently including civilians and fighters from all sides).

Conflict among local pro-government forces

Recently again, the presence of nominally pro-government armed groups in the provincial centre, and outbreaks of violent conflict between them, local journalists told AAN, has further weakened the defence of the province. Rival commanders make mutual accusations of assassination plots and targeted killings. This has increased the fear among locals that the provincial centre might fall into Taleban hands.

The latest of such incidents was reported on 18 February 2018, when around a hundred fighters belonging to Nezamuddin Qaisari, the head of the provincial popular uprising (khezesh-e mardomi) forces and a member of Dostum’s Jombesh party besieged those loyal to a rival commander, MP Fathullah Qaisari, who belongs to Jamiat-e Islami, at Maimana airport and tried to detain him over an alleged assassination plot. Eventually, after local elders and the Faryab governor mediated and the Afghan military stepped in, both sides calmed down (read media report here). The Jombesh-related group also belongs to those forces mobilised to take action against Taleban in 2015 and 2016 by Dostum.

Dispute among the Taleban

At the same time, there have also been tensions within Taleban ranks. Their recruitment policy – since 2009 – has been to allow Uzbek fighters to lead the militancy in this Uzbek-majority province (see AAN’s previous analysis here). This, however, has created tension between Pashtun and non-Pashtun commanders in some parts of Faryab, according to sources close to Taleban, even though the provincial Taleban leadership is mixed. Shadow governor, Mufti Muzafar, is an Uzbek from neighbouring Sar-e Pul province while his deputy Mullah Jawed, is a Pashtun from Qaisar district.

According to an Uzbek Taleban commander in Faryab, “some Pashtun Taleb commanders ignore the Uzbek shadow provincial governor’s instructions.” To prevent further tensions, Mufti Muzafar, the shadow provincial governor, has instructed the fighters under his command to operate only in their own areas and not carry out joint, large-scale offensives against government security forces. This may prevent the Taleban from pulling together large numbers of fighters in any single operation, but also has strategic benefits as it aims at spreading the fight over as much of the province at the same time as possible.

As well as local Taleban, and operating in alliance with them, a small group from the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) also fights in Faryab. IJU regularly releases high quality videos through its official Facebook pages, known as al-Sadeqin.

Conclusion

The province of Faryab continues to feature as one of the most active battlefronts in Afghanistan. It is also the most active one in the northwest of the country. It has an astonishingly widespread Taleban presence, including near the provincial capital Maimana, which is under a quasi-siege. If, as some locals fear, the Taleban managed to capture this important commercial hub, even if only temporarily, it would hand them a new propaganda victory. This would be not much less important than their temporary capture of Kunduz in 2015 (see AAN analysis here).

This threat would explain the latest government forces’ counteroffensive in the province. This offensive has also brought western troops back to this battlefield and is apparently designed to relieve Maimana of the immediate threat. The fighting, that had already been intensifying over 2017, has had a severe impact on the civilian population, including forcing substantial numbers of people to leave their homes. The presence of unruly paramilitary pro-government forces with unreliable loyalty only contributes to the population’s feelings of insecurity, while, at the same time, those groups’ unreliable loyalties contribute to strengthening the insurgency.

Edited by Kate Clark

 

(1) The latest US military assessment for Faryab, published by the US Special Inspector of the Government for Afghanistan’s Reconstrution (see here) and reflecting the situation in October 2017, categorises Almar, Kohistan and Qaisar districts as under “INS influence” (ie Taleban-dominated); Belcheragh, Gurziwan, Khwaja Sabz Posh, Pashtun Kot and Shirin Tagab are called “contested”; and Andkhoi, Dawlatabad, Khn Chahr Bagh, Maimana, Qaramqul, Qurghan, are counted as under “GIRoA influence” (controlled by the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan).

Also Ghormach is labeled as under “INS influence” but still listed under Badghis province.

A group of influential political parties have called for a change to the electoral system. This emerged out of the ongoing dispute between one of the parties, predominantly Tajik Jamiat-e Islami, and the presidential palace over the contested dismissal of Balkh Governor Atta Muhammad Nur. The group wants political parties to have a greater role in elections. Previous attempts at getting this have failed due to a lack of consensus, and the electoral system remained unchanged. Moreover, this new attempt at changing the electoral system has come very late. AAN’s Ali Yawar Adili takes a close look at the political parties’ demand and its impact on preparations for the upcoming elections (with input from Thomas Ruttig). 

This is part five of a series of dispatches about preparations for the elections. Part one dealt with political aspects and part two dealt with an initial set of technical problems: the date, the budget and the debate regarding the use of biometric technology. Part three dealt with the dilemmas over electoral constituencies. Part four dealt with controversies around the appointment of a new member of the Independent Election Commission, following the president’s dismissal of its chairman.

Leaders and officials of 21 political parties and groups came together at a conference in Kabul on 24 February 2018. They are coalescing around the demand for a change to the electoral system that would give political parties more weight in the upcoming parliamentary ballot. The group includes major parties such as Jamiat-e Islami, which is predominantly Tajik, predominantly Pashtun Hezb-e Islami (both factions of the party) (1), mainly Uzbek Jombesh-e Melli Islami and two major factions of the Hazara-dominated Hezb-e Wahdat. The 21-party group called in particular for parties to be allowed to field party-based candidates list and votes cast for these lists being transferable in each constituency in order to “prevent wastage of people’s votes.”

There are currently 74 registered political parties in Afghanistan, according to the list on the Ministry of Justice’s website. The group of 21 parties (see their full list in footnote 2) includes almost all of the former mujahedin factions, but none of the smaller pro-democratic and formerly left-wing parties.

The group’s 24 February “Statement of Political Parties and Currents about the Parliamentary Elections” (full text here) and under footnote 2) also included a number of other demands, that: parliamentary elections should be held before early Mizan 1397 (late September 2018) at the very latest; measures be taken to allow refugees, IDPs and those who live in insecure areas to use their right to vote; a room to accommodate political party agents be established within the IEC headquarters and provincial offices to allow for effective monitoring of political parties of all ‘elections processes’; and that the polling centres in different provinces that the IEC recently removed due, it said, to security reasons, but without any details beyond that, should be reassessed carefully and the IEC’s report should be shared with political parties.

The demand to strengthen the role of political parties in the electoral system is based on a proposal by the Special Electoral Reform Commission (SERC) that was established by the government in 2015 to come up with proposals for electoral reform. In December 2015, the SERC mainly suggested shifting from SNTV to a multi-dimensional representation (MDR) system (more on this below).

This new motion to introduce an electoral system more conducive to political parties was initiated and driven by Jamiat. On 25 February 2018, Muhammad Nateqi, deputy leader of Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami Mardom Afghanistan (led by Second Deputy Chief Executive Muhammad Mohaqeq), told AAN that the idea stemmed from the negotiations between Jamiat and the Palace over President Ashraf Ghani’s contested dismissal of Balkh governor Atta Muhammad Nur, who is also the head of Jamiat’s executive council (shura-ye ejra’iya). According to Nateqi, Jamiat had already, among other things (see AAN’s previous report about its demand on e-tazkera here), demanded a stronger role for political parties in elections during those negotiations. The Palace told Jamiat that it was not representing political parties in general, whereupon Jamiat reached out to other parties. Nateqi further said that, at first, there were eight political parties which agreed on the proposals reflected in the 24 February statement.

On 26 February 2018, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) released a statement to the media in response to political parties’ demand (see the statement here in English), saying that it “is committed to conducting the Wolesi Jirga and District Council elections in 1397 (2018-19), provided that the required budget for the process is provided within due time, and security of the process is maintained. Changing the electoral system at this sensitive time would seriously affect the preparations for the upcoming elections, and probably may [sic] result in delaying the conduct of these elections in 1397 (2018-19).” (3)

The Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA), a major domestic election observer group, also issued a statement on 27 February 2018 calling the SNTV system “old and unresponsive,” and that it results in wastage of “a substantial percentage of votes.” It also said that changing the electoral system “must not be an excuse for postponement of forthcoming parliamentary elections.” In this context, it emphasised that the next parliamentary elections must be held in the Afghan year 1397, ie before March 2019.

The Palace has so far not reacted publicly. Only President Ashraf Ghani’s deputy spokesman, Dawa Khan Minapal, in a conversation with AAN on 5 March 2018, suggested that the political parties could raise their demands with second Vice-President Sarwar Danesh, who is heading the law committee of the government within the framework of the electoral law.

The political parties responded to the IEC’s reaction on 5 March 2018 with another statement, calling it “muhaseba na-shuda” (unconsidered) and threatened to reconsider their cooperation with the IEC if it continued to take “unconsidered stances.” Nur Rahman Akhlaqi, a member of Jamiat’s leadership council, and Nateqi of Wahdat-e Mardom in conversations with AAN argued that the current electoral law had been enforced through a presidential legislative decree without being approved by the parliament. The government had not sent the decree to the parliament, they said, because the government had counted all the years since the expiry of the original five year term of the parliament (ie 2015) as (repeatedly) the ‘last working year’ of its legislative term. According to the constitution, the parliament cannot amend the electoral law in its last working year. According to them, the president could just issue another decree saying that parties could introduce lists and their votes could be transferable.

This exchange of partly unfriendly arguments between the IEC and the 21 political parties, who are among the main stakeholders in the elections, does not augur well as there had already been an absence of trust between them. In October last year, for instance, another political grouping called the Shura-ye Tafahum-e Jeryanha-ye Siyasi Afghanistan (Understanding Council of Political Currents of Afghanistan) demanded the complete replacement of the members of both commissions (see AAN’s previous report about its members and demands here). At that time, some other parties such as Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami faction supported the IEC. This time, however, Hezb is one of the signatories to the parties’ statements and its spokesman Nader Afghan confirmed to AAN on 5 March 2018 that the party was in full concurrence with the statements.

The Jamiat-Arg negotiations

As mentioned above, Jamiat has taken the lead in this initiative by reaching out to other political parties. This came after the conflict between Jamiat and the Palace over President Ghani’s contested dismissal of Governor Atta Muhammad Nur in December 2017. Both Atta (see here, the Jamiat statements here and here) opposed Ghani’s decision to remove Atta. Following this, Jamiat entered into negotiations with a delegation representing the Palace in late December, although Atta himself was not a member of this negotiating team. On the Palace’s side, National Security Advisor Muhammad Hanif Atmar, the head of the National Directorate of Security Masum Stanekzai, Minister of Finance Eklil Hakimi and Salam Rahimi, head of the administrative office of the president, were involved. Jamiat’s demands in those negotiations included the issue of Atta’s dismissal, changes in the electoral law, and the roll-out of the e-tazkera (see more on the controversies about e-tazkera here)

Jamiat’s Akhlaqi confirmed, when talking to AAN on 5 March 2018, that the demand for a stronger role for political parties in parliamentary elections was indeed the second item on Jamiat’s list of demands in the negotiations with the Palace. However, he refused to confirm Nateqi’s account that it was stimulated by Jamiat’s negotiations with the Palace, saying rather that it had originated from SERC’s 2015 proposal and, therefore, reflected an older general demand by all political parties. He insisted that the alleged lead role of Jamiat was “Palace propaganda” and a bid to alienate other political parties.

It also might be the case that Jamiat is trying to distance itself from being the initiator of the motion, because it has already been criticised by electoral allies such as the Hezb-e Islami faction led by former minister of economy Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal and Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami Mardom Afghanistan for allegedly acting on its own behalf in negotiations with the Palace and ignoring other parties’ desire to have a share in government (see media report here).

A flash from the past: discussions about the electoral system

Afghanistan’s electoral system has been a topic of debate since the first parliamentary elections in 2005. Prior to them, the then-50 registered political parties demanded a proportional representation (PR) system (see AAN’s previous reporting here). The United Nations initially also proposed an electoral system based on PR that would be applied in province-wide, multi-member constituencies which would be approved by the cabinet. However, former president Hamed Karzai rejected the system, partly to militate against the emergence of strong parties, and opted for a system based on a single non-transferable vote (SNTV). In SNTV, voters select a candidate rather than a party. (See also this AREU’s report). The debate continued before the 2010 parliamentary elections. In March 2008, dozens of parties with various ideologies demonstrated outside parliament, calling for an amendment to the electoral system. They wanted a ‘parallel system’, ie 60 per cent of the Wolesi Jirga seats to be distributed to party lists on the basis of proportional representation and 40 per cent on the basis of a ‘majority vote’ (SNTV). This system, they argued, would “uphold democratic norms and minimise the number of invalid ballots in elections.” This did not happen. (See AAN’s previous analysis here).

In 2012, the IEC drafted a new electoral law in which it proposed shifting to a mixed electoral system. The IEC did this based on a request from the Ministry of Justice, which had asked the IEC to review the existing electoral law after an initiative by the Wolesi Jirga disappeared following changes to its administrative board. According to the IEC’s proposal, after the ten seats for the kuchis (nomads) were subtracted, one third of the remaining 239 Wolesi Jirga (lower house) seats would be allocated to political parties and the remaining two thirds would continue to be distributed among individual candidates on the basis of SNTV. The provinces would serve as the constituencies for both party and individual seats. (See AAN’s previous analysis here, the draft electoral law in Dari here and the IEC’s statement in English here).

Those proposals, however, were deemed to further complicate the electoral system for a still widely illiterate or semi-literate electorate. Meanwhile, the SNTV system has continued to be widely criticised by various political groups for, among other issues, producing a high number of wasted votes, not encouraging the development of political parties and producing a fragmented parliament (see also AAN’s previous reporting here).

The NUG’s failure to choose a (new) electoral system

The debate about the need for changing the electoral system restarted after the disputed 2014 presidential elections. When the current president, Ashraf Ghani, and chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, formed the National Unity Government (NUG) in September 2014, they agreed on the need for “fundamental changes” to the electoral laws and institutions with the objective to “implement electoral reform before the 2015 parliamentary elections.” The political agreement (see full text here) also said the president would “issue a decree to form a special commission for the reform of the electoral system.”

Pursuant to this agreement, the Special Electoral Reform Commission (SERC) prepared two batches of recommended reforms. The first batch was submitted on 30 August 2015 and the second on 21 December 2015 (see AAN’s previous reporting here). The SERC members were unanimous in their desire to change the SNTV system, but failed to agree on what should replace it (see AAN’s analysis here). As a result, three proposals came out of their work:

First, in its first batch of reform proposals, the SERC recommended that the SNTV system be changed into a parallel system, that is to say, one third of the seats of the Wolesi Jirga should be allocated to the political parties on the basis of PR, with a country-wide constituency, and the rest would be distributed to independent candidates through SNTV in provincial-level constituencies. (The SERC also introduced a three per cent threshold and open list for political parties’ quotas. In its final batch of recommendations, the threshold was reduced to two per cent and the open list was changed to closed list.) Meanwhile, the SERC also recommended that the current province-wide, multi-member constituencies be divided into smaller one to five-member electoral constituencies for the independent candidates for the Wolesi Jirga which should be “approved with consensus).” The proposal was not unanimous as two SERC members disagreed with it and thus boycotted the meetings. As a result, the president referred the issue of electoral system and constituency back to the SERC for further studies. (4)

Second, as a result of further study, the SERC, with advice from the UN, developed a Multi-Dimensional Representation (MDR) system with multi-member constituencies (mainly provinces, but if necessary, some provinces could be divided in such a way that each constituency should at least have five seats), which it presented to the government in late 2015. Under the MDR system, in theory, there could be four categories of candidates: 1) independent individuals; 2) list of ad hoc alliance of individuals; 3) list of party candidates and; 4) list of a coalition of parties. The list would be open and voters would still vote for individuals, but the determination of the winners would be done in two steps – first counting how many seats the best-performing lists had earned and then awarding seats to the individuals on these lists with the most votes (see here)

Third, the two boycotting SERC members presented their own favoured system to the government, which was the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, a plurality system applied in single-member districts. According to their proposal, the quota seats reserved for women (65) and Kuchis (10) and the tiny Sikh and Hindu community (1) would be subtracted from the total 250 Wolesi Jirga seats and the rest (174) would be elected in single-member districts.

The debate over the choice of an alternative to the current SNTV has been polarised, as proponents of the different options have weighed how particular changes might impact the balance of power in the parliament. Other considerations have been the future parliament’s ethnic make-up, its factional and geographical representation, whether the changes would and should contribute to strengthening political parties or not, and what they would mean for the women’s quota. In a climate of heightened suspicion, it has been difficult for the government and different sides to unite around an alternative to the SNTV.

The government, therefore, did not incorporate any of these proposed systems into either of legislative decree which amended the electoral laws and which were rejected by the parliament in December 2015 (see AAN’s previous reporting here) and June 2016 (AAN report here).

In preparation for a third legislative decree, the cabinet focussed on only changing the electoral constituencies, without making any mention of the electoral system. It discussed single-member constituencies (which would, by extension, also mean the first-past-the-post system, a system that had been proposed by the two, dissenting SERC members) as an alternative to the current, province-wide, multi-member constituencies and tried to include them in the current electoral law. This law was passed by legislative decree in September 2016 and has not been submitted to the parliament for approval and has since been effective, governing electoral processes and institutions. However, the cabinet did not reach a consensus on electoral constituencies for either parliamentary and provincial council elections and deferred that decision to the IEC. In effect, it made no change to the electoral system: everything stayed as it was. (See AAN’s previous reporting about the discords on the proposed single-member districts here and here and about the status of decision about electoral constituencies here ).

Conclusion: an overdue but late demand and lack of consensus

The demand for a change to the electoral system is not new. SNTV has been criticised from various sides ever since it was introduced, but has proven impossible to remove. What is significant now is that this is the first time that major political parties have called for a specific, list-based electoral system. Their demand also indicates that electoral reform has been incomplete and has not addressed major issues around holding elections in Afghanistan, particularly the disenfranchisement of political parties.

The demand is valid, but has come too late for this electoral cycle. It is valid because, based on the constitution and the Political Parties Law, parties are entitled to a stronger role in elections, while the successive electoral laws, and the electoral system laid down in them –SNTV – prevented political parties from fielding party-based candidates lists. The SNTV favours individual candidates who are only allowed to mention their party affiliation on the ballot paper and election handouts. (In previous elections many did, while others preferred to label themselves as ‘independent’.) The move is late because coming to an agreement on the details of the proposed system could trigger a new round of open-ended debate and prove to be time-consuming. The proposal by some to solve the problem by a presidential decree (at the same time as they criticise the lack of involvement of the parliament on related issues) seems too simplistic. Given all this, the issue has the potential to further disrupt (the already far from smooth) preparations for parliamentary elections, which are still officially planned for this year. (The IEC has cancelled 7 July 2018 as the election date, but not given a new one yet.) At the same time, as suggesting a change to the election system which is bound to cause delays, the same 21 parties also insist that the elections be held on time.

It is also not clear yet how the reported “imminent breakthrough” in the Atta-Palace conflict might affect this initiative. It is possible that Jamiat will continue to pursue it, but also that it will take more of a back seat, and that, if it does, other parties will continue the push for change. A similar all-party initiative sought to promote the role of parties in elections before the 2014 presidential election – the so-called Coordination Council of Political Parties and Coalitions of Afghanistan – forwarded a ‘Democracy Charter’ (more here), but disintegrated in the run-up to that poll, when different member-parties joined opposing camps.

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Kate Clark

Photo source here.

 

(1) As seen in footnote two, there is only one Hezb-e Islami on the list while, in political reality, there are two Hezb factions that claim to be the one and only Hezb. One led by the party’s historical leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was in the insurgency until recently, while the other, led by former minister of economy Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, has operated as a political party in Afghanistan since 2005 (more background in this AAN analysis). Arghandiwal was seen at the parties’ 24 February conference. Nateqi said there were representatives from Hekmatyar’s faction, too.

(2) Full text of 24 February 2018 statement and the names of the political parties and groups that signed it (AAN’s translation):

Statement of political parties and currents about the parliamentary elections

We call for the holding of transparent and fair elections, which result in the establishment of a credible parliament, [which will be] the real representative of the will of all the nation and supported by a majority of the people. We emphasise that the next elections must be held on the announced date without any delay or procrastination. We are determined to turn these elections into an effective instrument for resolving the crisis. Ensuring transparency of elections and [making sure that] no faction opposes their results requires the monitoring and supervision [eshraf] by parties and electoral coalitions of the entire process of the elections, from the beginning to the end, so that [the transparency of the elections] is guaranteed and the shortcomings and violations of previous elections are not be repeated.

Considering these things, we political parties and currents emphasise that:

1. The parliamentary elections should be held at the latest in early Mizan 1397 (late September 2018).
2. In order to prevent the people’s votes for political parties and coalitions being wasted, the votes of lists in each constituency should be transferable.
3. For all residents of Afghanistan including refugees, internally displaced people (IDPs) and those who live in insecure areas, the way for them to use their right to vote should be paved.
4. Every eligible Afghan should be able to run as a candidate independently or from the address of their favourite party and coalition.
5. Through establishing a room for political party monitoring within the IEC headquarters and provincial offices, the way for political parties’ effective monitoring of the entire process of the elections be paved and no decision and action by the Independent Election Commission and Electoral Complaints Commission be taken, away from the party observation.
6. The polling centres which have recently been removed by the Election Commission in different provinces, due to security reasons, should be reassessed carefully and [the Commission’s] report be shared with the political parties.

We, political parties and currents, once again call on the National Unity Government and the International Community to take action as soon as possible to implement these demands [so that] the right of millions of people who are members of political parties are not wasted by depriving political parties of their right to participate in the elections.

We stand firm by our legitimate and reasonable demands and reserve the right to use all of our civil and legal rights to realise these demands.

Kabul – 5 Hut 1396 (24 February 2018)

Names of political parties and currents in alphabetical order [in Dari]

1. [Hezb-e] Eqtedar-e Melli
2. Afghan Mellat
3. [Hezb-e] Paiwand-e Melli
4. Jabha-ye Nawin-e Melli Afghanistan
5. Jabha-ye Nejat-e Melli Afghanistan
6. Jamiat-e Islami Afghanistan
7. Jombesh-e Melli Islami Afghanistan
8. Herasat-e Islami Afghanistan [previously known as Hezb-e Wahdat-e Melli Islami-ye Afghanistan]
9. Harakat-e Islami Afghanistan
10. Harakat-e Islami-ye Mutahed Afghanistan
11. Harakat-e Enqelab-e Islami Mardom-e Afghanistan
12. Hezb-e Islami Afghanistan [both Hekmatyar and Arghanidwal factions]
13. Hezb-e Islami-ye Mutahed Afghanistan
14. Hezb-e Etedal-e Afghanistan
15. [Hezb-e] Haq wa Adalat
16. Rawand-e Hefazat az Arzeshha-ye Jihad wa Muqawamat
17. Hezb-e Qeyam-e Melli Afghanistan
18. Mahaz-e Melli Islami Afghanistan
19. Nahzat-e Hambastagi-ye Melli Afghanistan
20. [Hezb-e] Wahdat-e Islami Afghanistan
21. [Hezb-e] Wahdat-e Islami Mardom-e Afghanistan

(source here)

Both Nateqi of Wahdat-e Mardom and Akhlaqi of Jamiat told AAN that there had been meetings with other political parties which might join the call for change to the electoral system. In the political parties’ second (5 March) statement, the list did include four more parties: Bedari-e Mellat-e Afghanistan; Refah-e Melli Afghanistan; Solh-e Melli Islami Afghanistan; and Mellat-e Mutahed Afghanistan. This increases the number to 25.

(3) The IEC, in its statement, also addressed some of the other demands by the political parties. For instance, on the demand for laying the ground for all residents of Afghanistan including refugees, IDPs and people in insecure areas, the IEC said that based on its legal obligation, it was “committed to providing the opportunity for exercising the right to vote to all persons eligible to vote throughout the country, and that will definitely include IDPs as well.” On the demand for a room for political party agents to be present in the IEC, it said that it had already established the National Election Forum as a continuous consultation mechanism with stakeholders, including political parties and “would [still] welcome their permanent representatives to the Commission.” On the demand for a reassessment of the polling centres, the IEC said that:

The IEC conducted a comprehensive program of the polling centers assessment at the secure areas of the country. The list of the polling centers including the areas, the polling centers of which were not assessed, was approved during the several open sessions of the Commission and was published on the Commission’s website. The PCs list will be finalized after adjudication of complaints received by the Electoral Complaints Commission. It is worth mentioning that in case security of those areas are maintained, where the polling centers were not assessed, the Commission is committed to assess the polling centers in there before the elections. It is also to be mentioned that, the polling centers of those districts where the PCs assessment cannot take place, will remain as per the past.

(4) In response to the concern that changing the electoral system would delay the elections, both Akhlaqi of Jamiat and Nateqi of Wahdat-e Mardom in conversations with AAN argued that the current electoral law has been enforced through a presidential legislative decree without being approved by the parliament, as the government has counted all the years since the expiration of the original five year term of parliament (since 2015) as the last working year of its legislative term, in which, according to the constitution, the parliament cannot amend the electoral law. According to them, the president could just issue another decree saying that parties could introduce lists and their votes could be transferable. However, it seems too simplistic and the agreement on the details of the proposed system (even if it is a consensus one) could prove to be time-consuming.

(4) The first batch of reform recommendations by SERC read:

Taking into account that the existing Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) system in Afghanistan; it does not meet the needs of this country, therefore SNTV is an outdated system and shall be changed. In the SNTV system, majority of the votes of the voters are wasted; as we see that the current members of the Wolesi Jirga have received votes from 38% of the voters.

The electoral system shall change in a way, which shall result in participation and development of the political parties, and which shall provide for an effective role of the political parties in the governance system of Afghanistan.

The SNTV system shall change into the Parallel system in a way, that one third of the seats of Wolesi Jirga shall be allocated to those political parties, which are exactly established and function in accordance to the provisions of the political parties’ law and other legislative documents in this regard. The political parties shall provide open list with preference of candidates for the Wolesi Jirga elections. Electoral constituency for the members of the political parties shall be the whole country. The political parties that receive at least 3% of the overall vote cast, shall be included in the electoral competition.

On electoral constituency for the independent candidates competing under SNTV, the recommendation said:

For the independent candidates of the Wolesi Jirga, the electoral constituencies within the province shall be divided to smaller 1 to 5 member electoral constituencies (approved with consensus).

 

 

Qari Hekmat, a self-proclaimed IS commander in control of parts of Jawzjan, has survived another Taleban attempt to oust him from the area in January 2018. Following this, he attempted – without success – to take a district centre in the province from government control. AAN’s Obaid Ali has compiled additional information about how he has consolidated his still precarious grip over two districts of this northern province by reaching out or attracting local and outside commanders, recruiting more fighters and putting in place semi-government structures under the flag of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). He looks at reports about foreign fighters in the area.

A new unsuccessful Taleban offensive

Qari Hekmat, a dissident Taleban commander, who has been sailing under the flag of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP; also known as Daesh in Afghanistan) since 2015, has survived another Taleban attempt to oust him from his area in the northern province of Jawzjan. This was less due to his strength, but rather more attributable to disunity amongst the Taleban forces attacking him.

Starting on 19 January 2018, the Taleban had gathered hundreds of fighters in an attempt to retake the two districts he controls, Darzab and Qush Tepa. Their offensive was carried out from three directions. Prominent local commanders in Faryab, Sar-e Pul and Jawzjan provinces led the Taleban fronts. Mawlawi Abdulbaqi, a Taleban commander in Belcheragh district of Faryab, to the south of Darzab, led the attack towards the north. Mullah Nader’s fighters, from Sayad district of Sar-e Pul, attacked Qush Tepa from the east. The Taleban front led by Qari Ghani, their shadow district governor for Qush Tepa, and Mullah Seraj, shadow district governor for Darzab came from Shirin Tagab and Dawlatabad districts of Faryab from the west. Both had retreated there in October 2017, when fighters loyal to Hekmat carried out their previous large-scale anti-Taleban offensive (read our previous analysis here).

The clashes continued for ten days causing serious casualties for both sides. According to local sources, 26 Daesh affiliated fighters and eight Taleban were killed. Hekmat’s fighters were forced to temporarily leave their positions near both district centres and toretreat to areas in northern Qush Tepa (Khanaqa and Beg Sar) and southern Darzab (Moghul and Sar Dara). The fight, however, unexpectedly ceased and the Taleban returned back to their original positions in Faryab and Sar-e Pul. According to local sources, the Taleban commanders participating in this operation lacked coordination in their command and control and their attack fell apart.

Following this episode, Qari Hekmat went on the offensive himself. On 26 February 2018, fighters loyal to him attacked two checkpoints of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) near the district centre, in Putaw and Qarayi villages. In Putaw, a few kilometres to the south of the district centre. ALP commander Sher Muhammad was aware that Hekmat would attack and was able to push him back. Also in Qarayi, just 500 metres to the northwest of the district governor office, another ALP unit was able to beat back the attack. According to local sources, eight of Hekmat fighters and two security forces – one ALP and one Public Order Police member – were killed.

The humanitarian fall-out of the fighting

Halima Karimi, a female Jawzjan provincial council member, told AAN in mid-January, before the latest round of fighting, that some 5,000 families fled last months’ fighting from Darzab alone. She said, “Around 2,800 IDP families [alone] live in critical conditions [around] Sheberghan“, Jawzjan’s provincial capital some 100 kilometres to the northeast.

However, these figures seem to be exaggerated. According to very recent UNOCHA data offered to AAN, 1,030 families (7,250 individuals) have been displaced from both districts over the course of 2016 and 2017 due to conflict. Since the January fighting, UNOCHA has not reported new displacements in Jawzjan in any of its weekly field reports. Local aid workers told AAN that, despite fighting, locals are less likely to flee under the current winter conditions.

But the figures between UN agencies also differ. The International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) weekly activity report of 15 November 2017 on humanitarian assistance said reportedly 1,707 families as being displaced from Darzab and Qush Tepa due to conflict. On 10 January 2018, still before the fighting, the organisation stated that reportedly 1,807 families had been displaced due to conflict in Qush Tepa district alone, to Sheberghan city and within the district. Since then, it also has reported no new conflict-related displacements in Jawzjan province.

Personal disputes, shaky loyalties

This second failed Taleban attack against Hekmat within four months (read AAN’s earlier analysis here), was probably not fully serious from the beginning. It was originally the result of a personal dispute between local Taleban commanders and Hekmat and followed weeks of tension over the killing of a prominent Taleban commander’s brother by fighters affiliated with Hekmat. On 9 January 2018, Nurullah, a Hekmat ally (and nephew of Mawlawi Zikrullah, another prominent commander loyal to Hekmat), shot dead a brother of Mullah Nader, a former Taleban shadow governor of Sar-e Pul province, in the Kandah area of Sayad district, in neighbouring Sar-e Pul. (This seems to have been a personal dispute; there is no indication of fighters loyal to Hekmat operating in Sayad.) Nader intended to solve the issue peacefully and sent elders to Darzab asking Qari Hekmat to handover the killer. However, Hekmat rejected this request and instead insisted that he would punish Nurullah in Darzab himself.

It also seems that a power vacuum exists in both districts that facilitated the ground for Hekmat’s ability to hold the area. Over the past two years, the Taleban have shifted their strategy from fighting in rural areas to coming closer to more populated district centres (Khamab, Qarqen, Mangijik, Aqcha and Khaniqa) in the province’s northern and eastern parts, as well as around the provincial centre, Sheberghan. The Taleban also increased their presence along the highways leading from Sheberghanto the district centres in an attempt to prevent logistic supplies getting to security forces based there.

Therefore, neither the government, nor the Taleban, were interested in retaining a strong presence in remote and isolated districts, such as Darzab and Qush Tepa. This has put Qari Hekmat, who understood these dynamics, in a good position to establish his foothold.

Apart from the district centres, which are under government control, fighters loyal to Hekmat now control Darzab and Qush Tepa fully. Government offices in both districts are largely paralysed, with the officials sitting in the district governors’ compounds and few nearby military bases and district governors in the provincial centre. The Taleban have shadow structures for the two districts that operate from ‘exile’ in Faryab province.

According to Abdulhai Yashen, head of the provincial education department, 42 out of 45 schools, including high schools, secondary schools and registered religious schools, are shut down in Darzab. In Qush Tepa, he said, this number is 21 out of 28. He told AAN local elders had reached out to Qari Hekmat a number of times to negotiate their reopening. He said, “In the beginning of the [Afghan] year [starting in March 2017], Hekmat vowed to reopen the schools but later, when foreign fighters joined him, Hekmat rejected the mediation”.

The number of Hekmat’s fighters is unclear, and government officials’ estimates differ. Sher Muhammad, the head of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) in Darzab district, told AAN in February 2018that their total number in both Darzab and Qush Tepa could total 1,000. Locals, however, contradict this. They told AAN that Hekmat leads only around 400 fighters. In any case, Qari Hekmat has proven he has sufficient forces under his command to be able, not only to threaten the local government (which is mainly confined to the district centres), but also to stand against the local Taleban fronts. Alhaj Muhammad Akram, head of the Provincial High Peace Council, who is from Darzab district and well aware of the insurgency dynamics in the area, told AAN “there are different ethnic groups – Uzbek, Tajiks and Pashtuns – among the fighters.”

Attracting commanders, setting up a parallel administration

It has emerged from reports that AAN received from the isolated region, that Qari Hekmat immediately after he switched to Daesh, and as early as 2015, had reached out to local commanders and had attracted others from elsewhere. He now hosts limited numbers of outside fighters from Ghor, Kunduz, Sar-e Pul and Balkh provinces. According to local sources, they constituted “not more than a few dozen.”

His first step was to selectively target local commanders who led small groups of fighters. Previously, most of them had either dealt with the Taleban or the local government. Some served as local Taleban commanders and others operated under pro-government militia forces with shaky loyalty. Qari Hekmat managed to convince at least 20 of them operating in Darzab and Qush Tepa to put themselves under his command.

The most prominent was Haji Zainuddin, a local Uzbek and former Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) commander. He had some hundred fighters located in an area at the border between Darzab and Qush Tepa. There, his fighters mainly operated as a community protection forces dealing with local issues independently. He had struck a deal with the Taleban in 2009 that formally put him under their control, but left a degree of autonomy. The deal was mainly based on two conditions: that his villagers in his area would not join the government forces – in return the Taleban would give him full authority to control the area, including taxation – and the Taleban would not deploy his fighters to other parts of the district. In 2016, when Hekmat became stronger, he switched side to Hekmat.

Another example is Mufti Nemat, an Uzbek commander hosting around 80 fighters. Nemat had surrendered to General Abdulrashid Dostum in February 2015. He stayed almost two years in Sheberghan, but later left and joined Qari Hekmat (read AAN previous analysis here). Now he serves as a Daesh-affiliated commander in the Sar Dara area of Darzab, which served as Hekmat’s fall-back position during the latest Taleban offensive. Commander Qudrat Gul, with 40 to 50 fighters, and commander Hamza, with around 30 followers, also started to operate under the Daesh flag in mid-2016.

Around the same time, with Omar Muhajer, who led fighters from Ghor province, some commanders from outside southern Jawzjan started to join Hekmat. Mujaher is a Tajik from either Ghor or Farah and is said to be very young. His previous affiliation, if any, is unknown to AAN’s local sources. The second outsider group is said to be from as far away as Dasht-e Archi district in Kunduz. It also is a small group of some 10 to 15 fighters, who are most probably from Jundullah (the Army of God). They joined Hekmat in late 2016. Jundullah is a splinter group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They are mostly active in Afghanistan’s northeast, but consist only of Afghans. In 2015, some Jundullah fighters had expressed interest in the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) by translating ISIL leader Abu Baker al-Baghdadi’s statements into the local language and dubbing and circulating ISIL video clips from Syria in social media. The Taleban then disarmed and detained a number of Jundullah fighters in Kunduz and Takhar provinces, making some of them to flee (read our previous analysis on Jundullah and Taleban dispute here). A third group, led by Mawlawi Habib Rahman from Balkh, joined Hekmat in 2016 with around ten fighters. He served as the head of the shadow judiciary under Hekmat for some months, but then was replaced for an unknown reason. Mawlawi Habib Rahman now serves as a Daesh-affiliated commander in the Sar Dara area of Darzab.

Over the border from Jawzjan, in Sayad district of Sar-e Pul province, another small group of fighters stretched out their hands to Qari Hekmat and visited his base in Darzab. Mullah Ghazanfar, an infamous Taleban commander, leads it. When he met Hekmat at the beginning of 2017, he sought assurance that he would be provided with shelter in Sayad, in case the Taleban pushed him out from Darzab. However, this friendship did not last for longer than a few months. In August 2017, Ghazanfar, along with Mullah Nader, the shadow Taleban district governor for Sayad, carried out a widely-reported assault against Afghan Local Police and public uprising forces in Mirza Olang village. This resulted in a number of civilians killed (read AAN previous report here).

Qari Hekmat has already set up a shadow structure in the area under his control to deal with people’s daily affairs. There were units for the judicial, military, police, finance and ‘virtue’ affairs, i.e. a religious ‘police’. He uses Arabic terms for them in a clear distinction from the Taleban’s shadow structure, for example, shortah (Arabic for police), al-maliyah (for finance unit), qazi’iyya (for judicial unit), and askariyah (for military unit).

According to sources close to him, the group has established a decision-making council of 14 members led by Hekmat to deal with different issues. “All members of the council are prominent commanders and heads of the units are also included. They discuss finance, military, public outreach and security issues every month.” Hekmat has distributed administrative positions among the commanders who joined him. Mufti Nemat serves as head of the military court, and Omar Muhajer as the head of the ‘virtues’ unit. Mullah Sohbatullah, another Uzbek from Darzab, heads the finance unit, while Mullah Qudratullah, a Tajik from either Herat or Badghis, operates the intelligence unit.

Hekmat also appointed two deputies: Mullah Zabihullah, for military affairs, and Haji, for civilian affairs. Local sources were unable to provide more detail; both deputies seem to come from outside the area.

Hekmat has proved that fighters loyal to him are able, not only to eliminate the Taleban from his area, but also practice Daesh-style brutalities. As AAN has already reported, his fighters publicly beheaded a local resident accusing him of distributing amulets in January 2016. In the same year Daesh-affiliated fighters set on fire two shrines in Bibi Maryan and Sufi Dost Muhammad villages in Darzab district. The shrines were popular locally, but Daesh suppresses all forms of religious activity that do not conform with its own interpretations. These activities also aimed to attract public attention and give further credibility tothe claim that the group is Daesh’s representative in the north. Qari Hekmat uses the Daesh logo in the statements and messages he delivers. In February 2018, for instance, the group distributed leaflets in Darzab and Qush Tepa with the Daesh logo calling on locals to obey the Daesh instructions.

In June 2017, Mawlawi Zikrullah, Hekmat’s fellow Darzabi commander, reportedly led a delegation with ten other fighters in Hekmat’s name to Nangarhar province to visit the ISKP leadership that is the recognised branch of IS in Afghanistan. According to sources close to Hekmat, Zikrullah stayed in Nangarhar for a couple of weeks. However, the nature of Hekmat’s connection with ISKP base in eastern Afghanistan still remains unclear. It seems it is more on the communication level, rather than operational or involving financial support being exchanged between Hekmat and ISKP. (1)

The issue of foreign fighters

Both the ALP commander for Darzab district, Sher Muhammad, and locals from the district, mention that foreign fighters had joined Hekmat. Baz Muhammad Dawar, Darzab’s district governor, told media outlets in December 2017, that Uzbeks, Chechen and even French and Algerian nationals had been seen in Darzab district. Asked by AAN how they identified them, locals said, because of their facial features and “the way they wear their cloths” and also because they did not talk to people. The spokesman of the Afghan Ministry of Defence (MoD), Dawlat Waziri, in December 2017, also picked up on the alleged presence of French and Algerians.

The French news agency AFP even quoted “European and Afghan security sources in Kabul “ confirming this, without giving more detail, though.

AAN has been tracking the militant groups active in Jawzjan over the past years. Reliable Afghan sources familiar with the insurgency dynamics in Darzab and Qush Tepa districts have reported that there were a dozen foreign fighters among Hekmat’s men, most of these being Central Asian. Locals told AAN that there might be a small number of Uzbek fighters, but that it was “hard to identify their nationalities or to figure out how many foreigners are there. ”According to Alhaj Muhammad Akram, head of the provincial peace council, some foreigners had joined Hekmat in mid-2016. Their identity was unclear, although most of them spoke Uzbeki and, therefore, locals associated them with Uzbekistan.

The sources denied the presence of any French fighters. According to Alhaj Muhammad Akram, “There is no evidence to claim the presence of French fighters”.

Conclusion

The Taleban have failed one more time to retake control of Darzab and Qush Tepa; mainly as a result of their own disunity. This has boosted the non-Taleban militant group’s morale and consolidated their power in the two isolated districts. However, if the Taleban were to become more serious in a future attack, the outcome would be unclear. The government, for the moment, does not seem to be in a position – or willing – to tackle this problem in this remote region. There are even indications that it might be happy that the Taleban – its much stronger enemy countrywide – has come under pressure there.

The Taleban’s unsuccessful counter-offensives indicate that the movement suffers from fragmentation and lacks a strong leadership at the provincial level in Jawzjan. This has yielded negative results affecting their local fighters’ ability to take on Hekmat. The Taleban also seem to face the same problem government troops face after so-called cleaning operations – the enemy withdraws, and returns when the troops retreat again.

Hekmat has taken advantage of this situation and dramatically expanded his territory in both districts. Some government forces hold out in the district centres, but the Taleban were wiped from parts of Darzab and Qush Tepa; territory they still held in October 2017.Public services and schools remain shut and locals face serious challenges in their efforts to continue their day-to-day lives.

Qari Hekmat’s group has emerged as the strongest single group in this part of Jawzjan. It might have come as a surprise, even to himself, that his capability to survive militarily (so far) has enabled him to set up his own shadow administrative structures in these two isolated districts. This facilitates disgruntled Taleban commanders and more radical groups to join him as an alternative to the Taleban. It has also turned the area into a refuge for such groups from elsewhere. But so far he has proven too weak to defeat the remaining pro-government forces holed up in the centre of his home district.

It is unclear to date whether he has any intention to expand his grip beyond Darzab and Qush Tepa. The appearance of the Central Asian fighters in Jawzjan and of Daesh style atrocities might be an indication that he intends to build relations with foreign fighters.

The size of the outside groups remains limited to a dozen fighters. This indicates that southern Jawzjan is still far from being a northern Afghan ‘Nangrahar’. Also, the danger emanating from this region is minimal in respect of the overall strategic balance in Afghanistan, as it is neighbouring countries where there is a fear of a spread of Daesh.

 

Editing by Sari Kouvo and Thomas Ruttig

 

(1) ISKP in Nangarhar faces major challenges to keep its fighters unified and to maintain access to sustainable financial channels. The long ongoing dispute between Central Asian and Pakistani fighters over leading the ISKP (after its previous leader Sheikh Abu Hasib’s death in a drone attack in May 2017) has created fissures in the group (although, this has not led to a formal split). The Central Asian fighters rejected to accept a Pakistani leader to lead the group. They accused the ISKP’s Pakistani fighters of maintaining connections with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.

 

 

 

 

The second meeting of the Kabul Process for Peace and Security Cooperation that was held in the Afghan capital on 28 February 2018 marked a change in the peace rhetoric. The Afghan government presented some very concrete proposals for peace talks with the Taleban. It came with a few conditions (not called as such) – mainly that women’s rights and the basic values of the constitution are not up for negotiation. The offer includes, for the first time, a mention of a ceasefire, an office in Kabul for the Taleban and the lifting of sanctions on those Taleban leaders who would join the negotiation. What is not clear is the sequence and over what time period all this would come together. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig and Jelena Bjelica (with input from Sari Kouvo) conclude that the ball now seems to be in the Taleban’s court, as they summarise and analyse the key messages coming from the second meeting of the Kabul Process.

AAN has also published a dossier bringing together all our analysis on efforts to find peace from 2010 until now.

President Ashraf Ghani’s “comprehensive plan to the Taleban and Pakistan,” as announced in the media in the run-up to the Kabul Process conference (1) was certainly the most complete peace offer that has been publicly announced since 2001.

In his speech, which Ghani consecutively delivered in three languages – English, Dari and Pashto (see transcript here) – the concrete points of what he called “the proposal on behalf of the National Unity Government to the Taleban” came in the Pashto part, addressing the Taleban in the language of the majority of their fighters.

He said that this proposal was offered “without any preconditions,” although he made clear at the same time that the basis for any negotiation would be the current constitution. Nevertheless, at the same time, he offered a partial “review” and “amendment” of it. Previously, the Taleban had rejected the constitution in its entirety and had demanded that a new constitution be drafted, if negotiations were to commence.

Ghani made it very clear, repeatedly throughout his presentation, that the “right and duties of all citizens, in particular the women” must be secured in this process “according to the current constitution.” Women and civil society would also be consulted and included at “each stage” of future negotiations. At least in the run-up to the Kabul meeting, however, this principle apparently was not applied, as Habiba Sarabi, the deputy head of the High Peace Council, can be heard complaining about in this clip posted by daily Etilaat-e Roz.

He also said that any solution must include the guarantee that no “armed group with links to foreign terrorist networks [or] foreign criminal organizations, state or non-state”, would be allowed to seek influence in Afghanistan. This dissociation from al-Qaeda has been a consistent demand of the international community from the Taleban. For the Afghan chapter of the Islamic State, ISKP, however, this would seem to be irrelevant as there is enmity not cooperation on the battlefield, despite some observers claiming the opposite. In any case, it is not difficult for the Taleban to make this statement at this juncture.

What has been proposed?

Ghani’s “peace proposals to the Taleban” have laid out a peace road map (our term, not his). Further down in the text, it is more specifically directed at “Taleban that quit the violence.” It consists of seven points, as follows:

• A “political framework” that includes: a “ceasefire,” the recognition of the Taleban as a political party (siasi gund), confidence-building measures and what he calls free and fair elections;
• A “legal framework” that includes the already-mentioned review of the constitution, the release of Taleban prisoners and the lifting of sanctions;
• It stipulates that: the government of Afghanistan should be officially recognised, the rule of law should be respected, the way should be paved for “reforms, a balanced development” of all regions of the country and the return of refugees;
• It calls for measures to be taken to ensure the security “of all citizens, and in particular of the reconciled Taleban”;
• It foresees that “refugees” [the term used here most likely refers to future returnees] and former fighters should be included in national progammes for social and economic development;
• It envisages that international diplomatic and financial support should be retained, including for determining the fate of foreign fighters and taking reconciled Taleban off the sanctions lists;
• A monitoring and evaluation mechanism should be set up.

Ghani added that the process should be conducted in three phases: negotiations, ratification (taswib) and implementation. He emphasised that in each and every phase women representatives should participate and be consulted. To “Taleban that quit the violence” a “peaceful and respectful life” is offered, Ghani said.

Ghani also said that the National Unity Government (NUG) – in the name of which the proposals are forwarded – had agreed that the Taleban should be offered the means to open an office in Kabul. Passports and the freedom to travel would also be provided to those involved in the negotiations and those accepting peace. In addition, they would be offered support to relocate their families to the country.

He called Kabul “the preferred venue” for talks, but also offered Muslim countries that are not engaged in the conflict (which, in the Afghan view, would exclude Pakistan and possibly hints that Indonesia could be involved – see footnote (1)), “a UN facility or any third country.” In the meantime, Germany has offered to facilitate, or to host peace talks with the Taleban “in Bonn, Berlin or elsewhere” and there are even talks of a “third Bonn conference on Afghanistan” (see tweet of Kabul embassy diplomat here).

Ghani also had a list of suggestions for support that he requested at the international level. He asked for “coordinated international diplomatic support” for this peace effort and “a concerted global effort to persuade Pakistan of the advantages of a stable Afghanistan.” He asked the countries and organisations in the region to align their initiatives with the Kabul Process. In the run-up to the meeting, some key countries had apparently refused to call the Kabul Process an “umbrella process,” under which Kabul wants to see all other peace initiatives operating. (2) Ghani also requested the global Islamic community “to counter the use of interpretations of religious texts as justification of unrestricted war” and terrorist acts. This is a continuation of earlier efforts to persuade Islamic scholars from the country, Pakistan and other Islamic countries to declare Taleban attacks ‘un-Islamic’, something which has received a mixed response so far.

The Afghan president further requested general support “especially” for the “reintegration of refugees and ex-combatants.” This is in the context of his offer to Pakistan of “a consolidated state-to-state dialogue,” which would include “a plan for the return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan within a period of 18 to 24 months.” So far, in the current situation, when Afghanistan is still dealing with around 600,000 returnees from 2016 and 2017, and with about 1.2 million documented refugees still in Pakistan, the UNHCR has only been able to mobilise 9.4 million US dollars – seven per cent – of the amount necessary to pay for already existing and expected returnees in 2018 (see here and here). (3) Finally, Ghani launched an appeal for support for peace-building initiatives through “transit, trade, and investment, the reform and anti-corruption strategy of the government, and the forthcoming 2018 parliamentary and 2019 presidential elections.” He insisted that the parliamentary elections would still be held this year.

A short analysis of the proposal’s content

Ghani’s peace proposals are the most far-reaching move in this field of any Afghan government since 2001 (see AAN dossier on peace talks). Most of what was offered is not new when each element is taken separately. The offer to have peace talks in Kabul, for example, had already been brought up in a statement of the presidential office before the meeting. This said that the government “prefers peace talks with Taliban to take place in Kabul or any other Afghan province.” This statement, in turn, came after a proposal by Akram Khpelwak, head of the High Peace Council (HPC) secretariat from December 2017, inviting the Taleban to open an office in Kabul (see AAN analysis here). However, in this combination, the seven-point proposal does evidently provide a new quality to the offer.

The proposals are not a peace plan yet, though. Such a plan can only materialise through the desired negotiations with the Taleban. Therefore, Ghani announced, the HPC would appoint “a negotiating team, supported by a professional government team,” including women and civil society members, and expressed his hope that the two sides would be able to reach an agreement, “insha’allah,” on an agenda.

It was further noticeable that there was no bellicose rhetoric in the speech. This is in contrast to the run-up to the meeting when Ghani – for example, in a meeting with tribal elders and other Afghan dignitaries five days before – proffered that he would give the Taleban a choice “between peace and war.” (4) It is also evident that this proposal came with no deadline, as had been variously indicated before this meeting. However, given that there is no clear, time-bound sequencing for a broad peace road map (although, for example, the ceasefire comes before the political framework in the seven-proposal list), this perhaps makes sense. This also could be subject to negotiation.

Despite the claim that Ghani’s offers do not carry any preconditions, some of proposals sound like straightforward demands, such as the demand to recognise the Afghan government. Some are even patronising, for example, when it is said, “ideas and opinions and proposals of the Taleban would definitely be considered.” This might be difficult to swallow for the Taleban.

The most striking feature of the peace proposals is that Ghani brings up the idea of a ceasefire. While such a step would be certainly welcomed by most Afghans, it remains open how he plans to get there. It is left open as to whether Ghani expects the Taleban to make the first step, or whether Kabul would do so at some point in time – or whether this needs to be simultaneous in Kabul’s eyes, and would come as a result of a first round of negotiations. Kabul actually could offer such a unilateral step first, given the latest statements – also by the United States commander in Afghanistan – that the tide had been turned against the Taleban (whether this is fully correct or not). This could give it the moral high ground. (5)

The Kabul Process Declaration

The wording of the final declaration of the participating governments and multilateral organisations of the 28 February 2018 Kabul Process meeting (text here) reflects and supports Ghani’s peace offer, although its language is more elusive and general in nature. Participant nations reiterated their support “to the Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace and reconciliation process” and concur “that direct talks between the Afghan Government and the Taleban—without any preconditions and without the threats of violence—constitute the most viable way to end the ongoing agony of the Afghan people.”

However, it contains one very significant offer: that the Afghan government’s “practical plan for reconciliation” should include the “negotiation of […] any contested aspect of the international community’s future role in Afghanistan.” This is a clear hint that the presence or withdrawal of the foreign troops – surely the most contested aspect – could be dealt with in any future peace talks. It reiterates, at the same time, the Afghan government’s and, more importantly, the US administration’s position that there would be no withdrawal before talks, as has been demanded by the Taleban. This takes the main argument out of their hands; namely, that it needs direct talks with the US to solve that problem. This proposal brings in the US, in any case, whether directly or indirectly.

However, even this positioning is not fully new. The same has already been said by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in a speech at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington on 18 October 2017, but this is the first time it has come up in such an official document.

The Taleban’s response

The Taleban reacted surprisingly quickly to the Kabul Process offers. A reply posted on their official website late in the afternoon of 28 February had some positive words for the “peace orientation” of Ghani’s speech.

At the same time, they accused him of “missing the point,” ie their main demand, the withdrawal of the foreign troops. However, this statement came before the Kabul Process meeting’s final declaration that, as published, actually addressed this point. It now remains to be seen what the Taleban will have to say about that. They also stated that they were not interested in “positions and privileges” which, in their view, amounted to “political bribes.”

From rhetoric of peace to peace offer

There has been a definite shift from the previous rhetoric about peace talks to the serious peace offer at the 28 February 2018 Kabul Process meeting. It seems that the Afghan government’s position has changed in quality, moving from general ‘invitations to talk’ to some concrete suggestions (see our 2015 dossier). This might also have to do with president Ghani’s wish, one year before his presidential term ends, to achieve a break-through on peace. He also started his term with a peace initiative (read AAN analysis here).

There are many hurdles to cross for this set of peace proposals beyond the general rejection by the Taleban of any official direct talks with Kabul. This even might be less serious than it seems, as repeated indirect or unofficial contacts have been consistently reported over recent years. Much of this, although not all, used the Taleban’s Qatar office as a point of reference, including contacts by high-ranking Afghan government officials, the UN and non-governmental actors, such as the Pugwash Conference. These contacts, which included discussions of issues such as the Afghan constitution and its possible revision, women’s rights and humanitarian issues, including better measures for the protection of the civilian population in the Afghan war, also showed that the Taleban are at least thinking through some issues. This would make no sense if they did not want to talk at all. This also put their first reaction to the Kabul Process meeting into a somewhat different light.

The peace proposal also comes at a time when Afghan government representatives visiting Saudi Arabia have stated that they are working on closing down the Taleban office in Qatar, which the Taleban have declared to be their only official channel for talks. This would definitely not seem to be a confidence-building measure by the Taleban. It is also not clear whether, when and under which circumstances, Afghan and US forces would tone down their current military offensives to facilitate talks. The US President’s recent “no” to such talks has been explained away by visiting US dignitaries in Kabul as an emotional reaction “after the horrendous week of terrorist attack by the Taliban” in Kabul in late January 2018. Moreover, the US’s support to Ghani’s peace initiative is embodied in their signature under the final declaration of the Kabul Process.

At the same time, there is also a large blank in the proposals and final declaration of the Kabul Process meeting. An implicit amnesty has, in practice, been offered to “another armed group,” as in the 2016 deal with Hezb-e Islami (AAN analysis here). This happens in the context of the International Criminal Court’s on-going deliberations about opening a full-fledged investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been committed by all parties since 2003. This would also include allegations against the Taleban which feature in the representations of over one million victims to the Court (see AAN analysis here).

The ICC is an independent court and its decision to start an investigation, or not, in Afghanistan cannot be subject to political decisions, such as the peace deal with Hezb, or the one desired with the Taleban. The ICC is concerned with the interest of justice and it leaves the interest of peace to other actors to sort out – even when the two interests seem to be conflicting. As AAN earlier reported, peace – or stability – has usually been sought in Afghanistan with little focus on dealing with the legacies of war crimes. Concrete examples are the failure to identify limits for amnesty in the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP) and the adoption of an amnesty law that provides amnesty for all those involved in the last four decades of war in Afghanistan. The lack of truth, the AAN report found, feeds into myths and conflicting narratives about the conflict – its victims, villains and heroes. It will only be by acknowledging the truth that the cycle of violence can be broken and a real process or reconciliation can start. Inevitably, this will be a long process in Afghanistan, but still needs to be an integral part of any sustainable peace process.

 

(1)The first meeting of the Kabul Process was held in June 2017. As then, the 28 February 2018 meeting came in the wake of increased violence in the capital (see AAN analysis here). The June meeting was overshadowed by the massive truck bomb in Kabul’s Zambaq Square near the German embassy. According to UN figures, this killed 92 civilians and injured 491. This January, Kabul was rattled by another series of attacks. The Taleban and the local chapter of the Islamic State shared responsibility for the violence (see AAN analysis here).

This obviously had an impact on the level of attendants of the meeting. This time, the Afghan government had hoped and planned for those attending to be ministers, then deputy ministers, but had finally had to settle with a “senior officials meeting,” mainly featuring AfPak envoys and ambassadors.

An exception was the Indonesian Vice President, Joseph Kalla. Afghanistan has recently courted the large south-east Asian, Muslim majority nation to act as a mediator in the conflict, but also invited Indonesian ulema to condemn Taleban terrorist acts as ‘un-Islamic’ (more details here). This is something many ulema in the Middle East and Pakistan have avoided doing so far.

(2) There are various bi-, tri- and multilateral initiatives, including those started by Russia, Kazakhstan and other countries (more in this AAN analysis).

(3) There is also an indirect reference to Pakistan’s role and the Taleban’s safe havens there in the final declaration’s second topic that deals with “the fight against terrorism.” It reads that

 […] states must “refrain from organizing, instigating, facilitating, participating in financing, encouraging or tolerating terrorist activities and to take appropriate practical measures to ensure that our respective territories are not used for terrorist installations, or training camps, or for the preparation or organization of terrorist acts intended to be committed by other states or their citizens.”

(4) Five days before the meeting, President Ashraf Ghani told a gathering of tribal elders, jihadi leaders and representatives of provincial councils in Kabul (media report here) that the aim of the meeting – described as “a main forum and vehicle under the leadership of the Afghan Government to guide and steer all peace efforts for ending violence in Afghanistan” – was “to create international consensus on Afghan peace and to see whether or not Taliban want peace.” According to another Afghan media report, he also said at the meeting that his government “… will give them [the Taleban] options to decide, they must think whether they have the intention to surrender to the will of Allah.”

(5) In a parallel development, The New Yorker magazine published an “An Open Letter to the Taleban” by former US negotiator, Barnett Rubin, on the eve of the Kabul Process meeting (here) in which he called upon the Taleban to “challenge Washington and Kabul to accept a temporary ceasefire.” Rubin’s letter is a ‘personal’ reply to a recent Taleban letter to “the American people” and the “peace-loving” members of the US Senate that had been published on 14 February 2018. They followed this up again on 26 February 2018 when they reiterated their stance that they would only talk to the US, not the Kabul government.

 

Author’s Note: The title and the theme of this set of theses refer to Barnett Rubin’s “Theses on Peacemaking in Afghanistan: A Manifesto” published in War on the Rocks on 23 February 2018 (read here). But these theses will mainly scrutinise Afghanistan’s internal institutional crisis that needs to be addressed in order to improve the conditions for successful peace talks that do not result in a roll-back of post-2001 achievements particularly when it comes to rights and freedoms.

 

ترسم نرسی به کعبه ای اعرابی
کین ره که تو میروی به ترکستان ااست

(I fear you won’t get to the Ka’aba, oh traveller(*)
The way you are going leads to Turkestan.)

Sa’adi

 

اوبه له سره خړې دي

(The water muddies at the source.)

Pashto proverb, also available in Dari

 

What is an optimist: A person that doesn’t take things as tragically as they are.

Karl Valentin

 

1

Afghans are facing a highly complex situation involving multiple crises – security/war-related, socio-economic and institutional – of which the emergency of the insurgency was only a symptom. This means that when concentrating on ‘peace’ (and outsourcing blame for the lack of it) without looking at Afghanistan’s internal defects, this addresses only half of the problem.

 

2

Afghanistan’s institutional crisis political institutions and their inability to adequately react to these crises. This is due to birth defects resulting from the fact that the 2001 Bonn agreement was never fully implemented. The most important birth defect was not so much that the Taleban and Hezb-e Islami were not invited to the conference. There were other ways of including their constituencies as evident in the presence of multiple Hezb leaders at various levels of the Afghan government as well as in parliament even before the peace deal. It was rather the centralised political system it created.

 

3

Over-centralisation does not refer to the discussion about whether Afghanistan should remain a central state or become a federation, or whether it should experience a degree of de-centralisation or ‘devolution’ (elements of the latter, such as the promotion of minority language education and the protection of ethnic groups not explicitly mentioned among the 14 in the constitution, could strengthen national cohesion). It refers to some powers given to the president, such as the power to appoint the members of ‘independent’ institutions and commissions, including the electoral institutions, thereby putting in question their independence. The same goes for the members of the Supreme Court.

 

4

Centralisation of power was further increased by the removal of the position of a Prime Minister when the 1964 constitution “minus Kingdom” was temporarily reinstated in Bonn in 2001, as well as by the refusal of Afghan leader Hamed Karzai and his main supporters to include an independent Constitutional Court in the Constitution during the 2003/04 Constitutional Loya Jirga. The position of a Prime Minister would have mitigated the effects of the presidential system without rendering the president only a symbolic head of state. It would have made possible the formation of coalition governments of various parties under his lead that would be responsible vis-à-vis parliament which, in turn, would be able to replace them when needed. Such a set-up would also have better reflected the political and ethnic diversity of Afghanistan’s population and political landscape.

 

5

It was another mistake in Bonn – and obviously one intended by Karzai’s supporters – not to prevent the chairman, deputies or cabinet members of the interim and transitional administrations (2001-04) from running for office in the 2004 and 2005 presidential and parliamentary elections. It gave them the responsibility for organising elections in which they would themselves stand and opened the gates for them to manipulate the outcome through the electoral institutions, which they had appointed.

 

6

It was also a mistake not to hold the first presidential and parliamentary elections simultaneously. Afghanistan has been suffering from the resulting convoluted electoral calendar ever since. The international community has failed after every electoral cycle so far since the one in 2004/05 to urge the Afghan authorities to carry out serious electoral reform. Major defects within the electoral system were already obvious after the 2004/05 electoral cycle.

 

7

The already delayed holding of the first elections – which was against the constitution, but seen then as a minor fault – opened the gate for further breeches of the constitution at key political junctions later on.

 

8

The effects of the over-centralisation of power only became fully apparent following the interim and transitional periods. This early period was overshadowed by the quasi-monopoly of power by the former ‘Northern Alliance’. It was also based on a one-sided disarmament and failed de-militarisation of Kabul after the overthrow of the Taleban regime, which contravened the stipulations by the Bonn agreement.

 

9

A partial disarmament campaign that favoured former western anti-Soviet and anti-Taleban allies empowered warlords and commanders, enabled their transmutation into anti-terrorism entrepreneurs, who were paid for by foreign militaries and profited from large security, logistical and other contracts. Many of them were given positions in government or the new security forces while their ‘private’ armed groups remained (and still remain) at their disposal. These groups are thus able to switch between being ‘irresponsible armed groups’ (outside of formal government chains of control) or ‘pro-government militias’ or units of the Afghan Local Police and similar forces.

 

10

The turning point was during the 2003/04 Constitutional Loya Jirga when the question “presidential or parliamentary system” became ethnicised. It pitted the Pashtuns and other small ethnic groups, supporters of a centralised presidential system, against most non-Pashtuns who supported a parliamentary system. The former won by a very small margin, leaving the substantial minority’s wishes largely unaccommodated. (The parliament was only given the right to ‘impeach’ ministers at any given time. This right was often invoked, leading to regular disruption of the government.)

 

11

One major outcome of these poor decisions and the developments playing out as a result is that the checks and balances foreseen in Afghanistan’s legal framework are often not utilised or even outmanoeuvred.

 

12

One major element of this are the long-term strained relations between the executive branch (‘the Palace’) and the legislative branch, particularly the lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga. This started during President Hamed Karzai’s tenure when the house was often circumvented and its reputation undermined by manipulation and bribing. (Of course the blame is also on those MPs who accepted this.) This often leads to mutual obstructions, blockades and acts of revenge, as well as the stalling of vital legislative projects.

 

13

Parliament’s effectiveness was further curtailed by the failure to allow political parties, including those emerging from the underground after 2001, to play a role in the elections. There is a factual, although not legal, ban of parties presenting lists of candidates in the parliamentary elections or from forming party-based factions in parliament.

 

14

The government has erected further hurdles for political parties, e.g. by repeated campaigns of re-registration (often close to an election), which aims to reduce their numbers through administrative measures instead of letting the voters decide.

 

15

This has created a lopsided playing field between the ‘civilian’ parties and the former armed factions (tanzims)-turned-parties, with their ability to mobilise armed power and occasionally use the threat of violence to achieve political goals. This resulted in the almost complete disappearance of the underfunded pro-democratic parties of the first post-2001 years, while it perpetuated the tanzim-based parties who have access to other resources in violations of the political parties law without being held accountable by the relevant authorities.

 

16

Checks and balances have been further undermined by the failure to hold the 2015 parliamentary election on time. The current Wolesi Jirga is in legal limbo, only patched up by presidential decrees, which, themselves, have become a major instrument of legislation around parliament. A fact that is also often overlooked is that the Meshrano Jirga has never been fully instated, as it lacks directly elected district council representatives, which have never been elected. It also seems that this election – although planned to be held simultaneously with the parliamentary elections and mentioned by the Afghan electoral commission when announcing a further delay in early February this year – have dropped from current election preparations.

 

17

In general, political institutions often remain a façade or are relegated to having a secondary status, while key decisions are made in an intransparent ‘inner circles’ on the basis of ‘traditional’ systems of patronage. President Ghani has not been able to cut through this corrupt system because he was elected on its basis, relying on an electoral alliance that included tanzims and parties who demanded ‘their share’ after he was declared president. The same would have probably happened, had he been the outright winner of the 2014 election. Positive steps such as more merit-based appointments are too small to swing the system around; simultaneous ‘deals’ such as the recent one in Samangan, and before the peace deal with HIG, undermine them again.

 

18

With these points being taken into account, we can conclude that Afghanistan’s political landscape is polarised in various ways, without buy-in into institutionalised ways of resolving political conflict: between the government and the armed opposition; within the National Unity Government (NUG) – where the camps are also fracturing; no current alliance is fixed –; and also between the personal or factional ambitions of leading personalities. There is no political middle ground. Even if power changes hands after the next election, it will remain within the existing élite. In such an environment, the threat of violence remains a key means of retaining power during political conflict. This is underpinned by the impunity for pre-2001 war crimes and human rights violations self-awarded by parliament through the 2010 ‘amnesty law’.

 

19

This polarisation is accompanied by tendencies to ‘ethnicise’ politics, both real and perceived. It currently culminates in the never-ending debates such as about electoral reform, the e-tazkira and the Arg-Atta and Arg-Jamiat negotiations. These debates will prolong the time needed to prepare any election or to reach a consensus on how this will be done and by whom. Many positions in the electoral institutions are still vacant or open to further change. In the shadow of these debates, tendencies become visible that some Afghans describe as ‘authoritarian’.

 

20

 

Now many dream about ‘going back to 2001’ and starting from scratch, and some even propose doing this by convening a new Loya Jirga. But this is arguably self-serving, as it likely would return those to office who have contributed to the current situation. This would likely be the case because the existing (although factionalised) political elite has created an almost hermetically sealed system which blocks entry to fresh forces, or only allows them by co-option.

 

21

In the current situation, it is not merely important that elections take place, when and in which sequence or combination (parliamentary first, or parliamentary and presidential simultaneously) but also what will the quality of these elections be and will the future parliament, president and government be seen as legitimate as a result? Legitimacy, in the eyes of potential losers and of the disillusioned electorate in general, will only derive from reformed, independent electoral institutions and measures to minimise disenfranchisement. Elections in an unreformed framework will mainly legitimise the International Community’s presence in Afghanistan (in the eyes of donor country parliaments and electorates, and even there scepticism about the Afghanistan involvement has grown).

 

22

Currently, electoral reform mainly means that both sides in the NUG are fighting for control over the electoral institutions.

 

23

Even if electoral reform results in the strengthening of the role of political parties, it empowers parties that do not democratically function internally. It arguably also empowers some that might intend to use democratic means to establish an undemocratic government.

 

24

The major fact impacting voter disenfranchisement is, of course, the on-going war, which has long spiralled into cycles of senseless escalation. The war, however, which has led to an insular presence of the government in parts of the country, also provides ample opportunities for the manipulation of future elections, for example by ballot-staffing in the absence of Afghan or international observers.

 

25

For now, the Afghan government and its international donors should undertake that the 2018/19 elections are the last ones that will be held in a largely unreformed framework and in breech of some stipulations of the constitution. This would require that efforts at full electoral reform commence the moment this electoral cycle is over, and are not left to the last possible moment, again.

 

Thomas Ruttig is a co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN, Kabul/Berlin). He has a degree in Afghan Studies from Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2000, he joined the UN mission to Afghanistan and – in this capacity – participated in a UN attempt to negotiate a peaceful end to the war between the Taleban and the ‘Northern Alliance’ that same year. He also had a part in the preparation of the 2001 Bonn conference and was a member of the UN team there. 

(*) e’rabi literarily means ‘nomad’.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has published its findings from victims who suffered war crimes in relation to the Afghan conflict, either in Afghanistan or in other countries. The victims mentioned murder, rape, forced disappearance, attacks against civilians and pillage. The ICC report said victims’ backing for an ICC investigation was “overwhelming” with 98 per cent of victims who made submissions to the Court saying they wanted to see this happen. As AAN Co-Director Kate Clark reports, the ball is now in the hands of the Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber’s judges who have to decide to investigate, or not.

AAN initially reported on the victims’ representations after the deadline for making them, 31 January 2018, had passed. This dispatch is an update with the final data from the ICC and its conclusions.

A redacted version of the ICC’s final report on victims’ responses can be read here.

The judges of the Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber had already heard from ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that she thought an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan was merited (see AAN reporting here). They then had to hear from victims, to see whether an investigation would be in the ‘interests of justice’ (understood by the Court as in the ‘interests of victims’). A section of the ICC called the Registry, tasked with hearing from victims, gave people two months (December 2017 and January 2018) to respond. The message was clear. Almost all who contacted the Court said an investigation was necessary. Out of a total of 695 submissions (1) – which could be from individuals or collectives, such as a village or family or families – 680 said they wanted an investigation, while just 15 said they did not.

Why did victims want war crimes investigated?

The ICC said those who did not want an investigation cited, “Security concerns and doubts as to the likelihood that the Prosecutor’s investigation would result in the perpetrators being brought to justice were the reasons cited for this refusal.” Those who think an investigation necessary said it was because they wanted an “investigation by an impartial and respected international court; bringing the perceived perpetrators of crimes to justice; ending impunity; preventing future crimes; knowing the truth about what happened to victims of enforced disappearance; allowing for victims’ voices to be heard; and protecting the freedom of speech and freedom of the press in Afghanistan.”

For anyone living or working in Afghanistan over the last two decades, such sentiments are very familiar, even though it has become increasingly difficult and dangerous to speak about war crimes, compared to the early years following the fall of the Taleban. As early as 2004, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) published the results of its consultation with Afghans about how they wanted to deal with the legacies of war crimes, at that time from the beginning of the conflict in 1978 to 2001. This report showed 70 per cent of those consulted considered they had been victims of war crimes and 84 per cent considered justice to be very important or important. Opinions diverged on what was considered to be justice (read the report here). Almost a decade later, in 2012, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) published the results of its research on community perceptions of dealing with legacies of conflict in Afghanistan (read the report here). This report showed that securing peace was the primary concern, but also that peace and justice were not seen as competing, but complementary concepts. The report should there was no genuine will to forgive perpetrators and that people could not just forget the past. A year later, AAN published its report “Tell Us How This Will End” (read the report here). Covering the entirety of the conflict in Afghanistan, the report showed that the strategy of promoting stability without justice – deployed at every turn of the Afghan conflict – had simply not been successful.

Given that victims are rarely heard in Afghanistan, it is worth quoting what some of them told the Court. “Attempts in the country to ensure justice have not been successful,” said one victim submission, “so it is better to give ensuring justice by the international mechanism.” Another said, “We have not seen the central government of Afghanistan create a fair and independent court or prosecuting warlords or Mujahedeen for the international crimes they have committed against innocent victims.” A third said, “The current government of Afghanistan cannot overpower the warlords in Afghanistan and there are a lot of crimes happening, but no one can raise their voices because of fear.” Such concerns by victims about what the ICC called the “effectiveness of the Afghan judicial system” strengthens the view that an investigation would fulfil one of the Court’s conditions, that it will only intervene if no other court can or will do.

Some victims asked the Court to keep their safety in mind. “My concern is not to be victimized again. And my identity must be kept secret. At the moment also, I am under threat.” Some believed that many more people would have submitted their views if they had felt it was safe to do so. One submission, for example, said, “Some other [redacted] we contacted expressed concern about filing a victim representation form for fear of retaliation.” Others said the practical difficulty of filing reports had no all victims had come forward:

Most people in Afghanistan and our bereaved families are not highly educated and do not have access to the internet and facilities and just because they have not been able to file or register this form, please do not disregard their feelings and do not forget them and listen to them so that the continuation of bloody and painful incidents like this is prevented.

What do we know of those who made submissions?

The people who responded to the Court said they had suffered the following crimes, a “non-exhaustive” list, the ICC said:

[M]urder; attempted murder; imprisonment or other severe deprivation of liberty; torture; rape; sexual violence; persecution; enforced disappearance of persons; other inhumane acts; attack against civilian population; attack against protected objects; destruction of property; pillage; forced displacement; outrages upon personal dignity; and denying a fair trial.

As to who they might have named as the alleged perpetrators, this report does not say. However, the Prosecutor’s preliminary examination from November 2016 said she thought there were cases to be made against the Taleban (including for murder and intentionally attacking civilians) (2), Afghan government forces (for torture) (3) and the United States military and CIA (for torture) (4).

We can see from the new report that Afghan victims in the country and the diaspora, (5) and non-Afghans responded. (6) They included victims of crimes that took place on Afghan soil (after May 2003 when Afghanistan became a state party to the Rome Treaty which established the ICC), as well as crimes that had a “prima facie nexus to the armed conflict in Afghanistan, are sufficiently linked to the Afghanistan situation and were committed on the territory of other States Parties since 1 July 2002.” That date is when Poland and Romania became a state party. Together with Lithuania (which joined in 2004), they have been mentioned by the Prosecutor because they had housed CIA black sites to which US security detainees were rendered and tortured.

Getting a breakdown on victims’ gender, nationality or ethnic group, date of birth, language(s) spoken, place of origin and current location of residence was hindered, said the ICC, because of the collective nature of most of the submissions (534 representations were assessed as collective, 165 as individual). (7) As far as the individual representations were concerned (which the ICC could get data from) the most significant characteristic was that only six per cent of victim submissions were made by or on behalf of women. As AAN reported earlier in the month, at least one NGO had warned this would be the case, saying the tight deadline and winter timing had exacerbated its problem of reaching women victims, many of whom lived in isolated places and could not leave their homes.

Who did not talk to the ICC

The ICC has recognised that, compared with the “vast number of victims in the country,” those contacting it were relatively few. The Court noted that its outreach had been poor and that, with no presence in the country, it had not managed to have a “clear voice” in Afghan media. That so many victims did manage to respond appears to be down to the work of advocacy organisations, “those with experience” in Afghanistan, whom the ICC “contacted and relied on… to reach out to victims with limited access to technology and to the public debate.” It also said it contacted lawyers and members of the Afghan diaspora in Europe for help.

Other factors reducing the numbers of Afghans contacting it, it said, were the “[l]ow levels of trust in judicial institutions” which hampered their “public willingness to engage.” It also cited low literacy rates, particular among women, and the multiple infrastructural challenges to reporting, including poor internet, geographical distances and difficulties in accessing remote areas, especially during winter. As AAN also reported, even though Afghanistan was given an extended time for victims to register their views, two months remained an exceptionally short time given the logistical challenges, insecurity and the ICC’s poor outreach strategy.

The exact number of victims represented in the submissions cannot be known, said the ICC because of the limited information in the submissions and because, given the security situation and the limited time frame, it cannot judge whether all members included in collective representations were properly informed. Nevertheless, it gave this breakdown:

• Representations were made on behalf of approximately 6,220 individual victims.
• Amongst these representations were 17 forms also submitted on behalf of 1,690 families.
• A further 12 representations were introduced by individuals and by organisations on behalf of approximately 1,163,950 victims and 26 villages. 
• Finally, another representation was submitted by an organisation reportedly on behalf of approximately 7 to 9 million people.

In the context of the fact that relatively few victims had come forward, the ICC said:

All [redacted] that the [ICC] Registry engaged with emphasized their longing for justice, which also characterizes many sectors of society, and their belief that peace in Afghanistan can only be achieved through justice. They reported that this belief was their driving force, [redacted].

What happens next?

If the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber do now decide to authorise an investigation, the real hard work will begin. The Prosecutor would have to decide which specific individuals to make cases against and start gathering evidence and witness statements in a country where access – both because of language and security – will be exceptionally difficult. The Court may also have to contend with US pressure, whether direct or indirect. Washington has said it opposes the Court’s involvement in Afghanistan and that any investigation against its personnel would be “wholly unwarranted and unjustified.” The Court would need to carry out its investigation while war crimes and crimes against humanity are ongoing (for a flavour, see this recent UNAMA report on the Protection of Civilians and AAN analysis here), where perpetrators enjoy impunity and victims frequently lack state protection and where the war is far from over.

 

Edited by Sari Kouvo

 

(1) The Court received 794 submissions, of which 41 were assessed to be duplicates and 699 were deemed to fulfil the Court’s criteria of ‘victim’. (It did not give the reasons for the remaining 54 not meeting this criteria.)

(2) The Office of the Prosecutor’s November 2016 Preliminary Examination Report (cited by AAN here) said there was a reasonable basis to believe that the Taleban and Haqqani network had committed war crimes (murder; intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, humanitarian personnel and protected objects; conscripting children; and killing or wounding treacherously a combatant adversary – all of which, it said, “were committed on a large scale and as part of a plan or policy”) and crimes against humanity (murder; imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty and persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political grounds and on gender grounds, all “allegedly committed as part of a widespread and/or systematic attack…”).

In terms of admissibility, the Taleban and Haqqani network’s crimes passed the gravity threshold. As to whether domestic courts were dealing with suspected war criminals, the Office of the Prosecutor pointed to the almost complete lack of any investigation or trial of alleged war criminals in Afghanistan and to the 2009 Amnesty Law which provides amnesty to everyone who has committed war crimes, including those who, in the future, reconcile with the Afghan government (see also this AAN report). It was noticeable, in this respect, that the government granted immunity to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his armed men in the context of the peace agreement signed with Hezb-e Islami on 29 September 2016. Amnesty for war crimes in domestic legislation can be interpreted as unwillingness by the state to prosecute.

(3) The Office of the Prosecutor (cited in AAN reporting here) has estimated that 35 to 50 per cent of conflict-related detainees “may be subjected to torture” by government forces and said there is a “state of total impunity.” There is a reasonable basis to believe, it said, that Afghan authorities have committed the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity pursuant to article, and sexual violence. Naming the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan National Police, Afghan National Army, Afghan Border Police and the Afghan Local Police (ALP), it says available information suggests the alleged crimes were committed on a “large scale.” Although there is no indication that they were committed “as part of any plans or policies at the national level,” in some cases, it said, there were plans or policies at the level of facility, district or province.

(4) The Prosecutor’s 2016 Preliminary Examination Report (see AAN analysis) said the CIA and US military, during interrogations of security detainees and in conduct supporting those interrogations, had:

… resorted to techniques amounting to the commission of the war crimes of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape… Specifically:

Members of US armed forces appear to have subjected at least 61 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity on the territory of Afghanistan between 1 May 2003 and 31 December 2014. The majority of the abuses are alleged to have occurred in 2003-2004.

Members of the CIA appear to have subjected at least 27 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and/or rape on the territory of Afghanistan and other States Parties to the Statute (namely Poland, Romania and Lithuania) between December 2002 and March 2008. The majority of the abuses are alleged to have occurred in 2003-2004.

Crucially, the Office of the Prosecutor said these “alleged crimes were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals,” but rather were part of a policy:

The Office considers that there is a reasonable basis to believe these alleged crimes were committed in furtherance of a policy or policies aimed at eliciting information through the use of interrogation techniques involving cruel or violent methods which would support US objectives in the conflict in Afghanistan.

(5) The report said, “conference calls were organised with members of the Afghan diaspora [redacted],” as part of the Court’s outreach.

(6) One submission was made in Arabic, likely an Arab victim of US forces. The following sentence also implies foreign detainees of the US military or CIA because Afghan forces have rarely held detainees in indefinite detention: “Video conferences were also held with civil society representatives and lawyers, [redacted], working closely with victims of indefinite detention without trial and victims of torture.”

(7) Some insight was also given by the language of the submissions: 175 in English, 323 in Dari or Pashto, one in Arabic, two in German, 193 in Dari together with English translations, and five in Dari or Pashto together with German translations.

 

 

 

For the first time since 2012, UNAMA has recorded a year-on-year decrease – of nine per cent – in civilian casualties sustained during the Afghan conflict. This relatively good news still meant that more than ten thousand civilians were killed and injured during 2017. There are glimmers of hope in UNAMA’s report; the Afghan National Security Forces took more precautions, it said, to protect civilians during ground engagements. There were ominous trends, too; almost a quarter of all casualties were killed or injured in suicide or complex attacks, most of them in Kabul, the highest numbers on record. Also, as AAN Co-Director Kate Clark points out, more than a quarter of all civilians killed or injured were deliberately targeted and most casualties were preventable.

UNAMA 2017 Civilian Casualty Figures* (read the full report here).

• 10,453 civilian casualties (3,438 deaths and 7,015 injured), representing a decrease of nine per cent compared to 2016 (with a two per cent reduction in deaths and six per cent in injuries);
• 1,224 women casualties (359 deaths and 865 injured), representing an increase of less than one per cent compared to 2016;
• 3,179 child casualties (861 deaths and 2,318 injured), representing a decrease of ten per cent since the previous year.

Since 2009, the armed conflict in Afghanistan has claimed the lives of 28,291 civilians and injured 52,366 others.

How civilians were killed and injured (in order of magnitude):

Cause of Casualty Total Number of Casualties Total Number of Deaths Total Number of Injured Percentage of all Civilian Casualties Comparison with 2016 Ground Engagements 3,484 823 2,661 33% 19% decrease Complex and Suicide Attacks 2,295 605 1,690 22% (16% of which were in Kabul city) 17% increase Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) 1,856 624 1,232 18% 14% decrease Targeted and Deliberate Killings 1,032 in 570 targeted killings during the year 650 382 11% 8% decrease (although killings were up by 13% and injuries down by 30%) Explosive Remnants of War 639 164 475 6% 12% decrease US and Afghan Forces Air Operations 631 resulting from 139 aerial operations 295 336 6% 7% increase

 

Who is responsible for the casualties:

 Anti-Government Elements (AGEs), most notably the Taleban but also Islamic State Khorasan Province, ISKP (also known as Daesh), and other Afghan and foreign insurgent groups. AGEs were responsible for a total of 6,768 civilian casualties (2,303 deaths and 4,465 injured), representing 65 per cent of all civilian casualties and a three per cent decrease compared to 2016.

Insurgent Actor Total Number of Casualties Total Number of Deaths Total Number of Injured Percentage of all Civilian Casualties Comparison with 2016 Taleban 4,385 1,574 1,574 42 12 per cent decrease ISKP 1000 399 601 15 11 increase Unidentified and other 1389 330 1059 – –

 

The leading causes of civilian casualties by Anti-Government Elements (in order of magnitude):

• suicide and complex attacks
• IEDs
• ground engagements
• targeted and deliberate killings

Pro-Government Forces, including Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), international forces (only the US has a combat mission in Afghanistan) and pro-government armed groups were responsible for a total of 2,108 civilian casualties (745 deaths and 1,363 injured), representing 20 per cent of all civilian casualties and a decrease of 23 per cent since the previous year.*

Pro-Government Actor Total Number of Casualties Total Number of Deaths Total Number of Injured Percentage of all Civilian Casualties ANSF 1693 529 1164 16 Pro-Government armed groups 92 26 66 International military 246 147 99 2 Unidentified 77 43 34 1

*Comparison with 2016 not given.

The leading causes of death by pro-government forces (in order of magnitude):

• ground engagements
• aerial operations
• killings and injuries of those known to be civilian or mistaken for anti-government elements
• casualties resulting from search operations.

Shelling from Pakistan into Afghanistan resulted in 42 civilian casualties (16 deaths and 26 injured) in 23 incidents or one per cent of civilian casualties, a four-fold increase compared to 2016. 

Trends in the conflict: ground engagements

UNAMA’s 2017 Protection of Civilians report presents a complex picture of evolving conflict dynamics and new patterns of civilian casualties. The most significant factor driving down casualty figures is that fewer civilians have been being killed or injured in ground engagements. The number of casualties has fallen below 3,600 for the first time since 2013. Those attributed to pro-government forces fell by 37 per cent and those to the Taleban and other anti-government elements by seven per cent. There was a particularly marked decrease – 29 per cent – in civilians killed or injured by indirect weapons, such as mortars, rockets and grenades, compared with 2016. This reduction translates into almost 800 people who are alive and uninjured today who would have been harmed if the 2016 casualty rate had been sustained. UNAMA reports that this decrease was most notable in the following five provinces: Baghlan, Helmand, Kandahar, Kunduz and Uruzgan. (UNAMA gives a useful table with the three leading causes of civilian casualties in each of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces, on page 67 of the report.)

This fall in numbers came despite the fact that “the levels of fighting,” according to UNAMA, were “only slightly lower than in 2016.” Another indicator of this is that, on 15 November 2017, the United Nations had recorded more than 21,105 security-related incidents for the first 11 months of 2017, an increase of one per cent since 2016. See also AAN’s analysis of the conflict in 2017 which assessed various indicators of insecurity here. One key reason behind the fall in civilian casualties from ground engagements, said UNAMA, were the “significant measures” taken by the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) to protect civilians, including: 

…the adoption of a National Policy for Civilian Casualty Mitigation and Prevention and related training for security forces, together with the adoption of practical measures on the battlefield, including relocation of security bases from civilian areas, and increased constraints on the use of mortars and other indirect fire weapons during ground fighting in civilian-populated areas.  

These measures helped cause a reversal in the trend observed in 2016, of pro-government forces, mainly the ANSF, harming increasing numbers of civilians (46 per cent more than in 2015), especially during ground engagements and especially with the use of indirect fire into civilian-populated areas (see further details here). (1)

Fewer civilians were also harmed during ground engagements in 2017, according to UNAMA, due to the “lack of major [insurgent] attacks against provincial centres and relative reduction in attacks against district centres by insurgent forces compared to 2016.” This was particularly the case in Helmand, Kunduz and Uruzgan provinces. Insurgents instead increased their targeting of stationary ANSF check-posts and convoys. UNAMA further noted that numbers of civilians killed and injured by shooting during ground engagements was up by 12 per cent, “in line” with this increased emphasis by the Taleban on directly attacking police check-posts.

Both sides have also increasingly issued warnings to civilians about forthcoming operations. Furthermore, in areas where frontlines remain static, civilians had already fled, thereby removing themselves from danger. (2)

The changing tactics of the Taleban – fewer attacks on population centres – may be a response to the increased threat of air strikes from both the United States and Afghan air forces. Gathering in large numbers in order to launch such ground offensives is far more risky as a result. (For more analysis, see here. After losing many fighters, killing many civilians and failing to take Tirin Kot, Lashkargah and Kunduz in 2016 (or hold Kunduz in 2015), the Taleban may also have decided to hold their fire and consolidate their control of captured areas. Reports have suggested, for example, that they have been organising their taxation and what is called in economic circles ‘revenue mobilisation’ (see this article, research here and discussion here about 12 minutes into a radio programme discussing the prospects for peace in Afghanistan). Whatever the reasons, the reduction in civilian casualties from ground engagements is a welcome development. Nevertheless, as UNAMA points out, the destruction in 2017 was still horrific and widespread:

… taking mothers, fathers and children away from their families, and displacing nearly half a million civilians in 2017. The conflict also destroyed homes, livelihoods and impeded access to health, education and services. UNAMA also continued to record a strong correlation between the use of weapons such as mortars, rockets and grenades during ground fighting and civilian casualties from unexploded ordnance, with children accounting for most casualties.

Other conflict trends: IED, suicide and complex attacks

Also helping to drive down civilian casualties in 2017 was the decrease in casualties from IEDs (an insurgent tactic only), by 14 per cent compared to 2016. There was a significant decrease (32 per cent) in casualties from remote-controlled IEDs, together with a more minor reduction (eight per cent) in those from pressure-plated IEDs. This is significant because IEDs were, for many years, the main cause of civilian casualties; the decrease in remote-controlled IED caused casualties suggests better targeting by insurgents. Again, though, the damage caused by IEDs cannot be minimised. In 2017, 1,856 civilians lost their lives or were injured by them. Pressure-plated IEDs, which are illegal due to their inherently indiscriminate nature, disproportionately affected civilians in the south, with about half of all those killed and injured living in in Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan provinces. Here, insurgents fought to retain territory and “typically placed the devices along roads mainly used by Afghan national security forces, but also frequented by civilians,” according to UNAMA.

Both the reduction in casualties from ground engagements and IEDs were partially offset by a large increase in casualties from suicide and complex attacks. More civilians were killed and injured in this type of attack in 2017 than in any year since 2009 when UNAMA began systematically recording civilian casualties. The Taleban and ISKP both employed this tactic.

Insurgents killed and injured more civilians in suicide and complex attacks than in ground engagements (2,295 compared to 1,368). The disproportion was especially marked with ISKP; 83 per cent of the civilians it killed and injured were in suicide and complex attacks (830 civilian casualties: 308 deaths and 522 injured as a result of 21 attacks). (3)

ISKP claimed 19 of those attacks (UNAMA attributed a further two) and, as in 2016, all were against civilians. More than one third targeted Shia Muslims: five were against Shia places of worship, one a library in Herat and another a political gathering in a predominantly Shia neighbourhood of Kabul. ISKP also attacked the media, government offices, a cricket match and the Iraqi embassy. The civilians killed and injured in attacks claimed by ISKP (781) increased by 18 per cent in 2017 compared to 2016. Civilian casualties from the 27 attacks claimed by the Taleban (782) decreased by 22 per cent compared to 2016. (4) UNAMA’s figures, then, do not bear out the theory that the Taleban, because of the threat from the air, turned from ground engagements against population centres to carrying out suicide and complex attacks.

The city of Kabul bore the brunt of this type of attack with 1,612 civilian casualties (440 deaths and 1,172 injured), 17 per cent more than in 2016, and comprising 70 per cent of all civilian casualties from this tactic in 2017. The 31 May attack alone (which remained ‘unattributed’ by UNAMA ­– see AAN discussion of who might have been behind it here) caused more than one third of all civilian casualties in Kabul city in 2017 (at least 583 civilian casualties, 92 deaths and 491 injured). Paktia and Helmand also suffered suicide and complex attacks, including the targeting of banks where ANSF personnel were drawing out pay.

Sectarian attacks and those on places of worship

One of the most disturbing trends in the conflict in 2017 was the three-fold increase in attacks on places of worship, religious leaders and worshippers. Shia Muslims were especially hard hit, suffering 83 per cent of the resulting casualties. UNAMA attributed 499 civilian casualties (202 deaths and 297 injured) during 38 such attacks last year. The number of deaths doubled, compared to 2016 and injuries were up by a third. ISKP was responsible for the majority of those casualties, but UNAMA notes, the number of attacks both attributed to and claimed by the Taleban against religious figures and places of worship also increased in 2017. (UNAMA attributed one attack to pro-government forces.)

Air Strikes

Causing only six per cent of the total number of civilian casualties in 2017, it could be argued that air strikes, particularly those by the US, receive a disproportionate amount of media and political attention. Nevertheless, attention would seem to be warranted because civilian casualties have increased, by seven per cent compared to 2016 and that made 2017 the worst year on record for civilians to be killed and injured in air strikes. The fast-expanding Afghan Air Force is now carrying out more operations and was responsible for more civilian casualties than the US. (5)

Civilian casualties from airstrikes by the Afghan Air Force occurred throughout the country, in 25 of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, with the highest number in Faryab province. Civilian casualties from US strikes, however, were concentrated in three districts, Chahardara in Kunduz province, Deh Bala in Nangrahar and Sangin in Helmand province. Together, they accounted for over 50 per cent of all civilian casualties from airstrikes from the US Air Force.

An expansion of the Afghan Air Force is a key component in the Afghan and US strategy of trying to hold and re-capture territory (see discussion here and here). The Afghan Air Force made nearly double the number of airstrikes in the first ten months of the Afghan solar calendar (21 March 2017 to 20 January 2018) than the previous ten months – 425 airstrikes, compared to 219. UNAMA attributed 309 civilian casualties (99 deaths and 210 injured) to the Afghan Air Force (49 per cent of the total) in 68 aerial operations.

The US has also seen the numbers of sorties flown and weapons released rise sharply; it released 4,361 weapons in 2017, compared to 1,337 during 2016. UNAMA attributed 246 civilian casualties (154 deaths and 92 injured) to the US Air Force (38 per cent of the total) in 49 aerial operations (while the US caused fewer casualties, it caused more deaths). (6) Four of the 49 operations each resulted in more than ten civilian deaths; they included offensive strikes on narcotics factories (see AAN reporting here and civilians mistaken for insurgents, and defensive strikes in civilian-populated areas.

The increase in sorties and weapons dropped in 2017 was far higher than the increase in civilian casualties, indicating that the quality of safeguards is not falling. As UNAMA put it, “the reduced harm ratio suggests improvements in targeting and civilian protection procedures.” Even so, it said:

…as civilian casualties from aerial operations reached record high levels in 2017, UNAMA once again recommends that both the Afghan Air Force and international military forces review targeting criteria and pre-engagement precautionary measures, including considering the high likelihood of civilian presence in populated areas and starting from a position of considering all persons to be civilians unless determined otherwise.  

Search operations

Search operations became the fourth leading cause of civilian casualties caused by pro-government forces in 2017. There were 123 casualties (79 deaths and 44 injuries) during 33 search operations, mostly in Nangrahar and Kandahar provinces, an increase of 40 per cent compared with 2016. Most involved National Directorate of Security (NDS) Special Forces (86 casualties, 61 deaths and 25 injured, in 23 incidents). They were either acting alone or partnered with international military forces (although UNAMA does not specify, these were likely either CIA paramilitaries or US Special Forces).

NDS Special Forces, says UNAMA, “appear to operate outside of the regular NDS chain of command, resulting in a lack of clear oversight and accountability given the absence of clearly defined jurisdiction for the investigation of any allegations against them.” The geographic concentration – in Nangrahar province, there were 12 search operations involving NDS resulting in 38 casualties and in Kandahar, 37 casualties in seven search operations – suggests no-one is reigning these units in. UNAMA describes NDS Special Forces entering one home in Mohmand Dara district and shooting dead all seven civilian men, all from one family, who were inside. They were IDPs from Achin district who had fled the heavy fighting there.

The Khost Protection Force, a paramilitary pro-government armed group outside any formal tashkil, also continues to operate with impunity, for example, killing a boy and injuring two others (all between 7 and 11 years of age) during a search operation in Sabari district, Khost province. 

Use of Children in the conflict

UNAMA reports on two pre-existing dynamics, now being substantiated, to do with the conflict-related use and abuse of children. It said it had verified 83 boys (under-18s) recruited and being used “as bodyguards, [to] assist in intelligence gathering, plant IEDs, carry out suicide attacks and participate in hostilities.” UNAMA attributed the recruitment and use of 40 boys to the Taleban, 19 boys to ISKP and 23 to the ANSF (mainly to the Afghan National and Local Police). This would appear to be an instance of under-reporting, given that UNAMA said it had also received “credible but unverified reports of 643 children recruited and used by armed groups.”

Also liable to be under-reported is the sexual abuse of children by government and anti-government forces: UNAMA said that, while researching child recruitment, it had verified four cases and received “credible and specific reports of 78 boys potentially victims of sexual abuse by parties to the armed conflict.” Boys were reported to have been forcibly recruited, or recruited under the false premise of an offer of employment, and subsequently sexually abused. The practice of bacha bazi – keeping boys for sex – has now been criminalised under Afghanistan’s new penal code. 

Conclusion

If the reduction in civilian casualties is to become a downward trend, rather than a one-year blip, some of the ways forward are clear. Government forces, UNAMA says, need to cease firing mortars and carrying out air strikes in civilian-populated areas and develop clear rules of engagement and tactical directives for using these weapons. It calls on the international military to support them and to strengthen its own “pre-engagement targeting protocols to prevent civilian casualties,” continue to conduct post-operation reviews and investigations and “ensure transparency, following allegations of civilian casualties from air strikes and search operations.” As for the insurgents, they need to stop targeting civilians and stop carrying out attacks in civilian-populated areas – whether suicide attacks, shooting or firing mortars. As the reduction in those being killed by government mortars and by the Taleban’s use of remote-controlled IEDs in 2017 shows, many lives can be saved from measures to protect civilians.

That the number of civilians killed and injured in the Afghan conflict has finally fallen after years of relentless increase is welcome. Even so, on average, 29 civilians lost their lives or were injured in the war every day last year, more than ten thousand in total. Just over a quarter of them were deliberately targeted, almost all by insurgents. Most of the casualties were preventable.

* As UNAMA says, figures are unlikely to be absolutely final. Reports of casualties from December, especially from remote areas, may still come in after the cut-off date for the annual report (7 January 2018) and those injured may die of their wounds. Some incidents may take months to verify. In previous years, there has been some fluctuation in the casualty figures in quarterly reports, for example, the civilian casualties for January to September 2016 were reported as 8,397 in 2016, revised to 8,531, when reported on in 2017 (a difference of 1.6%). Similarly with the 2016 mid-year report, there was a revision from 5166 (as reported in 2016), revised upwards to 5267 (a difference of 2%). UNAMA told AAN that, “The figures in each annual report are the most accurate.” It said the casualty figures tend to shift somewhat, but not by more than one per cent and usually do not go down.

 

 

(1) In 2016, pro-government forces caused more civilian casualties in ground engagements, reported UNAMA, than anti-government elements, 1,773 compared to 1469.

(2) UNAMA gives this breakdown of those causing civilian casualties in ground engagements in 2017:

Pro-Government Forces Civilian Casualties Afghan National Army 548 (153 deaths and 395 injured) Afghan National Police 111 (25 deaths and 86 injured) Afghan Local Police 42 (10 deaths and 32 injured) Afghan National Security Forces 183 (43 deaths and 140 injured) Pro-Government Armed Groups 70 (12 deaths and 58 injured) Anti-Government Elements Civilian Casualties Taleban 1,286 (284 deaths and 1,002 injured) Daesh/ISIL-KP 23 (10 deaths and 13 injured) Unidentified AGEs 49 (10 deaths and 39 injured) Undetermined 933 (226 deaths and 707 injured)

 

(3) The rest of the ISKP-caused casualties comprised: 104 civilian casualties (45 deaths and 59 injured) from 11 IEDs attacks, and mostly in Nangrahar: 29 civilian casualties (25 deaths and four injured) from 23 targeted killing incidents; 23 civilian casualties (10 deaths and 13 injured) from ground engagements; 13 civilian casualties (10 deaths and three injured) from abductions; and one death from unexploded ordnance.

(4) ISKP suicide and complex attacks resulted in far higher civilian casualty rates than the Taleban’s: 794 civilians were killed and injured in 31 Taleban attacks and 803 in 21 ISKP attacks. UNAMA could not attribute 671 casualties from such attacks, including the 31 May bombing in Kabul.

(5) The Afghan Air Force was responsible for 309 civilian casualties (99 deaths and 210 injured) (49 per cent) in 68 aerial operations; the US Air Force was responsible for 246 civilian casualties (154 deaths and 92 injured) (38 per cent) in 49 aerial operations; 76 civilian casualties (42 deaths and 34 injured) in 21 incidents could not be attributed.

(6) UNAMA could not attribute 76 civilian casualties (42 deaths and 34 injured) in 21 air strikes.

 

 

“‘Speaking truth to power’ is a phrase we often use,” wrote Raza Rumi, one of Pakistan’s leading liberal journalists, about Asma Jahangir, one of Pakistan’s most outstanding human rights and pro-democracy activists, who has died today in her home city of Lahore after heart failure. “She lived, practiced it till her last breath.” Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission that she co-founded became an inspiration and something of a model for the one in Afghanistan. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig met Asma Jahangir when he was a political officer in the UN mission to Afghanistan, UNSMA and here presents an obituary of her. 

Raza Rumi’s sentiment is one shared by many mourning the passing of Asma Jahangir, the small, resolute and, in private, “mischievously affable”, lawyer and “street fighter” who only reached the age of 66.

Asma Jilani Jahangir was born in 1952, five years after Pakistan had been founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah had wished it to be a secular state, but it drifted away into military dictatorship and Islamism. To defend and stand up for Jinnah’s idea was the thread that wove through Asma Jahangir’s life. It earned her the life-long hatred of the mullahs and the military, as well as threats, beatings and imprisonment.

She was six years old when, as Dexter Filkins wrote, her father – a wealthy landowner and government official – surprisingly quit his job in protest against the first military coup in 1958 and moved into opposition. The young Asma witnessed how he was arrested, harassed, survived an assassination attempt and the family’s land was confiscated. Filkins quoted Asma telling him that her father had said:

… that once a military government came it was a declaration that civilian institutions have failed. He was not really an idealist by nature, but he was strangely committed to the question of democracy and human rights.

Asma’s mother, college-educated but not politically active, took over caring for the family by opening a clothing business.

Asma seems to have been inspired by her father’s attitude. In the late 1960s, at 17, she organised her first demo, a women’s protest against the military regime. She climbed on the Punjab governor’s house and hoisted a black flag on it. Ever since, and subsequently armed with a law degree, she stood at the forefront of all pro-democratic struggles in her country. “However flawed democracy here is,” she told Filkins, “it is still the only answer.”

With her father, she set up a trust fund for political prisoners. She also fought against impunity in cases of so-called honour killings, against child labour and bonded labour (a form of slavery), capital punishment and so-called extra-legal killings of activists and journalists by Pakistan’s military establishment. She defended women who had been raped, but were accused of zina, adultery, and members of religious minorities against accusations of blasphemy. Professionally, she made it up to Advocate at Pakistan’s High Court and was also the first female leader of Pakistan’s Supreme Court bar association

With sister Hina Jilani and other colleagues, she founded Pakistan’s first ever women’s-run law firm in 1980 and later Pakistan’s first pro bono legal aid centre as well as a shelter for women who had suffered violence. She protested against the country’s Islamisation, the result of the introduction of the so-called Hudood ordinances, under military dictator General Ziaul-Haq in 1977. When she joined the popular movement for the restoration of democracy in 1983, she was incarcerated for the first time. An iconic photograph from that time shows her in her lawyer’s robe, angrily defending herself against two veiled, club-wielding policewomen.

Asma Jahangir also participated in the lawyers’ protest movement against the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf and, in recent days, supported the civil-rights Pashtun Long March in Pakistan.

In 1986, she was a founding member and Secretary General, later chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. In 2001 and 2002, she advised UNSMA, then the UN mission to Afghanistan, about establishing a similar commission for this country; that idea became part of the 2001 Bonn agreements.

By then, also well-known and respected internationally, she was appointed the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary or Summary Executions (1998-2004), on Freedom of Religion and Belief (2004-10) and, since 2016 and until she died, for human rights in Iran.

The 2003 Afghanistan report

As the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Jahangir visited Afghanistan – including Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat – in October 2002. She said (quoted here) she had heard “horrifying” accounts of summary executions carried out no by the former Taliban regime, but also, both before and after the Taleban. She criticised the “atmosphere of impunity and fear” in the country and that “those who leak information on violations of human rights are threatened.” She also criticised a then recent example of “excessive use of force by coalition forces“ in Uruzgan province in July 2002 where, according to Afghan authorities, 48 civilians were killed and 117 wounded in United States air strikes and “despite interventions by local (non-governmental organizations), the authorities have looked the other way.“

In her mission report, she called for an international inquiry into human rights abuses in Afghanistan during the previous 23 years of war:

The Special Rapporteur recommends that an international and independent Commission of Inquiry be constituted, backed by the United Nations, as a first step towards accountability. The mandate of the Commission should be limited to undertake an initial mapping-out and stocktaking of grave human rights violations of the past, which could well constitute a catalogue of crimes against humanity. The period should begin from the “Saur Revolution” (1978) and end with the establishment of the Interim Authority.

 Parallel to this, the [Afghan] Independent Human Rights Commission should be encouraged and supported to debate and solicit wider opinion on possible mechanisms for transitional justice.

AP quoted her as also saying:

The findings of this commission of inquiry will be a stepping stone toward setting up a mechanism of accountability so that perpetrators are brought to justice. 

Jahangir’s report included a seven page “glimpse” into past and present grave human rights violations and a report on a recent trial in Kabul of a perpetrator of human rights violations who was sentenced to death; she expressed grave concerns about the lack both of due process and – as the death sentence was given – “conformity with the United Nations safeguards and restrictions relating to the imposition of capital punishment.”

Jahangir’s report became the basis for the UN’s ‘Mapping” Report’ (2005) that was published briefly before being removed. It used public sources to map the war crimes of 1978 to 2001. The report was cached and published and an account of why it was repressed by AAN guest author Ahmed Rashid can be read here). This reluctance to face up to past war crimes, along with granting amnesties for war criminals and a failure to hold more recent perpetrators to account are all part of the background as to why the International Criminal Court may decide to investigated Afghanistan for post-2003 war crimes (see most recent AAN analysis here).

The struggle goes on

Malala Yusufzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Pakistan’s younger human rights icon, tweeted on Sunday:

Heartbroken that we lost Asma Jahangir – a saviour of democracy and human rights. I met her a week ago in Oxford. I cannot believe she is no more among us. The best tribute to her is to continue her fight for human rights and democracy.

Raza Rumi, the journalist quoted earlier called her a hero for the way she questioned the powerful – mullahs, the military, judges and politicians – and defended the downtrodden, for facing threats and attacks never being afraid.

Tributes have also starting to come in from Afghans. Describing her as a mentor and inspiration, former Afghan Independent Human Rights Commissioner, Nader Nadery, told AAN that Asma Jahangir had been the bravest person he had ever known:

“Until her last days she did not stop courageously standing up to dictators, criminals and religious fanatics….The void she leaves behind will not easily be filled. She will remain an icon of struggle for human rights and democracy in one of the most troubled parts of our world.” 

Asma Jahangir leaves behind husband Tahir Jahangir and three grown up children, two daughters and a son, as well as grandchildren. She also authored two books: Divine Sanction? The Hadood Ordinance (1988) and Children of a Lesser God: Child Prisoners of Pakistan (1992).

Also read this excellent article about her by Saroop Ijaz in the Pakistani Herald (2016).

 

Edited by Kate Clark

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

31 January was the deadline for victims of Afghan war crimes to share their experiences and opinions with the International Criminal Court (ICC). Based on information so far released by the ICC, the Court has received 345 representations on behalf of more than seven hundred thousand victims. These representations are important as they will factor in to the ICC’s assessment about whether prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been committed in Afghanistan over the past 15 years is in the interests of justice. While those submissions may be enough, says AAN’s Ehsan Qaane (with input from Kate Clark), to convince the ICC that launching a full investigation is in the interests of justice, the ICC’s call for victim statements revealed worrying failures in its capacity for outreach and communication in Afghanistan.

Why do victims’ experiences and opinions matter for the ICC?

On 20 November 2017, Fatou Bensouda, the ICC Prosecutor, announced that she had requested the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber to authorise a full investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Afghanistan since May 2003, ie from when the ICC gained jurisdiction in Afghanistan (see AAN’s previous report). Based on the Court’s regulations, victims normally have 30 days to submit their “representations”, ie their “views and concerns” to the Court (see regulation 50 of the ICC Regulations). Referring to the insecurity and the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan, the ICC Victims Participation and Reparation Section, which is responsible for receiving the representations asked for an extension of 42 days. The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber agreed to an extension, but only until 31 January. That deadline was passed last week.

The victims’ representations are important for when the ICC decides if prosecutions are in the interest of justice. So far, the ICC prosecutor has sought to show that crimes meeting the ICC threshold have been committed in Afghanistan and that the Afghan and United States governments have been neither willing nor able to prosecute these crimes (AAN’s report here). For the ICC to move to a full investigation and thereafter prosecution, the Pre-Trial Chamber needs to be convinced not only by the prosecutor’s submission, but also that opening a full investigation would be in the interest of justice (ICC statute, art. 53 and art 15). According to the ICC’s Policy Paper on Victims’ Participation, developed by the Office of the Prosecutor in 2010, the “interests of justice” means the “interests of victims.” Consequently, for the Court, it is not so important how many victims agree with prosecutions, but it would be important if many victims said that they did not want them.

The ICC Registry published a form – in Dari, Pashto, English and Arabic – on which victims’ representations could be submitted. It had 12 questions focusing on identifying victims and the harm they had suffered. The victims were also asked if they agreed or disagreed with an ICC investigation, ie if they believed an ICC prosecution was in the interests of justice or not.

What is known about the victims’ representations?

According to information on the ICC’s website (link now removed), the ICC Registry has submitted six tranches of victims representations to the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber. Five have been posted in redacted form: on 7 and 21 December 2017, 11 January and 2 and 5 February 2018. The ICC has received 345 representation forms in total, on behalf of slightly more than seven hundred thousand victims (715,015). They were in Dari, Pashto, English and Arabic. From all these victims representations, just two families, comprising 20 victims, and 30 other individuals said they did not want an investigation. (1)

The ICC has not released the content of these submissions or the identity of the victims or their representatives; such information might jeopardise their security. However, it said that both individual and collective representations were submitted, including one from an organisation saying it represented “more than five hundred thousand” potential victims of Rome Statute crimes. (2)

Over the past month, a handful of those submitting representations have chosen to speak to the media. They may or may not be typical. They include:

* Mujib Khelwatgar, the chairperson of Nai, Supporting Open Media in Afghanistan, said at a press conference on 22 January 2018 that his organisation had reported to the ICC about the murder of 48 journalists and the injuring, kidnapping and threatening of 142 others by the Islamic State for Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Taleban, including the Haqqani network (see here).

* Fatima, speaking to the BBC, said she had submitted a representation about her mother, a cook at an orphanage in Kabul who was killed in a Taleban suicide bombing in July 2017. The BBC also reported that Ahmad Eshchi, governor of Jawzjan in the 1990s (more about him here) had submitted a representation accusing First Vice-President General Abdul Rashid Dostum, of detaining him in December 2016 and ordering nine bodyguards to torture and sexually assault him. (A court in Kabul sentenced seven of the bodyguards to 8 years in prison in November 2017, but no case has been filed against Dostum in any court.)

* The British legal campaign group Reprieve told AAN that it had submitted representations on behalf of three clients: Pakistani Ahmad Rabbani and Yemeni Khaled Qassim were both detained and allegedly tortured by the CIA in Afghanistan before being rendered to Guantanamo (where they remain) and Pakistani Yunis Rahmatullah who was detained by British forces in Iraq and transferred to the US military, which transferred him to Bagram, Afghanistan, (in breach of an agreement with the UK) where he was then held for a further ten years. Reprieve also submitted a representation concerning US drone strikes in Pakistan, arguing that the US treated both it and Afghanistan as one conflict zone (and therefore it was covered by the ICC investigation) and that the US had illegally killed civilians.

* A man from Helmand (who did not want to be named) told AAN he had sent his representation to the ICC on the day of the deadline, 31 January 2018. He alleged that, in 2004, he had been detained and tortured for nine days by the then provincial governor of Helmand, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada (for his bio see here) and that one year before, the governor’s guards had killed one of his cousins and injured one of his brothers while they attended a peaceful protest against the government’s anti-narcotics policy in Helmand.(3) “Afghan investigators,” he said, “had not even registered my complaint.”

The ICC will need to decide whether the representations submitted are crimes over which the ICC has jurisdiction, ie war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and crimes of aggression and that they meet the ICC’s ‘gravity threshold’. (4)

Was the ICC’s communication and outreach sufficient?

Afghans have had more time than most nationalities to submit representations. The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber agreed to double the normal period given to 72 days. However, that is still very short for a country where information about the ICC has been scarce, where there is an ongoing conflict that hampers access to many of the areas where war crimes have occurred, where many people are illiterate, do not have internet or electricity and – for good reasons – have learnt to be careful about the information they share.

The ICC does not have a field office in Afghanistan through which it could have communicated directly with media, victims and other stakeholders. According to its website, its Registry trained some Afghan civil society activists and through them contacted victims. The actions of these individuals appear to have been crucial for enabling many victims to submit forms (see footnote 1). As to other outreach, from the date of the Prosecutor’s announcement to the deadline for the collection of victims’ representations forms, the ICC communicated with Afghan journalists just twice, both times in the form of press releases. On 20 November 2017, the Prosecutor announced her request to open a full investigation into the situation in Afghanistan and on 19 January 2018 emphasised to journalists that the ICC was ready to answer any questions they might have (AAN was also emailed both press releases by the ICC).

Some Afghan and international media, mostly print and online newspapers, did report Bensouda’s November 2017 request for a full investigation and the ICC’s call for victims’ representations (for example, here and here). However, victims who are illiterate and live in remote areas had no access to these reports. For example, the author, attending a training session for war victims in Herat, one of the four largest cities after Kabul, found that none of the 11 victim trainees, who were from Herat, Farah and Ghor provinces, had heard of the ICC or knew of the Prosecutor’s announcement.

Moreover, among most Afghan war victims, it is common to feel that if they take any step against perpetrators, they will not see justice, but also their safety will be jeopardised. In the case of the ICC, victims feared the perpetrators might be able to access the representation forms and bring further harm to them. That fear made outreach by the ICC particularly crucial; it needed to explain to Afghans what the ICC is, what it is doing and, crucially, that it assures confidentiality for victims.

Those trying to help victims have described facing many difficulties in helping victims to make representations, some of them a product of ICC failures to communicate its mission. Aziz Rafiee, for example, the head of Afghanistan Civil Society Forum and a member of the Transitional Justice Coordination Group, whose organisation helped victims in the north of the country to fill out and submit their representations to the ICC, told AAN on 31 January 2018: “Some of the victims did not trust the ICC because they had not heard of it and did not know what it was.”

Difficulties were not just to do with poor communications however; the exceptionally tight time constraint also exacerbated other problems. Homaira Rasuly, chairwoman of an NGO working for women’s rights, Medica Afghanistan, who also works with a group of lawyers, told AAN that her organisation had sent a letter to the ICC on 28 January, requesting an extension of the deadline to 28 February 2018. The ICC replied that this was not possible. Yet, Rasuly argued, women victims are a vulnerable group who were facing additional troubles submitting representations; they often lack access to the internet and cannot go out of their homes without an accompanying male relatives. That means, Rasuly said, “They need support [to make representations] from people like us who can go to their homes. However, in December and January traveling to the remote areas is difficult as the roads are closed by snow.” She told AAN that she understood that few of the victims who had submitted representations to the ICC were women.

What happens next?

The judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber, based on the information provided by the Prosecutor (5) and the victims representations, now have to decide whether to authorise a full investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. The Prosecutor had said in November 2016 that there was a “reasonable basis to believe” that the US military, CIA and government forces had committed the war crime of torture and that the Taleban, including the Haqqani network, had committed a range of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, humanitarian personnel and protected objects; conscripting children and killing or wounding treacherously a combatant adversary. It also appears that ISKP may be added to those who could be investigated (see footnote 5).

If authorisation for an investigation is given, the Prosecutor will then have to decide which specific individuals the ICC will make cases against. In the period of investigation, victims may also share their representations in more detail and, if asked by the Prosecutor, provide evidence and documents. The investigation would not be limited to those who have recently made representations.

Providing an opportunity to victims to share their views with the ICC in the pre-trail stage should be the first step to engaging victims in the judicial proceedings of the ICC. Early engagement of victims can contribute a sense of ownership of the proceedings to victims. This is particularly important in Afghanistan as the ICC, its rules and its headquarters in The Hague remain unknown for most citizens. Yet, until the ICC Prosecutor sent her request to open an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan to the ICC pre-trail chamber, the ICC had mainly engaged with the Afghan government (AAN’s dispatch on the ICC-Afghanistan communications). The past couple of months’ efforts by the ICC to collect victims’ representations is the first time the Court has sought to engage directly with Afghan media, civil society and public.

The fact that at least 345 representations on behalf of more than seven hundred thousand victims were sent to the Court by the deadline does show that there is an interest in ICC proceedings in Afghanistan – and that Afghans do not want to forget the crimes that have been committed in Afghanistan. Also, the fact that, at least in the submissions we know about, only 50 individuals have said they did not want an investigation should help to convince the Pre-Trial Chamber that an investigation would be in the interests of justice.

At the same time, the ICC’s very limited outreach to media and through civil society organisations to victims does raise concerns about the Court’s understanding of how to work in Afghanistan and what is needed to engage with victims, especially in the conflict-ridden areas of the country. Should the Pre-Trial Chamber decide that the Prosecutor can open a full investigation, the ICC will need to learn from this first exercise and commit many more resources and thought to communication and outreach.

Edited Sari Kouvo and Kate Clark

(1) Five out of the six submissions have been reported:

5 February submission

165 victims representation forms submitted on behalf of 211,925 victims, including 787 families and 26 villages. 114 out of 165 were sent via email and 51 were submitted online. 136 representation forms were collective (language breakdown not given).

One individual representation and nine collective representations, submitted on behalf of a total of 29 individuals, said they did not want an investigation.

2 February submission

138 victim representation forms submitted on behalf of approximately 501,306 victims and 94 families. 64 online and 74 were collected and sent via email, the majority of them by interlocutors that the Victims Participation and Reparations Section (VPRS) had previously met during its information and training sessions. 80 were collective. 34 forms were submitted in English, 45 in Dari, 2 in Pashto and 57 in Dari, together with English translations.

One family of six requested no investigation.

11 January 2018 submission

28 victim representation forms submitted on behalf of approximately 350 victims, seven online and 21 collected and sent via email by civil society representatives. 23 were collective. Three forms were submitted in English, three in Pashto, one in Dari and 21 in Dari or Pashto together with English translations.

One family of 14 requested no investigation.

21 December 2017 submission

Seven victim representation forms were submitted on behalf of 1031 victims, six online and one sent by email. Four were collective. Six were in English and one in Arabic.

All requested investigations

7 December submission

Five victim representation forms submitted online on behalf of a total of 514 victims. Four were collective. Two forms were submitted in English, one in Dari and two in Pashto.

All requested investigations.

(2) As regards the representations, the ICC Registry has noted that the information provided is, as yet, insufficient to give the exact number of victims. However, it does consider it sufficient for a preliminary assessment to find out if those represented are victims according to the definition of victims provided in Rule 85 of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of the ICC (see here). After this assessment, the number of ‘victims’ may be fewer.

(3) The Helmandi a former investigator, said he met former Afghan Attorney General, Ishaq Aloko, and submitted his complaint to him. He said Aloko told him that he could not investigate such a powerful man. In December 2017, he met the current attorney general of Afghanistan, Farid Hamidi, who was his former colleague at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission before he was appointed as the Attorney General, and gave him his complaint letter. Hamidi’s legal advisors told him his case was barred by the statute of limitations based on current Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code (ie no criminal acts can be investigated ten years after they were allegedly committed).

(4) When examining the gravity of crimes, the Prosecutor looks into “the scale, nature, manner of the commission of the crimes, and their impact.” For a better understanding of the gravity threshold the example of the Prosecutor’s decision not to investigate the ‘flotilla case’ is useful. On May 31, 2010, the Israeli Defense Forces intercepted a humanitarian flotilla of eight boats en route to the Gaza Strip. In the course of boarding and taking control of the vessels, the IDF killed ten people and injured approximately fifty. The Prosecutor said it did not pass the gravity threshold.

(5) Another order from the Pre-Trial Chamber, preparatory to its decision whether or not to launch a full investigation, was made on 5 February. It called on the Prosecutor to provide additional supporting materials, noting gaps in the materials already provided with respect to the structure, organization, and conduct of Afghan Forces, the structure and organization of the Islamic State operating in Afghanistan, and the structure, interrogation policies, and conduct of US forces. The material requested from the Office of the Prosecutor was as follows:

1. Any publicly available report from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (“UNAMA”) on the treatment of detainees, apart from the reports from 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017 already submitted;
2. “Any publicly available report from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (“AIHRC”) on torture, apart from the report from 2012 already submitted;
3. The United Nations (“UN”) Secretary-General reports to the General Assembly on the topic: “The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security”, from the years 2003, 2004, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017;
4. Any publicly available report from the UN Secretary-General to the General Assembly on the topic “Children and armed conflict in Afghanistan”, apart from the report from 2008 already submitted;
5. Further clarification and information, to the extent possible, about the structure and organisation of the Islamic State operating in Afghanistan; and
6. Further clarification and information, to the extent possible, about the structure of the US forces for the time period after 2008; for the interrogation policies of the US forces for the time period after 2006; as well as for the conduct of the US forces for the time period after 2011.

There are tight deadlines for this: the Pre-Trial Chamber wants information about points 1-4 submitted by 9 February ad that for points 5 and 6 by 12 February.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Between 20 and 29 January 2018, there were five high profile attacks in major cities and districts in Afghanistan. The three by far largest ones happened in the capital Kabul. This feeds into a month-long period of such attacks that began in late December 2017. Altogether, almost 250 people, most of them civilians, were killed in these attacks. Three of them (and half of the attacks countrywide) have been claimed by the Islamic State and two by the Taleban, but with the changing dynamics of the Afghan conflict is it becoming increasingly difficult to trust the claims of responsibility or to attribute responsibility. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig – with input from the AAN team – tries to make sense of the attacks and what they mean for the continued conflict and politics in Afghanistan.

1. What happened and who claimed responsibility? 

The current wave of attacks represents a new peak of the urban terrorist campaign carried out by the Taleban and by local IS-affiliated groups. Since 28 December 2017, there have been eight attacks in three major cities, Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar.

The list of the attacks in major urban areas:

• On 28 December 41, mainly young, Shia civilians were killed by a suicide bomber among the audience at a Shia education centre Tote in West Kabul. The attack was claimed by the local branch of the Islamic State (IS), its ‘Khorasan province’ (ISKP), through an IS centre-related news channel.
• On 31 December, 18 people were killed by a bombing at a politician’s funeral in Jalalabad. There were conflicting reports as to whether a suicide bomber or a motorcycle bomb caused the explosion. The Taleban denied their involvement, an ISKP claim was reported.
• On 4 January, 11 people, mostly police personnel, were killed by a suicide bomber during a protest involving shopkeepers in eastern Kabul, Jalalabad Road. ISKP claimed responsibility (see here.)
• On 20 January, 40 people were killed by armed gunmen who stormed Kabul Continental Hotel. Those killed included mainly government IT specialists, crew members of a private Afghan airline and other Afghan and international hotel guests. This is the only attack where all the victims were not Afghan. 15 of those who died and several of those injured were foreigners. The Taleban claimed responsibility.
• On 23 January, five people were killed when armed attackers stormed the Save The Children office in Jalalabad. The attack was claimed by ISKP.
• On 27 January, four people – two police and two civilians – were killed during a suicide attack in Kandahar City, near the Aino Mena housing scheme, when a suicide bomber struck a police vehicle. The Taleban claimed the attack.
• On 27 January, 103 people were killed when a car bomb exploded in Kabul’s Sedarat Square. This attack was claimed by the Taleban.
• On 29 January, 11 soldiers were killed when gunmen stormed a base of the Afghan National Army’s 111th division in Kabul. Again, ISKP claimed responsibility for it.

High-profile attacks in urban areas tend to overshadow ongoing fighting in provinces. However, there has also been simultaneous fighting in a number of provinces outside Kabul over this period. On the days of the biggest attacks alone, 20 and 27 January, media and other reports registered fighting and other security incidents in seven other provinces.

ISKP claimed four attacks, the Taleban claimed and denied their involvement in one. However, it is increasingly difficult to assess the claims and to attribute responsibility. There are indications that the diverse pro-IS groups are claiming attacks that have not been carried out by them. There are also indications that the Taleban are denying their involvement in attacks when there are particularly high numbers of civilian casualties. (The Taleban’s notion of civilians is discussed below). For example, the Taleban denied their involvement in the 31 December attack in Jalalabad that killed 18 people. According to Al-Jazeera ISKP claimed responsibility for it.

For the Taleban, or the semi-autonomous Haqqani network, it might be convenient that the IS claims attacks that have resulted in considerable loss of civilian lives.

In Kabul, there also might be an infrastructure, logistics and possible personnel (‘terrorists to hire’) that can be utilised by the Haqqani network or other Taleban groups, splinter groups now sailing under an IS banner, and violent Pakistani sectarian (anti-Shia) groups.

2. What accounts for this peak in attacks? What are possible motives?

This is not the first peak of attacks over recent years. There have been an earlier series of and extremely fatal single attacks, such as the April 2016 truck bomb claimed by the Taleban (AAN report here) and the one on 31 May 2017 near the German embassy when some 150 people were killed. This latter attack was not claimed by any group, and the Taleban denied their involvement. On 7 August 2015, three attacks happened on one day in Kabul, including another truck bomb – again denied by the Taleban and not claimed by any group – which killed some 50 people killed and wounded several hundred (media report here). The period between 16 and 21 October 2017 saw a series of countrywide, mainly Taleban, attacks on districts centres and government forces installations, with one IS-claimed suicide attack against a Shia mosque in Kabul (AAN analysis here).

The July 2016 suicide bomb attack against a peaceful demonstration of mainly Hazaras (media report here) and the September 2016 attack on the American University in Kabul – again not claimed by any group – indicated that ‘soft targets’ were being attacked more frequently (AAN analysis here).

At least five factors have contributed to the current peak:

1. All parties to the conflict have been stepping up their campaigns. The Taleban have done so various times, during the US surge from 2009 to 2012, and again since 2014, when most of Western combat troops withdrew. Although the Taleban gained some more territory in 2017 (for more detail, see here), they lacked the spectacular success of catching a provincial centre, such as Kunduz in 2015. Afghan government troops are carrying out its own anti-insurgent operations (see statement here), but were unable to gain the initiative so far. They have had difficulties in holding the territory from which insurgents were expelled. The US are sending in more troops and are increasing airstrikes to roll back Taleban gains and turn the general trend.
2. The next phase in the Kabul Process, an ongoing initiative to mobilise, particularly regional, countries to support a peace process for Afghanistan, is set to take place in late February. So far, this process has excluded the Taleban. As a result, the Taleban feel marginalised and as though they are not treated as an actor in their own right. Therefore, they are applying pressure to be included in talks and may, therefore, want to disrupt initiatives unless this happens.
3. Terrorist attacks in urban centres do not directly change the balance of power on the battlefield, but do have propaganda impacts. Both groups want to send a signal to the Afghan population and government that they are capable of carrying out such attacks, even in the highly secured capital. There also seems to be an element of competition between the Taleban and IS, with IS being a relatively new player on the Afghan conflict scene and a competitor for funding and local support. Both groups need to show off their military capabilities to donors.
4. Pakistan continues to support the Taleban as a card in its regional power game; although it denies this vehemently. It is clear that at least parts of their leadership structure are there and that Pakistani authorities are aware of their whereabouts. This is reflected by periodical arrests and releases of Taleban-related individuals. They are also not prevented to gather and publicly raise funds. Often when there is talk about attempts to open the door for peace talks there is an upsurge of highly visible terrorist attacks. This discredits the Taleban as a reasonable partner in such talks in the eyes of the population. However, negotiations are on the table as one option for ending the war, also on the Taleban side. The Taleban’s Qatar office has been established and authorised to explore this option.
5. The Taleban might also try to capitalise on the on-going government crisis and its new peak in the wake of the dismissal of Balkh governor Atta by President Ghani. They might hope to further undermine the government at a moment when it is dealing with considerable internal power struggles.

3. What are the targets and who the victims of the attacks?

An estimated 232 people have been killed in the eight attacks since 28 December 2017. Although members of the security forces and private security guards (in the Kabul hotel attack) were among the victims in all attacks, most of them were civilians, according to preliminary media information. This was the case in the Kabul education centre bombing, the Jalalabad funeral bombing (even if police were also there), the Kabul hotel attack (see above) and the ‘ambulance’ bomb in Kabul, as well as the attack on Save The Children (four of the organisation’s staff and one policeman dead). Also see this video of the 27 January explosion’s impact inside Jumhuriat Hospital as shared on social media.

The Taleban have denied official figures and insist that, for example, most of the ‘ambulance bomb’ victims were police. This followed repeated declarations that they do not target ‘civilians’. In their 28 January 2018 statement (here, in Dari here) they claim most casualties were “officers and workers (mansubin wa karkonan) … inside the old Ministry of Interior building.” Kabul daily Etilaat Roz also quoted eyewitnesses that three cobblers and two street children were amongst those killed.

The reason for this discrepancy is that the Taleban definition of civilian does not correspond with that of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The Taleban allow, for example, attacks, not only on military targets, but also on civilian government installations and those of what they call “invaders.” It is also clear that the use of an emergency van rigged with explosives as a car bomb, as on 27 January in Kabul, contradicts the international humanitarian law. In their already quoted statement, the Taleban justified their recent attacks as a reply to the US strategy:

If you want to play power politics and talk through the barrel of the gun, then do not expect roses from the Afghans either and await such replies.

 UNAMA’s most recent reports show that the number of Afghan civilian casualties has also risen again as a result of US and Afghan airstrikes. Even excluding those that are awaiting investigation results, these attacks could amount to war crimes, and there is no justification for any party to commit such acts.

The IS acts more indiscriminately. It also attacks government and allied installations, particularly the Shia community, arguing that members of that community are involved in fighting the IS in the Middle East. After the 28 December Kabul attack, it issued a statement that the attacked facility was a “recruitment centre” for the Afghan (mainly Hazara) Fatemiyun militias fighting in Syria for the Assad regime, posted by Afghan IS watcher Mussa Imran (here; see also AAN analysis here); for the Fatemiyun, see AAN reporting here and here). In areas under ISKP control, it suppresses everyone who is in disagreement with it. There have been numerous executions of tribal elders, videos of which have been repeatedly posted online.

4 . What does the past month’s violence say about the security situation in Kabul and the conflict in Afghanistan?

As noted above, this peak of attacks does not – yet – constitute a major shift in the conflict or the modus operandi of the Taleban. However, every new attack adds new victims to the war and every new battle, especially in the provinces, causes more people to flee their homes. This contributes to the feeling of a worsening security situation and the feeling that the government and its security organs are incapable of stopping terror attacks. UNAMA has shown in its most recent civilian casualty reports that in 2016 and 2017 Kabul has experienced a rising number of attacks and casualties resulting from them. Also the UN’s downgrading of Afghanistan in its mission review from post- to in-conflict country reflects the general deterioration of security in the entire country.

Parts of the political opposition are trying to capitalise on the growing fear and rage over the carnage. They criticise the government for its alleged failure to protect the population from the attacks, with some groups demanding its resignation. This is similar to the events during the June 2017 protests that had also been partly caused by an IS-claimed bombing (see AAN analysis here). Protests demonstrations have been announced again. In fact, key government critics have been in governmental positions themselves, some until recently, when similar attacks (see above) happened. Experience shows that governments, even in much more stable countries, from Indonesia to France, have not proven themselves able to prevent terrorist attacks.

5. What does this mean for the prospects of peace (talks)?

The Taleban’s recent wave of highly fatal attacks, causing many civilian casualties, has not made the idea of a negotiated end to the war through talks with them more popular. The US president now has also ruled that out in a reaction to the attacks. The IS seems to be out of bounds for any negotiations anyway.

So, the dilemma remains: Can there be a military solution to Afghanistan’s many problems? Many observers agree there cannot, looking at the failed attempt during the 2009-12 US troop surge that both failed to defeat or force the Taleban to the negotiating table, with up to 140,000 foreign and some 300,000 government troops and police. However, many in the Afghan political class and the wider population seem to entertain the hope that a military solution could be achieved. This is shown by a number of reactions on social media, including from well-known Afghan politicians, to president Trump’s hardened stance toward Pakistan and his latest rejection of talks with the Taleban show. A local shura in Logar province reportedly awarded a bravery medal to him for his stance on Pakistan.

Given the current, much lower, number of foreign troops – around 15,000 now – with only elite parts of the Afghan forces with improved fighting skills, this remains doubtful. The entire Afghan force will still take years to be able to take over full security responsibility in practice. Also, the current US strategy has been presented so far as an attempt to prevent a Taleban take-over (AAN analysis here), which would require subsequent talks. The American ambiguity stands in the way of developing a clear-cut strategy to end the conflict.

As we have written recently, 2017 was a lost year for peace talks and the outlook for 2018 remains bleak on this, as the Afghan parties, and now the US, build new hurdles for a political resolution, being determined to escalate the war at the same time. Under these circumstances, the choice for Afghans – civilians, government and insurgents – is between talks with an opposite party they despise, or years of continued bloodshed.

As this dispatch was finalised, the Pakistan government had not made any last-minute extension to the ‘Proof of Registration’ identity cards for Afghan refugees residing in the country. Those cards were due to run out on 31 January 2018. Without an extension, a huge number of people could be forced to go back to Afghanistan in the middle of winter and to a volatile security situation. Pakistan has been a generous host to Afghan refugees for almost four decades, but in the last couple of years, it has displayed increasing inhospitably towards them. In 2016, it pushed out over a half a million Afghan refugees to Afghanistan, and as AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Ali Mohammad Sabawoon report, there are now fears of a repeat of that forced exodus.

Late on Wednesday, 31 January 2018, the Pakistan cabinet approved a 60-day extension in the Proof of Registration Cards for Afghan refugees. (see here, here and here).

In June 2016, Pakistan pushed back over a half a million Afghan refugees, many with only a few days’ notice, as AAN reported at the time (see here). This expulsion was linked to the authorities’ decision not to extend the Proof of Registration (PoR) cards, the temporary identity cards that some Afghans residing in Pakistan have had access to since 2007. (Afghans with PoR cards are called ‘registered refugees’; those without are called ‘undocumented’ and are often treated like illegal migrants by the Pakistani authorities; for a full explanation, see this AAN dispatch).

2018 seems to have started with equally harsh intentions. “There will be no extension [of the Proof of Registration] after 31 January and they [refugees] will have to go to their country,” a senior official in the State and Frontier Region (Safron) ministry told the Pakistani newspaper Dawn in the mid-January.

Politics and PoR cards

Pakistan’s position on not extending the PoR cards, according to the Pakistani newspaper Tribune, was taken in view of both the increasing hostile attitude of Kabul and the pressure tactics of Washington towards it. Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, the ambassador of Pakistan in the United States, also commented on 19 January 2018 on Afghan refugees in Pakistan, saying they had turned into a security threat for their hosts. “Their youths are rented by terrorist groups,” he said. “We will deport both Haqqanis and Taleban to their own country including the Afghan refugees living in Pakistan.”

The turn in US policy towards Pakistan – President Trump said there should be increased efforts to persuade Pakistan to stop supporting the Taleban (see this AAN analysis) – and its deployment of more troops to Afghanistan, coupled with Kabul’s strengthening ties with India (see this AAN analysis here), all appear to have fuelled Pakistan’s reluctance to extend the PoR cards, hitting where it hurts, when it can hurt. Afghan refugees may well feel like pawns in a situation they have no control over.

A brief history of the extensions of PoR cards

In 2016 and since then, Afghan refugees have been on increasingly shaky ground when it comes to knowing how long they might be able to stay in Pakistan. Islamabad started providing Afghans with individualised computerised identity cards called Proof of Registration (PoR) in 2007, making them ‘documented refugees’. Although the cards were granted for only limited periods, they did enable holders to open bank accounts, purchase mobile phone SIM cards and get driving licenses. Most importantly, they provided a legal protection from arbitrary arrest, detention or deportation under Pakistan’s Foreigner’s Act. This improved the lives of many Afghans in Pakistan. In the beginning, the Pakistani government issued Afghan refugees with PoR cards for a period of two years or longer. The first PoR cards issued in 2007 were valid until December 2009. The second extension was until June 2013, the third until December 2015.

The PoR cards issuance policy became more ad-hoc and erratic in 2016 when the Pakistan government started extending the cards for only short periods of time, first, until June 2016 and, then, December 2016 (see this AAN analysis). In December 2016, under pressure from the international community, Pakistan extended PoR cards until March 2017. Just before the PORs were due to run out, on 24 February 2017, the Ministry of States and Frontier Region announced that the cards would be extended until 31 December 2017. The last one-month extension was granted by the Pakistani cabinet on its 3 January 2018 meeting. It allowed registered refugees to stay in Pakistan only for the rest of that month, until 31 January 2018. If it is not extended, the former card-holders refugees will have no legal protection from deportation.

Reactions to the 31 January deadline

In light of this Pakistan’s approach to Afghan refugees, the Afghan High Council on Migration held a meeting last week, at which President Ghani said that the refugees’ probable imminent return should be classed as a national emergency. The international organisations working with refugees and returnees have also been making efforts to help the Afghan and Pakistani governments reach a deal on this issue. Deputy head of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Sarah Craggs told AAN that IOM and other international organisations were still hopeful that Pakistan would extend the PoR cards, especially after months of significant high-level international pressure to do so. “There is some indication from Pakistan that they want to ensure dignified and voluntary returns,” Craggs said. “If extended,” said Craggs, “the PoR cards are likely to run through July 2018.” If that extension does not happen, she said it would put Afghanistan and its people “in a very vulnerable situation.” She called an extension “pretty critical,” saying if it does not come, “it will be extremely destabilising.” Craggs said that in 2016, “when there was a significant increase in returns, the humanitarian community launched a Flash Appeal and we may need to consider similar, depending on the situation.” She said that “returns over the past few years have already stretched resources, and there is a consideration of the absorption capacity…Most people [who have already come back] don’t have land and access to basic services.”

How many Afghan refugees have returned so far?

Already, since 2001, more than 3.6 million Afghan refugees have returned home from Pakistan. There was, initially, a huge push by UNHCR, international donors and the Afghan government to bring the refugees back ­– the homecoming was cast as proof that the new regime was popular. Also, in the first years after the Taleban regime was overthrown, conditions in Afghanistan seemed amenable to people re-starting their lives there. Over 1.6 million people returned from Pakistan in 2002. Between 2003 and 2015 between 50,000 and 400,000 returned each year. Then in summer of 2016, a huge number, on a scale not seen for over a decade, of over 600,000 Afghan refugees returned to Afghanistan (see this AAN analysis). Between July and early November 2016, UNOCHA reported, it was not uncommon to see as many as 4,000 people – sometimes more – pass through the border crossings at Torkham and Spin Boldak in a single day. Many were forced to return at short notice, after receiving 48-hour and/or a week’s notice to leave the country. They included those who had been living in Pakistan since the Soviet occupation (1979-89) when millions of Afghans sought refugee across their country’s borders. The younger ‘returnees’ comprise many who have never lived in Afghanistan. Some are even the children of those who have never lived in Afghanistan. Many of the returning Afghans have found themselves in a desperate situation in their homeland, with neither jobs nor proper housing.

The reasons for the mass returns in 2016, according to United Nations agencies and human rights organisations were fear of harassment and oppression by the Pakistani authorities (see this Human Rights Watch report (here and here), or in the case of undocumented refugees, fear of expulsion, as they are seen as illegal migrants and often subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or deportation under Pakistan’s Foreigner’s Act. The first-ever Afghan government media campaign called Khpel Watan, Gul Watan (“One’s own homeland, a dear (literally flower) homeland”) aimed at encouraging Afghans to return ‘home’, also contributed to increased numbers of returns. (See this AAN analysis).

Last year, fewer refugees returned from Pakistan – 57,411 in total, according to UNHCR who supported them. In July 2017, however, the UNHCR, together with the Pakistan and Afghanistan governments, launched a programme to register undocumented Afghans living in Pakistan, estimated to number between 600,000 and one million. They should receive Afghan Citizen (AC) cards, which provide them with legal protection from arbitrary arrest, detention or deportation under Pakistan’s Foreigner’s Act. The AC cards also allow Afghans to stay in Pakistan for the time being, until they can be issued documents, such as passports, by the government of Afghanistan. The initiative was a significant step aimed at regularising the stay for many Afghans at a time when return to their home country may not be possible.

Since 1 January 2018, only 1,573 undocumented Afghans returned from Pakistan. There has not been any return of documented refugees because the UNHCR repatriation programme is closed during winter.

This all adds up, according to IOM estimates, to about 2.4 million Afghans still residing in Pakistan: 1.3 million are refugees, ie people registered with Pakistani authorities and in possession of PoR cards; 1.1 million undocumented of which 900,000 have been registered with AC cards, but not all them have been granted yet, and 200,000 people still in limbo with neither PoR nor AC cards.

Impact of a push back on Afghanistan Pakistan

Following Pakistan’s decision of 3 January 2018 to extend the PoR cards for one month only, IOM’s Craggs told AAN that the Afghan government came up with a contingency plan, which includes ‘proactive diplomacy’ and ‘advocacy for gradual voluntary return’. Proactive diplomacy included the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation (MoRR) approaching the Pakistan government with a request for an extension. Rohullah Hashimi, the advisor for international affairs at MoRR told AAN that they asked Pakistan “not to mix humanitarian issues with politics.” He added that they were waiting to see “how much the Pakistani government was serious in its decision.” He insisted MoRR did have plans for returnees, including providing settlements for some within existing communities and opening camps for others in provinces bordering Pakistan. “We have already talked to UN agencies and international NGOs in Afghanistan and they promised to assist us,” Hashimi told AAN. However, the Afghan government does not have a good track record on supporting returnees; in 2016, despite openly inviting refugees to come back to Afghanistan, primary services like health and education in border provinces were not prepared for the influx of people (see this AAN analysis).

The return of a huge number of Afghan refugees would definitely put enormous pressure on Afghanistan. The Afghan government has been struggling to provide services to those that returned in 2016. Any returnees in 2018 would need not only food, employment, shelter and basic services, but a secure environment in which all of these services can be delivered (see this AAN analysis about 2017 security trends).

Any push back of Afghan refugees will also have some impact on Pakistan. Despite the fact that the majority of the refugees living in Pakistan are poor and Pakistan sees most of them as an economic burden, they, nevertheless, contribute to Pakistan’s economy with their skilled and unskilled labour. In 2016, when Pakistan decided to push Afghan refugees back to Afghanistan, a newspapers from Balochistan province in Pakistan wrote that, after the Afghans refugees withdrew their money from their bank accounts, in just a few days, the banks were emptied.

Instead of a conclusion: People’s concerns

Afghans residing in Pakistan are worried about a possible push back. The fact that the PoRs have not been extended beyond January is particularly problematic as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) voluntary repatriation programme, a key mechanism that provides for the returnees documented with the Pakistan government with some help to return, is closed during the winter months. The programme, that has been running since 2002, provides 200 USD cash per individual holding PoR cards. Children under the age of five are not entitled to cards, but are marked on the backside of one of their parent’s card and also receive the same amount.

Nur Muhammad, a shopkeeper living in Loralai district of Quetta is in a typical position for an Afghan refugee in Pakistan. He told AAN that if he is forced to return, he does not know what he will do with his business. “I have a business of nearly six million Pakistani Rupees (approximately 55,000 USD) and have already paid the annual rent of 360,000 Pakistani Rupees (approximately 3,500 USD) for 2018 to the owner of the shop,” he explained. If pushed back to Afghanistan, he said, “What should I do with this money and business?” He said the government of Pakistan had given them a one-month notice and when we spoke to him, on 29 January, there were just two days to go and no news as to whether it might extend their PORs. “If the Pakistani government wanted us to go to our country, it would have been better if they had warned us at least four months in advance.” He has additional worries: Faryab is insecure, he said, and he would not dare to transfer his family and shop there now.

Some local civil society organisations are also expressing their worries. The Afghan refugees committee from Peshawar, for example, asked the Pakistan government to allow for at least a one year extension. They highlighted that Afghan refugees in Pakistan are afraid of “insecurity, night raids by American forces, the presence of Daesh and Taleban.” These, they said, are the main factors hampering people’s decision to return. The Norwegian Refugees Council (NRC) also recently published a report calling on the different refugee hosting countries, including Pakistan, not to deport Afghan refugees at a time when security is deteriorating in Afghanistan.

Both refugees and agencies are worried about a possible mass push back of people across the border at a time when Afghanistan is not safe, services and employment opportunities for returnees are not evident and they would not have had time to prepare themselves. The question is whether these humanitarian concerns are equally important to those with the power to decide their fates.

 

Edited by Sari Kouvo and Kate Clark

 

 

 

Continuing our look back at key developments in Afghanistan in 2017, after migration and peace talks, we come to security. Tracking trends in security has become more difficult, as more areas suffering conflict have become inaccessible and those fighting – both Afghan and international –less transparent. However, AAN’s Thomas Ruttig has identified indicators to gauge what the trends were in 2017, compared both to 2016 and to 2014 when the character of western military involvement changed. He confirms that these trends show that the Afghan war became more violent and widespread in 2017.

Why measure security trends?

Measuring how successfully (or not) the post-2001 intervention in Afghanistan has gone so far requires an analysis of the country’s security situation. But fact-based information has become scarcer and because it is used in specific political contexts, that are often dominated by domestic political issues, particularly in the run-up to elections, interpretations of what data there is has become politicised.

One example is the discussion over Afghan security in the context of the large refugee movements of 2015/16 and whether it is safe for governments to deport rejected asylum seekers back to Afghanistan or not. Even though significantly fewer asylum seekers are now arriving in Europe, including from Afghanistan (AAN’s 2017 review of this topic here), this issue still dominates the discourse in many western countries, which are also troop contributors to the Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan. Several of them have recently further tightened asylum laws and practice.

In Germany, for example, the government in Berlin came under heavy public pressure over the entire period from 2015 to 2017 about how it steadfastly denied any deterioration in Afghanistan’s security situation in order to justify deportations. (1) When even governments of some of the German federated states (Länder) expressed doubts about whether that correctly reflected reality, Berlin turned to the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, to get a third opinion in the autumn of 2016. When the UNHCR sent what a leading German weekly, Die Zeit from Hamburg, called a “diplomatic but nevertheless unequivocal” rejection of the official German position, Berlin chose to ignore this and stick to its own position. (2)

The German debate was not made easier by the fact that most government reports relevant for the topic, including the one with the original October 2016 assessment, are classified. This is also the case in other European countries. In Germany, they are only made accessible to members of parliament and parties involved in asylum court cases. (The government argues that informing the members of parliament was informing the public, as they had been elected by it.)

The available information: fewer sources, less transparency

For many years, the international military in Afghanistan – ie the US/NATO-led ISAF mission – provided regular and comparable public information statistics on the war, for example about the number of enemy-initiated and other security incidents in the country (in the AAN archive; see also this AAN report on one aspect of them). In 2013 it chose to not release this information any longer (see AAN reporting this here). (Its regularly publishing of the number, origins and distribution of NATO and allied troops in the country did continue, see archive of the so-called ISAF placemats, that were published almost monthly, here.)

As to the other main actors in the conflict, Afghan government forces have only ever provided information on security incidents and casualties piecemeal and irregularly. The Taleban have been publishing a stream of ‘incident reports’ over a number of years and for the first time, at the end of 2017, these were put into a web-based report titled “Afghanistan in the year 2017.” But it does not summarise the number of claimed attacks and casualties caused.

Detailed and regular public reporting by NATO and US forces partly stopped and partly significantly slowed down after the ISAF mission was closed on 31 December 2014 and replaced by Resolute Support. The new mission is significantly smaller than ISAF and has a more limited mandate – now without a combat element and concentrating on training, assisting and advising exclusively. (3) The US military alone is also involved in a ‘can be combat’ mission, Freedom’s Sentinel, so does have more personnel on the ground. NATO argues that, after the so-called ‘security transition’ to an Afghan lead, its responsibility to report officially ended and this was now the responsibility of the Afghan authorities. (4) Without ISAF’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams that had existed in most provinces (here a list from 2010 and more details tables and a map in this undated NATO handbook, pp 99-112), it did indeed become more difficult for NATO to collect its own first-hand information on security incidents around the country.

This argument, though, only carries that far. Command and control as well as intelligence gathering and analysis structures remained (the ISAF headquarters was basically just relabelled), so that RS clearly has a capacity also for reporting. The US component of the international forces clearly still has some capacity, as the reports of the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) show; they regularly feature figures provided by the US military. The US military also regularly issues reports to Congress on “Enhancing Security and Stability in Afghanistan” that are publicly available and contain some figures that can be used for establishing indicators (the most recent report, released in December 2017, here). This report says that “the coalition relies largely on [Afghan armed forces] reporting for all metrics.” (5)

After ISAF’s decision, other entities – such as the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, now the International NGO Safety Organization (INSO) used also to regularly and publicly report security incidents, but took their quarterly assessments out of the public sphere in 2013. They felt their data had become the subject of protracted discussions that could endanger the providers of their information, namely NGOs in the field, the protection of which (and not providing public information), was ANSO/INSO’s mandate.

The UN continues to regularly provide various data in publicly available quarterly reports from its Afghanistan Special Representative to the Security Council (UNSC) and in its humanitarian agencies’ reporting. It does not state what sources it uses in the reports to the UNSC, but it can be assumed that it is provided figures from the US military and Afghan government.

Apart from this, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), a European Union organisation, provides extensive data down to the district level in its annual “Country of Origin Information Report” on Afghanistan’s security situation (most recent one published in December 2017, here). Geographically, its breakdown goes beyond the UN and US data, which is usually region-specific only. (Afghanistan’s security forces are structured along eight regions comprising several provinces each.) EASO also uses a lot of open-source information from media and think-tanks, as well as some classified data. It also interviews experts. In its most recent report, however, EASO has not reported in full years when it comes to numbers of incidents. This makes it difficult to compare its data, for example, with the UNAMA reports, whose reporting period starts on 1 January. Also it allows only limited comparability with EASO’s own reports from earlier years.

Importantly, it is clearly stated in EASO’s 2017 report that “this document does not claim to be exhaustive. If a particular event, person or organisation is not mentioned in the report, this does not mean that the event has not taken place or that the person or organisation does not exist.“ This hints at the possibility that there could be for example, an unknown number of unreported security incidents.

What indicators?

In the face of shrinking publicly available data, it is necessary to compile and assess what is there, particularly that which is published at regular intervals, meaning it can be used to identify trends over time, and to identify indicators that are meaningful. We suggest having five such indicators: (6)

• The number of security-related incidents

The number of incidents is a key direct indicator reflecting the intensity and geographical spread of the fighting in the country. ‘Incidents’ include military activities by all parties in the war such as air strikes or ground engagements, such as battles and ambushes, what the UN call ‘complex’, bomb and IED attacks’, assassinations and other types of violence (these categories can overlap), but also abductions and the discovery of weapons depots etc. (7) On this indicator, regular data is still available, despite the growing silence on the military side, for example from the UN and EASO.

In the US military’s reports (see for example here), it is argued that “effective enemy initiated attacks” (ie those that result in casualties) are “the most representative metric of overall security conditions rather than the total number of reported security incidents” as the Afghan forces “often do not report insurgent attacks that do not result in casualties” [Italics by AAN]. But this particular kind of attack is not regularly provided in those reports. Given this method of measuring, the total will be a portion of a larger total of insurgent attacks (a figure not given in the US reports), as it excludes those that were ‘ineffective’.

Sub-categories of this indicator could include the number of airstrikes and dropped ‘munitions’ or ‘weapons’. There may also be a sub-category of enemy-initiated and pro-government forces initiated attacks.

• Civilian casualties figures

The figures for Afghan civilian casualties are regularly reported by UNAMA, every six months with short quarterly updates, in its ‘protection of civilians’ reports. It provides breakdowns, and detail, in terms of the causes of casualties and the source (pro or anti-government forces); it also gives gender and adult/child breakdowns and regional trends. Similar to the US reporting of the number of ‘effective’ incidents, it can be expected here, too, that there is a grey zone, ie a number of non- or ‘underreported’ casualties, as UNAMA only includes cases in its reports that have been verified by “at least three different and independent types of sources, i.e. victim, witness, medical practitioner, local authorities, confirmation by party to the conflict, community leader or other sources” (see here). (8) UNAMA’s figures are also used in all above-mentioned US and EU reports.

There are also Afghan organisations and media who collect and publish figures about Afghan civilian casualties (see more below).

Sub-categories that could also be used include incidents of violence against Afghan media workers and aid workers (both Afghan and international). These are regularly provided by Afghan and international watch dog organisations.

• Afghan armed forces casualties figures

These figures had been consistently reported by the US military to the SIGAR, although they have rarely been provided to the public directly. These have now also become a victim of curbs on transparency. As the SIGAR revealed in his July 2017 report, the US forces in Afghanistan have, “at the Afghan government’s request, […] classified or otherwise restricted information about the ANSF’s performance.” (9) Apart from the casualty figures, this applies to “personnel strength, attrition, capability assessments, and operational readiness of equipment.” (The US government has also decided not to publish exact figures on the additional troops it is sending to Afghanistan in the framework of the Trump strategy – see here, p 19.)

• The number of conflict-related Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), ie those who temporarily or permanently have had to leave their homes as a result of fighting or other violence without crossing international borders

These figures are regularly provided now by UNOCHA.

• Territorial control

This refers to the ratio of control over territory by both Afghan parties of the war, the government in Kabul and the Taleban. How this can be measured exactly is a hotly debated issue, and the situation is relatively fluid. Different organisations apply different criteria. (10) As we are looking for a trend, however, even data sets the criteria of which could be disputed in detail but appear sufficiently reliable in themselves, are useful as long as they are comparable. Therefore, this analysis relies on the figures provided by the SIGAR reports which use US military data and public sources, such as from the UN. (Also, the resulting trends of other sources from their data compilations do not differ substantially from that of the SIGAR reports.) However, this data has only been published starting from December 2015 and only gives an overview of the post-ISAF period (see here, p 106).

About his methodology, the SIGAR reported in his April 2016 quarterly report, p 95-6:

According to USFOR-A [US Forces in Afghanistan], the RS mission determines district status by assessing five indicators of stability: governance, security, infrastructure, economy, and communications.

Using those criteria, five categories have been introduced there: under insurgency control; under insurgency influence; ‘neutral’ (meaning rather that both sides are more or less equally strong); under government influence and; under government control. ‘Influenced’ should be read as ‘predominantly controlled’. ‘Neutral’ was changed to ‘contested’ in the third quarter of last year (here, p 106), as SIGAR explained: it was not clear “whether these [contested] districts are at risk or if neither the insurgency nor the Afghan government exercises any significant control over these areas.” (We discussed what ‘territorial control’ means earlier, in these AAN dispatches, here and here.)

As the terrorism watch website The Long War Journal correctly explains, somewhat differing from the SIGAR definition (here):

… a “Contested” district means that the government may be in control of the district center, but little else, and the Taliban controls large areas or all of the areas outside of the district center. A “Control” district means the Taliban is openly administering a district, providing services and security, and also running the local courts.

A more detailed look into territorial control would need to measure factors such as access for government services, humanitarian aid and development assistance, the physical presence of a district governor or administration in the district centre and the presence of Taleban institutions.

Applying the indicators 

Not only the number of security incidents, but also those of civilian casualties, IDPs and territorial control reflect the intensity and geographical spread of the fighting in the country. (Afghan forces’ casualty figures have been given per region or province in the past.) The number of incidents alone is only a quantitative indicator, as all incidents are given the same weight, ie the assassination of one individual carries the same weight as a bomb attack with dozens of casualties.

The qualitative intensity, or severity, is more difficult to measure. UNOCHA has produced a map, based on the three indicators security incidents; civilian casualties and conflict induced displacement, reproduced in the EASO report (here, p 63). Relying that strongly on incidents figures still does not give the full picture.) It makes more sense to put them in context with other indicators to get closer to adequately describing Afghanistan’s security trend.

When assessing the trend, governments – such as the German one in its asylum-related reports – often only compare the current year or a certain period of it with that of the previous one. This only gives a short-term perspective and can be misleading about the trend. It is more useful, rather, to take a longer-term perspective and at least go back to the 2014 ISAF/RS transition which constituted a game-changer with regard to the key factor of how many foreign troops were on the Afghan ground and what their mandate was. (The mission for US troops only has been expanded and altered several times, since 2015 – see AAN analysis of the Trump strategy here, the ‘Nicholson plan’ here and the role of the CIA, here.)

It is impossible to go back to 2001 with most of our indicators as, for example, UNAMA started counting and reporting civilian casualties only in 2009 in a systematic manner (although there were some reports before that). As AAN reported earlier, there is also no full data set on IDPs between 2001 and 2009.

Indicator 1: the number of incidents

The latest full-year database available for this indicator is from 2016 from UNAMA’s annual report published in March 2017. Noting that “The overall security situation continued to deteriorate throughout 2016 and into 2017,” it reported 23,712 security incidents, “an almost 5 per cent increase compared with 2015 and the highest number in a single year ever recorded by UNAMA.”

EASO, in its latest report, only covered the period between 1 September 2016 and 31 May 2017, leaving out the usually most active summer months. Over the nine months covered, it came up with 17,779 conflict-related security incidents (we have subtracted the non-conflict related and ‘other’ ones from the EASO tables) in what it explicitly called “not (…) an exhaustive list of incidents.” If we add, conservatively, one quarter (4,445) to the EASO figure, we would arrive at 22,224, approximately confirming the level of the UN figures.

In early 2015, the UN reported that the 2014 figure – the last year before the transition from the ISAF to the RS mission – with 22,051 recorded incidents had surpassed the 2013 figure by ten per cent.

For the past year, it had registered 21,105 incidents by 15 November 2017, another one per cent increase, compared to the same period in 2016.

The figures above together indicate that the number of security incidents has increased by over ten per cent since the last year of the ISAF mission. For the present, the curve has flattened (ie the rate of increase has substantially decreased), but even if there were no increases between 2016 to 2017, this would constitute a plateau at the highest level since 2001.

Afghan Ministry of Defence figures reported by Afghan media in November 2017 corroborate this trend. According to this information, insurgent activities were up by 13 per cent in the current year that far, compared with the same period of 2016.

The UN also reported that the conflict “spread in geographical scope.” This is not withstanding the finding that 50 per cent of “all incidents recorded” occurred in five provinces, Helmand, Nangarhar, Kandahar, Kunar and Ghazni. Given the total figure, this would still amount to over 400 security incidents on average that year in the remaining 29 provinces.

Furthermore, the report makes the important point that the 2017 trend “reinforced the shift in the conflict evident since earlier in the year, away from asymmetric attacks towards a more traditional conflict pattern characterized by often prolonged armed clashes between government and anti-government forces.” This speaks for a qualitative escalation also of the war.

Find all “Report[s] of the Secretary-General: The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security” to the UN Security Council here and all his briefings to the Security Council here.

As a subcategory of the number of incidents, the number of American, but not Afghan airstrikes and ‘weapons released’ can be used. There are various US sources, such as the quarterly Operation Freedom’s Sentinel (OFS) reports. The most recent one, covering the period of July to September 2018 has figures for 2015 to 2017 and shows a slow, but almost steady rise up to the second quarter of 2016, with some ups and downs, followed by figures peaking in the third and fourth quarter of 2017; they are double or as high as in the immediately previous quarters (see here, p 29). (11) (Afghan and US airstrikes were together responsible for six per cent of civilian deaths and injuries in the first three quarters of 2017, according to UNAMA).

Find all OFS semi-annual reports here.

Indicator 2: Civilian casualties

Since it started counting and reporting systematically in 2009, the UN has identified 27,481 civilians killed and 50,726 others injured by 30 September 2017, bringing the total casualty figure to 78,207.

The US-based Brown University’s Costs of War Project has undertaken to cover the whole period of the post-2001 Afghan war. Using available public sources for up to 2009 (see here, appendix B) and UNAMA figures thereafter, it estimated that more than 31,000 Afghan civilians were killed between 2001 and August 2016.

UNAMA has measured the total annual figures of civilian casualties increasing year on year, with one exception, a drop by 3.2 per cent from 7,842 in 2011 to 7,590 in 2012. From 2012 to 2014, the figure grew significantly by a quarter, and from then onwards to 2016 by slightly under five per cent per year. The 2016 figure (the latest complete data set available for a full year so far; the 2017 UNAMA report is expected in February 2018) had 11,418 casualties, including 3,498 killed and 7.920 injured. In this trend, there were stronger relative fluctuations among the categories ‘killed’ and ‘injured’ with one dropping possibly over a period and the other one increasing, or vice versa.

UNAMA’s latest quarterly (published in October 2017) had a slight change in the trend. In the first nine months of 2017, the total casualty figure dropped by six per cent compared with the same period in 2016, to 8,019, of them 2,640 dead and 5,379 injured. But this drop came after another “record year,” the UN said, and masked a one per cent increase in the number of civilians killed. Their number was then still at the highest level ever recorded.

This indicator reflects an almost unbroken escalation of the Afghan war.

Find all UNAMA reports on civilian Afghan casualties here.

Afghan civilian casualties 2009-16, source: UNAMA (screenshot)

 

Pre-2009 figures based on estimates, source: Brown University (screenshot)

 

There are other counts and estimates of casualty figures of the Afghan war. The Afghanistan Independent Human Right Commission (AIHRC) is also regularly monitoring and reporting on civilian casualties. Its last report was disseminated after the last Afghan New Year (20 March 2017) and covers incidents in 1395 (21 March 2016 to 20 March 2017, here).

The AIHRC figures differ from UNAMA’s, due to the organisation’s different methodology. It says in its report that it attempts “to register and document all cases” that cause civilian casualties by on-the ground activity, ie “speaking to casualties and eye-witnesses,” but also says this can be limited by “security and logistic reasons.” At the same time, with eight zonal and six provincial offices, AIHRC is slightly better situated then UNAMA with its six offices.

UNAMA reported a slightly higher total of 11,418 civilian casualties than the AIHRC for 2016 which overlaps largely with the Afghan year of 1395. Due to the use of different calendars starting on different days, comparing both data sets is somewhat difficult. (UNAMA uses the Gregorian and the AIHRC the Persian solar calendar.) However, the reported general trends seem to confirm each other. Like UNAMA, the AIHRC also registered (see report, link above, p15) an increase in the total civilian casualties from 1393 (March 2014-March 2015) to 1394 (March 2015-March 2016) to 1395, from 7,005 to 9,431 to 10,608. At the same time, the AIHRC registered a slight drop in people killed from 3,129 (1394) to 2,823 (1395), ie by almost ten per cent. But the number of injured climbed by 23.5 per cent in the same period.

Like UNAMA, AIHRC does not report casualty figures by province, but by region. The AIHCR’s new report will come out in spring 2018.

Afghan media such as Pajhwok Afghan News have started publishing monthly reports a few years ago, but in January 2018, for the first time, it published an annual figure of what appears to cover all people killed, ie civilians and fighters of all sides. (It simply speaks of “people killed [and] wounded.”) According to this, “14,600 people have been killed and 10,277 others injured in 2,050 various attacks last year.” From this, it calculated a casualty rate of 86 people per day on average. As a data base, the agency used its own reporting, “Pajhwok Afghan News’s disseminated reports from different sources.”

Pajhwok concurs with UNAMA in some key findings: that most casualties were caused by direct combat, but that airstrikes were the most deadly single type of attack, resulting in a “high[er] number” of casualties per incident. It also reported that over half of all casualties were counted in five provinces (Nangrahar, Kandahar, Helmand, Kabul and Uruzgan, closely followed by Faryab, Ghazni, Jowzjan, Farah and Paktika). On the opposite end of the scale were Badghis, Samangan, Bamyan and Panjsher. Panjsher (one case) and Bamian (two cases) also accounted for the lowest number of “attacks,” while Daikundi had zero.

The Civilian Protection Advocacy Group (CPAG), an NGO umbrella group – based on an apparently more limited data base – counted 1,370 Afghan civilians killed and 2,360 others wounded in the last eight months of 2017. (12) The CPAG announced its findings on 10 January 2018. It said it recorded most casualties in Kabul, Nangarhar, Herat, Ghor, Kunduz and Helmand provinces and that most of the causalities resulted from suicide bombings, airstrikes and ground operations. Most casualties from US forces’ airstrikes occurred in Nangarhar, Herat, Kunduz and Uruzgan; in total, it said, 62 Afghans were killed and 167 injured this way. (Find the full report here).

The UNAMA figures indicate a steady rise in the number of civilian casualties since 2009, interrupted only once in 2012 compared with 2011. It can be expected that this trend will continue, although it might have reached a plateau in 2017, as the number of incidents had almost done so by November 2017. None of the other figures contradict this conclusion, in any way.

Other data bases reporting on subsets of civilians – such as aid workers and journalists – map somewhat similar trends. The 2017 report of the Aid Workers Data Base, reporting incidents globally in 2017, ranked Afghanistan, with 25 cases ranging from kidnapping to killing, the second most dangerous country for aid workers to work in, in the world. The number of incidents had grown almost year on year from one case in 1997 to 81 cases in 2013 which was the worst year in this category. It seems that with the reduction of western troops, according to the Aid Workers Data Base, also the number of cases where aid workers were harmed dropped (to 25 in 2016). Still, Afghanistan remained the second worst country when counting incidents (again after South Sudan).

As to journalists, one leading Afghan media watchdog, Nai, has just released its 2017 report in which it calls the past year “the most deadly” for local journalists so far, in terms of deaths and injuries, a conclusion reached also by the Afghan Journalists Safety Committee (AJSC) (see this report released on 11 January 2018. Counting all incidents of violence against journalists, which includes harassment by the government, pro-government militias or commanders as well as by insurgents groups, Nai wrote, 2017 was the second violent year, after 2016.

Indicator 3: Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) 

The number of conflict-related Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) has also increased since 2014, according to other UN data. UNOCHA spoke of an “absolute record growth” in their numbers in 2016 by 660,000. In 2017, there was another strong increase by 403,300 persons but the 2016 was not reached again (by 17 December 2017, see here; up to 448,069 by 8 January 2018, see here). After a drop from the record high in the last quarter of 2016, the number of IDPs rose again almost every month between February and November 2017, with a small decrease in December (although that month’s was still the second highest in 2017).

Apart from the Central Region (Hazarajat), with 192 displaced up to 8 January 2018, all other regions registered five- or six-digit IDP numbers. There were Afghans displaced by fighting or other forms of violence in 31 of 34 provinces and 219 of 399 districts while all 34 provinces had to accommodate IDPs. This confirms the countrywide spread of frequent fighting.

Before, between 2013 and 2016, IDP numbers had tripled. From 2012 to 2014, annual figures were under 200,000 (2012: 102,715; 2013: 122,815; 2014: 196,154), shooting up to about 470,000 in 2015 (see AAN analysis here). This means, the 2016 record followed on another one in the year before.

Although the number of new IDPs in 2017 was lower than in 2016, numbers are accumulating. While many IDPs return to their places of origin, the UN highlighted in its September 2017 report to the Security Council (here) that many “displaced communities” are living in an “increasingly precarious situation with no immediate prospect of returning to their areas of origin.”

[Amendment 31 January 2018: The total IDP figure by 31 December 2016 was given with 1,553 million people (here).]

UNOCHA’s very frequently updated website with location maps can be found here.

IDPs in Afghanistan (period of 1 Jan 2017 to 17 Jan 2018), source: UNOCHA (screenshot)

Indicator 4: Combat losses of Afghan government forces

The last year for which there are published figures for Afghan National Security Forces losses is 2016. SIGAR, based on Afghan figures, said 6,785 ANA and ANP members were killed and a further 11,777 wounded for the period between 1 January and 12 November 2016 (a total of 18,562 (here). Unpublished NATO figures seen by AAN counted 8,146 dead and 14,278 injured (22,424 casualties in total), for all of 2016. Casualty figures for 2017 are available for 1 January to 8 May. SIGAR in its July 2017 report, gave figures of 2,531 dead and 4,238 injured (6,769 in total) in the first quarter of that year. If the casualty rate was not brought down, those figures indicate that the total casualties for last year would be substantially higher than in 2016. Afghan media and individual Afghan journalists reported about 800 ANSF dead in September (read here) and 1,800 in October 2017 alone (13), which would also indicate a rise in the casualty rate in 2017 compared with 2016.

The 2016 NATO figures amount to 61 casualties a day, double that of the UN-recorded civilian casualties. The SIGAR called this casualty rate “shockingly high,” “unprecedented” and “unsustainable,” adding that figures provided to the US military by the Afghan authorities might still be “inaccurate,” and most likely “underreported.”

Those higher ANSF casualty figures not only indicate that the Afghan war has intensified further, they also reflect the UNAMA finding that the conflict is also qualitatively more violent.

At the same time, international forces’ casualties dropped, after their move to a largely non-combat mission and a drastic reduction in numbers during the transition from ISAF (140,000 at its peak in 2010 to RS (some 11,000 US troops plus 6,635 non-US NATO and non-NATO contributing countries (by May 2017, here)). (14)

By the end of 2014, ISAF had reported the total of those killed-in-action as 3,485 – with highs during the US surge in 2009 (521), 2010 (711) and 2011 (566). The number of foreign military killed in action have since fallen, to 27 (2015), 16 (2016) and 17 (2017). In 2018, there has been one casualty so far (source). The drop in foreign military casualties does not reflect a change in the war’s spread and intensity, but a qualitative change in the character of foreign troop deployment.

All SIGAR Quarterly Reports can be found here.

Wikipedia also has a compilation of data on ANA and ANP casualties between 2002 and 2014, based on media and think tank reports, here.

All international and Afghan forces’ casualties (2001-15), source: Brown University (screenshot)

All dead and wounded in Afghanistan 2011-16, source: Brown University (screenshot)

Indicator 5: Territorial control

According to the SIGAR reports, the Taleban have expanded their territorial control or dominance during most of the post-2014, post-ISAF period. In his most recent report published in October 2017 (here, p 106), he states that:

The Afghan government’s district and population control deteriorated to its lowest level since SIGAR began analyzing district-control data in December 2015. (…)

According to USFOR-A [US Forces – Afghanistan], approximately 56.8% [231] of the country’s 407 districts are under Afghan government control or influence as of August 24, 2017, a one-point decline over the last six months and a more than six-point decline from the same period last year.

In October 2017, it said the insurgents – which now include the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) ­­– ‘controlled’ 13 and ‘influenced’ 41 districts (13 per cent). This left 122 districts ‘contested’ (30 per cent). SIGAR added that it was “not clear whether these districts are at risk or if neither the insurgency nor the Afghan government maintains significant control over these areas.” Earlier that year, in February 2017, the insurgents had ‘controlled’ 11 and ‘influenced’ (ie dominated) 34 districts (11 per cent of all districts). At the same time, however, SIGAR also reported that the government had extended its control, with 97 districts fully controlled and 146 dominated (in total 243 or 60 per cent). The explanation is that the number of contested districts was squeezed slightly; they dropped from 30 (112) to 29 per cent (119).

The Taleban claimed higher numbers for themselves, in their 2017 report, published in January 2018,

… forty one districts of Afghanistan are completely under Mujahidin’s control, while tens of other cities and districts are mostly controlled by Mujahidin. As far as the enemy is concerned, they cannot move freely and do not feel themselves secure even in the areas under their control.

This might be exaggerated, although the second part of the statement accurately reflects the situation in many areas. Even the Long War Journal wrote, in October 2015 (here), that before the 2016 fighting season, “The Taliban [controlled] 35 of Afghanistan’s 398 districts and [contested] another 35” (ie higher numbers than SIGAR). It further noted, “It is likely that additional districts in Kunar, Nuristan, Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Logar, Wardak, Zabul, Ghazni, Nimruz and Kandahar are Taliban administered or contested.”

According to the SIGAR reports (here, p 69 and here, p 89), most Taleban expansion came between November 2015 and November 2016 when the government lost about 15 per cent of the districts it had controlled or influenced to the Taleban. The number of those districts dropped from 292 to 233. Over the same time, the number of ‘contested’ districts rose from 88 to 133 (in 2015 still called ‘at risk’).

Districts under Taleban control and influence rose from 27 in November 2015 (not differentiated) to 41 in November 2016 (9 controlled, 32 influenced) and to 54 in August 2017 (13 controlled and 41 influenced).

At the same time, the US forces in Afghanistan reported that the part of the Afghan population living under Taleban control dropped from 2.9 to 2.5 million people from late 2015 to late 2016, resulting from the loss of more populated and gain of less populated areas. Based on the figure used in the report of 32.1 million Afghans, 2.5 million this would have represented under eight per cent of the population. Another 9.2 million (28.7%) lived in contested districts.

The same figures for August 2017, as reported by the US military in Afghanistan, was “3.7 million Afghans (11.4% of the population) liv[ing] in districts under insurgent control or influence. This is a 700,000-person increase over the last six months.” Another 8.1 million Afghans (24.9%) lived in contested districts.

By August 2017, the latest available SIGAR data, government numbers were at 231 (-2 compared to late 2016) under its control or influence and 122 contested (-11).

Control of the population has become a sensitive issue, given the US military’s belief that the government needs to control 80 per cent before the Taleban will be pushed to seek peace talks. (The OFS report cited above gives 2020 as a deadline for this goal.)

Control over districts in Afghanistan (government, Taleban, contested; Nov. 2015-Feb 2017). Source: SIGAR

In contrast to 2016 when the Taleban, for the first time since 2011, managed to take over a provincial capital, Kunduz, and to hold it for two weeks, they were unable to repeat such a success in 2017, although they reportedly intended to. At the start of the 2017 ‘fighting season’ after the Afghan New Year in March, Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed told the US daily Stars and Stripes (quoted here) that “there will be an increase in attacks in those provinces that are on the verge of collapse” over that year.

This, however, does not reflect a change of trend, as the Taleban continued to operate near a number of provincial centres and to keep them under pressure. This included Farah (the centre of which was facing take-over attempts three times in 2017, see for example this Guardian report, Kunduz city (again), Lashkargah (Helmand) and Tirinkot (Uruzgan) as well as Ghazni (see here, Sar-e Pul and Maimana (Faryab). For an analysis of other large scale Taleban operations in 2017, see this AAN analysis). The Taleban also control much of Maidan-Wardak and Logar provinces (read a reportage here) to the immediate south of the capital Kabul, have conducted larger operations in Parwan to its north and also operate in some rural parts of Kabul province. Finally, their underground terrorist networks frequently carry out suicide and ‘complex attacks’ in the capital. The local IS-affiliate, Islamic State Khorasan province (ISKP), as a relatively new terrorist actor in urban areas, adds to this threat. Its readiness to target large crowds of Shia Muslim Afghans has marked out a new sectarian trend in the Afghan war. But according to UNAMA’s 2017 mid-year report (the latest detailed data set, see here, p 33-5), the Taleban still eclipsed it both on the number of such attacks and the casualties they caused. (15)

Direct territorial control or dominance is just one dimension of the insurgency’s reach. The Taleban have also established parallel para-governmental structures, reports of which come up in the media only occasionally. Afghan media, for example, reported over the recent months that they systematically tax “media outlets, businessmen and common people“ and even “Provincial Council members [and] governor house officials“ all over Ghazni province, collect electricity fees in Kunduz and extort road tolls from truckers in Zabul. The Taleban are also building up networks of privately financed madrassas and mosques (see here in Helmand:  and in Badakhshan). Their courts continue to operate, mediating in land and other conflicts (an example from Faryab), and maintain prisons (an example from Helmand). They impose changes on the school curriculum (an example from Logar) and influence the hiring and firing of teachers. It can also be assumed that they use government funding sent to schools operated by the Ministry of Education in Taleban-held areas (on such an arrangement, read this BBC reportage from Helmand). As the BBC report showed, the Taleban rule of parts of the province is so unchallenged that they can “focus on health, safety and trading standards.” In Uruzgan, they were able to temporarily close down 46 of the province’s 49 clinics in summer 2017, reportedly after their demand for special treatment for their wounded fighters was turned down. The Taleban have also started posting videos and statements in which they claim to organize road building and other infrastructure projects.

As scholar and former US official Barnett Rubin remarked in a tweet on the Ghazni report: “Who controls Ghazni if a radio station pays taxes to both government and Taliban?” It should have been known from the mujahedin’s fight against the Soviets, that it is problematic, in a guerrilla war (which Afghanistan still largely is), to try to draw a map which cannot but be static, while ‘front lines’ are extremely fluid and control of certain areas differs even between night and day. These maps can only provide some approximation of what control means. (The different methods and maps are also discussed in the EASO report, pp 63-7.)

Moreover, the insurgents, in particular, although organised in provincial and district structures, are often highly mobile and not held up by any district or provincial boundaries. In attack or retreat modus, they cross such boundaries with ease, while the more institutionalised structures of their adversaries (and particularly, in the past, of the multinational ISAF forces) are sometimes inflexible in responding to such flexibility. For example, the retreat of Taleban fighters from Faryab to Sar-e Pul (under the pressure of a self-declared Daesh commander) seems to have confronted the Afghan government forces with difficulties in how to coordinate their response (AAN analysis here). (16)

Concluding what the trend is

The five indicators for the intensity and violence of the Afghan war – security incidents, civilian and Afghan forces’ casualties, IDPs and Taleban territorial control – have shown mostly upward trends. If not any longer increasing, they showed that intensity and violence were close to having reached plateaus; levels were at their highest since data started to be collected, with the exception of additional conflict-related IDPs that was higher in 2016 than in 2017. This is definitely the case for the time since the withdrawal of most international forces by the end of 2014 and the ISAF/RS switch and, where data is known, usually from before that, too. Decreases have mainly been very slight and always temporary.

The UN has also made similar conclusions. In its 2017 strategic review of its mission in Afghanistan, it downgraded Afghanistan from a post- to an in-conflict country, stating:

The key observation regarding the current situation in Afghanistan (…) is that Afghanistan is not in a post-conflict situation, where sufficient stability exists to focus on institution-building and development-oriented activities, but a country undergoing a conflict that shows few signs of abating.

All parties to the conflict – the Taleban, the Afghan and the US government – are almost entirely focussed on the war (see AAN’s analysis on the absence of ‘peace talks’ in 2017 here) and achieving military advantage. (It is not just the US which is raising “the tempo of operations,” as an ICG analysis put it recently in 2018.) Given that, it can only be expected that, as the Afghan war approaches its fortieth anniversary, the voracity and possibly the geographical extension of the conflict may again increase this year – unless peace unexpectedly breaks out (our look at peace talks in 2017 give no grounds for hope). What happened during Obama’s surge of 2010 to 2012 could be repeated, that we see a mutually reinforcing spiral of escalation of the conflict.

In this piece, we have tried to assess the statistics of the Afghan war, while always aware that the data presented encapsulate into misery and loss. An escalation of the conflict would very likely push the five indicators we have considered up even further, translating on the ground into more lives lost, homes destroyed and hopes ruined.

Edited by Sari Kouvo and Kate Clark

 

(1) It continues to claim there were ‘sufficiently safe’ areas in the country, including the terror attack-ridden capital Kabul. In its annual asylum-related situation report, in October 2016, it stated:

The security situation remains volatile. It differs regionally. There are regions where the situation is sufficiently under control and, for the individual, comparatively calm and stable.

It concluded that rejected Afghan asylum seekers could and should be sent back. For that purpose it hired a number of charter planes, and by the end of 2017, and including the first of this series in December 2016, had deported 155 Afghans.

(2) For example, the (then) Interior Minister of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, Stefan Studt, stated:

When Mr [Thomas] de Maizière [the federal Interior Minister] says there are safe regions, and I ask him where they are, and when I then do not get a precise answer, … then this is something where, as far as I see it, one has to say clearly that I can’t see this security.

Remarkably, Studt is a member of the German Social Democratic Party that is in coalition with Maizière’s (and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s) Christian Democratic Union. So, doubts about Berlin’s reading of the Afghan situation did not only exist among the opposition parties.

Here main points of the exchange of letters between the UNHCR, the German government and the Länder:

UNHCR wrote in December 2016,:

It is the view of the UNHCR that it needs to be considered when assessing the current situation in Afghanistan and the needs for protection of Afghan asylum seekers that since [UNHCR’s last assessment in] April 2016, the security situation has generally once more visibly deteriorated. (…) With a view at the regional differences in the assessment of the security situation in Afghanistan, the UNHCR would like to note that, because of the permanently changing situation […], it does not differentiate itself between “safe” and “unsafe” areas.(…) An over-generalising approach that, when it comes to the danger of human rights violations relevant for the protection of refugees or subsidiary protection, considers certain regions as safe and reasonable internal refuge alternative, is impossible in the view of the UNHCR, given the current situation in Afghanistan.

The German government, in a joint letter of its Federal Interior and Foreign ministries, nevertheless wrote to the states’ interior ministers that:

In general, the security situation in Afghanistan did not change significantly in 2016, compared with the previous year. As the statistics of the UN mission [in Afghanistan] UNAMA show (report dated 6 February 2017), the number of civilian casualties only increase slightly (by 3 per cent). […] Therefore, the assessment of the [German Federal Government’s] report on the asylum-related situation dated 19 October 2016 continues to be valid.

(Working translations by AAN. The original UNHCR statement here and the Interior Ministry’s letter here. Both are in German only.)

Sticking to the same line ever since, the German government has consistently rejected requests to publicly answer queries by media and even parliamentarians which areas exactly in Afghanistan it considers ‘sufficiently safe’. Even the classified reports do not name any provinces or other areas and contain hints at best.

(3) As AAN has repeatedly reported, there of course continues to be a parallel, and often shady, US combat mission, named Operation Freedom’s Sentinel (OFS) (see for example here.) OFS is also publicly issuing reports to Congress, with a classified annex (see the most recent one here).

(4) It needs to be noted that the security transition itself became less and less transparent, as insurgent activities did not falter after the 2010-12 US surge. As a result, certain areas (sometimes whole districts, sometimes only parts) were cut out of ‘transitioned’ provinces when it was felt that the Afghan forces could not withstand the insurgency on their own (see this AAN analysis and a particularly striking example here). This followed a trend in the transition becoming less and less ‘conditions-based’, in contrast to how it was originally designed (read this AAN report about it).

(5) There are also publicly available quarterly OFS reports (most recently from December 2017 here), but they contain no figures that are not available elsewhere.

(6) The Brookings Institution has developed its Afghanistan Index using 21 security indicators alone, plus economic, governance/rule of law, polling and “Pakistan indicators” (latest version from September 2017 here). In contrast to our approach, this index measures more general developments.

(7) This author suggests differentiating between attacks on targets that are considered legitimate of not under international humanitarian law, ie between attacks on combatants and civilians, including persons hors de combat.

EASO uses an even wider spectrum of incidents (see here, p 17), which include:

• Violent incidents targeting individuals: kidnapping, targeted killing, intimidation, harassment…
• Explosions: IED detonations, suicide bombings…
  • Non-conflict related violent incidents: criminal activities, drug trade…
• Security enforcement: arrests, discovery of weapons caches…

(9) The ANSF also include the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate for Security (NDS), with its own fighting units, but it is unclear whether the casualty figures also include NDS paramilitaries. Paramilitary forces such as the Afghan Local Police (under Ministry of Interior control) and pro-government militias are not included.

(10) Apart from The Long War Journal, maps on assumed territorial control have also been published by the London-based Institute for the Study of War; various ones are available on the Afghan Hindsight website, here).

(11) Figures of “effective enemy initiated attacks” released in December 2017 (here).

(12) CPAG was founded by The Liaison Office (TLO), a peace-building NGO, with financial support from Open Society Afghanistan. Its member-organisations include the following: Equality for Peace and Development, Cooperation for Peace and Unity, Afghan Women’s Educational Center, Norwegian Refugee Council and Sanayee Development Organization. Formerly known as the Civilian Protection Group (CPG), a number of Afghan civil society organisations joined hands to advocate for the rights and protection of civilians in close cooperation with the Afghanistan Protection Cluster of the UN family. The primary goal of this initiative is to create awareness, to sensitise and engender responsiveness to issues concerning the protection and human security of all Afghan civilians.

(13) The so-called ‘placemat’ for Resolute Support used here as the source for the European troops only has 6,941 US troops. This was the official figure used before US media discovered that US troop numbers on the ground had been under-reported by around 3,500 (see for example here).

The fact that the RS placemat is not updated on an almost monthly basis as it used to be in ISAF times (see archives here) is another example of decreasing transparency on such kind of statistics.

(14) The October figure was given by well-informed Afghan freelancer Bilal Sarwary on Twitter, as noted by the author (who was unable to relocate the link).

(15) According to UNAMA, the Taleban claimed responsibility for 10 suicide and complex attacks resulting in 318 civilian casualties (93 deaths and 225 injured) – six per cent of all civilian casualties during the first six months of 2017 – while Daesh/ISKP claimed responsibility for seven suicide and complex attacks, resulting in 183 civilian casualties (66 deaths and 117 injured) comprising three per cent of all civilian casualties. The remaining 650 civilian casualties (100 deaths and 550 injured) took place during six suicide attacks attributed to unidentified Anti-Government Elements.

(16) An earlier example demonstrated that also western troops had that problem. Ghormach, a particularly volatile district of Badghis (then under the Italian-led and less proactive ISAF West and with Spanish troops in its capital Qala-ye Now), had to be transferred to Faryab province which was covered by the German-led ISAF North with its then very proactive Norwegian Quick Reaction Force QRF – at least in the ‘zonal’ NATO structure – in order to more effectively counter Taleban activities there (see our discussion of this here).

 

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