[ full, unlicensed translation of article in September issue of Sekai by Tooru Shirakawa, a 24-year old journalist who has travelled to Afghanistan 5 times in the last 3 years to conduct research and make contact with local people. ]
In April 2009, my feet touched down again on Afghan soil. This was my fifth extended visit to gather local information.
Coming out of the plane my nostrils were once again assailed by the combined aromas of sand, spices and faeces that always accompany my sense of arrival in this
Map of Afghanistan
country.
As I walked out of the airport building, I was greeted by my friend of 3 years, Ismat and we celebrated this reunion with an embrace; “We have missed you, son.” says Ismat with a huge smile on his face. He is one year younger than me, at 23, and works for the UN. He has a small build and is always wearing lightly-coloured sunglasses. A slightly timid man, he is prone to swings of emotion. Ismat undertook some training in Japan at one time for a month and is very much a ‘Japan-man’. Once, however, when he came to meet me at the airport when I visited in February 2008, there was a moment of tension : “Why does Japan always take sides with America?”.
These, his first words to me, were prompted by world-wide reporting of the adoption by the Japanese Diet in January of that year of the “Terrorism Special Measures Law” – approving SDF provision of re-fueling services to American warships in the Indian Ocean. The law had just come into effect that February and the fuss surrounding the issue in Japan had been reported all over the world; for the Afghanistan people it was the moment that Japan’s ‘pro-America stance’ was first exposed. The story goes that even President Karzai had not suspected it.
This was the first time that the mild, young Ismat had ever expressed such anger to me; and it reflected the damage done by these events to his somewhat fantastical image of Japan.
Japan has a certain, special kind of ‘popularity’ in Afghanistan. This is in no small part due to the omnipresence in people’s daily lives of Japanese consumer goods. The casual visitor first notices the startling number of 1990s Toyota Corollas on the roads of Kabul city centre. Almost all the cars there are second-hand Japanese models. Bearded men drive around, whistling, in Corollas decorated with stickers advertizing ‘The Tanaka Rice-Wine Micro-Brewery’… Above all, the relationship between Japan and Afghanistan is not burdened by hidden, vested interests. Neutrality has preserved Japan’s reputation in Afghanistan. It could be said that the 2008 adoption of the ‘Terrorism Special Measures Law’ created the first cracks in the friendly relationship between our two countries; this probably appeared to the Afghan people as a kind of ‘betrayal’.
The Afghan Press
In the hotel lobby, groups of self-appointed ‘interpreters’ are hanging around – these are men who call out to foreign journalists in gentle voices with the promise of an ‘exclusive interview with the Taliban’; for the most part their intention is to sell foreigners out to armed groups of insurrectionists – you’d make it to the suburbs before being surrounded by a group of men with guns.
When I hire an interpreter I am careful to only take on close relatives or friends of Ismat. When conducting research in a country where the most intimate of relations between people are based on clan affiliations, a trusted partner like Ismat is a necessity. The domestic economic situation in Afghanistan is dire and large numbers of university graduates find there are no jobs for them. As a result, people’s hearts have hardened and the foreign hostage-taking business has come into existence as a means of making a living.
The ‘brain drain’ of educated Afghans to foreign countries is also a serious problem. The breakdown of law and order over many years has led to a situation where the English-speaking, educated class will emigrate as a matter of course in order to earn a decent amount of money. Of the six interpreters I have employed since beginning my research in Afghanistan, over half put the money I paid them towards their emigration and resettlement costs and have left the country. In the universities, it is almost at the point where final year students provide the lectures for the first years. This exodus of the next generation of young talent puts a question mark over the country’s ability to establish independent government policy.
The breakdown of law and order invites a decline in the quality of media reporting. Most foreign news agencies have local staff conduct research on the ground and it is
Foreign forces in Afghanistan
now rare to see foreign journalists travelling around and gathering information for themselves. During the large-scale demonstrations in Kabul in February 2008, the people covering the story were almost all Afghans – there were only three foreign journalists on the ground reporting on events, and one of them was me. At present, foreigners are only involved in the kind of information-gathering where security is to some extent guaranteed – insertion with military forces, for example.
Japanese press agencies are also struggling in Afghanistan and only the Kyodo News Agency still maintains an office there. I was approached in 2008 by a certain news agency in Japan with a request for written coverage, but the conditions proposed were nothing short of humiliating from the point of view of a media professional : “Our man is covering the situation in Afghanistan but the situation is too dangerous for him to leave Kabul – how about you cover the rest of the country for us?”.
But it is dangerous to leave all reporting to Afghans; the lack, historically, of reliable media in the country means it is rather an understatement to say that present-day journalists are not of the highest quality. In addition, the poor economic situation and lack of work leads many so-called journalists to regard the job as a means to make money in any way possible. When I visited a news agency used by the BBC and NHK, I heard the following from a member of staff there :
First off, we need you to write down what kind of content you need the interview to produce – it will cost you, but we will come back with what you request.
These agencies have lucrative contracts with large, foreign media corporations but their journalistic integrity leaves much to be desired. It is highly doubtful whether news coverage of events here can be timely and fair. Of course, there are some outstanding local journalists, but without considerable local experience and knowledge it is a quite a job to identify them.
In the Afghan press, there is a conspicuous lack of reporting by local journalists on the domestic situation. Japanese newspapers’ coverage of Afghanistan also largely involves the word-for-word reproduction of foreign news agencies’ articles. It is a fact that Japanese press coverage, with its dependence on US and European media sources, is not functioning healthily.
What is the Taliban?
Taliban
Behind the collapse of law and order lies the resurgence of the Taliban. Their influence has increased dramatically since the presidential elections in 2004. According to the thinktank ‘International Council of Security and Development’, 72% of the country in 2008 was under the control of the Taliban.
The majority of those who made up the Taliban hardcore located in the country in 2001 have been beaten back into the tribal areas bordering Pakistan and their domestic presence is now limited to Helmand and Kandahar provinces. The terror attacks of recent years have been largely conducted by a group known as the ‘New Taliban’.
In January 2008, I visited the Choroi Kanba refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul. There are now said to be at the very least 230,000 refugees in the country. At this camp, around 400 people were struggling to survive. They had fled from the Sangin region in the war-ravaged Helmand province, where their village had been obliterated in air attacks by foreign military forces. Kabul is situated on a plateau at about 1900 metres above sea level. The wind that blows through the mountains is cold; at night the temperature drops as low as minus 20°c. Most of the refugees live in tents of thin canvas with no heat source at all. Several foreign aid agencies were distributing blankets, but during my visit people were still dying from exposure to cold.
Looking around the camp, the majority of inhabitants are women, children and the elderly. There is not a single young man. When asked, people say that they have gone off to join the Taliban.
The ‘new Taliban’, as opposed to the old ranks, are victims of air attacks who independently choose to launch attacks. They operate in small groups of between 5 and 10 people and on a fundamental level bear no relation to the old ranks of the Taliban who ran the country before the US-led invasion of 2001. They have adopted the name ‘Taliban’ for its emotive force and cannot be said in any real sense to represent a military wing of the former Taliban. However, with their origins in the dust and devastation left after foreign air attacks, these groups are far more radical than the original Taliban, who are primarily an ideological organization who do not conduct attacks with political objectives that would involve casual citizens. The ‘new Taliban’, however, will attack any foreigners, regardless of civilian or military status. Last year, a British woman working with a christian aid organization was shot dead in the centre of the city.
While everyone knows that the ‘Taliban’ exist, it is a very difficult task to grasp completely what it is in the present reality. Much research has been and is being conducted, but the results all seem to point in different directions.
Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative in charge of Pakistan and Afghanistan affairs for the Obama admninistration, revealed at a conference in Tokyo in April this year that he classifies the Taliban in three different ways :
- a minority core group aiming for a society based on fundamentalist Islam;
- citizens who have come to support the Taliban due to rage caused by having lost family members killed in military conflict, or poor government, or unresolved poverty issues;
- mercenaries who join the Taliban as a ‘career move’, based on the logic that the Taliban will pay soldiers more than the government will.
More than half of the thus-defined Taliban, he continued, are made up of members of group 3. One could assume this assessment to be based on the enormous revenues the Taliban are estimated to gain from poppy cultivation.
There are some people, however, who describe this as an ‘imaginary classification’. In May of this year, I succeeded in getting an interview with Wakir Ahmad Mutowakir, who was high up in the Foreign Ministry of the former Taliban government. Mr. Mutowakir was captured by US forces during the 2001 invasion and incarcerated until 2004 at Baghram air base. He currently denies any Taliban connections, but there are rumours around the city’s watering holes of his association with the group. Out of the people to whom foreigners can still gain access, he is the most knowledgeable about the Taliban.
The Westerners say that the Taliban are mostly mere mercenary soldiers fighting for money, but who is going to carry out a suicide bombing for money? They will only go so far because their actions are based on ‘belief’. Their consciousness is one of resistance against the forces that seek to occupy and dominate their country and culture.
Mutowakir points out that the nature of the Taliban has changed considerably.
The definition of the word ‘Taliban’ has changed. Previously, the word used only to mean ’student’ in Arabic, but now among people in this country it means ‘those who fight for the freedom and independence of Afghanistan’.
The Obama administration’s main aim is to see the Afghan government engage the ‘moderate wing of the Taliban’ in dialogue. Mutowakir doubts whether such an undertaking can be successful.
As I keep on saying to you, the Taliban are ‘people who fight for independence and freedom’. You’re not going to get anywhere by talking to Taliban who are not fighting. Because if they are not fighting, they are not Taliban. Who on earth is President Obama trying to negotiate with?
This change in the nature of the Taliban seems to have escaped the Americans. The more military pressure they apply and the higher the body count rises, the greater the numbers of new recruits for their insurrectionist enemy. Negotiation itself is difficult since there is no unified organization as such and therefore the standard strategy of seeking dialogue with one’s top counterparts cannot be applied.
Matters have already past the point where military measures will lead anywhere. Despite the presence of troops from around 40 countries in Afghanistan, the situation gets worse from year to year.
Mutowakir describes the Taliban’s goal as “the withdrawal of all foreign military forces”. If that is the case, then the Obama administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan must be regarded as rather running off at a tangent.
However, it is not the case that a complete withdrawal of all foreign forces would see a resolution to the situation. There is a significant possibility that an immediate withdrawal of foreign forces would be followed by civil war. The native Afghan military forces, with US guidance and funding, are swelling in size each year. Currently, this native army draws the boundaries of its activities in cooperation with the military tacticians of 40 other countries – there is a fear that their departure would lead to a collapse in the balance of power. In such a case, a clash between the current government administration and Taliban forces would be inevitable. Even if the current government was overthrown, the non-unified nature of the Taliban itself would lead to further struggles for power.
The US-led invasion has beaten the state of affairs in Afghanistan down to a point from which it is not possible to recover. There is no magic medicine that is going to cure or resolve this situation.
First, we must discuss the original justifications for the American invasion that brought Afghanistan to this state. Then, we should think about a way to provide a soft landing, so to speak, a solution ‘in a form that is best for the Afghan people’.
The state of support for the PRT
During this research trip, I visited the largest foreign air base in Afghanistan – Baghram air base in Parawan province, about an hour and a half’s drive from Kabul. American, Turkish and French troops are currently stationed there. ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) has divided the country into four regions, and Baghram air base represents a strategically-critical position in the eastern theatre.
This was the second time for me to be ‘inserted’ with troops. The American military frequently send journalists out with their troops – during the trips, accomodation, food and transport are all provided and while on the move special security detachments accompany you. From the base promotional literature, one is given the impression that journalists are regarded as VIPs.
Obviously, prisoners of war currently incarcerated there, on-base funerals and other negative goings-on are completely out of bounds and reporting of them is not permitted. Information gathering on-base is also strictly limited, and it is only possible to interview the individuals who have been given the job of introducing and promoting the base to you.
Entering the base feels like entering America. From a land of violence and famine, one experiences a considerable shock on entering a systematically-run society – it is hard to believe you are standing on the same soil. Inside the base, there are supermarkets, hamburger bars and pizza shops. I was surprised to see there is even a beauty salon. In the shops, dollar bills fly back and forth, in the cafeterias Americans lick ice-cream and guzzle down fried chicken. If all the people were not wearing military uniform, you would think you were in some American provincial town.
TV games are currently the rage on base, and young soldiers were gathered around a monitor playing a war game. Outside the base they kill people and get killed for real, back on base they continue the killing in a game. The mixture of reality and falsehood left me feeling quite speechless.
During this insertion, I conducted research into the activities of a PRT – Provincial Reconstruction Team. The US military are deeply involved in this activity – constructing schools, building roads and providing medical treatment and care. The Obama administration increased troop numbers by 21,000 but, at the same time, made increasing reconstruction efforts a central task of the military in Afghanistan. PRT is the carrot in the US military’s ‘carrot and stick’ strategy.
At dawn, in a meeting with the PRT unit with which we would be spending the day, we were informed by the unit commander that five troops would maintain a cordon around us and we should not egress from that area. Prior to our departure, a strange atmosphere surrounded the whole unit. Perhaps it was something to do with the soldiers being only just into their 20s. Bellowing and hooting, some pretending to kiss each other’s arses, they were playing together like children. These young soldiers, with a strange fatalism showing in their faces, could just have been about to head off on a school trip.
They said they were going to a nearby village to meet with some local leaders. Three armoured personnel carriers travelling in convoy moved off and we left the base behind us. On the way, the vehicle I was in drove over a bicycle, crushing it. Fortunately, there had been no-one on it, but a boy who may well have been its owner caught our eyes through the window of the armoured personnel carrier with a decidedly unfriendly gaze. The American troops commented, “OOOooh! That’s done it!”, and laughed heartily.
After about an hour we pulled up in a small village. The villagers stood around the troops at a distance watching them carefully. Some of the older ones looked quite put out by the team’s arrival, but some younger boys came up to the soldiers to ask for money : “Give us a dollar!”.
We went into a house with the troops. The American soldiers strode straight in with their desert boots on. Afghanistan, like Japan, is a country with a culture where it is just plain wrong not to take off your shoes before entering a building. The children of the house made a noise from another room, as if testing whether we could hear them or not.
In the guest room, a number of village leaders were gathered, waiting. A man in his 40s, dressed in black, appeared to be the leader and he was exercising his charm on the American soldiers. The other four leaders were watching uncomfortably.
We will do what we can to cooperate with you. If armed groups appear here, we will let you know.
The man in black was very cooperative. One of the other leaders said, “We have found a bomb near the village.” The American unit commander replied that they would, well, check it out tomorrow. The village leader rubbed his hands together and said, “…and in return I hope that the little matter of my son working on the base will make some progress.” Between the village leaders, who cannot wait to see the back of them, and the US troops who need local cooperation, it is not unlike a contest between a wily fox and a mischievous monkey that refuses to be serious. The unit commander remarks that the aim of reconstruction activity is “educating through giving support”.
Most Afghans do not know about the situation in their country. They are taught that America is bad. So, we want to give them support and through that educate them with the message that Americans are good people.
This is the so-called ’sweet tongue’ which serves to justify the PRT programme. But the question remains whether an occupying force can change the consciousness of the Afghan people by offering them ’support’. After our insertion time was up, I travelled to a village not far from Baghram air base that had received support from PRTs.
Once they saw my camera, everyone refused to be interviewed. After several hours of searching, just one man agreed to give me an interview. Ali (not his real name) explained the other villagers reluctance to talk to me with these words :
They are scared! Of course. If the Americans knew that we had spoken critically of them they would come and kill us.
Ali continued, his voice trembling with anger :
The American troops come on the pretext of giving us support, and they come into our villages with their guns. Actually, they are just searching for terrorists. We are not terrorists. We are scared what would happen if we were to turn them away, so we have no choice but to accept their support.
Last February [2008], I was researching with a unit in the Eastern province of Khost who were air-lifted to various points along the dangerous border area with Pakistan. These troops were in the front line of defense against Taliban crossing the border from Pakistan to fight. A PRT team – ‘Human Aid Unit’ – consisting of medics and vets travelled with us. They, too, were forcing their way into houses and searching for terrorists under the banner of offering ‘human aid’. After conducting searches, they would take pictures of the vein patterns in people’s eyes using a special camera for use in a military database. The aim was to separate the insurrectionists from the ordinary citizens.
In the extremely violent Eastern and Southern regions, PRTs work together in a set with battle units. This is another feature of the PRT system that draws criticism. Mutowakir (quoted above) comments on the PRTs :
If they are there to offer aid, why do they need military uniforms? People here cannot tell them apart from normal soldiers. And so people are scared of them.
I must admit that I think Mr. Mutowakir’s remarks do make sense. The PRT members bear no markings on their uniforms by which they might be identified as aid
- PRT camp under construction
workers, and they conduct standard patrols during the course of their ‘aid’ work. The research I was able to do makes it hard to say that they have won the support of the local people.
Furthermore, some areas have actually refused to accept aid. PRTs are conducting major construction work all over Afghanistan, but voices of opposition are being raised by Afghan citizens. Roads are built, but everything must yield to military transport. Fire trucks and ambulances may never overtake a military vehicle. Some citizens can be heard to comment that “they only built [the roads] so that it would be easier to patrol”.
With regard to school construction as well, the PRTs build mixed schools designed for boys and girls being educated together. In a country where the majority of the population are conservative muslims, school construction thus also attracts criticism since these new schools are clearly “organs of western frontierism”.
Afghans have, for various historical reasons, almost always regarded western countries as their enemy. It is a fact that there is local opposition to the kind of PRT-type aid being offered by the western forces here in the hope of winning local support.
Furthermore, local construction companies that actually do the building work for the PRTs, earn a reputation as ‘western collaborators’ and are targeted for attack by armed insurrectionist groups. When I ask a senior commander on the ground about this aspect of the PRTs’ work, “It is the job of the police to maintain local law and order” is the curt reply.
Japan has also been ‘collaborating’ in the PRT project since the first quarter of this year. JICA detachments have been working under the guard of Lithuanian troops in Chagcharan in the western province of Ghor. The deterioration of the security situation is the reason given for this collaboration in the PRT system, but it is surely questionable whether this has been the right decision.
When I ask Mr. Mutowakir about this, he makes a gesture of prayer and says
The PRT are just military. They are a target for Taliban attacks. I pray that none of our friends from Japan will come under attack.
Doctor Saab
In October last year, I visited Nangahar Province in the east of the country. I went to find out more about a Peshawar council that has been active in Afghanistan for four and a half centuries.
If you visit the region of Dara-I-Nur where the council’s activities take place, and you encounter an area across whose countryside spread small, but thriving wheat fields. In Afghanistan where a barren landscape extends over a vast area, this is a fairly unusual sight. At the site of a water channel construction project organized by the Peshawar council, the local representative Dr. Tetsu Nakamura. When he gives an instruction in the Pashtun language, the bearded workers set to work with vigour. Listening to people I meet from the nearby villages, I am warmly welcomed as they tell me :
Thanks to Dr. Saab [ saab = doctor in Pashtun, this affectionate nickname refers to Dr. Nakamura] we have been able to grow crops here once again. Japan is no foreign country – it is a true friend.
Tragically, last August [2008], a Japanese working locally with the Peshawar council, Kazuya Ito, was murdered. All the other Japanese workers except for Dr. Nakamura – who decided to continue his work there – returned to Japan. Dr. Nakamura himself has been ringing the warning bell for some time now that ‘the greatest crisis in Afghanistan is drought’. According to the WFP (World Food Plan), Afghanistan produces less than 60% of its own food. In an agricultural country like Afghanistan self-sufficiency is a fundamental key to sustainable existence and the WFP statistic is indicative of a catastrophe.
90% of the Afghan population are farming people. A bad crop due to drought would lead directly to famine. Some people, with nothing to eat, would turn and join the Taliban or other armed insurrectionist groups. It is the food crisis that is mainly bringing about the breakdown in law and order.
Impoverished soil has been turned to poppy production, the raw material for drug manufacture. Around 90% of the world’s poppies are cultivated in Afghanistan. The poppy is the main source of revenue for armed insurrectionist groups and a principal fuel for the fires of chaos in the country. In the region irrigated by the Peshawar council, however, there is not a single poppy field. Provided there is enough irrigated and nutrient-rich soil, there is no need for farmers to cross the ‘dangerous bridge’ that leads to poppy cultivation. The areas where the Peshawar council is active are safe and healthy places to live. Normally, in such rural areas of Afghanistan, foreigners arriving unannounced would almost certainly be kidnapped or killed, but here I – a Japanese – was welomed warmly by people who told me with smiles on their faces that ‘the Japanese are different’. There is the trust that Dr. Nakamura and his colleagues have spent 25 years fostering in this part of the world. And with the success of the crop programme, people’s lives are beginning to regain some stability.
I see one main hope in the work that Dr. Nakamura has been doing in Afghanistan. In the midst of the terrifying storm of violence gripping most of the country, this area has managed to maintain an oasis of peace. Irrigation projects and other activities in which Dr. Nakamura has been involved may contain within them – admittedly by some round-about route – the key to turning many of the country’s problems in a favourable direction.
Military Power will solve nothing
The situation in Afghanistan gets worse year by year and the presidential elections on 10th August [ref wikipedia : An ISAF spokesperson stated two days before the election that insurgent attacks had averaged 32 per day in the last 10 days, but had spiked up to 48 attacks per day within the last four days. ] are expected to be accompanied by large-scale disturbances. In Kabul, I heard many speak dejectedly to the effect that “Karzai is going to win anyway (whatever we do)”. In the last elections held here, vote-buying and selling was commonplace and there are those who even now dispute Karzai’s right to the presidency.
President Karzai’s younger brother, Wali Karzai, is widely suspected of being associated with the narcotics business and the president himself cannot claim to have high public support ratings. But there are no other candidates in this election (Aug 2009) who have the high profile and international recognition that the name Karzai brings with it.
The increase in the activity of the present Taliban began in earnest with the 2004 elections. They charged that the elections results were not true, numbers joining armed insurrectionist groups began to swell and the law-and-order situation in the country deteriorated rapidly. This time round also, the Taliban are declaring their intention to block the election process, and similar unrest can be expected.
Director of the 2003 US Golden Globe winner “Afghan Year Zero”, Shidik Balmak, speaks of the current state of heart of the Afghan people :
There should be a way to break out of this situation. But the decisions required to resolve the situation are not in our hands, but in the hands of foreigners. This is probably the reason for the philosophical resignation of the Afghan people.
Many Afghans believe that the current administration does not reflect the will of the people of Afghanistan and is merely an American puppet government. The result would be the same whether elections were held or not. It may be for exactly this reason that the Afghan people hold the ‘Taliban’ in favour.
There are very few positive aspects to report about Afghanistan at present. Rampant violence, starvation caused by drought, and the downward spiral of the economy all continue to relentlessly deteriorate. Japan has got involved with Afghanistan through the dispatch of the Marine SDF to the Indian Ocean, and participation in the PRT programme. But neither of these ventures can be said to be turning the situation in Afghanistan in a positive direction.
I feel acutely aware of an overly-simplistic and casual consciousness of the actual situation on the part of the foreign countries involved here, including Japan. It is necessary to find out what the Afghan people are angry about and to hear their laments. The majority of the population there are farming people who believe devotedly in Islam. What these people want is to be freed from violence, and to have enough food to get them through each day.
I once asked Dr. Tetsu Nakamura how he thought Japan should be interacting with Afghanistan.
We have to think not so much of things that we should do, as of things that we must not do. Exploiting a foreign country – ‘implementing self-interested strategy’ with out taking into account the actual situation will have a negative effect.
Presently, many countries are involved in Afghanistan through the dispatch of their armed forces and it is exactly Japan’s declaration that ‘we will not send military forces’ which has an impact with the local people and gives us influence here.
Now, surely, is the time for us to stop and think.
