Brookings: Series - Trip Reports

Ukraine at a Crossroads with Europe?

Steven Pifer — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:43:00 -0400

The Kyiv Security Forum, held in the Ukrainian capital on April 18-19, brought together Ukrainians, Europeans and Americans to discuss the current challenges facing Ukraine. Much of the discussion centered on Ukraine’s relationship with the European Union, in particular on whether Kyiv will make sufficient progress in meeting EU conditions to permit signature in November of an EU-Ukraine association agreement.

Several speakers asserted that Ukraine is at a crossroads with Europe. “Ukraine is at a crossroads” has been written or said so many times over the past 20 years that it has become something of a cliché. This time, however, it may be for real. The choices that Kyiv makes in the next weeks and months will determine whether Ukraine moves closer to Europe or whether the EU-Ukraine relationship gets stuck on hold.

EU and Ukrainian negotiators concluded the association agreement at the end of 2011. It would significantly deepen Ukraine’s links with the European Union. Among other things, it includes a deep and comprehensive free trade agreement that would open up large segments of the EU’s economy to Ukrainian exports. It is a big deal.

Although the association agreement was initialed in early 2012, it has since sat in limbo. The European Union has declined to sign given growing concerns over the past two years about negative developments regarding democracy within Ukraine.

EU officials have asked Kyiv to make progress on three conditions—implementation of its general reform agenda, reform of its electoral law, and an end to selective prosecution—in order to permit signature of the agreement at the EU Eastern Partnership summit in November. These conditions were reaffirmed at an EU-Ukraine summit in February, which called for “concrete progress” by May.

Many regard the third condition as the most critical. More than a dozen senior members of the opposition have been sent to jail since President Victor Yanukovych took office in 2010. Most attention focuses on the case of former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko. She was convicted in 2011 for signing a gas contract with Russia in a trial that received broad criticism in the West. The near unanimous view in European capitals and Washington holds that Tymoshenko is a victim of selective prosecution. On the day her conviction was announced, even Moscow joined in the barrage of condemnation of the verdict.

In the seven weeks since the EU-Ukraine summit, there has been good news and bad news. The good news: Yanukovych pardoned Yuriy Lutsenko, a leading opposition leader, along with one other opposition member.

The bad news: Serhiy Vlasenko, Tymoshenko’s lawyer, was stripped of his membership in the Rada (Ukraine’s parliament) on grounds that he could not hold his Rada seat and continue his legal work. Critics cite this as another selective application of the rules, as many Rada members, including in the pro-government Regions Party, hold outside jobs that would appear to contravene the rule. And more bad news: the Prosecutor General is pursing another case against Tymoshenko, alleging her involvement in the 1996 murder of businessman Yevhen Shcherban. Given the many questions about how the 2011 trial was conducted, few analysts have confidence that this legal process will be objective.

At the Kyiv Security Forum, several speakers made clear the key importance that Europe attaches to what happens to Tymoshenko. Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, Vice President of the European People’s Party—the European Parliamentary party with which Tymoshenko’s party is affiliated—took a stark position: Tymoshenko had to be released, or there would be no signature in November, and Ukraine would miss its window of opportunity with the European Union. EU Ambassador to Ukraine Jan Tombinski cautioned that Kyiv had to understand that the European Union only accepted democratic states that abided by the rule of law. European Parliament member Pawel Robert-Kowal warned that, even if the association agreement were signed, Ukraine had to demonstrate real progress, as the agreement would face the challenge of ratification by 27 individual EU member states.

During and on the margins of the conference, some Ukrainians expressed optimism that the Ukrainian government would take a positive step regarding Tymoshenko. Others doubted that Yanukovych would take any action on his archrival. Some expected the Ukrainian government to try to do the minimum necessary in order to argue that it had met the EU conditions and assert that freeing Lutsenko, but not Tymoshenko, should prove sufficient progress on the condition of selective prosecution.

Right now, EU member states appear to be split. Some, primarily in Central Europe and the Baltic region, do not want to delay signature of the association agreement over Tymoshenko. They fear that Ukraine might otherwise drift into Russia’s orbit.

Other EU member states, apparently now in the majority, believe Kyiv must do more to show its commitment to European democratic values. France and Germany lead this group. The fate of Tymoshenko has become a domestic issue in Germany, and Chancellor Angela Merkel said on April 17 that, “if the Yuliya Tymoshenko case is not settled, the association agreement cannot be signed.” Ukrainian diplomats understand that Berlin presents the toughest case to win over.

Although the European Union and Ukraine have agreed that concrete progress should be made by May, that might not prove a hard deadline for an EU decision on whether or not to sign the association agreement in November. Some in Kyiv believe a final EU decision could wait until later in the year, perhaps as late as October.

The question remains, regardless of when the European Union decides: will Ukraine do enough to secure signature? That may turn on Tymoshenko’s fate—and how badly Yanukovych wants the association agreement.

Neither Brussels nor Kyiv appear to have a Plan B in case the association agreement is not signed. In late March, Tombinski warned that, if the agreement were not signed in November, the press of other EU business in 2014 and the Ukrainian presidential election in 2015 would put Ukraine and the association agreement on the back-burner until late 2015. Another European diplomat recently suggested the delay would last until 2016.

Ukrainians do not want to think about what happens if the association agreement is not signed. But they expect a failure to sign to be warmly welcomed in Moscow, to be followed by a greater Russian push to draw Ukraine into the Customs Union that currently includes Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Yanukovych thus far has resisted joining the Customs Union. Doing so would be incompatible with a free trade agreement with the European Union and would essentially kill the association agreement—which is almost certainly Moscow’s objective.

So, Ukraine may indeed be facing a critical crossroads. It is one where the key choices are as much about Yanukovych’s domestic policy—how democracy will develop and how the opposition is treated—as they are about foreign policy. If Yanukovych makes the right choices, he will take an important step in integrating Ukraine into Europe. If he makes the wrong choices, he risks miring the country in a gray zone between Europe and Russia and having to face Moscow’s pressure with a severely weakened hand.

Editor's note: Steven Pifer, a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe and a former ambassador to Ukraine, was in Ukraine April 18-20 to attend the Kyiv Security Forum.

Authors

Steven Pifer

Image Source: © POOL New / Reuters

Indonesia Field Report IV: Wildlife Trafficking, Illegal Fishing, and Lessons from Anti-Piracy Efforts

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The Cruel Wildlife Market

Hundreds of cages with birds, lizards, bats, and mammals were stacked upon one another, with tens or sometimes even hundreds of specimens crammed into one cage. Several dozen white-eyes (a bird genus) were squeezed into a cage appropriate for one canary. At least a hundred bats were stuffed into another container. In a cage atop this stack, more than fifty green agama dragon lizards, some dead, with their bodies rotting amidst those still alive, were desperately competing on the ceiling of their container for a little of bit space. Two baby civets, on sale for 400,000 Indonesia rupiah each (about USD 40) were shoved into an adjacent box. Like the rest of the unfortunate animals – squirrels, chipmunks, black-naped orioles, drongos, leafbirds, shamas, mynas, partridges, and the highly-prized and highly-threatened lories – the civets had no water and no protection from the full blast of the hot Indonesian sun. Many of the animals would die in this (in)famous Yogyakarta bird market before they were sold to new owners.

Meanwhile, however, the Yogyakarta bird market, like other wildlife markets in Indonesia and East Asia, serves as a perfect incubator for diseases that can mutate and jump among species, such as avian influenza and SARS. Such zoogenic diseases could potentially set off a catastrophic pandemic killing millions of people. The spread of the viruses to domestic animals and people is exacerbated by the trade in roosters for cock-fights, also on sale in the market amidst the wild-caught birds and animals. Even the animals sold before they die in the hands of their traders often do not survive as household pets – typically the fate of species such as woodpeckers, eagles, and owls.

The inhumane treatment of the animals in the many wildlife markets I visited during my research across the Indonesian archipelago was as heart-wrenching as the devastation this unmitigated trade in wild birds and other animals wreaks upon Indonesia’s ecosystems. Orange-headed thrushes and white-crested laughing thrushes, available in cages to eager buyers, are now exceedingly rare in the remnants of Indonesia’s forests, for example.

To reduce the consternation and criticism of international tourists, Yogyakarta’s wildlife market was moved more out of sight – away from its previous location next the frequently visited old royal palace. Nevertheless, enterprising Indonesian young men on motorcycles still bring Western tourists to the market’s new location. A young German woman, with a Lonely Planet Indonesia guidebook tucked in her purse, was eagerly taking photos of the cages, her very short shorts and tanktop as much an affront to Indonesia’s cultural sensitivities in this conservative Muslim city as the appalling conditions of the traded animals are to Westerners. An emblematic introduction to the fusion and confusion of conflicting values in this modernizing yet tradition-bound country?

Hunters and Buyers

In the Indonesian Market

Indonesian buyers and sellers rarely exhibit any qualms about the ecological impacts of the trade and the conditions of the animals. Wildlife trade, particularly in birds, is deeply entrenched in Java’s culture. A Javanese proverb states that every man should have a house, a horse (these days often interpreted as a car, or at least a motorcycle), a wife, a kris (a traditional dagger), and a bird. Because of this strongly-held tradition, at least one third of Javanese households keeps birds, I was told by representatives of a joint international-Indonesian environmental NGO, whom I interviewed on the condition of anonymity. Indeed, strolling through middle-class neighborhoods of Javanese towns reveals house after house with several cages of prinias, bulbuls, orioles, laughing thrushes. Eerily, however, there are precious few birds in the Javanese countryside, most having been caught by traders.

The bird trade is so culturally-ingrained that only some environmental NGOs operating in Indonesia dare oppose it. “Our current priority is to preserve and try to rehabilitate the devastated Indonesian ecosystems. The bird trade is just too difficult; too culturally sensitive. Attempting to stop it could get us shut down or hamper our other operations, such as trying to restore at least a tiny sliver of Indonesia’s lowlands forests. The Indonesian police are not interested in the bird trade anyway. We count ourselves lucky when we get law enforcement action against endangered mammals,” one of the NGO representatives told me after I repeatedly assured him that I would not identify either him or the NGO.

But even in this tradition-oriented society, tastes in the wildlife market do evolve. Unfortunately, in Indonesia and East Asia, wildlife tastes have been changing all too often toward a more expanded and voracious appetite for wild animals and wildlife products. One of the latest fads in Indonesia is keeping lizards; and young middle- and upper-class Indonesian men on the make now prefer them to birds.

Still, rare and highly-endangered birds, such as lories from Papua, or the Bali starling, continue to be highly desirable and can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. A summer 2012 biological survey revealed that only 31 Bali starlings were left in the Bali Barat National Park, a conservationist involved in the survey told me. Then in July 2012, poachers coated a few trees with glue and captured six of the starlings in the park, eliminating one fifth of the population in the wild. A release of captive-bred birds is planned to boost the population of the species whose survival hangs on a thread as thin as the fishing nets that poachers also use to catch the birds. But without better law enforcement in the park and against buyers throughout the archipelago, and without a dramatic decline in the desirability of the Bali starlings by Javanese bird owners, will the released birds have any chance?

Some of the poachers are desperately poor. In the Moluccas or Papua, they are sometimes paid as little as a bowl of noodles for a day’s hunting, or a pack of cigarettes for a rare bird. But that pack of cigarettes can be enough to extirpate an endangered species. And traders can be shockingly frivolous in how many individual birds or animals they are willing to have killed for the survival of a few that would bring high profits on the international market. Ambonese hunters, mostly very poor, will be paid five dollars for a caught black-capped lori. In order to smuggle out the protected endangered and highly-desired species, traders will then shove the small birds into plastic bottles tied together, throw them into the sea, and fish them out miles away from the island and any possible law enforcement action. With the surviving birds fetching up to thousands of dollars, even a 95% loss of the captured birds (many would suffocate in the plastic bottles) will generate handsome profits. For a fistful of dollars, a species can be rapidly wiped out.

Keeping birds and consuming products from wild animals has a long history in Indonesia. The Dayak communities in Kalimantan, for example, have hunted hornbills for their feathers for centuries. In northern Sulawesi, the Christian community has had a strong taste for bushmeat, with anything that can be hunted often being highly craved for dinner (and very pricey in the Langowan and Tomohon bushmeat markets). One of the greatest delicacies—its consumption being a symbol of status and affluence -- is the black crested macaque, a primate endemic to Sulawesi. Over the past three to four decades, the species has been experiencing an 80% decline. Although deforestation in Sulawesi has eliminated much of the macaques’ habitat, hunting these days actually poses a far greater threat to the species. In addition to its highly-prized meat, its fur is used in traditional dancing to signify bravery; and its skulls decorate masks and costumes.

Protecting the threatened primate has become an environmental priority for conservationists in northern Sulawesi. In an inspired move, an NGO tried to reduce some of the hunting pressures on the macaques by producing artificial skulls looking identical to the real ones, so the replicas would be used for traditional costumes. Another NGO that is currently leading the effort to save the macaques near the Tangkoko Reserve – the Selamatkan Yaki project – has emphasized environmental education to explain to consumers that if they do not reduce the hunting to sustainable levels, all the macaques will be gone and there will be no more pricy meat or and no more fun of hunting the primates, a factor which many hunters identified as an important motivation. (Many of the wildlife traders I interviewed across the archipelago about the critical depletion of the species they were selling and the negative impact on their business if the animals were extirpated in the wild were shockingly unaware and indifferent. They would insist that the birds and animals would always be in the forest and dismiss my suggestions that the species could die out and their trade collapse.) As part of its environmental education and demand-reduction effort, the Selamatkan Yaki project has also tried to involve the local Christian church in the campaign for environmental conservation, as well as to get influential community leaders to declare that the macaque meat, unlike pork, is not crucial for celebrations. But these demand reduction efforts, as imperative as they are, are also very painstaking and slow-going. And for many species, the time is running out at a rapid pace.

In the Booming International Market for Wildlife

The portent of extinction has become all the more threatening as the volume of animals hunted for the local traditional markets is nowadays vastly surpassed by the volume of animals hunted for the booming international market. These international profits often dwarf those in the traditional trade, and international wildlife trading and trafficking are expanding at an exponential rate as a consequence. Many of the hottest wildlife markets are located in China and in East Asia.

Keenly embraced by East Asia’s increasingly affluent middle and upper classes, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) concoctions promising extraordinary curative powers, enhanced longevity, and increased sexual prowess are more popular than ever. So is the consumption of exotic bushmeat. These international wildlife-demand markets have resulted in extraordinary numbers of animals being hunted, sometimes in the millions of specimen per year. The toll on genera such as pangolins, seahorses, turtles, or civets has been huge.[1] Just over a decade ago, for example, Malayan box turtles, then widespread across Indonesia, as well as two endemic Sulawesi land tortoises, fell victim to the Traditional Chinese Medicine craze. So that they would be eventually shredded in blenders into TCM jelly and paste, villagers in Sulawesi would collect them everywhere and sell them for 5000 Indonesian rupiahs (about half a U.S. dollar) per turtle or tortoise. According to a biologist from the Pacific Institute in northern Sulawesi, a subsequent three-month field research project in the area in 2007 found only 2 specimens of what used to be several plentiful species, including some found nowhere else. The turtles and tortoises were literally eaten off the island.

One of the newer fads in the Traditional Chinese Medicine market I encountered during my research in Kalimantan was for hornbill tusks. In Kalimantan, the bills and tusks would fetch 2 million Indonesian rupiahs (roughly USD 200), making the beautiful and enigmatic hornbills a new favorite of local Kalimantan hunters. In the demand markets of China, Singapore, Macau, and Hong Kong, the tusks would bring far more. The presence of well-heeled Chinese coal and timber companies in Kalimantan facilitated the trade, and the companies were often already paying off the Indonesian police, military, navy, and coast guard. Even without extensive bribes, stopping the trade in the tusks would be of far lower priority for Indonesian law enforcement agencies than interdicting artisanal illegal mining, for example, which the big mining companies have an interest in stopping and can financially motivate the law enforcement agencies to take action against.

Policy Responses

Reducing Demand for Wild Animals through Captive Breeding

Sometimes, a legal market in captivity-bred animals can greatly reduce pressures on the natural ecosystems and species. The prohibitions and restrictions on importing wild birds into the United States and European Union, coupled with a legal supply of desirable birds, such as parrots, from captive stocks, greatly reduced poaching for those markets. This legal supply of birds certified to have been bred in captivity have had a palpable impact in Indonesia too, where the bird trade to Europe and the United States dramatically declined, despite the fact that the trade had a centuries-old history, being established essentially at the time when Europeans first arrived in the Moluccas and Papua and saw the local exotic birds.

However, according to the environmental NGOs and conservation biologists I interviewed in Indonesia, bird-breeding facilities in Indonesia itself have not produced similarly positive conservation outcomes, and often serve merely as mechanisms for laundering birds caught in the wild. For a bribe, Indonesian officials often hand out fake licenses for such supposedly captive-breeding programs and the birds. For example, since selling wild-caught lories is illegal, traders often claim that they are captive-bred and produce fake documents to launder the birds.

Alternative Livelihoods for Hunters and Illegal Fishermen

These days hardly all hunters are desperately poor individuals. Nonetheless, even organized crime groups specializing in poaching frequently hire local people living on the edge or inside the forest as trackers, guides, and even shooters. In Indonesia, they can be very destitute individuals struggling to eek out a living and support their families, like those in the Moluccas, who will hunt endangered birds for a bowl of noodles a day. Providing them with an alternative means of livelihood is not only important from the perspective of human rights and human security, but also frequently critical for the success of conservation policies.

Occasionally, alternative livelihoods programs to reduce poaching have scored successes. On the Indonesian island of Seram, for example, twenty poachers of rare parrots were converted (through the work of Profauna, one of Indonesia’s NGOs most determined to fight against the illegal wildlife trade) into rescue-center staff and wildlife guides for tourists. As a result of this alternative livelihoods effort, poaching dramatically fell off. But the success depended on a steady flow of eco-tourists whom the newly-converted poachers could guide. For that, an international counterpart to the conservation effort helped recruit birdwatchers in the United States to travel to Seram. When that international supply of eco-tourists fell off, the income from wildlife guiding for the former poachers declined and the pressure to resume illegal hunting to generate livelihoods intensified once more.

The Seram story is a micro-example of the conditions on which successful alternative livelihoods depend. If poor poachers have an assured income from other sources, they are often willing to abandon the illegal hunting, even though poaching often brings more money. But their income from other sources needs to be steady and assured. The problem with many ecotourism alternative livelihoods efforts is that the income fluctuates greatly and tends to be sporadic and seasonal. Often, for an area to draw a sufficient number of ecotourists to generate income, it needs to contain large mammals that can fairly easily be seen by tourists. Thus, eastern Africa’s savannahs tend to attract many more tourists than rainforest areas.

Moreover, success in bringing an alternative income to potential poachers depends also on the number of potential poachers. It is one thing to employ twenty hunters (like in the Seram example) and quite another thing to bring employment to several thousand people who may reside in or near an ecologically-sensitive area and can become poachers (as well as illegal loggers). The number of jobs generated by ecotourism is often far lower than the existing local needs for employment and the number of illegal poachers, illegal loggers, and pastoralists who encroach on forests. Moreover, whether such ecotourism takes the pressure off poaching is also dependent on whether eco-lodges and ecotourism companies capture the vast majority of profits or whether local communities do in fact get a sufficient cut from the profits.

Note that the above discussion has not taken into consideration whether or not the influx of humans through high-impact ecotourism generates even greater environmental damage than the previous hunting and more profoundly disturbs the entire ecosystem, rather than just particular species.

Income generated by non-ecotourism alternative livelihoods efforts, such as converting hunters into producers of ethnic crafts or honey and other renewable wildlife products, rarely does better than ecotourism alternative livelihoods. Mostly, such alternative economies generate incomes too paltry and sporadic to be attractive to local communities to sufficiently wean them off poaching. Success of such efforts mostly tends to be lower than even the infrequent success in converting illicit crop farmers to farmers of legal crops. In the case of wildlife poaching, legal agricultural production can sometimes reduce hunting – though once again, the question is whether the required land conversion and deforestation will ultimately devastate the entire ecosystem even more. Just as in the case of alternative livelihoods for illicit drugs, success is predicated on well-enforced property rights, the availability of microcredit, good infrastructure, and other structural factors. Crucially, it also depends on well-established value-added chains and assured markets, neither of which are developed easily in remote areas where forests or biodiversity-rich savannahs still exist. Thus on Indonesia’s Flores island, one of the sensitive land and marine areas, there may well be first-rate avocados, but because of a lack of infrastructure and value-added chains, farmers often feed them to pigs instead of exporting them. Flores’s four kinds of mangoes could well be successfully sold in many international markets, but those markets have not yet been developed. And if one day they are, it is critical that they do not generate new deforestation to clear the way for the mango trees, compounding the pressures on already devastated natural forests of the island.

In the Komodo National Park area, for example, inducing local people to switch from dynamite-fishing that decimates the area’s biodiversity-rich marine ecosystems to carving wood crafts for tourists has met with some successes. However, the former fishermen got used to taking wood from the park’s mangroves, replacing one negative ecosystem impact with another. Persuading them to use jackfruit timber instead has become the new imperative. Similarly, seaweed farming in the Komodo area and around Sulawesi has become a popular alternative to fishing, and one that currently has a thriving international market. But careful assessments as to whether the seaweed farming – and of what particular seaweed species and through what precise methods - is fully compatible with coral conservation have yet to be made.

Scuba diving tourism is thriving in the area, bringing with it a variety of positive spillovers for the local economy, such as new restaurants, lodges, and markets. But it is mostly concentrated in Labuan Bajo, not benefiting all parts of Flores equally and many not at all. Moreover, most hotels and dive companies are not owned by local people, with much of the profit leaving for Jakarta or abroad. And only very few of the dive masters are local people.

Improved Law Enforcement

Without alternative livelihoods in place or the ability to change the structure of incentives for the many types of actors who participate in the illegal wildlife trade – as well as without reducing demand for wildlife products -- law enforcement is rarely a sufficient answer. But it is a critical and inescapable component of such efforts.

In Indonesia, enforcement of wildlife regulations has a long way to go. The problem starts with the laws themselves. With few exceptions, such as in the case of kingfisher species which are not allowed to be hunted, Indonesian law does not prohibit the killing and trapping of wild animals in general, only those protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Unsustainable legal hunting, often poorly monitored to assess its true environmental impact, thus devastates species in Indonesia, with Indonesia’s law enforcement agencies having no interest or means to counter it. Even for wildlife protected by CITES, the Indonesian law sets as the maximum penalty five-year imprisonment or a ten thousand dollar fine. But poachers and wildlife traffickers rarely face law enforcement action, frequently bribing their way out of punishment in Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt courts. If they are sent prison at all, it is usually for a few weeks at most.

Nonetheless, improvements in Indonesia’s wildlife protection enforcement are under way. Many new commitments, efforts, training, and better practices are stimulated by ASEAN’s Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN) and its international government and NGO partners. The United States government is actively supporting those efforts; and INTERPOL has also elevated wildlife trafficking on its list of priorities. In turn, the importance of acting against wildlife trafficking has also risen for Indonesian law enforcement agencies, though it still retains a much lower priority than drug trafficking, for example, and hence rewards (such as promotion in rank) are not come easily earned for interdiction of wildlife trafficking. Such increased law enforcement efforts are very important and welcome. Setting quotas for the minimum of wildlife cases Indonesian law enforcement officers must catch is hardly the optimal law enforcement approach but, arguably, it shows at least an increased awareness of the issue.

Yet as is the case with law enforcement against all kinds of illicit trade, sometimes increased law enforcement only makes the markets more hidden. Certainly in Indonesia, sales of more politically and legally-sensitive species, such as monkeys, that are either sold outright illegally or whose trapping generates strong criticism from environmental NGOs, has been driven from public view. Nonetheless, behind closed doors, these species are usually available in many of the country’s big wildlife trading places. When in the huge Jatinegara wildlife market in Jakarta, where supposedly any animal, no matter how endangered and enigmatic can be bought, I tried to pull out my camera, I was met with a great deal of hostility and protests from local sellers and was essentially chased out of the market. One representative of an Indonesian environmental NGO, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that tiger parts, rhino horns, or alive orangutans and Komodo dragons can all still be obtained in the Jatinegra market and from Indonesia’s other wildlife traders. Illegal pet shops in Jakarta boast that they can deliver any species within a week – and often the transaction is made over the internet.

Nonetheless, there have been some genuine successes in Indonesia’s law enforcement. In Bali, for example, the enforcement of the ban on catching sea turtles has been greatly strengthened. Used in traditional Balinese ceremonies, turtles had been caught at a rate many times surpassing the 1000 specimen catch per year allowed under local regulations. In 1999, 27,000 turtles, for example, were slaughtered. Profauna encouraged zero-catch quotas and pushed for greater law enforcement by the police and other law enforcement agencies, such as the Forestry Ministry. The fact that police units on Bali have a reputation for being less corrupt than elsewhere in Indonesia, and with greater international presence to help in the monitoring, the police confiscation of turtles increased significantly and the illegal catching decreased by 80 percent since.

The intensification of law enforcement interdiction in Indonesia has been critically enabled by the increase in animal rescue shelters. In the past, the Indonesian police often used the small number of available animal shelters as an excuse for not undertaking interdiction raids, claiming that they could not care for the rescued animals. Indeed, according to a very impressive young female Muslim veterinarian in Bali who has supervised some of the rescue shelters, about 95 percent of animals confiscated in wildlife markets or private collections are too sick and damaged to be returned to the wild. With few releases possible, because they might introduce new diseases that could devastate the wild populations, most of the recovered animals will have to be treated at the shelters for the rest of their lives or euthanized. Unfortunately, rehabilitation shelters in Indonesia have depended almost exclusively on foreign funding. Several important international donors have been disappointed with Indonesia’s performance in cracking down on the wildlife trade and have not renewed their donor commitments, leaving some of the shelters struggling to operate.

Challenges in Cracking Down on Illegal Fishing

To some extent, improvements have also been registered in Indonesia’s efforts to combat illegal domestic fishing in protected areas. The Komodo National Park provides an example. Fifteen years ago, dynamite and sodium-cyanide fishing, both extremely destructive to the marine ecosystem, were prevalent and perpetrated by local communities around the park and by fishermen from the eastern parts of Flores as well as other islands, such as Sulawesi and Sumbawa, as already mentioned above. When confronted by local communities trying to prevent the destructive fishing, fishermen from the eastern part of Flores and surrounding islands would often admit that the reason they were coming to fish in the Komodo National Park was the lack of fish available in their home areas, where local stocks were depleted as a result of the destructive fishing.

Pressure from international NGOs and intergovernmental agencies, such as UNESCO, on law enforcement agencies operating in and around the Komodo National Park stimulated better law enforcement action and diminished the dangerous illegal fishing practices. The fact that the Komodo National Park, including its extraordinary marine ecosystem, obtained high international visibility, and hence international pressure for protection, critically helped.

Surprisingly, because the issue can be construed as one of national security and certainly of national sovereignty, Indonesia has been far less capable of cracking down on illegal fishing by foreign fishing fleets, including Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Philippine, that invade its waters. Some of the Indonesian fishermen I interviewed about international illegal fishing in their waters maintained that they were afraid to confront the foreign fleets because the foreign fishing ships were presumed to be armed. They believed that the presence of guns on the fishing ships also deterred action by Indonesia’s coast guard. Some of the fear can perhaps now be offset by the creation of a community patrol “coastal watch” effort run by the Ministry of Fisheries, for which the U.S. government has installed a communications technology that allows the fishermen to report the presence of illegal fishermen in real time and thus enables a heftier law enforcement response.

Most of the interviewed fishermen, however, believed that the lack of robust law enforcement action had to do with large amounts of corruption money sloshing around in the international fishing industry which could easily buy off Indonesia’s naval and coast guard patrols. Church and NGO activists in Labuan Bajo, Flores, for example, recounted how they suspected that local police and navy officials were involved in the smuggling of the endangered Napoleon wrasse (also known as humphead wrasse), the trade in which is prohibited by several countries and whose possession in Indonesia requires special permits from the government. Nonetheless, the species is highly sought after in Taiwan, China, and other East Asian markets. Repeated tipoffs to local Labuan Bajo police and navy units regarding the illegal catching and smuggling of the wrasse fell on deaf ears, with the law enforcement agencies demanding proof from the activists before they would take any kind of law enforcement action against the identified smugglers. The activists thus invited local media to the port where the wrasse smuggling was taking place, and “by accident” spilled one of the boxes transporting the smuggled wrasses, forcing the police to acknowledge in front of flashing cameras that illegal fishing was taking place there. Nonetheless, a visit to the Chinese market in Labuan Bajo in October 2012 revealed Napoleon wrasse on sale. The trade in other exotic fishes, even if not necessarily protected species (CITES only prohibited the trade in some sharks and manta rays in March 2013), was thriving there. Local buyers were eagerly haggling with fishermen over lips from parrotfish, manta ray parts, and sharks fins.

Lessons from Indonesian Anti-Piracy Efforts for More Robust Law Enforcement Action against Illegal Fishing and Wildlife Trafficking

The anti-piracy efforts in the Strait of Malacca and around Indonesia can provide insight into the factors which can stimulate better law enforcement action by Indonesia. Before the frequency of maritime piracy spiked around the Horn of Africa and West Africa, pirate attacks on ships at sea in Strait of Malacca amounted to almost half of the world’s piracy incidents. Out of the more than 250 yearly attacks in the Strait and around Indonesia during the first half of the 2000 decade, the majority originated in Indonesia.[2] Indonesia’s archipelago provided many safe-haven opportunities for pirates, while law enforcement action against them both on land, such as on the Riau islands, and at sea was sporadic and limited at best.

As the frequency of pirate attacks kept growing, it came to present a threat to Singapore’s economy – critically dependent on the safety of its seaborne commerce and accessibility of its port, with more than 50,000 vessels carrying 40% of world’s trade passing through the Strait yearly. Backed by the United States, Singapore pressured Indonesia to take more robust action against the pirates and delivered a variety of financial incentives-- delivering technologies, patrol assets, and ultimately paying for much of the anti-piracy effort Indonesia mounted. Anti-piracy intelligence sharing among Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, previously inhibited by traditional rivalries, also increased, even though many of the proposed “joint” patrols among the three navies really amounted only to “coordinated” patrols. In the latter part of the 2000 decade, piracy in the Strait fell off by about three-fourths – even though the actual number of interdiction operations on the seas remained very small. Just the greater deployment of patrolling assets and importantly actions by Indonesia against the pirates on land created a robust deterrent effect.

The fact that Singapore mounted strong pressure on Indonesia is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that ultimately Singapore had to back up the pressure by extending various modes of assistance to stimulate greater law enforcement action against the pirates. What is more interesting is that in the case of maritime piracy, unlike in the case of its many other large-scale illicit economies, such as illegal logging and mining, Indonesia was able to overcome the corruption that has long plagued its law enforcement apparatus and undermined the interdiction and deterrence efforts. In other words, it was pressure from Singapore, underwritten by material assistance from that city-state, that stimulated Indonesia’s resolve to go after the pirates. But what accounts for Indonesia’s improved capacity to carry out the law enforcement effort?

To a great extent, the answer appears to lie in the low profits and un-institutionalized form of corruption surrounding maritime piracy in the area. Unlike in the case of piracy off the Somalia coast, the profits from piracy around Indonesia were fairly low, with attacks often amounting more to robberies on the seas and in ports, rather than to long-term hostage and cargo seizure with ransom payouts in the millions of dollars. (Indeed, the “pirate” attacks around the Indonesian archipelago that have taken place over the past three to four years remained mostly thefts and robberies when ships are anchored in Indonesia’s ports.) Consequently, the bribes from piracy paid to either Indonesian coast guard or navy officials or to local government officials on land in areas that the pirates used as safe-havens were not very large, nowhere on the scale of the bribes paid by illegal logging or mining companies. Nor have the Indonesian law-enforcement agencies become addicted to the piracy bribes for their institutional budgets, unlike in the case of bribes and problematic profits from natural-resource extraction on which Indonesia’s military and law enforcement agencies have come to depend for sustaining their operating budgets.[3] The political costs Jakarta had to absorb to make law enforcement agencies act against the pirates and the muscle it had to exercise to corral local officials into compliance were far lower with respect to piracy than the political costs would be for Jakarta to enforce compliance with resource-extraction regulations. The number of political and institutional actors with a vested interest in perpetuating piracy (because of the rent payouts it generated) was also much smaller than in illegal logging and mining, and the management problem for Jakarta therefore also much simpler. The resolution of secessionist militancy in Sumatra’s Aceh region, after the 2005 peace deal, is sometimes also put forward as a factor enabling the more robust law enforcement action against the pirates.[4] But there are limitations as to how far this explanation carries, given that most of the pirate attacks did not originate from Aceh and the area was not a prime safe-haven area for the pirates. (The fact that many of the former Free Aceh Movement combatants continue to be unemployed and economically-frustrated could easily make them an easy recruitment pool for pirate businessmen. Other illicit economies, such as marijuana cultivation, have in fact been thriving in the region.)

For combatting wildlife trafficking and illegal logging in Indonesia, the anti-piracy story has two implications. On the positive side, in the case of wildlife trafficking, the vast majority of the conservation actors and Indonesian government officials I interviewed agreed that corruption surrounding wildlife trafficking was not institutionalized. Nor was it believed to generate large off-budget income for the law enforcement institutions, like logging and mining. Tackling individualized corruption, as difficult as it is, is still far simpler than weaning entire institutions of illicit budgets.

On the negative side, the bribery profits from illegal fishing for Indonesia’s law enforcement agencies are considerably higher than those from piracy. For some agencies, such as the coast guard and the navy, the bribes may well constitute corruption payoffs akin to that from mining and logging that go beyond individual bribes. That is bad news for developing more robust law enforcement action.

The barriers to international cooperation against illegal fishing are also far higher than against piracy. Major fishing offenders such as China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam would have to take on their domestic fishing industries -- a high-cost political action they have not been willing to mount, just as Indonesia has not been able to effectively take on its logging industry, for example. Vietnam and Indonesia have announced joint anti-illegal fishing patrols, but whether these will amount to more than window dressing by Vietnam yet remains to be seen.

Beefed up law enforcement action against wildlife trafficking and illegal fishing is critical. Providing effective alternative livelihoods for poor hunters is a policy that enhances human rights and human security as well as greatly facilitates law enforcement. Unfortunately, alternative livelihoods efforts are rarely effective, with auspicious circumstances mostly lacking and structural problems difficult to overcome. Ultimately, there are great limits to what even much more effective law enforcement and much more effective alternative livelihoods can accomplish unless demand for wildlife products around the world, and particularly in East Asia, is rapidly reduced. So far, demand reduction efforts in the region for bushmeat and Traditional Chinese Medicine have registered thinner, even if somewhat improving, results than demand reduction efforts to reduce the consumption of illicit drugs. But time is running out for Indonesia’s magnificent biodiversity –both on land and in the sea.

[1] For details, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia,” Working Paper No. 6, The Brookings Institution, June 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/6/illegal%20wildlife%20trade%20felbabbrown/06_illegal_wildlife_trade_felbabbrown.

[2] “Piracy Down 3rd Year in Row: IMB report,” Journal of Commerce Online, January 23, 2007; and “Pirate attacks Up 14 Percent Worldwide in Jan-Sept Period, Maritime Watchdog Says,” Associated Press, October 16, 2007.

[3] See, for example, International Crisis Group, “Indonesia: Natural Resources and Law Enforcement,” Aseia Report No, 29, December 20, 2001, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/Indonesia%20Natural%20Resources%20and%20Law%20Enforcement.pdf; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Indonesia Field Report III – The Orangutan’s Road: Illegal Logging and Mining in Indonesia,” The Brookings Institution, February 7, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/02/07-indonesia-illegal-logging-mining-felbabbrown.

[4] Michael Shuman, “How to Defeat Pirates: Success in the Strait,” Time, April 22, 2009.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Chaiwat Subprasom / Reuters

Indonesia Field Report III – The Orangutan’s Road: Illegal Logging and Mining in Indonesia

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Kutai’s Destruction

Like in a desolate Edward Hopper landscape, the orangutan was clinging to the one last tree that stood next to the river in Kutai National Park in eastern Kalimantan. The joy of seeing this magnificent primate was spoiled by his destroyed habitat. Under normal circumstances, the orangutan would never venture so far out from trees, but here he was in a beyond-degraded and marginal habitat, probably looking for food that he could no longer find inside the forest.

Although once a jewel of biodiversity in Indonesia, teeming with Sumatran rhinoceroses and bantengs (wild Asian cattle species), and long-portrayed as one of the greatest wilderness areas left on the Indonesian side of Borneo, much of Kutai today looks like a devastation zone. Kilometers deep into its boundaries, the park has been stripped of trees. Despite the fact that the park is nominally a protected area, the trees have been logged for their hardwoods as well as to cultivate palms. The park was also badly affected by extensive fires several years ago. The big dipterocarp trees that are the essence of a Southeast Asian rainforest and on which many animal species depend for survival – and the hardwood of which is unfortunately highly valuable – have been all but eliminated in vast tracks of the park. The one last standing dipterocarp a kilometer deep into the forest has become an attraction to show to tourists. As a result, and also because of hunting, few hornbills are left in much of the park: Over the days we spent there, we saw only three species of hornbills: wrinkled, rhinoceros, and Asian pied. Overall, despite hours and hours in the forest, we could saw few other species of birds and mammals, including those that should be common genera in this kind of habitat, such as bulbuls and broadbills. One of the most common bird species in the park, even as deep into the forest as that which several hours of hiking would bring us, seemed to be the blue-eared barbet, a typical forest-edge species whose prevalence well inside the forest indicated that the forest is destroyed and of marginal quality and resembles more a forest edge, rather than a high-quality lowland growth.

We cut the motor of our canoe to watch the orangutan male, but instead of birds and insects, we continued hearing engines and industrial noise from a major coal mine that churned on nonstop for 24 hours a day right on the edge of the forest. Quite possibly, the mine could actually lie at least partly inside what was once national park. Park boundaries in Indonesia are exceedingly easy to redraw to accommodate mining and logging interests and generate revenues for local officials. During interviews with artisanal loggers in villages inside and around Kutai and in other national parks throughout the archipelago, I was told that local government officials and park managers would occasionally clandestinely encourage or at least tacitly tolerate artisanal logging and mining for gold and coal. The initial opening up of the ecosystem and thereafter its degradation would then allow them to apply to national offices in Jakarta to have parts of the park redesignated as unprotected environmentally-degraded land so they could issue permits for industrial-scale logging and mining concessions or African oil palm plantations, which bring great revenues. As efforts to improve local resource management and governance have produced various rankings of how much revenue local officials raise and “invest” in local communities, few regencies (the local administrative unit in Indonesia equivalent to a county) have an incentive to be saddled with forest that cannot be exploited. Whether the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) schemes, discussed below, will succeed in altering the structure of incentives remains to be seen and depends as much on local political-economy structures and power distribution as on their technical and financial feasibility.

The river within which we had canoed was itself clogged by piles of tailings, and spots of gasoline and some industrial runoff floated on the surface with regularity. Two several-hours-long night trips revealed only two buffy fishing owls and three common sandpipers, while no kingfishers or mammals could be sighted. Ornithologist Keith Barnes who has studied birds throughout Africa and Asia commented that until our research trip to Kutai, he had not been on a river in Southeast Asia for more than one hour without seeing at least a squirrel: “There is something seriously wrong with this forest.” For one, vast tracks of the forest are gone, with empty grassland and brambles, and not even secondary forest growth, left in its wake. Indeed, lowland forests throughout Indonesia have been destroyed or are facing tremendous pressures from logging; and even highland forests, such as in Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Halmahera, are increasingly shaved off by logging companies that decide to stomach the logistical expenses of hauling away the timber from steep hills and mountains or by poor artisanal loggers and farmers who desire more land.

Deforestation in Indonesia Going Down?

During the 2000s decade and beyond, deforestation in Indonesia has slowed down, but that is partially because so much forest has already been cut down. Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has won international accolades for promising to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Indonesia 26% by 2020 through reducing deforestation (even while maintaining a 7% annual growth). Indonesia, one of the world’s largest carbon-emitters, may well come close to succeeding in that goal, but it will be to an important extent because much of its forests have already been commercially logged out, not because conservation efforts have become more robust and effective. Commercially-viable lowland forest in Sumatra is gone, pockets still remain in Kalimantan, and Papua is the hotspot of logging and chainsaw profits.

What is highly disturbing about Indonesia, however, is that the small slivers of forest that are left (often designated as protected areas) continue to be invaded by loggers, poachers, and miners – whether poor artisanal ones who operate illegally or official companies with formal licenses obtained through bribery. Because law enforcement continues to be exceedingly poor and many officers are on the take, even protected areas are far more degraded than similar protected areas elsewhere in Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia or Thailand. These countries too have logged out their forests, but what areas they set aside for conservation, even though small they might be, they tend to protect far better than Indonesia does. Moreover, many of the areas designated as protected in Indonesia, even national parks, are those that had already been commercially logged out and had their biodiversity degraded – the forests of Sulawesi provide a prime example. Setting logged forests aside and protecting them from new encroachment has the potential to greatly boost biodiversity; but whether once species that have become extinct or come close to extinction in a particular area can return and biodiversity be fully restored to its original richness (to that of a primary unlogged forest), no one knows. Many of the tree species and ecosystems they support take several hundred years to grow and reach maturity.

Indonesia’s Law Enforcement and Its Complicity in Illegal Economies and Other Regulatory Problems

Indonesia’s law enforcement and military forces are not only inadequate and under-resourced, they are also deeply complicit in various illicit economies, including illegal logging and mining. The corruption problem goes well beyond many individual officers being in on the take. During the Suharto era, Indonesia’s military had investments in large parts of Indonesia’s economy. Although it was forced to give up many of these past investments, it continues to rely on outside-the-budget revenues for large parts of its income. A decade ago, as much as a third of revenues for the military came off budget, and that dependence and problem has been poorly tackled since and has not fundamentally changed.[1]

Local police officials and military officers not only close their eyes to illegal resource extraction, they at times actively encourage it in order to promote their family businesses. Some representatives of the mill concessions I interviewed in eastern Kalimantan’s business hub Samarinda even claimed that local law enforcement officials would make them accept illegally cut timber for processing or the mills would face raids. “Look, realistically, we have few incentives to comply with regulation,” one of the logging company executives told me. “Getting all the permits and licenses takes a lot of time. You have to pay bribes to local officials and to those in Jakarta. And these days, bribes are complicated and unreliable. If we don’t pay bribes, it will take two years to get a license. And then what? The police or the military will hold up the logs on the river, sometimes for weeks on, until the timbers starts rotting. It’s far simpler just to pay off everyone right away.” He went on to bemoan how corruption used to be far simpler during the Suharto era, with a 10% standard rate for everything. “But these days, the military are angry that the police are getting a cut too, and they’re both jealous of who gets to be paid more. And yes, the coast guard and the navy make money off the coal exports.” Complicity and impunity debilitate regulatory policies. This is particularly so in a deeply corrupt system, such as Indonesia’s, where big violators often hold great political power, including sometimes by being members of Indonesia’s parliament or local administrations, rarely are arrested; and even then can bribe their way out of the law’s punishment.

Strategies to improve natural resource management and protect the environment in the face of seductive vast profits have been undermined in Indonesia not just by poor law enforcement, as key as that is. Efforts to develop effective and equitable regulatory frameworks have also been complicated by overlapping and competing bureaucracies, unclear regulations, poor local management and government capacity, and lack of clear land titles. Poor local administrative capacity and poor local law enforcement capacity are exacerbated by the fact that for a variety of reasons line ministry, law enforcement, and military officials are often rotated out of many postings and areas after a few months. Such short-term assignments guarantee that the officials are in a perpetual catch-up effort to learn local issues, or lead them to simply ignore local contexts. The short-term rotation system is based on the assumption that it limits how deeply involved in local corruption schemes the deployed officials can become. Instead, they often have an incentive to make as much money as fast as possible before they are sent to a less lucrative posting.

Community Ownership as the Solution?

To the extent that law enforcement raids do take place, whether to satisfy Jakarta or silence international criticism, they often target the poorest participants in the illegal economies, such as illegal miners and loggers. Their activities are hardly benevolent; rather, they have significant and highly negative effects on the environment. Overall, their impact may be less detrimental than in the case of large Indonesian or multinational companies, but they often significantly disturb and destroy fragile ecosystems, such as highland forests where commercial logging is unviable and which thus become some of the last strands of forest standing. But the reality also is that the basic livelihoods of artisanal loggers and miners can be profoundly dependent on these illicit economies, and their human security entwined with their participation in illegality. Lacking access to legal livelihoods, microcredit, and titles, they are also far less able to pay license fees and bribes, as well as having little capacity to bribe their way out of being arrested. The sentence of several months or even years in prison may deter some from further illegal logging. But some of the villagers whom I interviewed had been imprisoned for illegal logging and stated that they merely switched to poaching. They could not make ends meet legally and faced lesser sanctions for poaching than for illegal mining and logging. Among the variety of illicit economic activities surrounding resource extraction, Indonesia’s law enforcement frequently makes the most effort to crack down on artisanal illegal mining because large mining companies have an interest in keeping the artisanal loggers out of their way.[2]

Democratization and power decentralization in Indonesia were expected to better align the behavior of local officials with the interests of local communities, strengthening local communities’ rights and improving environmental protection. That promise has not often materialized for a variety of reasons: First, powerful interest groups and large businesses, often linked to local politicians, tend to be far more effective at lobbying than local civil society groups. Indeed, many of the NGOs working in the community rights or natural resource sectors I interviewed throughout Indonesia felt impotent; along with journalists, they would expose violations of laws and regulations, but no one would be punished and behavior would not change. Second, feeling they have poor choices and that most politicians are corrupt anyway, many voters are easily seduced by cheap handouts from politicians before elections. Rather than poorly- performing government officials being voted out of power, they are often reelected or arrange for their family members to be elected. Throughout Indonesia, resource-baron local dynasties have been emerging. Third, decentralization has greatly empowered local officials in Indonesia – in fact, often to the extent that they believe they can get away with a lot in violating edicts from Jakarta and disobeying the national government. Conflicting local and national regulations only further permit escaping desirable regulations.[3]

Furthermore, it is not always clear that local communities are fundamentally opposed to economic exploitation that destroys the local environment. Occasionally, they will resist and protect their land from logging or mining and even do so effectively – such as in the famous case of the Wehea Forest in Kalimantan. The level of social cohesion plays a critical role. In tightly-knit indigenous communities spiritually-linked to a forest, as in the Wehea case, the capacity to resist the lure of short-term profits can well be strong and effective resistance action can be organized. But many communities in Indonesia’s frontier areas such as Kalimantan are transmigrasi migrants. They do not have attachments to the area, they do not necessarily plan to stay there for the long term, they do not know their neighbors in the shack next door, and they often do not have land titles. They have moved to the logging and mining areas precisely to make money. They are in it for the quick buck, and their horizons tend to be very short, even shorter than the horizons of many local government officials. When I questioned the officials about the sustainability of their primary commodity exploitation-led growth, many would delightedly reply that they had coal supplies for twenty years – “a very long time.” And even communities with more established roots in an area but that are struggling with marginal livelihoods are easily tempted to sell their land to big companies for exploitation.

Many resource-extraction companies have also learned that they can get away with unsustainable strategies, not only politically and legally, but also economically. For many years, Indonesia’s timber and mill industry was eating its own tail, slashing the forests at a rate that was unsustainable while the industry was becoming more and more bloated. But instead of suffering the painful effects of having to downsize their operations as Indonesia’s forest shrank and the Indonesian national government became more interested in limiting deforestation (if only to get its hands on the REDD+ money), many companies were able to diversify or altogether switch into African oil palm cultivation or mining.

International Mechanisms to Foster Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability I: REDD+

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and, more broadly, approaches such as paying-for-ecosystem-services (PES) schemes are based on the idea that if the economic structure of incentives pushes toward environmental degradation because natural ecosystems are not economically valued, one can change the structure of incentives by pricing environmental services, such as carbon capture. These financial transfers pay for an undesirable – such as, environmentally-destructive – economic activity like logging or mining not to take place. Western governments who care about tropical forests not being destroyed or Western companies that need to offset their carbon emissions pay for forests elsewhere not to be cut down and carbon emissions thus not to be released. In the best of outcomes, such schemes will reduce carbon emissions and preserve forests and biodiversity. After several years of tough and protracted negotiations, Indonesia and Norway agreed in December 2012 on such a REDD+ scheme which pays for a protection area to be established abutting the Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan, to create an important buffer zone around it. Investors in the Rimba Raya forest include Russia’s giant gas producer Gazprom and a large German financial institution Allianz. The project was originally supposed to start in 2010, but then stalled as the Indonesian government proposed to cut the amount of land devoted to the conservation area because an African oil palm plantation company had overlapping concessions that it was not interested in relinquishing.

REDD+ mechanisms were at the center of the stalled UN climate change negotiations in the latest November 2012 Doha round. And just like the overall climate change negotiations, they too are mired in international political disagreements. The procedure on which to base reference emission levels, i.e., the baseline from which the level of carbon emission that would take place in the absence of REDD+ is counted, is developed; but key emitters, such as Brazil, have refused to submit to international verification and monitoring procedures. In a country with deep corruption and pervasive regulation evasion such as Indonesia, credible external monitoring will be key for making REDD+ and other PES efforts effective.

A second major problem is that the lack of emissions reductions commitments from the United States, China, India, Canada, and Russia raises doubts about how and whether funding for REDD+ will be generated and at what levels. China and India are loath to commit to any emission reductions until the United States makes a move, and perhaps not even then. Nor has it been agreed as to how much of the burden and responsibility middle-income countries like Brazil and Indonesia need to share. Indonesian officials I interviewed often expressed a desire that the REDD+ is used to pay for law enforcement in the national parks and other protected areas, for example; but Indonesia is not so poor that it requires international payoffs to pay its park rangers better. Anyway, the problem often lies as much with actors outside the national park as with the rangers themselves.

And here lies one of the potential difficulties with REDD+. The payoff goes to either the national government or a local government. But surrounding the two and between the two, there are often complex webs of powerful vested economic actors. Even equitable and proportional transfers between the national government and local governments do not guarantee that local government officials will develop the muscle and wherewithal to resist corruption and coercion from powerful economic groups, particularly if those economic groups are the military and police, like in Indonesia. Nor will the money necessarily make its way into the hands of the artisanal loggers and miners. In other words, the domestic payoff transfer and internal distribution of the money and transferred resources will affect the REDD+ effectiveness as much as their international component.

Such problems with government compensation to local forest owners for preserving natural forests have been experienced even outside of the carbon schemes. If monitoring and law enforcement is poor and the local community places little intrinsic value on forest and biodiversity preservation, local communities will often collect the money and log anyway, or in other cases face invasion by logging companies from outside the community. Similarly, if payments are set too much below the value of logging the forest, even compensated owners can be tempted to participate in illegal logging while collecting no-cutting rents.[4] And making sure that the money reaches the forest-dependent communities and is not usurped by corrupt powerbrokers is often a challenge.

Another aspect of REDD+ that could have important effects is developing local capacities to better manage forests. But those better sustainable practices will once again run into local economic interests that either need to be bought via the REDD+ transfers or coerced by law enforcement to comply with regulations. What the REDD+ initiatives have already accomplished in Indonesia is to force officials in the Forestry Ministry – a notoriously corrupt institution which regards its task as making as much money out of forests as possible, rather than preserving forests and biodiversityn – to conduct much better assessments of existing forests and even publish that data. Previous self-monitoring and data collection on deforestation has been rather unreliable in Indonesia.

Critically, the price structure of the payoff schemes will be a significant determinant of their effectiveness not only for capturing carbon, but also of preserving the world’s biodiversity.[5] Surprisingly, a certain price structure could have a negative effect on the preservation of natural forests, and the failure to incorporate biodiversity considerations in forest management designs could be compounded by emerging carbon-for-forest payoff schemes. In some countries and under some circumstances, where there is strong government commitment, successful cooptation of key logging industry stakeholders, and effective law enforcement, such financial transfers can halt deforestation or even expand existing forest cover.[6] But for that to be likely, the compensation payments need to be far greater for preserving natural, and especially primary, forests than for capturing carbon by degraded forests or replanted forests or timber plantations. And these differentials – with by far the most compensation going for primary forests, smaller amounts for secondary forests, and the least for non-native monoculture plantations – need to be sufficiently great to steer government decisions toward keeping forests intact. Without such a price structure in place, with any tree accorded an equal or similar carbon-capture value, governments could be tempted to maximize profits by intensely logging their forests first and then signing up for carbon offsets for halting further deforestation, including from forests that are no longer viable for commercial logging or through biodiversity-poor reforestation and plantations. Even if the logged forest regenerates timber through replanting or natural recovery, it often cannot do so in a manner that will restore its original biodiversity. Without a far greater unit price for carbon captured by intact natural forests rather than by forest plantations and other reforested areas, the carbon schemes thus encourage the preservation of any forests – including monocultures – rather than native primary forests.[7]

International Mechanisms to Foster Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability II: Green and Other Certification

Since the 1990s, certification labeling of the legality and environmental sustainability of harvested timber or African palm oil or of the absence of conflict in the extraction of minerals has emerged as a key mechanism to suppress undesirable behavior associated with economies that cannot be fully prohibited. Certification is supposed to mitigate inherent harms and negative externalities, such as human rights violations, social strife and violent conflict, and environmental destruction. To combat illegal logging, timber certification is meant to designate that the logged and traded timber has been sourced and transported in a legal or environmentally-sound way and that illegal timber has not been mixed in with the legal timber. Ideally, such certification examines and approves the entire custody chain; the traded timber would be certified from the moment it is carefully, legally, and sustainably selected for cutting in the forest to the moment a customer buys a piece of furniture in a Western furniture store. Any gap in controls in the custody chain increases the chance that illegal timber enters the trade and is effectively laundered.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC, an independent, international NGO) certification, which tracks timber from forest to the shelf, is often considered the current gold standard of certification labels for timber. However, by the end of the 2000s, the FSC still certified only approximately 220 million acres, of which 110 million are in North America, while there are 10 billion acres of forested land on Earth.[8] Less than 2% of tropical timber was covered by FSC certification.[9] Getting certified is expensive, costing about U.S. $50,000 per concession, and customers are not always eager to absorb the higher costs.

Given the size of the trade and the complexity of certification – as wood changes many hands along trade routes and is processed into many, often minute pieces, over extensive periods of time – the reliability of the process is frequently problematic, with many opportunities for fake certificates, falsification, or timber laundering along the way. The more timber subject to certification, the more challenging it will be to maintain quality and reliable certification. When I asked a logging company representative in Samarinda about whether they were concerned about failing to obtain green certification and whether they altered their practice as a result of increasing desire for such certification in Western markets, he just laughed: “For us, it’s just another bribery item. We pay for the inspectors. And anyway, they go out for two days out of a year – how much can they see?”

Beyond the sheer volume and the previously discussed challenges of law enforcement intensity, fake documentation, and the amount of time it takes to check a sufficient amount of timber to discourage laundering and smuggling, certification schemes are also plagued by other problems: The most important one is that timber may be certified as legal, but may not be harvested sustainably and in an environmentally sensitive way. Some of the legality verification is very limited, confirming only that timber originated in a particular concession area and that the company had the necessary permits. Other legality certification can involve more rigorous evidence of compliance with harvesting regulations and other operational matters. [10] Even then sustainability may not necessarily be a part of the certification evaluation. Since most legislation mandating certification of wood and wood products, including the expanded U.S. Lacey Act and the European Union’s Timber Regulation due diligence requirements, centers on its legality, as opposed to its sustainability, suppliers have concentrated on precisely assuring timber’s legality but not necessarily sustainability. Moreover, getting a certification for sustainability takes considerably longer and is far more expensive than the legality certification.

Certification problems often start with forest management plans. Both the design and implementation of forest management are often pervaded by serious problems, even though the mere existence of such a plan can qualify the logged timber for certification. Not all forest management plans ensure sustainability and minimal environmental damage, including measures to protect biodiversity. Often forest engineers, large numbers of whom are required to design programs for all the logging operations, are incompetent and corrupt. Moreover, since natural forest regeneration often takes decades in the tropics, there is not any easy way at present to see whether the management programs are effective, and to correct policy if they are not. Thus certification does not always involve all three components: legality, timber sustainability, and biodiversity protection. Certificates are issued only for one or two components of desirable practices, with law enforcement officials and customers having no idea what exactly is being certified and whether the certified timber in fact reflects optimal practices.

In addition, consumer preferences and regulatory requirements for certified wood have given birth to some certification schemes of dubious quality. Many of these certification labels represent simple cases of “greenwashing,” i.e., illegal and unsustainable wood being certified as legal and sustainable. In other cases, major retailers – even in the United States and Western Europe where customers are overall greener and the regulatory oversight greater – have appropriated and advertized green labels, including that of FSC, without ever being certified.[11] At other times, timber and wood product suppliers have obtained FSC’s chain-of-custody certification indicating that they have adequate capacity to check their supply chains without actually handling any FSC certified timber.[12] Extensive unreliability of certification can whitewash consumer conscience and encourage greater, and undesirable, consumer demand. Large numbers of certification schemes also make law enforcement more difficult. Watching the watchdogs, or in this case certificate issuers, and establishing lists of reliable certifiers, is essential for certification to reduce illegal logging.

Critically compounding the limitations of certification is the fact that some of the most important and emerging markets, such as India and China, fundamentally do not care about corporate social responsibility or mitigating the multiple harms that various economic activities can generate. Mining company representatives I interviewed in Sulawesi, Kalimantan, and Sumatra all said how they love to sell coal to India. “The Indian companies just don’t care about anything,” the representative in Kalimantan opined. “Not any environmental issues, social conflict, nothing. It’s a pleasure dealing with them. They even don’t care about the quality of the coal. They just want more and more of it.” Clearly, to improve the effectiveness of certification, it is necessary to create certification inspectors who are fully independent and not paid by the business firms or governments seeking the particular legal, environmental, or social certification. It is also necessary to fundamentally change attitudes toward corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability in emerging markets. Not surprisingly, many Asian companies and multinationals tend to behave better at home than abroad, like in Indonesia. Indonesian logging and mining companies are hardly, however, paragons of virtue.

While critical, a regulatory framework only partially determines the effectiveness of policies. Local institutional and cultural contexts matter a great deal and can facilitate or render ineffective regulatory frameworks. The overall level of corruption and the quality of law enforcement and rule of law matter as much as the regulatory design itself. And in Indonesia they have a long way to go to improve.

As we were leaving Kutai, we stopped at a roadside shack to take some photographs of the destroyed forest. A local Dayak woman was selling various wares. While trying to talk us into buying parts of animals her father killed in the park, such as hornbill feathers, she told us that she frequently sees orangutans cross the paved highway. On either side of the road, there was little forest left – just palms as far as the eye could see. It was not clear to us where the orangutans would be going or why: Perhaps there is so little food left in the forest that even here, in a national park, they are forced to eat the insides of the African oil palms, a foraging coping mechanism that frequently puts them in conflict with people and gets them killed. While I was looking at the road and the destroyed forest, a paraphrase of the famous line from Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptical novel The Road ran though my head: Borrowed time and borrowed world and whose eyes with which to sorrow it?

[1] See, for example, International Crisis Group, “Indonesia: Natural Resources and Law Enforcement,” December 20, 2001, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/Indonesia%20Natural%20Resources%20and%20Law%20Enforcement.pdf.

[2] See also Samuel Spiegel, “Governance Institutions, Resource Rights Regimes, and the Informal Mining Sector: Regulatory Complexities in Indonesia,” World Development, 40(1), 2012: 189-205; and Gavin Hilson, “What Is Wrong with the Global Support Facility for Small-scale Mining?” Progress in Development Studies, (7)3, 2007: 235-249.

[3] For how decentralization has become excessive and distortive, see International Crisis Group, “Indonesia: Defying the State,” August 30, 2012, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/b138-indonesia-defying-the-state.pdf.

[4] For examples of such compensation policies and their shortcoming in particularly institutional and regulatory settings in China, see, for example, Forest Trends (2006): 20. For an effective, but expensive compensation scheme that increased the amount of land protected from certain kinds of environmentally-damaging land in Colorado, the United States, from just under 350,000 acres in 2000 to almost one million in 2005, see “Mountains for the Centuries,” The Economist, 382(8514): 35.

[5] For other challenges for effectively implementing REDD+, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Not as Easy as Falling off a Log: The Illegal Timber Trade in the Asia-Pacific Region and Possible Mitigation Strategies,” Brookings Foreign Policy Working Paper No. 5, Brookings Institution, March 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/3/illegal%20logging%20felbabbrown/03_illegal_logging_felbabbrown.

[6] See, for example, Raymond Gullison, Peter Frumhoff, Joseph G. Canadell, Christopher B. Field, Daniel C. Nepstad, Katharine Hayhoe, Roni Avissar, Lisa M. Curran, Pierre Friedlingstein, Chris D. Jones, and Carlos Nobres “Tropical Forests and Climate Policy,” Science, 316, 2007: 985-986; and William Laurence, “Can Carbon Trading Save Vanishing Forests?” Bioscience, 58, 2008: 286-287.

[7] For how carbon offsets support such undesirable behavior in Papua New Guinea, for example, see Colin Filer, Rodney J. Keenan, Bryant J. Allen and John R. Mcalpine, “Deforestation and forest degradation in Papua New Guinea,” Annals of Forest Science, 66 (8), December 2009: 813-25.

[8] Pervaze A. Sheikh, Illegal Logging: Background and Issues, Congressional Research Service, June 9, 2008: 5. Even the FSC is not infallible, as was revealed with respect to illegal and unsustainable timber from Laos the FSC nonetheless certified. See, for example, World Rainforest Movement, “Laos: FSC Certified Timber Is Illegal,” http://www.illegal-logging.info/item_single.php?it_id=1683&it=news; and Wright and Carlton.

[9] The Economist, September 25, 2010: 13.

[10] Sam Lawson and Larry McFaul, “Illegal Logging and Related Trade: Indicators of Global Response,” Chatham House, July 2010: 77.

[11] See, for example, Environmental Investigative Agency, Behind the Veneer: How Indonesia’s Last Rainforests Are Being Felled for Flooring, 2006, http://www.eia-international.org/cgi/reports/reports.cgi?t=template&a=117.

[12] Lawson and MacFaul: 75-76.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Stringer Indonesia / Reuters

Indonesia Field Report II – Bali High, Rainforest Low: The Illicit Drug Trade in Indonesia

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Yet another Western tourist – this time a 56- year-old grandmother from Britain – has become the face of drug trafficking in Indonesia. Her death sentence for smuggling 10 pounds of cocaine worth of $2.5 million in her suitcase has riveted international media. Her story – that she was coerced to smuggle the drugs in order to protect her children and grandchildren whose safety was at stake – vaguely resembles the misfortunes of Bridget Jones from the movie Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. But so far, no miraculous Mark Darcy has landed to liberate her from prison and death row. Rather, human rights groups have criticized the British government for not doing enough to provide an adequate legal defense for Ms. Lindsay Sandiford. But as unfortunate as her story is, and even as it is but one in a long line of Western tourists dramatically apprehended and punished for drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, it is to a great extent a distraction from the drug trafficking problems and trends that Indonesia faces.

Like other countries in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has for decades applied extremely harsh penalties for drug trafficking and drug use. Like in Ms. Sandiford’s case, Indonesian law punishes drug smuggling with the death penalty, or at least a decades-long imprisonment. Merely getting caught smoking a joint can land one in jail for several years. As with elsewhere in Southeast Asia, such harsh penalties have done little to decrease drug trafficking in Indonesia.

In fact, both drug use and drug trafficking appear to have increased in the country. In 2011, Indonesia’s user population was estimated to be approximately 4.1 million, or 1.6 percent of Indonesia’s total population. In 2009, that user population was believed to be only 500,000.[1] If the estimates are equally correct – or more precisely make the same (under)estimation mistakes for both years – that would be an astounding eight-fold increase in three years. The expansion of Indonesia’s middle class, its growing purchasing power underpinned by the country’s economic boom fueled by its primary commodity exploitation and resulting GDP growth rates of over six percent, the stress of increasing inequality, and the democratization and political opening of the post-1998 era are all the kinds of triggers that can increase illicit drug consumption. Just like in China, Indonesians have been developing a taste for methamphetamines, ecstasy, heroin, and ketamine.

If the number of drug seizures, which can be signs of both greater drug flows and greater law enforcement effectiveness, are any indication, trafficking too seems to be increasing. Drug shipments intercepted at the Soekarno Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, arguably the most patrolled and monitored port of entry into the country, have risen from 16 in 2008 to 63 in 2010 and 52 in 2011.[2] With over 18,000 islands and a coastline of over 54 thousand kilometers, the Indonesian archipelago offers the perfect geography for smuggling, never mind how under-resourced and notoriously corrupt the Indonesian law enforcement apparatus is, and how weak and bribery-susceptible the justice system. Even with much less corruption in Indonesia – as critical and pivotal an achievement as that would be – and far greater resources devoted to counternarcotics enforcement, Indonesia would still be the trafficker’s paradise. Particularly since for several years now, prices of illicit drugs in Indonesia are believed to have remained higher than elsewhere in Southeast Asia.[3]

With the poor rule of law and the pervasive and deeply-ingrained corruption that exists in the country, Indonesia’s law enforcement and military officials, even more so than their counterparts elsewhere in the world, are perfectly positioned to dominate Indonesia’s drug trade. The dramatic court showcases of Western tourists smuggling drugs aside, examples of military and law enforcement complicity in drug trafficking abound. Rather laughably, officials at one of Indonesia’s high-security prisons, for example, have been caught cooking meth and supplying both the prison and the nearby city.[4] According to U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, Indonesian military commanders in West Papua have participated in all manner of smuggling, including drug and timber trafficking across the border with Papua New Guinea.[5]

Importantly, however, Indonesia is no longer just a transit country for illicit drugs heading to Australia, China, and Japan, but is also increasingly a destination country. It is also a hot and rapidly expanding meth production center. Since cold medications containing pseudoephedrine are sold in Indonesia without prescription or any registration required, as they used to be in the United States until the early 2000s, cooking meth is easy. A major producer of methamphetamines itself, China supplies the pseudoephedrine both to Indonesia’s pharmaceutical industry and illicit market in a rather unregulated and unmonitored manner.

Ever more, the meth cooks in Indonesia are native, instead of the Dutch who would arrive in their former colony to produce the methamphetamines. Indeed, one of the most important developments in the Indonesian drug market is the growth of Indonesia’s domestic production capacity. The expansion of the synthetic drugs market and the domestication of production have potentially large transformative effects on Indonesia’s landscape of organized crime. Western tourists may well be those most visibly apprehended in Indonesia, but the formation of powerful Indonesian drug-trafficking groups can radically transform the structure and characteristics of the Indonesian criminal market. The emergence of far more powerful and vertically-integrated drug-trafficking groups could alter the market’s proclivity toward violence. So far, it has been a rather peaceful market. It could also change the relationship between the Indonesian state, military and law enforcement officials, and politicians on the one hand and Indonesia’s criminal gangs on the other – a complex web described in Indonesia Field Report I on urban gangs. With far greater profits at stake than in the previous drugs-for-tourists deals, a large meth market is also bound to attract the attention of powerful organized crime groups from other Southeast Asian countries and China, potentially triggering turf wars over the market and once again fundamentally altering the relationship between state and crime in Indonesia. Already, members of Malaysian drug syndicates attempting to smuggle drugs are caught with increasing frequency at Jakarta’s airport.[6]

Although the growing meth market is potentially radically transformative of Indonesia’s criminal market and is certainly highly lucrative, Indonesia is hardly a newcomer to the drug trade. Along with Cambodia, the Philippines, and India, Indonesia has long been a significant producer of cannabis. The Aceh region in Sumatra has been one of the primary cultivation areas, with the pot profits funding Acehnese secessionists and Indonesian jihadists as well as poor farmers.

Historically, various foreign as well as domestic political actors profited from the illicit and licit drug trade in Indonesia. Opium poppy used to be cultivated in Borneo and other islands of the archipelago during the 19^th century. At the turn of the 20^th century, the Dutch imported opium from British India, Persia, and Turkey and sold it in legal government-sponsored shops and smoking outfits as well as to pharmaceutical companies. The Japanese occupation forces taxed the opium-processing factories as did Sukarno’s pro-independence forces who took over the factories from the Japanese. After the end of World War II, the pro-independence parallel government smuggled out large quantities of illegal opium to Singapore to generate revenues to fight the Dutch.[7]

More surprisingly, coca, the quintessential Latin American drug-producing plant, also used to be cultivated in Indonesia. During the 1870s, a Javanese coca cultivar was developed with leaves containing about 1.5 percent cocaine, a much higher potency than the South American coca varieties had at that time. Foreign sales of coca leaves subsequently boomed, with over 1,000 tons of leaves exported to Amsterdam for processing into cocaine in 1912. By 1920, coca exports had increased to 1,600 tons, equivalent to 25 tons of cocaine and surpassing the level of cultivation in Peru and Bolivia during that period.[8] As attitudes toward cocaine use began to change during the 1930s and the European market shrank, Indonesia’s coca cultivation and exports dwindled. By 1935, coca leaf exports from Java fell to less than 10 percent of peak production, and after a few years coca cultivation in Indonesia rather precipitously stopped. The expansion of the global illicit trade in cocaine after the 1970s fueled a massive coca cultivation expansion in the Andes, yet Indonesia’s cultivation has not returned. But now, the illicit market in synthetic drugs has robustly taken off.

Of the various smugglers I was able to interview in Indonesia during my research there in the fall of 2012, none were as reticent as the drug smugglers. Those who organized illegal mining and logging bragged with pride about their capacity to bribe Indonesian authorities – see Indonesia Field Trip Report III on illegal logging and mining. Wildlife poachers and traffickers exhibited with glee, and without any remorse, the animals they slaughtered – see Indonesia Field Trip Report IV on wildlife trafficking. But those who supposedly could talk about local drug peddling and trafficking were tight-lipped, nervously looking over their shoulders and denying any knowledge. The differential penalties – very harsh for drug trafficking and minimal for illegal logging, mining, and wildlife trafficking – may not have reduced the intensity of illicit drug flows in Indonesia, but they have silenced the participants in the illegal drug trade. And yet one needs to wonder not only about the readiness of Indonesia’s law enforcement to cope with the potential growth and power of Indonesia drug trafficking groups, but also about its priorities. The illicit drug trade often generates the most international opprobrium; yet it is the illicit as well as licit destruction of Indonesia’s biodiversity that is most pressing and requires urgent attention from the Indonesian government and law enforcement. After all, the drug trade is in renewable, nondepletable resources -- unlike Indonesia’s forests and unique species that are being overexploited and are disappearing at breakneck speed. Once they are gone, there is no way of bringing them back. Meth will be cooked and consumed decades from now. The only question is who will control the meth market and what kind of political power the market will generate.

[1] United States Department of State Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control strategy Report, March 2012, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/187109.pdf: 262-266.

[2] Multa Fidus, “Malaysian Syndicates Dominate Drug Smuggling in RI,” Jakarta Post, 26 April 2012, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/04/26/malaysian-syndicates-dominate-drug-smuggling-country.html.

[3] Interview with counternarcotics officials, Jakarta, October 2012. Given Indonesia’s rather limited and varied efforts to collect systematic drug data as well as frequent short-term fluctuations in drug prices, such assessments need to be taken with a grain of salt.

[4] Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja, “Indonesian Drug Trafficking Busts Doubled in 4 Years,” Jakarta Globe, 4 April 2011, http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/indonesian-drug-trafficking-busts-doubled-in-4-years/433371.

[5] Philip Dorling and Nick McKenzie, ‘Indonesian Army Linked to Drugs,” Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/indonesian-army-linked-to-drugs-20101222-195kx.html.

[6] Fidus.

[7] Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 290.

[8] David Musto, “International Traffic in Coca through the Early 20th Century, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 49(2), January 1, 1998: 145-156.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Supri Supri / Reuters

Indonesia Field Report I - Crime as a Mirror of Politics: Urban Gangs in Indonesia

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:00:00 -0500

Gang Truce in Indonesia … and El Salvador

Following a wave of violent confrontations and tit-for-tat killings, the leaders of five mass organizations-cum-urban gangs in Greater Jakarta – Pemuda Pancasila (PP), Pemuda Panca Marga (PPM), the Betawi Brotherhood Forum (FBR), the Betawi People’s Forum (Forkabi), and Badan Pembina Provinsi Keluarga Banten (BPPKB) – agreed to a ceasefire in June 2012. The violence to be shut down had erupted in the late winter and early spring of 2012, escalating and taking on ethnic overtones in March 2012 when the leader of another gang John Refra, a.k.a. John Kei, was arrested on murder charges. Fronting as a debt-collecting business, Kei’s Key Youth Force (Amkei) was centered on Moluccan migrants in Jakarta and had been clashing with rival gangs from Flores. The June gang truce, facilitated by police negotiations and mediation,[1] for a moment seemed to turn the violence off. The gang truce paralleled a ceasefire announced by two large gangs in El Salvador – an ocean away.

In El Salvador, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Calle 18, two large transnational gangs whose notoriety and proclivity to violence greatly surpasses the Jakarta toughs, declared a ceasefire in March 2012. In exchange for various privileges for imprisoned gangs leaders and members, the two maras promised the El Salvadorian government that they would turn off the violence that has significantly contributed to El Salvador’s extraordinarily murder rate of over 60 per 100,000 which for years plagued El Salvador’s citizens. Endorsed and facilitated by the government and the Catholic church, the truce was celebrated as a major breakout from the high urban criminal violence. Indeed, the truce appears to have reduced murders and other visible violence in El Salvador during the past year.[2] Even as extortion and less visible forms of violence have continued since the deal and even though there were signs in the fall of 2012 that the truce was becoming shakier and less stable, the truce has held so far and has been declared (rather controversially) by the government to be a model of dealing with urban gangs.

By contrast, in Jakarta the truce did not hold; and several weeks later, turf contestations among its gangs were back on. Of course, with 8 homicides per 100,000, Indonesia’s murder rate is nowhere close to El Salvador’s. In fact, despite occasional dramatic killings by the gangs that draw sensationalist media attention, Indonesia’s urban gangs come across as rather docile compared to their Central American brethren. Jakarta’s smog may be deadly and its traffic murderous and the inability of Jakarta’s cabbies to locate any address may well push one’s self-control to the threshold of violence; but with respect to crime, Jakarta is a remarkably safe city. Even in the vast slums where, as in San Salvador, the state is absent and the gangs rule, the atmosphere of violence is palpably lower than in many of Latin America’s cities. That does not mean that the Jakarta gangs do not exercise a great deal of power and authority over both slum areas and some business parts of the city. Just like in Rio de Janeiro, some gangs may at times have a virtual stranglehold on a neighborhood, complete with checkpoints and controlled entry into the slum.[3]

The State and the Street Rough

Yet the violence is indeed much lower in Jakarta – one reason being that the influence that official authority, such as the law enforcement, exercises over the gangs is great. Indeed, Indonesian gangs have a decades-old history of thick and complex relations with the Indonesia government, primarily its military, intelligence, and police forces, and also with Indonesian political parties that goes back to Indonesia’s independence. That basic set-up of the gangs doing the bidding of the formal powers has weathered dramatic changes in the country’s fundamental political arrangements and forms of rule over the decades. The faces and names of the gangs have changed, but the essential arrangement of official power remaining the true master and overlord of the criminal underground and employing the gangs for the purposes of the state and political bosses – as shady and illicit as these purposes may often be – has persisted.

In Latin America too, the state has often used criminal groups to advance its goals: In Mexico, deals and arrangements between the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional [PRI] that ruled Mexico for 71 years plus Mexican law enforcement agencies on the one hand, and drug-trafficking groups on the other hand, moderated crime until the 1980s.[4] In Rio de Janeiro and Jamaica, politicians have long used the urban gang bosses to deliver votes and collect donations for their political parties in exchange for patronage.[5] In Central America, the military and intelligences services employed criminal groups to fight insurgents during the civil wars of the 1980s; and in the 1990s, organized crime groups there evolved from the military-crime nexus of the civil wars. However, Latin American urban gangs have frequently broken away from their subservient relationship vis-à-vis the official power elite and have become rather disobedient, and at times very violent.

In Indonesia, and throughout much of South and Southeast Asia, the state and major formal political parties have been better able to hold the rein on the criminal gangs. That is not to say that the urban gangs, and their facades and manifestations as youth wings of political parties, are totally under the thumb of the politicians or military and police forces. They are agents in of themselves, with their own political and coercive power, at times fiercely asserting their own identity and agency. They negotiate and push back against their political-military overlords even as they take orders from them. Still, in contrast to Latin America, the relationship between the gangs and official political power in South and Southeast Asia has overall remained far smoother and less confrontational. By and large, the gangs have remained tightly integrated into the formal political processes and often closely linked with particular political parties.

Whether taking over unregulated spaces through force due to the absence of other regulators or being de facto granted concessions from the state, the Indonesian gangs have collected rents from various informal and illegal enterprises. They will organize, direct, and tax informal parking on Indonesia’s city streets; the fees are minimal and a refusal to pay may well result in slashed tires or a scratched car, but unlike in parts of Rio, it is unlikely to land one in a hospital. Gangs will also tax nightclubs and street vendors for protection. Often, this informal tax collection can be pure extortion; at other times, the gangs may actually provide protection against rivals, often from different ethnic groups, not merely against themselves. The nightclub protection racket tends to be highly lucrative: The Association of Indonesian Entertainment and Recreation Center Entrepreneurs claimed that over 400 nightclubs, bars, massage parlors, and discos in Jakarta generate revenues of around $200 million annually, with owners spending about 20% on formal and informal fees.[6]

At times, the protection racket can become quite formalized, with gang members hired off the street by “formal” security or debt-collection services.[7] In fact, Jakarta’s business operators have increasingly moved to these formal, legal firms, instead of hiring the informal gangs straight off the street to pay for protection and debt-collection services. The membership between these two types of protection outfits often highly overlaps, but the bosses of the former tend to sport ties rather than tattoos. Like their brethren around the world, gangs in Indonesia also have taxed, or run, gambling, prostitution networks, and local drug distribution operations. At times, the gangs provide informal microcredit, but that service tends to be rather abusive and frequently slips into loan-sharking.

The Many Facets of Preman

There are many types of gangs in Indonesia and they vary in their savviness of how to accumulate power, cultivate political connections, and acquire political capital.[8] Rather surprisingly, many Indonesian gangs frequently do not appear to provide extensive socio-economic services to the communities where they operate or deliver otherwise absent public goods, beyond providing protection and security. Many of the street vendors I interviewed throughout Java and in Sumatra, for example, complained about the gang taxes and claimed that the gangs were of little use to them and appeared to welcome when the state acted to suppress the gangs.[9]

Some are informal organizations of soldiers and sailors out for fun after dark, and one would not expect them to have political ambitions or organize services parallel to or in the absence of the state. Neither would one expect such behavior from the motorcycle gangs, such as the Moonraker, Grab on Road (GBR), and Exalt to Coitus (XTC), that operate in Indonesia.[10] But since Indonesia moves on mopeds and motorcycles, distinguishing a motorcycle gang of the Hells Angels-type from a gang that employs the typical Asian means of transportation may be tricky.

Indeed, the labeling of groups and individuals as preman (with the term encompassing everything from a criminal, street tough, to an outright organized crime group) has often been used and misused for political purposes. As much as the formal state institutions and political parties have used the gangs for their purposes, they have also often found it convenient to make the gangs and, more broadly, the urban poor their scapegoats. Many underprivileged urban young, or homeless people and beggars have been labeled preman merely because they are poor and live in a slum. Similarly, the Indonesian police have a tendency to call even peaceable groups of young kids just hanging around on the streets preman.

Some gangs, such as the aforementioned of John Kei’s Key Youth Force, are ethnically based. The transmigrasi policy encouraged population movements throughout the archipelago – mostly Javanese and southern Sulawesi natives moving to other islands; and, inevitably, quite apart from the transmigrasi policy, Jakarta’s economic growth and opportunities attracted migrants from elsewhere. With poor skills and lacking access to established patronage networks, they would often languish in Jakarta’s slums, with particular ethnic groups settling down in particular areas. The young unemployed become easy recruiting targets for ethnically-based gangs. The wider ethnic-minority community would depend on the gang for access to formal and informal jobs and other patronage, with other ethnic enclaves and their gangs remaining closed to outsiders. Some of the prominent ethnically-based gangs have included groups from Ambon, the Moluccas, Timor, and southern Sulawesi, particularly Makassar.

Violence between the ethnically-based gangs has occasionally not only triggered violent confrontations in the criminal market, but also set off wider ethnic violence in Indonesia. The November 1998 Ketapang riot in West Jakarta between gangs from Ambon and Flores, provoked by clashes over the control of parking lots and a gambling den, was believed to be the last spark igniting the ethnic and sectarian violence in Ambon during the late 1990s and early 2000s. But that narrative may have merely provided a convenient excuse for the police and military forces to be supporting Betawi (Jakarta native) gangs since then. Of course, ethnic tensions over access to land and state resources in Ambon had been growing for a number of years and were intensified by the Islamist salafi global mobilization of the 1990s. (The ethnic violence itself, despite its terrible human toll, provided Indonesia’s military and law enforcement forces with a plausible justification to keep high budgets after the collapse of the Suharto regime.)

But the gangs that do provide socio-economic services and hobnob with the politicians can accumulate a great deal of political power. Indeed, it is often very difficult to draw clear distinctions between some gangs and formal political youth organizations in Indonesia. The two entities may strongly overlap in leadership and membership, with each being unique and separate only at the margins. The gangs with the most explicit and thickest connections to formal political parties provide – rather naturally – the most extensive socio-economic and social services beyond protection, such as street cleaning, electricity, water distribution and sewage, flood assistance, and blood donations. They also resolve disputes, whether over land in slum areas without formal justice institutions and rule of law, or even among businessmen who choose to risk going through Indonesia’s corrupt and increasingly unpredictably bribable courts. Importantly, they also deliver votes for their political sponsors, put on mass rallies to demonstrate the particular political party’s street power, intimidate opponents, and break up the opponents’ rallies or labor strikes. Both the gangs and youth organizations help local party bosses to win public goods tenders and are themselves rewarded with such tenders by their political overlords.

From Nationalism to Ethnicity and Islam: The Evolution of Urban Gangs in Indonesia

One of the most powerful gangs and most visibly used as a tool of the political order and highest formal political power is Pemuda Pancasilla. A criminal gang with large membership on the one hand, it also managed to present itself as the ultimate defender of Indonesian nationalism and the New Order of President Suharto. Established in the early 1980s in Sumatra, it grew under the leadership of Yapto Soerjosoemarno to claim a pan-ethnic membership of 10 million throughout the archipelago in the late 1990s.[11] Often doing the bidding of Indonesia’s military and intelligence services or Suharto’s political party (Golkar) it coerced support for Suharto’s regime, beat up opponents and extorted the Chinese business community for private rents and political donations, as well as partook in charitable activities and the provision of socio-economic goods to local communities. It also provided privileged access to jobs. Unlike the gangs that the Indonesian state employed after the creation of Indonesia and those that had been used by Indonesian political actors even during the colonial, pre-independence days, PP succeeded in sufficiently covering its origins and connections to the criminal underworld so as to portray itself as the ultimate voice and carrier of the official ideology and values of the Suharto’s regime.

Given how tight with the Suharto regime PP was, it is not surprising that it did not weather well the end of the Suharto regime. After the end of Suharto’s reign, Pemuda Pancasilla tried to transform itself into an official political party, and twice, under different names, it did very poorly in national elections. It still exists as a youth group and a street gang, but it now needs to share power in the criminal market and in the political space far more than ever before with other gangs-cum-political-organizations.

The criminal gangs that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Suharto regime have reflected the diversification of political cleavages in Indonesia. Many have remained ethnically-based.[12] Not surprisingly, some of most successful urban gangs have been those that have received the most support from the post-Suharto state and law enforcement – namely, Jakarta’s Betawi gangs, such as the Betawi Brotherhood Forum (FBR) and the Betawi People’s Forum (Forkabi), based on ethnic groups “native”[13] to Jakarta. By supporting them, the security services believe they have a better capacity to control outbreaks of ethnic violence beyond the criminal market.[14] By the late 2000s, the Betawi groups displaced other ethnically-based groups from large areas of Jakarta, such as Tanah Abang area.

Reflecting the new era of Indonesia’s Islamization during the 2000 decade, the Betawi gangs have also embraced Islamist narratives. Donning Islamic regalia, they have at times taken it upon themselves to enforce sharia and harass the Christian and Ahmadyyia minorities in West Java – both because of genuine ideological drive and because such actions would make them politically useful to politicians mobilizing on the basis of Islamization as well as generate various resources, including access to land, and other economic rents for the gangs. This coating with Islam too made them appealing to Indonesia’s military and law enforcement agencies, which since the early 1990s have also become increasingly Islamized.

The (Non)Evolving State’s Response: Beyond Cooptation and Selective Repression?

The selective embrace of some of the preman and targeted repression of other gangs is nothing new in Indonesia. The most brutal campaign of such selective weeding out of the gangs who were most troubling for the regime and cooptation of those most useful to the regime took place in the early 1980s. Suharto’s so-called Petrus campaign (short for mysterious killings) viciously and rather indiscriminately targeted all manner of “inconvenients” – unemployed youth, disobedient criminal gangs, or those supporting Suharto’s rival General Ali Moertopo, and sometimes even just street children. At the end of the campaign, between 5,000 and 10,000 people were killed.[15]

Although far less violent than during the Suharto era, the anti-preman repression waves during the 2000 decade have continued to target political criminal enemies as well as to cater to the growing middle-class fears of criminality and distract the broader body politic from other problems, such as the country’s socio-economic difficulties, and also away from having to fundamentally redesign the tight relationship between the state and political parties and criminals. Like the mano dura policies in El Salvador and Central America, the suppression campaigns would target vulnerable marginalized individuals merely because they sported a tattoo, and would flood the jails with low-level offenders or members of targeted criminals simply on the basis of their membership, rather than any evidence of actual criminal behavior.[16] But this seemingly indiscriminate repression has consciously coincided with highly-selected nurturing of some cultivated “friendly” gangs.

Indonesia’s politicians continue to be deeply complicit in the perpetuation of the state-crime/cooptation-repression pattern, for fundamentally breaking with the system would require their sacrificing the various advantages they get from employing the criminal gangs. It is far easier and more convenient to occasionally give in to periodic public outrcries for anti-crime campaigns and to round up the most vulnerable people.

In labeling the sponsorship of favorite proxies and ethnic-kin vigilantism as “community policing,” politicians and law enforcement agencies in Indonesia put a new face over the past decade on old practices. Often underwritten with a lot of money, such “community” initiatives and “community partners” would receive official blessing to cleanse areas, such as Tanah Abang in Jakarta, of ethnic and business rivals. At the same time, in a classic Mansur Olson fashion,[17] the repression waves have made membership in a gang all the more valuable: those without membership and sponsorship would be more vulnerable to arrest and have more difficulties obtaining patronage. Within certain bounds, gang membership would materially, politically, and psychologically empower marginalized individuals, while, paradoxically, by reinforcing the pressures toward gang membership within the slums, gang leaders and politicians as well as police and military officials would profit from the repressive anti-gang campaings.

Such a policy of incomplete, selective repression is also much cheaper than addressing the basic socio-economic and public safety deficiencies that trouble Indonesia’s sprawling slums. Rather than bringing the state into the slum in a comprehensive, multifaceted, and accountable manner,[18] periodic selective repression allows the powers that be to get away with murder (literally and figuratively) while minimizing the resources necessary to suppress crime and manipulate it for one’s purposes. In the long term, the outcome is a profound marginalization of vast segments of society and perpetuation of political and socio-economic conditions that give rise to alienation and that sever bonds between citizens and the state, but in the short term, such an approach is cheap and delivers benefits to adroit politicians and law enforcement agents.

Nonetheless, the concept and language of “alternative livelihoods” for the preman have seeped into political discourse and policies in Indonesia. Formally organizing the gang members in official security or debt-collection companies has been described as one form of “alternative livelihoods.” This approach has several limitations: One is that the amount of jobs these companies generate is still vastly fewer than the amount of jobs provided by the gangs. Second, the “services” that the gang members obtain from belonging to a gang go beyond employment and regular services and are not matched by the formal security companies. And fundamentally, as long as the formal security or debt-collection companies behave no less thuggishly than the informal gangs, they are merely a cover for the same old nexus of political-power-formal-business-and-crime that has characterized the Indonesian scene.

What may perhaps be changing in that nexus is its increasing interaction with terrorism in Indonesia. While still much less violent and virulent than in South Asia or the Middle East, Indonesia’s salafi terrorist groups have been experiencing a certain revival over the past several years – reinvigorated by the influx of refugees from the Middle East, funded by Saudi Wahhabi money for two decades, and at least indirectly fostered by the apathy and meekness of Indonesia’s government and politicians over the past several years when it comes to speaking up against the kind of Islamization that oppresses ethnic minorities and undermines individual human rights. One of Indonesia’s counterterrorism policies of the early 2000s (which have been widely heralded as very effective) has been to throw arrested terrorist group members into the same poorly-controlled general population prison facilities that are used to incarcerate the preman and other criminals. The consequence has been that the criminals and terrorists have been fraternizing and establishing conspiratorial relations.[19] During several recent terrorist attacks in Indonesia, the various terrorist groups have used ex-criminals and criminal gangs both for logistical support and conduct of actual terrorist operations – though the recent terrorist attacks have been highly unsuccessful from the perspective of the terrorist groups and generated minimal casualties and damage.

Overall, these crime-terror connections in Indonesia remain very low level and not very frequent: the salafi terrorist groups, organized crime, urban gangs, and the preman continue to be distinct nonstate actors, very differently connected to and differently antagonistic toward the Indonesian state. The big question is whether eventually, perhaps as a result of their interactions with the terrorist groups, the Indonesian criminal gangs will throw off the reins of their political overlords and strike out far more on their own, and perhaps far more violently, as the gangs do in Latin America, or whether the formal political system in Indonesia will manage to maintain the delicate balancing act of using the urban gangs and criminal groups for its own purposes, while keeping their power in check.

[1] “Gang Leaders Vow to Bury the Hatchet,” Jakarta Post, June 30, 2012.

[2] For details on the truce in El Salvador, see, for example, Linda Pressly, El Salvador Gang truce: Can MS-13 and 18th Street Keep the Peace? BBC News Magazine, November 21, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20402216.

[3] For the atmosphere in Rio, see, for example, Vanda Felbab-Brown, “President Obama's Visit to a Favela in Rio: Below the Surface Calm,” The Huffington Post, March 17, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vanda-felbabbrown/obama-brazil-favela_b_837371.html; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “President Obama to Visit a Rio Favela: Surfing on Sewage,” Brookings Institution, March 17, 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2011/03/17-obama-favelas-felbabbrown.

[4] See, for example, Luis Astorga, “El Tráfico de Fármacos Ilícitos en México: Organizaciones de traficantes, corrupción y violencia,” paper presented at a WOLA conference on Drogas y Democracia en Mexico: El Impacto de Narcotráfico y de las Políticas Antidrogas, Mexico City, June 21, 2005, cited in Laurie Freeman, “State of Siege: Drug-Related Violence and Corruption in Mexico: Unintended Consequences of the War on Drugs,” WOLA Special Report, June 2006; Peter Reuter and David Ronfeldt, “Quest for Integrity: The Mexican-US Drug Issues in the 1980s,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 34(3), Autumn 1992:102-103; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The Violent Drug Market in Mexico and Lessons from Colombia,” Foreign Policy at Brookings, Policy Paper No. 12, March 2009,

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2009/03_mexico_drug_market_felbabbrown/03_mexico_drug_market_felbabbrown.pdf.

[5] See, for example, Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Enrique Desmond Arias, ‘The structure of criminal organizations in Kingston, Jamaica and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.’ Presentation delivered at the conference on “Drug Trafficking, Violence, and Instability in Mexico, Colombia, and the Caribbean: Implications for US National Security,” at the Matthew B. Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, University of Pittsburgh, October 30, 2009; and Enrique Desmond Arias and Corinne Davis Rodrigues, “The Myth of Personal Security: Criminal Gangs, Dispute Resolution, and Identity in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas,” Latin American Politics and Society, 48(4), 2006: 53-81.

[6] Hasyim Widhiarto, “Former Street Thugs Revamp Jakarta’s Protection Racket,” Jakarta Post, November 1, 2010.

[7] Ibid.

[8] On how frequently nonstate actors, including criminal groups, provide such services in both Asia and Latin America and how they use the provision of such services to acquire political capital and legitimacy, see, for example, Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Human Security and Crime in Latin America: The Political Capital and Political Impact of Criminal Groups and Belligerents Involved in Illicit Economies,” FIU/WHEMSAC, September 2011; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, December 2009).

[9] Interviews with street vendors throughout Java and in western Sumatra, fall 2012.

[10] See, for example, Bayu Marhaenjati, Zaky Pawas, and Ardi Mandiri, “Gang Warfare in Jakarta’s Streets,” Jakarta Globe, April 14, 2012; A’an Suryan, “Concerted Efforts to Tame Motorcycle Gangs,” Jakarta Post, April 23, 2012.

[11] For a detailed study of Pemuda Pancasilla, see Loren Ryter, Youth, Gangs, and the State in Indonesia, Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington, 2002.

[12] David Brown and Ian Wilson, “Ethnicized Violence in Indonesia: The Betawi Brotherhood Forum,” Working Paper No. 145, Murdoch University Asia Research Center, July 2007, http://wwwarc.murdoch.edu.au/publications/wp/wp145.pdf.

[13] Native is a relative term. The term Betawi is applied to people who have lived in Jakarta for several centuries, and, in fact, the name comes from an old colonial name for Jakarta – Batavia. But centuries ago, many of those people were migrants from various parts of Indonesia’s archipelago and Southeast Asia themselves, and ended up mixing with migrants from other parts of the world, including Arab, Chinese, Indian, Portuguese, and Dutch migrants.

[14] “Betawi Big Boys Rule Jakarta Underworld,” Jakarta Post, August 28, 2009.

[15] Ian Wilson, “‘War against Thugs’ or a War against the Poor?” Jakarta Post, April 7, 2012.

[16] “From Petty Theft to Rioting, Gangs Are a Jakarta Plague,” Jakarta Globe, March 4, 2012.

[17] For seminal conceptualization of collective actions problems and group formation, see Mansur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

[18] On how the design and implementation challenges of such comprehensive state approaches, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Conceptualizing Crime as Competition in State-Making and Designing an Effective Response,” NDU-ONDCP Conference on Illicit Trafficking Activities in the Western Hemisphere, Washington DC, May 21, 2010, http://www.brookings.edu/research/speeches/2010/05/21-illegal-economies-felbabbrown; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Bringing the State to the Slum: Confronting Organized Crime and Urban Violence in Latin America,” Brookings Latin America Initiative Paper Series, December 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/12/05%20latin%20america%20slums%20felbabbrown/1205_latin_america_slums_felbabbrown.

[19] International Crisis Group, “How Indonesian Extremists Regroup,” Asia Report No. 228, July 2012, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/228-how-indonesian-extremists-regroup.pdf.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Reuters Photographer / Reuters

Egypt’s Transition Two Years Later: A Turkish Perspective

Ahmet T. Kuru — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I was probably the only one wearing a tie in the Tahrir Square on January 25, 2013—the anniversary of the revolution. Different groups were gathering in the late afternoon while I was giving an interview to TRT (Turkey’s public TV) about my observations of post-revolution Egypt during my 11-day stay in Cairo. I had the opportunity to conduct interviews with 20 Egyptian politicians, activists, and scholars. I asked them questions around three main subjects: 1) How do you explain the revolution, why 2011 and why not before? 2) Are you satisfied with the aftermath of the revolution? and 3) What do you think about the future alliance between Egypt and Turkey in terms of having a shared policy toward the Middle East?

There was a near consensus on the first question. My interviewees emphasized similar clusters of reasons: the Tunisian revolution set an example; the Mubarak regime was 30 years old (or in fact the “regime” was 60 years old) and the Egyptian people (who are normally very patient) were fed up with corruption and failed policies; Mubarak alienated not only the wider public but also the military by preparing his son Gamal as his successor; social media equipped young people with new opportunities to get organized (by the way, I do not know the cost during the revolution but cell phone services are now quite cheap in Egypt); the demonstrations in Tahrir Square were at first led by diffuse groups with no hierarchy, but three days later the Muslim Brotherhood joined and substantially increased the number of protesters; and Al-Jazeera played a major role by its nearly nonstop broadcasting of the demonstrations.

As someone who had heard some Turkish leftists depict the Arab Spring as an “American conspiracy,” it was surprising how the role of the United States was so negligible and inconsistent during the Egyptian revolution, according to my interviewees.

The answers to the second question (on the aftermath of the revolution) were much more diverse. It would be wrong to categorize them into two groups—the opposition to and supporters of President Mohamed Morsi. Many of my interviewees were critical of Morsi but their reasons diverged considerably. For some, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood constitute an Islamist threat to Egypt. A professor warned me that “the Muslim Brothers are not like the AKP [Turkey’s pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party]” but “they are like Erbakan’s parties.” He also reminded me how Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan was welcomed in Egypt as a hero in his September 2011 visit, but after he asked Egypt to embrace a secular state, his popularity among Islamists quickly dissipated.

Beyond the issue of Islamism, some who had positions in the old regime criticized the Brotherhood for being radical in terms of the speed of change (e.g., pushing the Constitution too quickly without even consulting with the Vice President). Others, however, criticized the Brotherhood for being too slow and compromising toward the old regime, having secret agreements with the military, and letting the old regime survive financially.

The role of the military figured prominently in my conversations. A formerly senior member of the Brotherhood told me with pride: “It took you [Turks] twenty years to solve the problem of civil-military relations, but we did it in two years.” By contrast, many opposition figures noted that this would be a naïve claim; the military still has the power to interfere in politics and continues to play a substantial role in the Egyptian economy.

Besides these specific criticisms, one major argument of the opposition was that Morsi lacked projects and initiatives for solving Egypt’s social and economic problems. They also point out that the Muslim Brotherhood is full of medical doctors and engineers; but includes very few lawyers and social scientists. Yet even the critics admit that the opposition parties do not have such projects or initiatives either.

Even on the issue of democracy, it was unclear to me whether some opposition figures were all that much better than the Brotherhood politicians. For me, the dissolution of an elected parliament by a politicized court decision is nothing but a “judicial coup d’état.” Turkey was saved from such a coup in 2008 and Egypt experienced it in 2012. Yet some opposition members seem to whole-heartedly support the court decision.

In debates about Egypt’s domestic politics, Salafis appear to have a puzzling position. On the one hand, they are blamed for pushing the Brotherhood to be more radical (e.g., inserting Al-Azhar into the constitution as a consultative body on the matter of Sharia and rejecting a female quota in parliamentary elections). On the other hand, they are perceived to be divided and changeable. Several interviewees stressed that it was good to see Salafis in Egyptian party politics for the sake of normalization, in comparison to Tunisian Salafis who largely remain outside of the political system and prone to violence.

My third and last question was on foreign relations, especially those with Turkey. In general, the Egyptian elite seems to be focusing on internal problems and willing to restrain its regional ambitions. Regarding Turkey, nearly everyone I spoke to expressed a desire to have better relations with Turkey than during the time of Mubarak. They would like Turkey to support Egypt domestically, in the economic realm for instance, rather than pursuing joint initiatives in the broader region. This is one reason why the Egyptian elite seems hesitant to take a more pro-active stand against the Assad regime in Syria. Another reason is that there is still a tendency to put Israel at the center of foreign policy issues and they regard Assad as, at least historically, part of the anti-Israel bloc.

I also realized the extent to which Egyptian elites continues to have some misperceptions about Turkey. As an example, several of them tried to convince me in vain that Erdoğan is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Turkey branch.

Authors

Ahmet T. Kuru

Image Source: © Amr Dalsh / Reuters

Israel Elections: Netanyahu’s New Coalition Troubles

Natan B. Sachs — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:23:00 -0500

Update: Exit polls indeed suggest a very narrow victory for Netanyahu’s right wing/religious bloc. The results suggest a difficult task ahead for Netanyahu of building—and maintaining—a stable coalition.

Israelis head to the polls today—January 22—to elect the 19th Knesset, Israel’s parliament. With current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return all but assured, these elections at first glance lack drama and indeed, the campaign has been relatively subdued. But slightly beneath the surface, deep political and societal changes on both the right and on the left could alter the future of Israeli politics and foreign policy. That potential, however, might not manifest for a few more years, until another round of parliamentary elections.

While a Netanyahu victory suggests overall continuity in Israel’s foreign policy and U.S.-Israeli relations, the Israeli political landscape’s drift to the right, in some respects, and the make-up of the new Knesset may threaten the very stability of his government, should it face pressures on the Palestinian issue in particular. This suggests less flexibility by Netanyahu in governing on the Palestinian issue, but also raises the prospect of another round of elections before President Obama’s second term is through.

A Fractured Campaign Agenda

The outgoing Israeli government was relatively stable and long-serving by Israeli standards, where early elections are the norm rather than the exception. This is not likely to be a trend. In recent decades as the major parties have shrunk, coalition formation has become even more complex. The 19th Knesset will likely convene with at least a dozen factions, which may splinter further during the Knesset’s term.

Given this, most political parties in Israel entered this election campaign less with the aim of defeating Netanyahu outright and more with an eye toward increasing their own power and gaining a better position in coalition negotiations. While the opposition pays lip-service to the notion of an electoral victory, opposition politicians are visibly jockeying for positions in light of Netanyahu’s re-election. Indeed, early in the campaign, it appeared that the leaders of the major opposition parties, including Shelly Yacimovich of Labor, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni of the Movement, and journalist-cum-politician Yair Lapid of the newly established Yesh Atid party, were hoping to join Netanyahu’s cabinet. They each carved out a niche agenda, hoping to attract a different segment of the opposition vote, but failed to form a united front to mount a genuine challenge to Netanyahu in the elections. With this fragmentation on the left and in the center, deeper changes in Israeli society have emerged into the political arena, exposing domestic differences that are usually masked by the foreign policy debate.

The right also reveals brewing change. While Netanyahu’s leadership of his own camp is unchallenged, he now finds himself with a transformed right wing, consisting of far-right candidates in his own Likud party and a resurgent national-religious party headed by newcomer and this election’s rising star Naftali Bennett.

Taken together, Netanyahu faces a daunting task of reconciling a polarized political landscape in one coalition. If in his next term foreign policy issues do not create pressure on Netanyahu his coalition may end the term early. This was his fate during his first term as Prime Minister from 1996-1999.

Outlook for the Next Coalition

The key question to be answered in today’s election – assuming Netanyahu’s bloc indeed wins a majority – is the size of Netanyahu’s Likud/Yisrael Beitenu joint list, and thus the leverage he will bring to negotiating his governing coalition. Should Netanyahu’s own faction be large enough, he will be able to form a relatively stable coalition with either the right or the center, granting him leverage over negotiations with either.

However, should the Likud list drop to the low 30s in terms of MKs, as some polls have suggested, and the combined right-wing/religious bloc to the low 60s (of 120 MKs), Netanyahu will not be able to form a right-wing/religious coalition stable enough to sustain pressure on Palestinian issues or other contentious questions (including budget cuts and legislation on religion-and-state issues). In this case, Netanyahu will be forced to turn to the center, without the leverage of a credible alternative to reduce the demands of centrist parties.
And yet, the center in the next Knesset is expected to be significantly smaller than it was, therefore it will likely not suffice to grant Netanyahu a stable coalition, according to the latest polls. It may well be that Netanyahu, in other wods, will be forced to bring in both right wing or religious parties and center parties, reconciling them with each other in coalition negotiations and the division of sensitive portfolios. Moreover, he will have to maintain this polarized coalition in the face of foreign policy pressures and difficult fiscal decisions looming throughout his next term.

Foreign Policy Outlook

Beyond the fractured Knesset and the rise of extremists in his own party, Netanyahu also faces a diplomatic challenge: with the exit of Defense Minister Ehud Barak from the Knesset and the retirement of President Shimon Peres in two years, Netanyahu loses Israel’s main public faces to the world. Other interlocuters to Washington may also be absent, including Dan Meridor and even Ambassador Michael Oren (rumored to be leaving his post at the end of his term next year). Netanyahu, conscious of Israel’s difficulties in the international arena, may well try to bring some of these figures back into the cabinet on a personal rather than party basis.

The same logic would suggest that Netanyahu will strive to bring in to his coalition centrist figures, such as Tzipi Livni, to soften the image of his government abroad. However, the inclusion of moderates in the coalition may, in fact, have little impact on Israel’s foreign policy. For instance, on the Iranian question, the lines of the debate in Israel do not run parallel to those in the Palestinian arena. Some relative doves on the Palestinian issue are hawks on Iran, and vice versa.

Moreover, the main result of the fractured and polarized Knesset and coalition will be paralysis rather than moderation. Since the center will not suffice to support a coalition on its own, and since Labor is likely to remain in the opposition for the time being, Netanyahu will have to secure his right flank in order to survive politically. To do so, he will probably opt for continuation of the foreign policy status quo as much as possible. This is especially likely given Netanyahu’s own singular focus on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, and his own preference to avoid any dramatic changes on the Palestinian issue.

And yet, for those hoping for change in Israeli policy, the fractured and polarized political arena offers a glimmer of hope for the future. Should there be any U.S. diplomatic movement on the Palestinian question, the pressures within Netanyahu’s coalition may lead to early elections. Netanyahu may find himself having to move toward the center to placate the United States and his centrist coalition partners, while risking an outright revolt from his right and from his own back bench.

Furthermore, in Israel’s next election, the social and political processes outlined above on both the right and the left may change the political landscape considerably. Labor may emerge stronger, and clearer lines between the dominant political blocs may emerge. Most importantly, the current fragmentation in the political center and the lack of a centrist leader may be resolved before the elections to the 20th Knesset. In short, Netanyahu’s likely victory today may spell stagnation on many foreign policy issues for awhile, but the seeds of more fundamental political change in Israel may also be planted by the results announced tonight.

Authors

Natan B. Sachs

Image Source: © Baz Ratner / Reuters

Prospects of Political Reforms in Myanmar

Jeffrey A. Bader — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 13:42:00 -0500

A recent trip I took to Myanmar (Burma) provided an occasion to reflect on some large and small issues in U.S. foreign policy, and to think about what works and what doesn’t. My trip came shortly before it was publicly revealed that President Obama will visit Myanmar in the second half of November, which will highlight Myanmar’s reform and opening to the West.

Questions, and tentative answers:

1) Is Myanmar seriously on the path to reform?

So it would seem. The signs were abundant on my trip. The senior officials I met spoke convincingly about their commitment to democratic reform. One Minister positively mentioned democracy heroine Aung San Suu Kyi’s participation in a recent government-sponsored workshop. Newspapers published lively debates, virtually free of the all-pervasive censorship of the last two decades. Pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi and her father Aung San, the founder of modern Burma, could be seen on the walls of village restaurants. A large U.S. official human rights delegation visited in October and met with top Myanmar officials. Ordinary people spoke of the profound change in atmosphere, and of their willingness to speak out on matters where there was fear and silence only recently. This change in mood follows a series of steps disassembling key foundations of the repressive structure of Myanmar’s military government – release of hundreds of political prisoners, legalization of the opposition political party National League for Democracy, legalization of peaceful demonstrations, and revival of talks with rebellious ethnic groups.

2) What is Aung San Suu Kyi’s role and what is she doing?

Aung San Suu Kyi remains unequivocally the most popular political figure in Myanmar. She and her party decisively won the by-elections in April 2012 after the end of her years of confinement. There is reason to believe she and her party will win national elections in 2015 and be in a position to form a government. In preparation, she is showing a strongly pragmatic streak, reaching out to officials in the government, bonding with President Thein Sein and speaking positively of them at her Congressional Gold Medal ceremony. There is grumbling in the overseas human rights community at her apparent embrace of the compromises of national politics. She is encountering the inevitable second-guessing that accompanies the decision to cease to become an icon and to become a political actor, just as Lech Walesa endured second-guessing when he worked with General Jaruzelski in Communist Poland in the early 1980’s.

3) Did anyone in the West see this coming?

Perhaps somewhere someone in the West foresaw Myanmar’s turn toward reform, but the conventional wisdom certainly did not. Asia analysts inside and outside the government, editorialists, and human rights advocates alike all scorned Myanmar’s installation of a civilian government in April 2011 and its elections last year as fraudulent, saw little political significance in Aung San Suu Kyi’s release, and projected a grim political future.

4) How did it happen?

There are many retrospective theories, none fully satisfactory. One important factor seems to have been a generalized desire to escape Myanmar’s growing dependence on China by establishing the basis for renewed relations with the West. Myanmar historically is a fiercely independent country, having for example quit the Nonaligned Movement because it felt it was too aligned. Resentment against the Chinese presence, and its enterprises dominating the extractive industries while providing little employment for Myanmar nationals, runs deep. Some Burmese experts, including Thant Myint-U, the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant, presciently wrote of a new mood among the younger Myanmar officer corps, who have played a central role in spurring reform. Human rights groups point to the effect of years of sanctions in persuading the leadership it needed to take a new course. Advocates of engagement credit ASEAN with helping to knock down the generals’ resistance to the international community. Within Myanmar, the aging senior generals seem to have confidence they will not be held accountable for past repressive behavior, and the officer corps generally is comfortable that its special role in Myanmar politics will be preserved under a constitution that gives them a privileged and outsized role. This sense of security among the military old guard may have made them more willing to accept the current political opening.

5) What was the role of the U.S. Government?

From 1990 to 2008, successive administrations, pushed by the Congress, piled sanction upon sanction on Myanmar – bans on new investment, bans on imports, and designation of people and companies for financial sanctions. Under George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush played a large role in identifying the regime as a target for further isolation. In his inauguration speech, President Obama offered to reach out a hand to adversaries “if (they) are willing to unclench (their) fist. “ That policy has produced little in the way of positive results around the world, except in the case of Myanmar. The Administration decided early to open a channel of diplomatic engagement with the Myanmar leadership, conducted on the U.S. side by Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, laying out the agenda for political reform and nonproliferation by Myanmar that would induce sanctions relaxation on the U.S. side. The expressed willingness of the U.S. government on an authoritative level to offer a road map to good relations gave the Myanmar government an incentive, and confidence, to proceed. The decision of the Obama administration, in coordination with allies in Europe and Australia, to significantly ease sanctions earlier this year should provide a further spur to both desperately needed economic development and political reform.

6) Are there broader lessons with regard to sanctions as a tool to change behavior of bad actors?

Sanctions are sometimes the only effective way for the U.S., and the international community, to signal the unacceptability of a regime’s behavior. Such was the case for a long time with Myanmar. So imposition of sanctions was appropriate.

But sanctions, it must be remembered, are not an end in themselves. As the popular song goes, you’ve got to know when to hold and when to fold. There is invariably an irresistible momentum in Washington to continue on the sanctions path whether or not it gives any indication of leading to positive outcome. Human rights groups sometimes see sanctions against malefactors as the measure of sound and moral government policy, and publicize the violations of dictatorial regimes to rally public support and funding around campaigns that have sanctions as their end product. The Congress wants to show that it is doing something, whether effective or not, and sanctioning dictatorial regimes becomes seen as a way to demonstrate its virtue. This dynamic is evident, for example, in the case of Cuba. We have now had sanctions in effect for over 50 years toward Cuba, and their support among American political actors has in no way been weakened by their manifest strengthening of the Castro brothers’ hold on power. Everyone – the U.S. political class, the private advocacy groups, the Castros – seems happy with this state of affairs, with the exception of the Cuban people who are its victims. Policy toward Myanmar was developing along the Cuban model, but happily it has now diverged from that path.

7) Is the U.S. Government well structured to deal with issues like Myanmar?

Since the Carter Presidency, there has been a growing infrastructure of offices and officials with responsibilities purely for human rights issues, divorced from broader matters of foreign policy and national security. These offices have evolved into the voice of the human rights NGO community within the U.S. government, frequently serving as a megaphone for the human rights NGOs, seeking their input to State Department human rights reports, and fighting for the specific measures proposed by the NGOs. In some ways, this is not radically different from the way in which other constituencies are represented in the foreign policy apparatus, e.g. business through the State Department’s Economic and Business Bureau. But the identification of the human rights offices with their constituency tends to be more single-minded (note: The current Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Michael Posner, in fact has escaped this straitjacket and acted as a strong advocate for human rights but with a focus on practical, not symbolic, results and a nuanced awareness of broad foreign policy objectives).

When I served as Senior Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council during the transition of U.S. policy toward Myanmar between 2009 to 2011, I chaired a number of interagency meetings (called Interagency Policy Committees) on Myanmar. Normally, meetings of this kind are attended by one senior representative of each agency, accompanied by one more junior person. In the case of Myanmar, no less than seven offices from the State Department – the East Asia Bureau, the Human Rights Bureau, the US Mission to the UN, the State Department liaison to the US Mission to the UN, the US Mission to international organizations in Geneva, the US Ambassador for War Crimes, and the Refugees Bureau – attended. Agencies at such meetings are expected to speak with one voice. With seven offices attending, all seeking to have their voices heard, it was difficult to impossible for that to happen. Some of them were aggressively seeking creation of a Commission of Inquiry to look into Myanmar regime war crimes, at precisely the moment when Aung San Suu Kyi was released from captivity and there were hints of softening of repression. Only by empowering the Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific to speak for the State Department and to conduct diplomacy without a group from his building looking over his shoulder was the Administration able to pursue a coherent, and ultimately successful policy.

8) What is the best way to deal with issues involving bad actors like the Myanmar regime?

The human rights NGOs have an indispensable role in tracking human rights abuses, highlighting publicly the offenders and offenses, and mobilizing the international community to censure them. This is one of the proud features of a democratic society with a conscience, the activities of these groups of private actors with a strong commitment to justice even in obscure corners of the globe and their determination to make victims of injustice heard. Not only should we not ignore or marginalize such groups; we should celebrate them, and magnify and amplify their role.

The role of the U.S. government needs to be different. It should not ghettoize human rights issues. Nor should it encourage the creation and proliferation of offices that result in the drawing of lines between officials, all of whom should have as their top priority our national security and foreign policy success as well as a strong commitment to human rights. There should not be a small group of people anointed to express human rights concerns, acting as representatives of the NGO community, while officials with responsibility for national security and foreign policy fall into a reflexive response of marginalizing human rights in response. Our current structure frequently produces formalized battles over countries that are human rights bad actors. In such cases officials with broad national security responsibilities tend to roll over human rights when dealing with countries of major national security concern, like China, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, while deferring to the human rights offices on countries of lesser foreign policy importance, like Myanmar. This is not a framework built for success or sound policy development. Our government needs to sensitize our top national security officials to the need to build human rights issues more effectively into policy, while reminding the human rights offices that they too need to have a commitment to broad U.S. national security goals, not just the advancement of a virtuous NGO agenda.

Authors

Jeffrey A. Bader

Image Source: © Soe Zeya Tun / Reuters

Central Asia: Disasters, Displacement and Human Rights

Elizabeth Ferris — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:16:00 -0400

I’d never been to Central Asia before and so when we planned a workshop in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, I looked forward to learning about displacement and disasters in this part of the world. Together with UN OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance), the workshop focused on protection in natural disasters for representatives of governments, UN agencies, Red Cross/Red Crescent national societies and civil society organizations from seven countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Disasters are common in this region and governmental capacity to respond to – and especially to prepare for – disasters varies a lot within the region but is in most cases limited. Tajikistan, for example, has around 9000 earthquakes a year – most of which are small but the possibility of a major earthquake in the future is a frightening one. A report by my colleague, Johannes Linn outlined both the risks of earthquakes in this region and the inadequate government capacity to prepare for it. As he wrote two years ago, “the bottom line is that there has been little progress in this critical area [preparedness and response capacity] since the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago, and the risk of a major disaster possibly on the scale of Haiti, is a real threat…If anything, the ability of Central Asian countries to respond to a major disaster today is less than in Soviet days.” A report by UNDP last year made essentially the same point – that both national and regional preparedness had declined since the Soviet days. Earthquakes can occur, of course, in both rural and urban areas but there is particular fear of a major earthquake striking an urban area, where populations are concentrated and where it’s not clear how many structures are designed to be earthquake-resistant. I was glad to see the active role being played by UN agencies in carrying out contingency planning throughout the region.

In addition to the dangers from earthquakes, the region regularly experiences river flooding and landslides and there is growing concern that climate change will lead to increased flooding from glacier mountain lakes.

In addition to the dangers from earthquakes, the region regularly experiences river flooding and landslides and there is growing concern that climate change will lead to increased flooding from glacier mountain lakes. There are thousands of lakes in Central Asia and as glaciers recede, more lakes are likely to be formed, dramatically increasing the risk of what are called glacier lake outburst floods. People at the workshop, however, did not seem particularly concerned about climate change; other issues seemed much more urgent. But there is a possibility that these glacier lake outburst floods could affect neighboring countries.

And there are other trans-border dimensions. A governmental representative from Uzbekistan noted that landslides from Kyrgyzstan’s Fergana Valley could affect Uzbekistan as well – a source of particular concern given that there are a significant number of uranium tailings in the Fergana Valley, a legacy from the Soviet times. Many of these sites are undoubtedly degraded. I had never thought about the possibility of ‘radioactive landslides’ before and wondered why this possibility hadn’t received more attention.
You would think that with countries facing similar and interrelated threats from natural hazards, there would be strong incentives to cooperate on preventing and preparing for disasters. After all, working together on natural disasters is generally less politically controversial than trying to resolve political conflicts. I was thus encouraged before I set off for Kyrgyzstan by Johannes Linn’s upbeat report last year about regional cooperation. But although there were open and cordial exchanges between participants from different countries in the workshop, there were few signs of concrete steps to promote regional cooperation. For example, in spite of an optimistic launch of a new Central Asian Center for Disaster Response and Risk Reduction – with financial support from the European Union regional support for the initiative seems to be faltering. Three governments have to agree to join for it to come into force, but so far only two governments have signed up; Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and so, at least for now, the Center is on hold. Water and energy management issues are controversial in the region, as evidenced by the opposition to the construction of the Rogun hydropower plant in Tajikistan. Construction of this dam (which, when completed, will be the highest in the world) has been in the works for decades. But there are questions about the impact of the dam on neighboring Uzbekistan and controversies about the planned resettlement of 30,000 people from areas likely to be flooded by the dam.

Although the workshop focused on natural disasters, everyone was conscious of the June 2010 violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, in which over four days mobs had burned largely Uzbek homes, killing some 400 people (according to official figures) and destroying more than 2,000 homes. Some 400,000 people were displaced, including over 100,000 who crossed the border as refugees into Uzbekistan. On one level, the crisis was over quickly. Within weeks, the refugees and most of the IDPs had returned and over the past two years, many of the destroyed houses have been rebuilt. The UNHCR representative told me that today there are only 3,200 IDPs left although far larger numbers – around 172,000 are still considered to be affected by the June events. This is down from the July 2010 figure of 75,000 IDPs and 400,000 affected. In comparison with many other situations where displacement drags on for years, this was positive indeed.

But although the situation is presently calm, people admitted that there is still tension and the possibility of another violent outbreak couldn’t be ruled out. This is reinforced by disturbing reports of discrimination and harassment of the region’s ethnic minority, the Uzbeks. All of these countries have complex ethnic relationships. Kyrgyzstan, for example has some 80 distinct ethnic groups; while the Kyrgyz make up about 40%, and the Uzbeks slightly under half in the southern region of Osh, the local governments are dominated by ethnic Kyrgyz.

As happens in most major emergencies, there was an influx of international organizations following the violence, but most have since left. And yet the continued presence of international organizations, such as UNHCR and UNICEF, in Osh may serve as an effective prevention measure for further violence.

There is considerable migration within and beyond the region. Uzbeks who can’t find jobs in Kyrgyzstan have gone to Russia as economic migrants, leaving wives and children behind, often sending money home. In fact, the International Organization for Migration reports that in 2009, remittances from overseas workers totaled USD 882 million.

Usually when I think of natural disasters and displacement, the cases that come immediately to mind are the Haitian earthquake, the Japanese earthquake/tsunami, and the massive flooding in Pakistan and Colombia. But this workshop in Bishkek reminded me that many countries which rarely feature in Washington DC headlines are also vulnerable to disasters. Perhaps because they aren’t regularly on the international radar screen is precisely the reason that practitioners and academics alike need to pay more attention to them.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

The Focus of Israeli and Palestinian Politicians

Martin S. Indyk and Tamara Cofman Wittes — Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

We visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority for six days of conversations with the Israeli and Palestinian leadership and their advisers, as well as Israeli politicians from across the spectrum, and senior national security officials. Key findings:

• The overwhelming focus of Israeli politicians, from left to right, is on domestic social issues. The disintegration of Kadima (from winning 28 seats in the last election to polling at an astonishing zero today), has led them all to conclude that concentrating on the Palestinian issue has no current traction with Israeli voters.

• Although Prime Minister Netanyahu's broad-based government now looks much more stable, confrontations over secular-religious relations, budget priorities, settlement activity, and the role of the Supreme Court could generate fractiousness and coalition collapse by Spring 2013. In the meantime, Netanyahu has greater scope for action, but the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is unlikely to be a significant beneficiary.

• Israeli officials are reassured by current P5+1 solidarity in the face of Iranian negotiating tactics, but worry that the Iranians are playing out the clock while increasing their stockpile of enriched uranium (now large enough for five bombs if further enriched).

• They watch Syria's crisis anxiously, especially the army's protection of its chemical weapons. While they see potential strategic advantage in Assad's ouster, they fear a descent into chaos. For the time being they will sit on the sidelines, hoping that Assad's demise will come sooner than later but, in contrast to earlier adventures in Lebanon, they do not yet see a path to effect that outcome.

• For West Bank Palestinians, like Israelis, life is relatively normal, despite an economic slowdown. They too do not evince much urgency to pursue a new set of political negotiations, or a more confrontational course. The economic situation of the Palestinian Authority, though, remains highly precarious and dependent on donor funding.

• Ironically, the absence of pressure might have its benefits. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas now seems willing to test Prime Minister Netanyahu's talk of a new opportunity through a series of one-on-one conversations that should get underway shortly. This could generate improvements on the ground, though a major breakthrough seems unlikely.

• Abbas is simultaneously pursuing two other tracks far less likely to produce positive results -- non-state membership in the UN General Assembly, and reconciliation talks with Hamas. Either of these could provoke confrontation with Israel and/or international actors.

Israel's Domestic Politics: Mandate for...What?

Last month, Netanyahu called for new parliamentary elections in September, a year ahead of schedule. However, before the campaign got off the ground, he forged an agreement to bring Kadima, the largest party in the Knesset, into the governing coalition, giving him a mandate of an unprecedented 94 seats. the surprise move forestalled a political campaign that was to be fought largely on economic and social issues, offering opportunities for a reawakening on the left end of Israel's political spectrum.

For Kadima's newly elected leader, former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, the calculation to join the government was simple. Polls showed that in new elections, Kadima's parliamentary delegation would be eliminated, meaning that many current members would lose their seats. For Netanyahu, the broader government freed him from a polarized parliament and made him less dependent on the right-wing faction within his own Likud Party and the religious parties. It also gave him up to 18 additional months before the uncertainty of elections. So although Netanyahu's previous coalition was both stable and fairly productive in legislative terms, the expansion gives him flexibility and time to defuse domestic economic and social issues that were beginning to bolster his opposition. This added space was particularly useful as Netanyahu faces an increasingly brazen challenge from a nativist, pro-settlement, law-and-order faction within his own Likud party. In the run-up to elections, this intra-Likud rift will likely sharpen, as will the secular-religious rift over army service and welfare benefits, and a possible rift within Kadima as some seek the lifeline of rejoining Likud while others desert to the opposition.

Speculation in the Western press has focused on whether Netanyahu's broader mandate would increase the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran or a new push for peace with the Palestinians. In our encounters, these issues were far from the center of discussion. Instead, four domestic issues were repeatedly cited as priorities for the government, including its new Kadima partners: electoral reform; resolving the issue of ultra-Orthodox Jews' participation in military service; improving economic and social services, especially for the urban middle class; and dealing with the increasing number of illegal African migrants -- now some 50,000 -- who continue to seep across the border from Egypt's Sinai Desert.

The Labor Party, after years of running on the imperative of Middle East peace, is returning to its leftist roots under the leadership of Shelly Yehimovich, a dynamic social democrat who is banking on populist rhetoric and a vibrant young volunteer staff. Yair Lapid, the former television personality and son of liberal gadfly Tommy Lapid, launched a new party seeking to represent the social protest movement, but lost momentum when elections were put on hold. Mofaz and Kadima must produce policy gains on social issues in order to justify joining the ruling coalition. Meanwhile, the Likud-led government is seeking to build up its track record -- including by providing free early childhood education. The rising social demands and ever-rising defense spending may presage a confrontation in the Knesset over the national budget, which by law must be passed before the end of 2012 for the government to survive.

Although secular-religious tensions in Israel remain a source of concern on both left and right, the trend seems to be in favor of compromise policies that may, over time, improve the social integration of Israel's ultra-religious (haredi) community into the mainstream. While haredi Israelis comprise only about 10% of the population, they represent 21% of the primary school population. Only 35% of haredi men work, and only a few thousand serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. All this places a disproportionate burden on the state's social welfare system, creating grievances. However, growing economic pressures within the haredi community are driving more of them to seek paid employment and increase secular education for their children. Politicians we spoke to foresaw compromise on including more haredi Israelis in either military service or compulsory national service, and expect a new law on this subject to pass the Knesset before the judicially imposed deadline of September 1st. Over time, several interlocutors suggested, the haredi community will become more integrated into Israeli society, and their rabbinical leadership will lose its monopolistic influence over the community's political and social engagement.

The migrant issue seems to encapsulate a number of current political trends. The government has been unable to halt the flow of migrants trafficked through Sinai from Sudan, Eritrea, and other conflict-ridden parts of East Africa. The migrants often face harrowing abuse by traffickers in Sinai before they are found and captured on the border. The Israeli government has insufficient legal or institutional capacity to handle this trend, whether through border protection and interdiction, social services, detention, or refugee processing. As a result, many illegal migrants end up undocumented; the lucky ones find illegal employment, while others end up homeless on the streets of poor neighborhoods in southern Tel Aviv, angering residents and adding to local problems of prostitution and organized crime. PM Netanyahu has promised to crack down on illegal employment of migrants, build a stronger border fence on the Sinai, and construct holding camps for migrants along the border. But while we were in Tel Aviv, an anti-immigrant rally attended by several ruling-party parliamentarians was followed by what newspapers called a 'pogrom' against African migrants in the area, in which local residents ran through the streets breaking windows and beating migrants they found on the street. The fallout from such incidents, in which politicians on the left and right trade accusations of racism and indifference to the country's poor, underscores the volatility of the issue in domestic politics and its intersection with broader economic anxieties and frustration over state services.

Israel and the Region: Anxiously Watching and Waiting

As we met officials in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, negotiators from the Perm 5+1 and Iran were meeting in Baghdad for a second round of talks over Iran's nuclear program. Just a few months ago, many thought an Israeli strike on Iran was imminent, with no active diplomatic process and with Israeli officials warning that Iran was coming close to a "zone of immunity" in which its ability to achieve weapons capability would be unstoppable. For now, Netanyahu seems willing to give diplomacy a chance. While Israelis remain deeply skeptical that the talks will produce results that will place meaningful curbs on the Iranian nuclear program, they are reassured by the P5+1's insistence at the end of the latest round of negotiations on the implementation of UNSC resolutions which call for a halt to Iranian enrichment. Iran's unwillingness to accept the confidence building approach offered in Baghdad or the expected inspections agreement with the IAEA, however, has reinforced Israeli skepticism and led them to warn anew of Iran's growing enriched uranium stockpile and capabilities. For the moment, they will wait to see whether impending oil import sanctions which take effect in July will generate a more flexible Iranian approach at the next round of negotiations in Moscow in mid-June. If the talks break down, expect renewed Israeli warnings of military action; if they make modest progress, expect growing tensions between Israel and those members of the P5+1 who may argue for a slackening of resolve.

The continued carnage in Syria was a topic of frequent conversation, and Israeli officials seem genuinely torn by the crisis there. At the strategic level, they see immense potential strategic advantage in a change in Damascus that would break Iran's conduit to Hizballah and isolate it further in the region. They continue to assess Assad's fall as inevitable although they have revised earlier optimistic assessments of his prompt demise. But while Israel reportedly has good intelligence on Syria's military (where they see no cracks for the time being) and abilities to act there in covert and overt ways, Israel's national security establishment considers it folly to attempt to hasten the process. They are especially conscious of the Syrian opposition's fractiousness and lack of political authority, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood's prominent role, and wonder who they would support. And the specter of another Lebanon hangs over Israeli thinking in much the same way that the shadow of Iraq hangs over American debates on intervention in another Arab country. So they watch warily from the sidelines, keeping close tabs on the Syrian army's control of its chemical weapons stockpile and looking to Washington for leadership to end the crisis -- much like Syrians themselves, so far in vain. Nevertheless as time passes, Israeli concern over the rise of yet another Sunni Islamist regime in Assad's place or, worse, the collapse of Syria into sectarian warfare is making them increasingly uncomfortable. And if the Syrian army should lose control of its CW sites or capabilities, then Israel's hand could be forced.

The first round of the Egyptian presidential elections took place while we were in Israel; most of our interlocutors have become resigned to Islamist dominance of Egypt (and the rest of North Africa) regardless of the electoral outcome, and hoped at best for a cold peace to continue. Their lack of familiarity with Islamist trends and movements in North Africa is notable, and the differences and debates among Islamist parties elude them. They worry about an Islamist Egyptian government abrogating the Camp David Treaty, but their most urgent concern was whether the military and security cooperation that functionally secures the peace day to day would suffer under civilian rule.

Palestine and Israel: The Status Quo is Sustainable...For Now

By comparison with these portentous events in neighboring countries, relations with the Palestinians seem trouble-free -- for the moment. Both Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank are cooperating in the prevention of violence and terrorism. Enhanced economic relations are improving living standards for Palestinians in both areas. Some 50,000 West Bank Palestinian workers are now employed by the Israeli economy (a significant number in settlements), the highest number since the early Oslo years. It is even conceivable that with growing tax revenues the Palestinian Authority might be able to balance its budget by 2014 without dependence on foreign assistance. Although Arab funding has been sharply reduced and the PA is heavily in debt to Palestinian banks, Israel and the PA are now working together to explore an IMF facility that could generate new funding of up to $500 million to bridge the gap. The Palestinian economy is fragile though, still dependent on spending by the PA that trickles down and that demands a constant inflow of aid.

In this environment, with the United States, the EU and the Arab League preoccupied with other more pressing crises, neither Netanyahu nor Abu Mazen seem to feel any pressure to return to the negotiating table, or pursue other options. Ironically, it may be the very absence of that pressure that actually generates a new, more serious bilateral engagement. Quietly, the leaders' representatives have been engaged in routine weekly meetings that appear to have produced agreement on a series of three meetings between Netanyahu and Abu Mazen. Since these would be "exploratory conversations" rather than formal negotiations, the demand for a settlement freeze has been put aside for the moment (although new Israeli settlement activity could bring them back in a hurry). Some on the Palestinian side are insisting that before the meetings take place, Netanyahu should release 123 pre-Oslo prisoners as well as rifles and vehicles for the Palestinian police that have been sitting in Jordan for years. It seems that Abu Mazen is inclined to accept Netanyahu's argument that once they are talking it will be easier for him to take such actions and at least begin the direct encounter. Already last week, Netanyahu released to the PA bodies of Palestinian prisoners who had died in custody.

The Palestinian president's intention seems to be to take away Netanyahu's pretext and test whether anything has changed in his approach now that he is no longer dependent on right wing opponents of peace with the Palestinians for his government's survival. Netanyahu appears ready to begin talking about either a final agreement or an interim agreement; Abu Mazen is ready to discuss an interim agreement as long as the ultimate endgame is first defined. It still seems unlikely that the two leaders, left to their own devices, could actually achieve a breakthrough but they might lay the groundwork for one once a newly-elected American president can consider whether to invest again in this always fraught exercise.

At the same time, however, Abu Mazen faces continual pressures to pursue steps that do not depend on Israeli cooperation. The reconciliation discussions with Hamas are ongoing to propose an interim government, headed by Abu Mazen, that would rule the PA until new elections (although many are skeptical those elections would ever take place). Reconciliation could, if it progresses, put Salam Fayyad out of a job and potentially threaten aid flows. In addition, Abu Mazen keeps the prospect of UN action on the table -- specificially, seeking non-state member status in the UN General Assembly when it reconvenes this September. As with last year's abortive Security Council gambit, this move would produce a crisis in Palestinian relations with Israel and the Quartet while providing nothing more than a hollow symbolic victory.

Authors

Image Source: Darren Whiteside / Reuters

Afghanistan Field Trip Report VII: The Overall Transition in Afghanistan

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: The following article is the last in a seven-part series of reports based on the author’s fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2012. In this piece, she discusses the implications of the 2014 transition. Read Felbab-Brown’s other recent reports on Afghanistan in “Firefight in Kabul” and “The Road to Jalalabad.” She also writes about the 2014 withdrawal of U.S. forces in "The U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership", ISAF’s logistical challenges and the complex political realities in northern Afghanistan in “Crossing the Salang,” the Afghan Local Police and other self-defense forces in Afghanistan in “The Afghan Local Police: It’s Local, So It Must Be Good…Or Is It?", and the counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan in "Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan".

The year 2014 will mark a critical juncture in Afghanistan’s future. After a decade of extensive international engagement and arduous fighting in Afghanistan, the international presence will be significantly reduced and circumscribed. Although the international community has committed itself not to abandon Afghanistan as it did in the 1990s, the onus will be on the Afghan government to provide for the security of its country and its economic development.

If security can be maintained and improved, Afghanistan’s mineral riches can start generating vast revenues in years to come. Their wise andAfghans are thirsty for sovereignty. Many, especially those living in highly-contested areas, are tired of the foreigners’ presence. At the same time, Afghans are also deeply afraid of the post-2014 future. A disintegration of the country into yet another phase of civil war is on everyone’s mind. Indeed, various preparations for a possible civil war are under the way. Ethnic tensions are running at the decade’s peak, and are reflected in the resurrection of militias, strengthening of alignments with powerful local patrons, and hardening of ethnic networks. Many Afghans are hedging their bets, often giving, for example, two sons for the Afghan National Army (ANA) and two sons to the Taliban, thereby maximizing their chances of aligning with the winning side – no matter who winds up in power when the fighting ends. In this context of great uncertainty, the dominant tendency is to operate on the basis of short-term horizons, and to maximize power and profit before it all comes down.

But a complete post-2014 crash is not inevitable. Afghans are afraid of a civil war, but they are also weary of it. The post-2001 period brought great improvements to the lives of many Afghans, expanding their social and economic opportunities. Those well-positioned were able to reap unprecedented profits. A new educated energetic generation has emerged over the decade and exhibits the capacity to rise above ethnic factionalization and narrow, self-interested profit maximization. Even those poor Afghans whose life over the past decade has involved eking out only a bare existence, while back-and-forth fighting and Taliban intimidation continued to ravage their homes, do not want to see their hardships augmented by a full-blown civil war.

Afghanistan’s future is not preordained, and the transition strategy is a plausible path to a stable Afghanistan. Many large uncertainties surround it, and major challenges persist, challenges for which the international community does not have easy responses or ready strategies. But it can still work, and there are really no alternative policies available that would preserve the security, social, and economic accomplishments in Afghanistan, and vindicate the large blood and treasure investments of the international community and the Afghan people.

The Military Transition and Its Challenges

The lynchpin of the transition strategy and its most developed element is the gradual transfer of responsibility from ISAF to Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) for Afghanistan’s security and for fighting the still-entrenched Taliban. The size of the ANSF has been expanding rapidly, and the quality of military skills of the Afghan forces has also been improving. The ANSF continue to be challenged in some critical domains, such as command and control, intelligence, air support, and specialty enablers. But there are still two years to grow the ANSF’s capacity, and the expectation is that the international community will continue providing these critical assets after 2014.

The ANSF, particularly the ANA and the Afghan National Police (ANP), are also being increasingly battle-tested. In tranches, parts of Afghanistan are being handed to the ANSF to be the dominant security provider. In those areas, the ISAF is frequently deployed only when called upon by ANSF. So far, out of the five-part transition, two tranches have been completed, and a third tranche is planned to transferred soon.

How the ANSF handles especially the third tranche will be critical, because, so far, they have taken charge of mainly stable or secured areas. Yes, there have been some tough places, such as Lashkar Gah and other parts of the Helmand province where the Taliban presence has previously been robust, but the ANSF has yet to take over areas that are still being violently contested. How they perform during the third tranche will be the most telling indicator so far of their likely performance after 2014; Especially in eastern Afghanistan, where the fighting can get very tough, since the East did not receive the same level of ISAF reinforcements as Afghanistan’s south during the surge. But even the significant security improvements in the south are fragile. The Taliban will have every incentive to bloody the nose of the ANSF there to show that the transition strategy is not working, and that ANSF cannot stand up to them once the internationals’ presence is reduced. If the ANSF can respond robustly that will be an important sign that it can hold its own after 2014.

One of the major deficiencies of the military-side of the transition strategy is its one-way direction. The transition is supposed to be conditions-based, and to an extent it is. ISAF’s recommendations of which districts are selected for handover to Afghan responsibility are based on a rather comprehensive assessment of the security situation, quality of governance, and strategic significance of the areas. But ultimately, the transfer decision lies with President Hamid Karzai and his principal advisor for transition, Ashraf Ghani. Complex political considerations, including ethnic balancing, at times influence the transfer decisions, despite ISAF’s advice. More worrisome, there is very little scope in the handover strategy for NATO forces to go robustly back into an area that was handed over to the Afghans, if the original assessment of handover readiness proves incorrect. Squeezed by the internationals’ timelines, such as the U.S. military drawdown schedule, the transition process is essentially a one-way street. Neither the foreign capitals nor the Afghan government have appetites for anything but scaling back the international military presence.

Yet what level of U.S. and ISAF military support for the ANSF will remain after 2014 is still be determined. No decision has been made about the number of U.S. and other international troops nor the character of their mission been defined. Ideally, the ISAF will embed advisors within Afghan units, which is necessary both for mentoring the units and for integrating U.S.-provided air support. Other assets that the ANSF will continue to need for some time include foreign assistance with intelligence, command and control, medical evacuation, and specialty advisors. But if the post-2014 mission of international, including U.S., troops is defined very narrowly as self-interested anti-al-Qaeda/ anti-global-jihad operations only, the mentoring capacity will collapse. Nor will Afghans overall be reassured or even welcoming of a foreign presence that exposes them to the risk of terrorist retaliation, but does little to satisfy their need of much more broadly-defined security and improved governance.

Moreover, as ISAF forces are thinning out, they will be more and more dependent on ANSF for intelligence – both for understanding the broader dynamics in Afghanistan and even for narrow counterterrorism missions. The likelihood will grow that intelligence will be manipulated to eliminate rivals by labeling them the Haqqanis, for example, or that there will be insufficient understanding of the delicate intricacies of Afghan politics, such as the Taliban reintegration process. It will be all the worse if the widely-reported fight among Afghan intelligence and security services goes beyond interagency rivalry experienced in most countries and is a symptom of broader ethnic rifts plaguing the ANFS. Similarly, if the government of Afghanistan decides to relegate the international military forces to their bases and rarely calls upon them for assistance, such as for night raids, the less effective any continuing international military training can be. The faster ISAF draws down before 2014 and the more limited in size and missions it will after 2014, the more any progress will be jeopardized and chances for stability undermined.

A disturbing big unknown is whether the ANA will be able to withstand the ethnic factionalization that is already fracturing the institution. The issue is not just that the command positions are overwhelmingly dominated by Tajiks, a fact that is resented by Pashtuns. The problem at this point goes deeper, with ethnic fissures running deep through the military. Unless such tendencies are rolled back, such as by rewarding commanders who operate even handedly across the ethnic groups within the ANA and do not seek to cultivate a circle of ethnic friends, the ANA may ethnically fracture after 2014, only intensifying the civil war tendencies.

The ANA is also increasingly weakened by corruption: In some of the best kandaks (a battalion in the ANA), excellent soldiers are not being promoted because they do not have influential friends. Conversely, many extra positions, with the rank of colonel, for example, are being created so that commanders can give payoffs to their loyal supporters. Soldiers from marginalized groups, without powerful patrons, or simply those who cannot afford to pay a bribe are repeatedly posted to tough environments, whereas their better-connected compatriots get cushier postings. Clamping down on such corruption is as important as increasing the ANA numbers.

The ANP has of course been notorious both for such corruption and for intense ethnic factionalization. It is important that the international community continue to demand credible progress against both vices and carefully assesses whether personnel shifts are indeed motivated by efforts to reduce corruption or mask further ethnic rifts and the firing of one’s ethnic rivals.

Critically, the ANP continues to lack an anti-crime capacity, and the anti-crime training it receives is minimal. Instead, the ANP is being stood up as light counterinsurgency forces. Yet crime, such as murders, robberies, and extortion, are the bane of many Afghans’ daily existence. The inability of the Afghan government to respond to crime (and often its complicity in it) allows the Taliban to bring in its own brutal form of order and justice and develop a foothold in Afghan communities. Worse yet, the ANP is notorious for being the perpetrator of many crimes, such as extortion along roads.

However, when the ANSF, including the ANP, perform well, their legitimacy with Afghans increases. The response of the Afghan commandos to the April 15 Kabul attack stimulated a spontaneous support-your-troops campaign throughout Afghanistan, for example. Public appreciation in turn motivates troops to go out and risk their lives and not engage in abusive behavior.

But a major danger regarding the legitimacy and capabilities of the ANSF is the planned reduction in ANSF size after 2014. Although hoped to be consistent with improved security in Afghanistan, the reduction is predominantly driven by an expectation that the international community will not be likely to continue paying the current tab for the ANSF, and the Afghan government will not be able to absorb the costs. Up to 130,000 military and police troops may be fired – yes, gradually, and yes, the currently high attrition rate may reduce the number of those fired considerably. But the force downsizing will still leave a lot of young men, recently trained and issued weapons, without a job. Afghanistan’s unemployment is already running high, and it is precisely the salary motivation that induced many to sign up for the ANSF. Peacefully integrating those young men into Afghanistan’s society will be no smaller challenge than effectively integrating demobilized Taliban fighters. Similarly, there is currently no plan as to how to terminate the Afghan Local Police and other militia programs being stood up in Afghanistan and arming up to ten of thousands of Afghans in their villages and along major roads.

There are no easy solutions to these serious challenges. However, one thing is clear: the faster the international community leaves Afghanistan and the more it reduces its presence, especially its military presence, the more all the negative dynamics will intensify. And at that point, the international community will the fewer means and lesser leverage to combat these challenges.

Negotiations with the Taliban: Still a Question Mark

A rush out of Afghanistan, the U.S.-Afghanistan long-term Strategic Partnership Agreement notwithstanding, will also hamper negotiations with the Taliban. Although so far, the talks have mainly amounted to talking about talking. Despite repeated feelers from various factions of the Taliban, the internationals’ leverage in the negotiations will be all the more limited as their presence thins. The Taliban’s negotiation strategy thus may be to engage in talks without giving up anything while waiting it out until after 2014. The signing of the U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement is an important signal to the Taliban that simply waiting it out will not work, since the international community and their militaries will still be present in Afghanistan after 2014. But the shape and content of any negotiations will inevitably be linked to what happens on the military battlefield, as well as each side’s assessments of its military strength and prospects for achieving a better deal through military means. The Taliban thus does not need to rush to conclude negotiations or commit to substantially giving up its power, such as by disarming, before 2014.

Too much is unknown at this point about what the Taliban could settle for. Certainly, it will be loath to give up any influence it already has in large parts of the country. It may also be leery of simply being allowed to participate in elections, especially at the local level. Its strengths often lie far more in being a spoiler than in delivering good governance beyond order and rough justice. The Taliban faces some tough dilemmas in agreeing to a compromise with Kabul, such as accepting the Afghan constitution. Such a prospect and an overt power sharing deal with Kabul will discredit the group in the eyes of many of its fighters as well as in the eyes of the broader population to whom it appeals on the basis of its claim to be fighting against Kabul’s venal, predatory, and unjust rule. The Taliban decision to withdraw from negotiations last year, for example, can be a maneuver to pacify disquieted young radical middle-level commanders who do not support negotiations.

Similarly, whether the Taliban will be able to abide by the internationals redlines, including breaking with Al Qaeda, is still a major question mark. Elements of the Taliban, especially the Kandahari, may well have learned that its association with al Qaeda ultimately cost them their power, but the group also owes many debts to the global jihadist movement. The death of bin Laden may have weakened some of the networks, but reneging on these debts to their global jihadi brothers will be costly for the Taliban, no matter how locally oriented its southern and northern elements are. The Taliban’s decision making on severing its links with other jihadists will be deeply influenced by the relative power between the southern Taliban and the eastern Taliban factions, such as the Haqqanis. The Taliban can agree to many things, but what will it uphold? The lesser and more narrowly-defined the presence of the international community after 2014, the lesser its capacity to roll back any violation of the peace deal. And such violations do t not have to be blatant takeovers of territory – after 2014, as now, the Taliban can exercise a lot of influence through a far more subtle intimidation.

Meanwhile, the negotiating processes have so far produced far more fear than confidence. President Karzai has felt extremely threatened by the Taliban preference to negotiate with the United States. Despite Washington’s extensive efforts to bring Kabul to the table and reassure the suspicions of the Arg Palace, President Karzai has not trusted Washington not to leave him high and dry by signing a separate deal with the Taliban.

Ironically, as much as the Arg Palace is suspicious of negotiations, so are Afghan minority groups extremely leery of any negotiations with the Taliban. Memories of the Taliban’s brutal rule of the 1990s and the Northern Alliance’s fight against the Taliban loom large in their minds, and they also fear the loss of military and economic power they accumulated during the 2000s. Key northern leaders may prefer a war to a deal that they would see as compromising their security and power. Many in the north are actively arming and resurrecting their patronage networks and militias. Many civil society groups, including women’s organizations, equally lament being left out of the process. Few are satisfied with the performance of the High Peace Council that President Karzai designated to integrate the various Afghan voices into the negotiations and to promote a broad-based societal reconciliation.Under the current circumstances, negotiations with the Taliban are not likely to prove a strategic game-changer.

What a Collapse Could Look Like

If the current political order and security arrangements cannot be sustained, and civil war cannot be averted, it will highly unlikely comprise well-defined fighting along clear division lines. Unlike in the mid-1990s when the Taliban was pushing its way north, there is unlikely to be one well-defined line moving north across the Shomali Plain. Rather, any fighting will be highly localized and complex. Some areas, such as the province of Balkh and most of the province Herat, for example, have a chance of remaining very stable and seeing little fighting. Key local government officials or powerbrokers have these areas firmly in their grip. Other areas, such as the southern province of Kandahar, may be as much contested between the Taliban and ANSF as among various Durrani Pashtun powerbrokers linked to the Afghan government and new “warlords” and powerbrokers who emerged in those areas in the 2000s through the support of the international community, which depended on their services. Unlike in the 1990s when it was leveled by a barrage of outside shelling, Kabul, likely the last place to succumb to any future civil war, would likely instead experience a flaring up of intense street fighting. Rightly or not, many Pashtuns feel that they were disposed from land in Kabul by the influx of Tajiks after 2002.

Increasing instability and outright civil war will also make it irresistible for outside actors, including Iran, Pakistan, Russia, China, and India, to once again cultivate their favored proxies to prosecute at least their minimal objectives in Afghanistan and the region. Their rivalries in Afghanistan will spill beyond that country and intensify their competition in other domains as well.

But there is also the possibility of a military coup after 2014, not a rare phenomenon in Afghanistan’s neighborhood. Even with all its deficiencies, the ANA will be one of the most well-trained institutions in Afghanistan. Its commanders, or commanders of a particular ethnic faction within it, whether at the highest levels or at the middle rank, may well consider military rule preferable to a civil war. Given how extremely dissatisfied with the current political system many Afghans are, overwhelmingly seeing it as an exclusionary mafia regime, they may even welcome a coup. Already, calls for a strongman are not infrequent in Afghanistan. But the different groups at odds with each other, Ghilzai Pashtuns, Durrani Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and many subgroups under these broad categories, are hardly likely to agree on who the strongman should be. President Karzai is no doubt conscious of the coup specter. Already, his relationship with the ANSF, and the ANA in particular, is at arm’s length at best. Rather than trying to develop a strong control over and relationship with the ANSF, he has preferred to operate by dividing and co-opting his rivals.

Governance Reforms: Necessary, but How Likely?

It is precisely the fractured political system and poor governance that are the biggest hole in the transition strategy. Afghans are deeply dissatisfied with a government and power structures they see as rapacious, capricious, and unaccountable. Indeed, governance in Afghanistan post-2002 has been characterized by weakly functioning state institutions unable and unwilling to enforce laws and policies uniformly. Official and unofficial powerbrokers have issued exceptions from law enforcement to their networks of clients, who can thus reap high economic benefits. Political patronage networks have been shrinking and becoming more exclusionary. Ordinary Afghans have become disconnected and profoundly alienated from the national government and the society’s other power arrangements. They are deeply dissatisfied with Kabul’s inability and unwillingness to provide basic public services and with the widespread corruption of the power elites. They despise the impunity that has characterized the post-2001 era.

Local government officials have had only a limited capacity and motivation to redress the broader governance deficiencies. Many are unable and unwilling to rise above narrow exclusionary communal patronage networks. In highly militarily contested localities, poor governance easily undermines any security improvements and pulls in new instability. Corrupt and incompetent government officials are rarely fired or punished for their misbehavior – mostly they are just posted to another locality.

The presidential elections of 2014 (or 2013 should they be advanced as has been suggested) provide an opportunity for governance reforms. But they can also be a trigger for major political infighting, whether or not President Karzai will seek to remain in power. The fight over the remaining rents of the ending political dispensation and the need to consolidate one’s support camps in anticipation of the shaky future, and hence to deliver spoils to them in order to assure their allegiance, will not be conducive to consensus decision making and broad-based good governance. Yet it is critical that the international community engages in advance planning and devotes maximum leverage to assure that the next presidential elections in Afghanistan are as credible and legitimate as possible.

Unfortunately, the international community’s position on governance has been ambivalent at best. Its strategy thus oscillated between tolerating corruption for the sake of other goals -- with the justification that Afghans are used to corruption anyway-- or confronting it head on, but with little effectiveness. Ignoring corruption is often justified as prioritizing stability, but since corruption and the lack of rule of law are key mobilizing mechanisms for the Taliban and source of Afghans’ anger with their government, it is doubtful that stability can be achieved without addressing at least the most egregious corruption.

The transition strategy is also supposed to entail a transition in the international community’s dealings with the Afghan government and responding to poor governance. The internationals’ declining willingness to simply continue committing blood and treasure for the sake of Afghanistan’s stability could lead to a welcome international scrutiny of the funds flowing into Afghanistan and insistence on better governance. In fact, many international officials are speaking about moving toward a transactional relationship with Afghanistan, in which only good governance performance will be rewarded with development (and perhaps even military) funding. But the level of scrutiny and monitoring will once again be dependent on the level of the internationals’ presence. Moreover, even transactional relationships can be subverted: Pakistan, for example, has become a master in getting maximum payoffs from Washington and the international community and delivering a minimum in return. And Kabul too can play Islamabad’s game that a collapse in its country would be so dangerous to the international community, by once again becoming a haven for terrorism, for example, that the international community cannot afford, and hence cannot push the country’s leaders too far in their demands or impose too strong punitive measures. After all, Kabul can ask, who would want to jeopardize all the massive international investments made in Afghanistan?

The political and governance system in Afghanistan is, in fact, so pervasively corrupt and so deeply and intricately linked to key structures of power and networks of influence, that some prioritization of anti-corruption focus is required. Such prioritization could include a focus on systematic tribal discrimination, corruption and ethnic discrimination in the ANSF, corruption that undermines fragile legal markets, such as illegal road tolls, and massive fraud in the Afghan banking system. Finally, efforts to undermine effective, nondiscriminatory local officials should not be tolerated.

A chance to push such governance reforms through will be augmented if the international community finds a way to work through President Karzai rather than against him. The Obama Administration’s early confrontation with Karzai over corruption left him deeply suspicious of and outright antagonistic toward Washington without making him improve governance or tackle corruption. Many aspects of the transition strategy will be hampered if the relationship between Kabul and Washington deteriorates further. However, it may not be impossible to persuade President Karzai that he is likely to lose much more from a collapse in Afghanistan than from a transition away from his system of rule and toward improved governance.

The process of negotiations with the Taliban could provide an opportunity for improving governance. But that will be the case only if negotiations are designed as an inclusive process that brings in multiple political stakeholders, including non-Pashtun ethnic groups and civil society representatives. Such groups should include not just women’s and Western-style non-governmental organizations, but also representatives of marginalized tribes and Islamist movements. To the extent that Washington seeks to strike a deal at all costs and that negotiations become close-to-the-vest bargaining among the United States, Afghan powerbrokers, Pakistan’s intelligence services and key Taliban factions, they will merely reward the Taliban’s military tenacity and produce neither improvements in governance nor national stability.

Structuring negotiations in a way that broadens political representation in Afghanistan will be very difficult. The negotiating process is easily subverted by a myriad of spoilers – from factions within the Taliban, to the country’s ethnic factions, to a mistrusting Arg Palace, to tribal factions and power cliques within the non-Taliban Pashtuns, to neighbors such as Pakistan.

Pakistan remains a deeply problematic factor in the transition process. Even as Afghans from all walks of life and all ethnic groups expect the United States to solve the Pakistan problem for Afghanistan and once and for all stop Pakistan’s meddling in Afghanistan’s affairs, the United States and the international community are unlikely to develop such a capacity between now and 2014. Uncertainties about Afghanistan’s future are likely to only further harden Pakistan’s determination to cultivate proxies in Afghanistan and subvert processes it cannot control or sees as not consistent with its interests. So far, at least, Pakistan has proven impervious and clever in resisting pressure from Washington. While engaging with Pakistan – persuading and rewarding it for good behavior as well as cajoling and pressuring it -- clearly needs to be a key priority of the transition strategy, it is unlikely to suddenly start producing vastly different outcomes. But if Afghanistan can get its own house in order and significantly improve governance, it will be far less vulnerable to troubles stirred up by Pakistan.

A young educated generation is growing in Afghanistan that shows willingness to take on massive governance challenges in the country. Many young leaders, lawyers, and human rights activists eagerly speak of rising above ethnic factionalization and about improving governance, service delivery, and accountability. The ideas they put forth to improve governance include devolution of power from Kabul to provinces and districts, allowing for local taxation and elections of lower-level government officials. They call for an electoral reform to end the current distortive single-non-transferrable vote system, allow the formation of political parties, and reduce electoral corruption. With passion, they also call for ending the current rule of impunity and bringing warlords, powerbrokers, and criminals, including those at the highest levels and with the greatest power, to justice, by subjecting them to the justice systems and removing them from government positions. Many of these young Afghans are impressive and inspiring. But obviously should they ever be in a position to implement such political reforms, they will be a huge threat to powerbrokers and businessmen who benefit greatly from the current system. Will the voices of the young reformers have an impact on policy? How many will be coopted into the system and succumb to self-guarding power and profit rewards or be intimated by the powerbrokers or the Taliban? And how many will stay in Afghanistan, instead of seeking a better future abroad?

The Coming Economic Crisis

One factor that will influence whether the young generation stays in Afghanistan is whether, even before they are in a position to influence the political system, they will find a job.

Unemployment continues to run high in Afghanistan, and it affects not only poor uneducated rural populations, but also university graduates in cities. Unfortunately, unemployment is likely to rise considerably further after 2014.

Even if the promised development funds actually continue to flow into Afghanistan after 2014 (and insecurity does not deter them or national governments abroad do not cut back further as a result of austerity measures and domestic publics tired of the Afghanistan project), the funds will shrink dramatically. Much of the money coming into Afghanistan is associated with the large presence of foreign military forces. So are many jobs currently available to Afghans – from the tens of thousands of them who work as interpreters and drivers. Both will inevitably shrink dramatically as a result of foreign troop reductions. And so will the entire economy of Afghanistan – at least in the short term.

If security can be maintained and improved, Afghanistan’s mineral riches can start generating vast revenues in years to come. Their wise and uncorrupt use can be a tremendous boost for Afghanistan’s development. But so far, the activity of many foreign multinationals normally panting to begin exploiting such mineral riches has been primarily limited to a cautious exploration of possibilities. Even the normally gluttonous and risk-taking Chinese firms have satisfied themselves mainly with establishing presence (so as not to yield the field to India) and signing contracts rather than actually beginning to extract resources. To exploit the resources, multinationals or the Afghan government need to invest massively into infrastructure development. But that is a long-term investment that can easily be lost if intense insecurity prevails again. Even more so than insecurity it is the lack of established judicial processes and dispute resolution mechanisms that primarily discourages foreign investors. Chinese firms too, typically not particularly concerned about corruption, have expressed their misgivings about the lack of rule of law in Afghanistan and its implications for foreign investment.

Apart from expanding agricultural production, desirable also for sustainably reducing poppy cultivation, having Afghanistan serve as a regional trading and transportation hub is being explored as an economic engine for the country. After all, Afghanistan lies on the crossroads of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, and much of its history is one of outsiders’ competing on its territory for access and influence. Why not turn lying on the crossroads into an advantage, such as by reviving ideas of a new Old Silk Road, with Afghanistan at the center. India’s interest in Afghanistan is already motivated by its desire to expand access to Central Asia. Russia, China, and Iran similarly want to expand geostrategic access and business opportunities. But to make such a Silk Road idea pan out, the deep and intense rivalries that characterize Afghanistan’s neighborhood will have to be overcome first. The more instability there will be in Afghanistan after 2014, the harder to achieve a cooperative regional framework.

Many serious problems thus surround the transition strategy in Afghanistan. Major question marks remain about the capacity and coherence of Afghan security forces after 2014. The destabilizing political processes in Afghanistan – from ethnic mobilization to the shrinking of patronage networks – and poor governance are even more disconcerting. Afghans are deeply dissatisfied with the abusiveness and impunity of the current political dispensation in Afghanistan. Afghans overwhelmingly desire peace and security. But they are hedging on all sides – whether with the Taliban or with local powerbrokers. In such a highly contested and uncertain environment, it is little wonder that more than anything people desire certainty, even if the price of certainty is repression. Many such negative trends are compounded by Afghanistan’s meddlesome neighbors. The economic future of Afghanistan will also be an uneasy one at least immediately after 2014.

But at the same time, Afghans are tired of war and crave stability and better governance. The Afghan security forces are improving. A younger generation of Afghans is ready to break with the impunity, nepotism, and ethnic factionalization that have characterized Afghanistan’s political processes and many are already working hard to improve their country.

The transition process lacks responses to many of Afghanistan’s massive challenges. But the international community should nonetheless seek to make the transition process as orderly, judicious, and unrushed as possible. A process that continues to support Afghan security forces and partner with them on the battlefield after the 2014 transition and that emphasizes the need to improve governance in Afghanistan can significantly reduce the chance that the Afghanistan stabilization and state-building efforts do fall apart.

Persevering does not guarantee success. But leaving quickly and defining the post-2014 mission in very narrow counterterrorism terms only spells out failure.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: Danish Siddiqui / Reuters

Afghanistan Trip Report VI: Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan: A Good Strategy Poorly Implemented

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: The following article is one of a series of reports based on the author’s fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2012. In this piece, she analyzes the evolution and outcome of counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan, with a special emphasis on the policies of the Obama administration. Read Felbab-Brown’s other recent reports on Afghanistan in “Firefight in Kabul” and “The Road to Jalalabad.” She also writes about the 2014 withdrawal of U.S. forces in "The U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership", ISAF’s logistical challenges and the complex political realities in northern Afghanistan in “Crossing the Salang,” and the Afghan Local Police and other self-defense forces in Afghanistan in “The Afghan Local Police: It’s Local, So It Must Be Good…Or Is It?"

Narcotics production and counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan are of critical importance not only for drug control there and worldwide, but also for the counterinsurgency, stabilization, economic, and rule-of-law efforts in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, many of the counternarcotics policies adopted during the 2000s decade had serious counterproductive effects on these objectives.

In a courageous break with thirty years of counter-narcotics policies that focused on ineffective forced eradication of illicit crops as a way to reduce the supply of drugs and bankrupt belligerents, the Obama administration wisely decided in 2009 to scale back eradication in Afghanistan. Instead, its counternarcotics strategy emphasized selective interdiction of high-level and particularly Taliban-linked traffickers and comprehensive rural development.

But the effectiveness of the administration’s well-thought-out counternarcotics strategy has been challenged by major implementation difficulties. Effective implementation is ultimately dependent on achieving robust progress in improving security and governance in Afghanistan -- the former very tenuous at best, the latter overwhelmingly characterized by corruption, abuse, and incompetence. Critical problems have also arisen as a result of misguided policies in the field. Interdiction has lost its selective focus on high-level Taliban-linked traffickers and become indiscriminate in targeting small-level farmers. In most of Afghanistan, including some of the most strategic areas, alternative livelihoods efforts have not amounted to comprehensive long-term development. And eradication and bans on poppy are still going on, once again emiserating farmers and driving instability and conflict.

Why Scaling Back Eradication Was a Good Decision

After several years of essentially laissez-faire toward poppy cultivation, far more aggressive interdiction and eradication policies were undertaken in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009. Interdiction was supposed to target large traffickers and processing laboratories. Immediately, however, the effort was manipulated by local Afghan powerbrokers to eliminate drug competition, particularly drug-trade business belonging to their rivals. Instead of targeting top echelons of the drug economy, many of whom had considerable political clout, interdiction operations were largely conducted against small vulnerable traders who could neither sufficiently bribe nor adequately intimidate the interdiction teams and their supervisors within the Afghan government. The result was a significant vertical integration of the drug industry in Afghanistan and an intensified dependence of small traders on powerful patrons. A second negative impact of the way interdiction was carried out was that it allowed the Taliban to integrate itself back into the Afghan drug trade. Having recouped in Pakistan, the Taliban was once again needed to provide protection to traffickers targeted by interdiction.

Manual eradication was carried out by central Afghan units trained by Dyncorp as well as by regional governors and their forces. Immediately, it provoked violent strikes and social protests against it. Another wave of eradication took place in 2005 when reduction in poppy cultivation was achieved. Most of the reduction was due to the suppression of cultivation in Nangarhar province where, through promises of alternative development and threats of imprisonment, production was slashed by 90 percent.

However, alternative livelihoods never materialized for many. The Cash-for-Work programs reached only a small percentage of the population in Nangarhar, mainly those living close to cities. The overall pauperization of the population there was devastating.[1] Unable to repay debts, many farmers were forced to sell their daughters as young as three as brides or abscond to Pakistan. In Pakistan, the refugees frequently have ended up in the radical Deobandi madrasas and have begun refilling the ranks of the Taliban. Apart from incorporating the displaced farmers into their ranks, the Taliban also began to protect the opium fields of the farmers, in addition to protecting traffic. In fact, the antagonized poppy farmers came to constitute a strong and key base of support for the Taliban, denying intelligence to ISAF and providing it to the Taliban.

By 2009, eradication had had the following -- overwhelmingly negative -- effects: It did not bankrupt the Taliban. In fact, the Taliban reconstituted itself in Pakistan between 2002 and 2004 without access to large profits from drugs, rebuilding its material base largely from donations from Pakistan and the Middle East and from profits from another illicit economy, the illegal traffic with licit goods between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Rather that weakening the insurgency, eradication strengthened it by driving economic refugees into the Taliban’s hands. Eradication also alienated the local population from the national government as well as from local tribal elites that agreed to eradication, thus creating a key opening for Taliban mobilization. Moreover, the local eradicators themselves were in a position to best profit from counternarcotics policies, being able to eliminate competition – drug business and political alike – and alter market concentration and prices at least in the short term and within their region of operations.

Eradication was thus complicating counterinsurgency and stabilization policies in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration’s decision to focus instead on interdiction and rural development was the right decision.

A Selective Interdiction Policy Has Become Indiscriminate

Under the Obama Administration, the interdiction policy has been geared primarily toward Taliban-linked traffickers. Going after Taliban-linked traffickers was the sole counternarcotics mandate of ISAF forces, though other international and Afghan counternarcotics units could target other traffickers as well. ISAF’s counternarcotics operations have sought to reduce the flows of weapons, money, drugs, precursor agents, and improvised explosive device (IED) components to the Taliban, with the goal of degrading the Taliban’s finances and physical resources through interdiction. Although hundreds of interdiction raids have now been conducted, especially in southern Afghanistan, and large quantities of opium and IEDs have been seized in these operations, it is questionable whether the impact on the Taliban’s resource flows has been more than local. Large-scale military operations to clear the Taliban from particular areas, such as in Marja, Helmand, have affected the insurgents’ funding capacity and resource flows in those particular areas.

But so far, the cumulative effects of the narcotics interdiction effort to suppress financial flows do not appear to be affecting the Taliban at the strategic level. This is because the Taliban fundraising policy has long been to tax any economic activity in the areas where the insurgents operate – be they sheep herding, such as in the north, illegal logging in the east, or National Solidarity Program projects in the center.

The strongest effect of focusing interdiction on Taliban-linked traffickers appears to be at least temporarily to disrupt its logistical chains since many of its logistical operatives handle both IED materials and moving drugs. In combination with ISAF’s targeting focus on mid-level commanders, the prioritization of the counternarcotics-interdiction focus is probably palpably complicating the Taliban’s operational capacity in Afghanistan’s south, where both the military surge and counternarcotics efforts have been prioritized.

But in the zeal to disrupt the Taliban logistical chains and weaken the Taliban’s command structures, especially at the operational middle-level, the ISAF interdiction policy lost the selectivity carefully crafted into the design of the strategy. ISAF units often do not have an easy way to ascertain whether someone is a middle-level commander or not. What does it take to be a middle-level commander – being in charge of three, ten, one hundred Taliban? What does it take to be a Taliban supporter? The dual-focus of night raids and house searches on both capturing “high-value” (whatever that actually means) targets and searching for drugs and explosives has blurred the distinction between farmers and high-value drug or Taliban operatives. Does the fact that a household has opium make the household members Taliban supporters? Obviously not, since many rural Afghans do not hold their assets as cash in a bank, but rather as opium stocks at home. ISAF house searches that seize or destroy any found opium, perhaps under the belief that they are destroying Taliban stockpiles, can in fact wipe out the entire savings of a household. Thus in areas that have been subject to intense interdiction raids, such as Marja or Nad Ali districts of Helmand, the effects of supposedly selective and hearts-and-minds-oriented interdiction can resemble blanket eradication. Often, their impact on the economic well-being of a household is often more detrimental than that of eradication because such searches can wipe out all of the long-term assets of a household and because after eradication, a family can still have a chance to replant. And the effects on stability and the counterinsurgency campaign are the same as from eradication: intense alienation of the affected population from the Afghan government and ISAF forces and susceptibility to Taliban mobilization.

Although the interdiction policy has lost its selectivity at the level of distinguishing small and high-level traders, its selectivity on the Taliban connection has come with problematic side-effects. One of them is to signal to Afghan powerbrokers that the best way to conduct the drug business in Afghanistan is to provide counterinsurgency services, such as intelligence, militias, and real estate property, to ISAF, or to be aligned with the government of President Hamid Karzai. As a high-ranking ISAF official in Kandahar told me in the fall of 2010, “In the current struggle for Kandahar, our nightmare is to have to take on at the same time the Taliban and Wali [the then-alive Ahmed Wali Khan, President Karzai’s brother and the top powerbroker in Kandahar]. But we understand that he has alienated some people in Kandahar.” A former high official of the U.S. PRT in Kandahar similarly explained to me the difficulties the international community has faced when trying to impose redlines on powerbrokers such as General Razziq, now the police chief of Kandahar and a well-known Taliban hunter and previously a warlord and smuggler from the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar. “We gave them [Razziq and other Kandahar powerbrokers] redlines. But very quickly they violated all the redlines. But they are effective in getting things done. We can’t go after them at the same time as we are fighting the Taliban. When the Taliban is defeated, the Afghans will take care of the powerbrokers themselves.” Tolerating the rapacious and thuggish behavior of such useful powerbrokers may be a price necessary to absorb in order to maximize the effectiveness of counterinsurgency on the battlefield in the short term, but when the powerbrokers-cum-drug-traffickers who thus get themselves an out-of-jail card and obtain vast power and profits are some of the most abusive and most reviled warlords, the legitimacy of the Afghan government is critically undermined.

Especially early on, the Obama administration accorded great importance to fighting corruption in Afghanistan. Various Afghan civilian structures, such as the Major Crime Task Force, and equivalent units within ISAF, such as its anti-corruption task force, Shafafyat, were stood up. But Washington demanded that anti-corruption reforms take place with an intensity that ignored Afghan realities and political complexities -- a system in which the highest government officials as well as the lowest ones, line ministries, banking centers, and most international contracts are pervaded by corruption. The lack of prioritization as to what corruption needed to be tackled first and unequivocally thus produced only dramatic promises from President Karzai to fight corruption, with little actual follow up.

Moreover, as the Obama administration decided to wind down its military presence in Afghanistan, Washington began vacillating again in its determination to take on corruption.. Many argued that tackling corruption is a luxury the United States can no longer afford; instead it needs to prioritize “stability” by working through local powerbrokers, instead of being obsessed with their criminal entanglements and discriminatory practices. The downside is that Afghans overwhelmingly resent the lack of respect for law by the powerful in their country and consider themselves governed by an illegitimate thuggish mafia regime. The resulting level of dissatisfaction and alienation among Afghans is so high that it is difficult to see how without significant improvements in governance or at least a major expansion of patronage networks, the current political order in Afghanistan can be stable beyond 2014.

Rural Development Has Often Been Ineffectively Designed

Throughout most of the 2000-2009 period, alternative livelihoods programs were slow to reach the vast majority of the Afghan population, and largely failed to address the structural drivers of opium poppy cultivation. The lack of security and increasing insurgency in the south halted many of the alternative livelihoods projects. A legal microcredit system was lacking in most of Afghanistan. Although some areas, such as Helmand had been showered with aid, much of it failed to reach ordinary farmers. Projects such as the Kajaki Dam, the centerpiece of USAID development efforts in the south of Afghanistan for much of the decade, failed to be completed because of insecurity. At the same time, economic development programs even in the more permissive environments, such as in northern Afghanistan, often simply did not materialize although bans on poppy were secured through promises of alternative livelihoods.

The Obama administration set out to redress this glaring hole in the counternarcotics and stabilization policy in Afghanistan and emphasized rural development, allocating about a quarter billion dollars a year to the effort. But immediately, the economic development programs were plagued by vacillation between two competing understandings of the purpose of economic development projects: Is their purpose to buy off the population and wean it off from the insurgents or are they designed to produce long-term sustainable development?

The buy-off concept has included so-called quick-impact projects carried out by the U.S. military with money from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) or through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) as well as so-called “economic stabilization projects,” also known as District Delivery Program or District Stabilization Framework, carried out by USAID. The latter were conceived as short-term cash-for-work programs, lasting weeks or at best months. Their goals have been to keep Afghan males employed so that economic necessities do not drive them to join the Taliban and to secure the allegiance of the population who, ideally, will provide intelligence on the insurgents. Under this concept, U.S. economic development efforts have prioritized the most violent areas. Accordingly, the vast majority of the allocated funds went to the most contested provinces of Kandahar and Helmand where the U.S. military surge was focused. In 2010, for example, USAID allocated $250 million for the two provinces. [2] And in Helmand’s Nawa district, USAID spent upward of $30 million within nine months, in what some dubbed “[the] carpet bombing of Nawa with cash.”[3] With Nawa’s 75,000 people, such aid amounts to $400 per person, while Afghanistan’s per capita income is only $300 per year.

Although U.S. government officials emphasize that these stabilization programs have generated tens of thousands of jobs in Afghanistan’s south, many of the efforts have been unsustainable short-lived programs, such as canal cleaning and grain-storage and road building, or small grants, such as for seeds and fertilizers. Characteristically, they collapse as soon as the money runs out, often in the span of several weeks. Nor has adequate consideration been given to the development of assured markets; consequently much of the produce cultivated under the USAID-contracted programs will possibly not find buyers and rot. Many other structural drivers of poppy cultivation, such as a lack of legal microcredit, rural infrastructure, and processing facilities and poor productivity and profitability of legal crops, also persist. Nor is there robust evidence that the stabilization programs have secured the allegiance of the population to either the Afghan government or ISAF forces or resulted in increases in intelligence from the population on the Taliban.

Because of the complexity and opacity of Afghanistan’s political, economic, and contracting scene, many of these international programs have continued to flow to problematic, discriminatory, and corrupt powerbrokers, generating further resentment among the population, and intensifying Afghanistan’s rampant corruption and lack of accountability. At other times, they have spurred new tribal rivalries and community tensions.

Nor have these programs yet addressed the structural deficiencies of the rural economy in Afghanistan, including the drivers of poppy cultivation. A microcredit system, for example, continues to be lacking throughout much of Afghanistan. In fact, many of the stabilization efforts, such as wheat distribution or grant programs, directly undermine some of the long-term imperatives for addressing the structural market deficiencies, such as the development of microcredit or the establishment of local Afghan seed-banks and seed markets and rural enterprise and value-added chains. Shortcuts such as the so-called Food Zone in Helmand and similar wheat distribution schemes elsewhere in Afghanistan are symptomatic of the minimal short-term economic and security payoffs (but substantial medium-term costs) mode with which the internationals have operated in Afghanistan. The result: persisting deep market deficiencies and compromised rule of law.

There is a delicate three-way balance among long-term development, the need to generate support among the population and alleviate economic deprivation in the short term, and state-building. A counternarcotics “alternative livelihoods” program in Afghanistan provides a telling example: Aware of the deeply destabilizing effects of poppy suppression in the absence of alternative livelihoods and yet under pressure to reduce poppy cultivation, Helmand Governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal, widely acclaimed as a competent and committed governor, launched a wheat-seed distribution project during the 2008-09 growing season. In order not to grow poppy, farmers were handed free wheat seeds. This program proved popular with the segments of the Helmand population who received the free wheat and the program was emulated throughout Afghanistan and continued in 2010.

Poppy cultivation did decrease in Helmand in 2009, and many enthusiastically attributed the results to the wheat distribution program, rather than low opium prices. And yet there are good reasons to doubt the effectiveness of the program, at least with respect to development and even governance. Because of land density issues in Afghanistan, the lack of sustainability of the favorable wheat-to-opium price ratios under which the program took effect, and the limited ability of wheat cultivation to generate employment, wheat turned out to be a singularly inappropriate replacement crop.[4] Indeed, much of the wheat seed ended up being sold in markets rather than sown.

Due to the insecurity prevailing in Helmand at the time, the program was undertaken without any field assessment of what drives poppy cultivation in particular areas of Helmand and in Afghanistan more broadly.Yet because most people welcome free handouts, the program was popular. But it also became politically manipulated by local administrators and tribal elders who sought to strengthen their power. Although the program was deficient from a development perspective, it brought immediate political benefits to those who sponsored it, including the political machinery of President Hamid Karzai who at that time was seeking reelection. Good governance was thus equated with the immediate handouts and their political payoff without regard for long-term economic development, sustainability, best practices lessons, and optimal decision-making processes.

At the same time, the wheat program and other economic stabilization programs often set up expectations on the part of the population for free handouts from the central government and international community without being economically viable and sustainable in the long term and without requiring commitments from the local community. Thus, many of the CERP and stabilization programs have encouraged the Afghans to expect payoffs for any activity consistent with the interests of the international community, even if the activity is also in their own interest and they would have carried it out anyway.

In line with the 2014 transition, USAID has committed itself to phase out the economic stabilization initiatives and short-term cash-for-work programs and instead transition to economic development programs that focus on long-term capacity building and sustainability. The Afghan government has also embraced such a policy shift. A fundamental change of this sort in the orientation of the development assistance programs is highly desirable. But the forthcoming reduction of the U.S. and ISAF’s presence in Afghanistan and the anticipated smaller budgets after the 2014 transition have diverted much of USAID’s and other international organizations’ attention and energies from field implementation of the programs to programmatic restructuring of their assistance efforts. One large question to be yet resolved is what entities – international or Afghan – will replace the PRTs, which are to be retired in 2014. However problematic in their delivery of economic assistance programs – mostly quick-impact projects rather than sustainable development programs – and whatever their other shortcomings, the PRTs have been the principal provider of economic assistance in some of the most isolated and insecure areas of Afghanistan. It is not automatic that Afghan line ministries – notoriously incompetent and corrupt – or other international development entities will fill the PRT void.

Even with the transition imperatives and priorities, immediate political pressures from the bottom up continue to reinforce ISAF’s predilection for short-term quick-impact projects. Sustainable development requires a lot of time, but the Afghan population has been highly impatient to see some minimal improvements and often has demanded handout programs without regard for long-term sustainability and desirability. Thus, in 2011 again, many short-term quick-impact projects were extended and new large budgets were allocated to them.

Moreover, the persisting, however substantially reduced, insecurity even in high-profile focus areas, such as Marja and Arghandab, can also threaten the limited short-term “stabilization” programs. The Taliban has strongly intensified its campaign to assassinate Afghan government officials, contractors, and NGOs who cooperate with ISAF and the Afghan government. Both implementers and Afghan beneficiaries of the economic programs have been killed. This intimidation campaign has scared off some Afghans from participating in the programs and may again result in local Afghan officials and internationals being more than ever locked up in their compounds and rarely venturing into the field among the Afghans after 2014. Such isolation greatly hampers the internationals’ ability to understand the complex and political dynamics that define any particular area of Afghanistan and hence to design effective assistance programs.

U.S. and ISAF officials emphasize that in cleared areas in the south, shops have reopened on the streets and bazaars seem livelier. Yet Afghan shopkeepers often say that they are trying to make as much money as possible in a short window of opportunity because they expect security to deteriorate again after 2014 and they may then lose all business opportunities. Thus, even for these stabilization programs as for any economic development efforts, security is a critical prerequisite. The faster the international community rushes out of Afghanistan leaving still weak Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the more economic programs in Afghanistan will be undermined.

Counterproductive Eradication Is Still Going On

The Obama Administration has encountered withering criticism from Russia for its counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan. Suffering from drug and infectious-disease epidemics and a broader demographic crisis, Russia has complained that its drug and population problems stem from the large supply of heroin from Afghanistan. Refuting overwhelming evidence from forty years of counternarcotics efforts that actions on the supply side tend to have minimal effects on drug-use trends, and unwilling to invest in appropriate drug prevention and treatment facilities, Russia has demanded aggressive eradication in Afghanistan. It also provides counternarcotics training to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But despite Russia’s vociferous complaints, eradication is still going on Afghanistan. The Obama Administration defunded only centrally-led eradication by an Afghan eradication unit that the United States had trained. Eradication efforts led by Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics and provincial governors are still carried out. If the occasional rare major eradication drive or poppy cultivation ban, such as in Nangarhar in 2008 (described below), is discounted, eradication can been seen to have consistently hovered between 2500 and 4000 hectares a year, before and after the Obama Administration’s counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan was adopted.[5]

The current Afghan-led eradication continues to be associated with the same problems that plagued the previous centrally-led eradication. Powerful elites are able to bribe or coerce their way out of having their opium poppy fields destroyed or to direct eradication against their political opponents. The poorest farmers, most vulnerable to Taliban’s mobilization, bear the brunt of eradication. Alienated farmers often join with the Taliban to oppose eradication and entire regions are destabilized as a result. The violent protests against eradication and attacks on the eradication teams in Nangarhar’s Khogyani, Shinwar, and Achin areas this spring provide a vivid example. Eradication targets are often set without regard for their effects on the economic conditions of the farmers, local conflict dynamics, and counterinsurgency efforts. Officials from Kabul often arrive in a provincial capital, round up governors and police chiefs and order them to destroy a predetermined number of hectares of poppy: In the western province of Herat, overall one of the most stable parts of Afghanistan and a major locus of drug smuggling routes, the Ministry of Counternarcotics decided in April of this year that eradication should take place in the Shindand district where insecurity and Taliban presence have been strong, just as ISAF and ANSF were planning to undertake clearing operations there. Any hearts and minds efforts were bound to be eviscerated by the eradication drive, and intelligence flows from the population on the Taliban bound to dry up. At the same time, the intensity of eradication is miniscule -- in the low thousands of hectares per year -- when compared to what is necessary to significantly suppress poppy cultivation in Afghanistan – requiring eradication of over one hundred thousand hectares a year – and to drive cultivation to one of Afghanistan’s neighbors. (Without a significant reduction in global demand, suppression of poppy cultivation in one place will merely drive it to another.) For many years to come, such suppression could only be achieved through sheer brute force since alternative livelihoods cannot be stood up quickly. And of course, such an effort would destroy the larger stabilization prospects for Afghanistan.

Not all poppy suppression efforts in Afghanistan always take the shape of bulldozing the poppy plants. In Helmand, the province with most intense poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, where Governor Mangal has been held up as the paragon of good governance, poppy suppression has also taken the shape of destroying farmers’ water pumps, especially in the poor, insecure, recently liberated poppy areas north of the Helmand river.[6] That approach may minimize how much poppy survives purely on rain water, but it also kills the production of legal crops and destroys the farmers’ means of procuring water for consumption and other household use. Not surprisingly, this approach has effectively played into Taliban’s mobilization efforts.

Bans on cultivation can have as devastating an economic impact on the rural population as eradication. Although hailed as hallmarks of great governance, such as in Nangarhar or Balkh, they are ultimately as politically and economically unsustainable as premature eradication before alternative livelihoods are in place. In Nangarhar, for example, Governor Gul Agha Sherzai has managed to keep cultivation negligible or limited -- driving cultivation down from a 2007 cultivation peak of 18,739 hectares[7] to zero for the next several years. He achieved this “success” through a combination of buyoffs of influential maliks (tribal elders), promises of alternative livelihoods, and threats of eradication of the poppy crops and imprisonment of violators. But the promises of alternative livelihoods have mostly failed to materialize. While farmers close to the provincial capital Jalalabad have often managed to cope by switching to crops such vegetables, increasing dairy production, and working in construction cash-for-work programs, farmers away from the provincial center, such as in the districts of Achin, Khogyani, and Shinwar, have suffered great economic deprivation. As their income has crashed (often by 80%) and no alternative livelihoods programs have been available to them, their political restlessness has steadily grown. Those areas have seen great levels of instability, intensified tribal conflict over land, water, and access to resource handouts from the international community, rebellions of young men against the local maliks supporting eradication,[8] physical attacks on eradication teams, intense Taliban mobilization, and increased flows of militants into and through the province from Pakistan. This year, several instances of significant violent resistance and protests against eradication flared up in Nangarhar, and cultivation has crept up to close to 2000 hectares[9] because many farmers no longer have any means of making a living under the poppy ban and have to fall back on poppy cultivation for securing basic livelihoods for their families.

Several incentives, at times perverse, encourage eradication by Afghan governors and officials of the Ministry of Counternarcotics despite the fact that eradication is instigating instability and hampering counterinsurgency efforts. First of all, some Afghan government officials, especially those with a Communist background, genuinely believe that poppy cultivation is bad for Afghanistan and that its suppression is important, no matter what costs for Afghanistan such suppression generates. Afghan government officials who believe in aggressive eradication also told me during interviews that since the Afghan constitution prohibits poppy cultivation, it is their duty to destroy it regardless of any side-effects. Others believe that pushing ahead with eradication will secure the favor of the international community – whether in Washington or in Moscow. Such considerations are particularly important to those officials in Afghanistan who entertain presidential ambitions, such as Governor Gul Agha Shirzai in Nangarhar or Governor Mohammad Atta in Balkh. Even though as a result of eradication and bans, local populations may be alienated from them and positive links between the governor and the rural population severed, the international community often still hails their performance as a model of good governance to be emulated elsewhere in Afghanistan.

A codification of this international equating of good governance with poppy suppression, regardless of its popular legitimacy, is an Afghan-government program called Good Performance Initiative (GPI) and funded primarily by the United States and United Kingdom. The initiative aims to deliver high-impact development assistance to those provinces that have eliminated or significantly reduced poppy cultivation, or demonstrated other effective counter narcotics achievements. Its objective is poppy elimination and maintenance of poppy free provinces through the provision of financial support for priority development projects.

The program is readily embraced by governors who qualify for the rewards – usually around $10 million a year – because governors do not have any taxation capacity and depend on Kabul for any provincial funds. Rarely however do the GPI funds result in systematic alternative livelihoods programs. Allocations that are not simply diverted for personal profit often amount to one isolated project here and there at best, rather than any robust rural development. A high provincial official in Nangarhar I interviewed in April 2012, for example, could not tell me what happened with all of the GPI funds that Nangarhar received over the past several years, beyond highlighting that one generator was delivered to a district (he was not sure which one) and a university dormitory and several other unspecified buildings were built in Jalalabad, Nangarhar’s capital. Promises of systematic rural development and robust alternative livelihoods made to poppy farmers are thus mostly unmet. Whatever level of poppy suppression has been achieved, it has been achieved mainly through the threat of coercion rather than through the establishment of robust and sustainable legal livelihoods. The outcomes are consequently both fragile and often an additional stimulus to the insurgency and instability in Afghanistan.

With More Poppy on the Horizon, How Can Counternarcotics Policies in Afghanistan Be Smartened Up?

After the 2014 transition in Afghanistan, poppy cultivation is likely to increase to some extent. Yes, the global opiate market has been saturated by Afghanistan’s production over the past decade. But when not driven by a decrease in global opiate prices, downward fluctuations in Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation have been principally achieved through unsustainable economic handout policies, governors’ coercion, or the deterrent effect of ISAF’s presence in some of the key poppy production areas, made more credible as a result of ISAF’s house searches and opium seizures. Thus, some upswing in production after 2014 – primarily in areas squeezed by bans and eradication drives – is likely.

The faster the international community leaves Afghanistan, especially if sustainable comprehensive rural development programs are not in place and if ANSF are unable to cope with resulting insecurity, the more counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan will be undermined. The worst policy under such circumstances or in advance of the 2014 transition would be to insist on more aggressive eradication, such as by providing more funding for the GPI. Instead, interdiction, including by ISAF forces, needs to become far more selective. Seizures should be limited to truly large stockpiles as opposed to any household opium holdings. The quick-impact “economic stabilization” programs should be terminated as soon as possible. Instead, a shift to ground-assessment-based, sustainable comprehensive rural development with robust monitoring capacity to minimize corruption should be completed as soon as possible.

Counternarcotics efforts are a key component of stabilization and development efforts in Afghanistan. However, premature and inappropriate efforts to suppress the drug economy greatly complicate counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and stabilization objectives. Ultimately, they thus also jeopardize economic reconstruction, political consolidation, and the rule of law.

To learn more about the overall transition strategy in Afghanistan, also read Vanda Felbab-Brown’s last analytical report from her recent research trip.

[1] For details, see David Mansfield, Pariah or Poverty? The Opium Ban in the Province Nangarhar in 2004/05 Growing Season and Its Impact on Rural Livelihood Strategies, GTZ Policy Brief No. 1, September 2005, http://www.gtz.de/de/dokumente/en-FinalCopingReportStudyPAL20.7.pdf

[2] Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “In Afghan Region, U.S. Spreads the Cash to Fight the Taliban,” Washington Post, May 31, 2010; and Karen DeYoung, “Results of Kandahar Offensive May Affect Future U.S. Moves,” Washington Post, May 23, 2010.

[3] Ibid.

[4] David Mansfield, “Responding to Risk and Uncertainty: Understanding the Nature of Change in the Rural Livelihoods of Opium Poppy Growing Households in the 2007/08 Growing Season,” http://www.davidmansfield.org/data/Field_Work/UK/FINAL_UK_DRIVERS_REPORT_08.pdf.

[5] For eradication levels over the past decade, see United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan Opium Survey: Summary Findings, October 2011: 15.

[6] For details, see David Mansfield, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Counternarcotics Efforts and Their Effects in Nangarhar and Helmand in the 2010-11Growing Season, AREU, October 2011.

[7] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghanistan Opium Survey 2012, April 2012: 30.

[8] David Mansfield, The Ban on Opium Production across Nangarhar – A Risk Too Far, September 2010,

[9] UNODC: 30.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: Parwiz Parwiz / Reuters

Afghanistan Trip Report V: The Afghan Local Police: "It's Local, So It Must Be Good" - Or Is It?

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: The following article is one of a series of reports based on Vanda Felbab-Brown's fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2012. Here she analyzes the Afghan Local Police and other self-defense forces programs. Read also her recent report on the progress of Afghan security forces in "Firefight in Kabul," on governance problems in Afghanistan in "The Road to Jalalabad," on the U.S. troop withdrawal in "The U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership", and on ISAF’s logistical challenges and the complex political realities in northern Afghanistan in "Crossing the Salang."

Among the most controversial aspects of the transition strategy in Afghanistan are various efforts to stand up self-defense forces around the country. These Afghan “militias” are supposed to increase security in areas where Afghan National Army (ANA), Afghan National Police (ANP), and ISAF presence are highly limited. With ISAF denying that the various programs amount to a militia effort (calling the units everything else but militias and insisting that they are based on Afghan traditions, such as arbakai), the most visible version of these efforts right now is the Afghan Local Police (ALP). The ALP currently numbers around 13,000 members and is slated to increase to at least 30,000 by the end of 2014.

The purpose of the ALP is to extend at least a modicum of security to communities where Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) are unlikely to be deployed for a long time. In those communities, the ALP is relied on to weaken the Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, and the Haqqanis by either hiring their soldiers away for the ALP or having the ALP fight them, and to generate intelligence for ISAF.

U.S. military officials claim to be thrilled with the program. In conversations with me (during my recent research in Afghanistan in April 2012 and previous research trips)[1], they describe the program in glowing terms and portray it as tremendous success. They report that the ALP is enthusiastically embraced by local communities and effective in fighting the Taliban—often characterizing it as a “game changer.” As a U.S. Special Operations Forces officer explained to me: “All politics is local. The ALP’s local, so it must be good. After all, that’s what counterinsurgency theory teaches us."

In contrast to the rosy U.S. military’s portrait of the ALP, many Afghans tend to fear the ALP and other self-defense forces programs and have negative views of such militia efforts. Their experience with militias and arbakai is of these forces turning on local communities, extorting them and predating on them, engaging in the theft of land and goods and even murder, and brutalizing rival ethnic communities. Occasionally, some communities have positive views of the ALP and other arbakai and even volunteer to stand them up. But often, the Afghans who most enthusiastically embrace such programs are the ALP commanders themselves, or the powerbrokers who try to sell their unofficial militias to the formal self-defense programs for hefty payoffs.

The Tenth Time Around, We’ll Get It Right

The ALP efforts, and other concurrent versions of the self-defense programs, are nothing new; raising self-defense forces or inducing various tribes to do one’s fighting has been repeated in Afghanistan’s history many times. The Soviets in the 1980s resorted to raising tribal militias when they realized that they were not winning in Afghanistan, and used the militias as part of their exit strategy. Indeed, many Afghans associate the current militia programs with the Soviets’ defeat and see it as yet another signal that the United States is preparing to leave without a stable order in place.

Since 2002, various versions of the self-defense programs have been tried to stabilize pesky or troubled villages -- including the Afghan Auxiliary Police, the Afghan Public Protection Program, and the Community Defense Initiative, also known as Local Defense Initiative groups in some areas. In some of these efforts, the self-defense forces receive a salary. In others, they are not supposed to be paid; but many of them insist on some sort of payment, so the non-payment rule is often adjusted.

Not all of the militias have been stood up under the supervision and blessing of the U.S. military. The National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan intelligence agency, has for years been standing up or encouraging the establishment of separate self-defense units, especially in areas where the Tajik-dominated NDS fears the presence of too many Pashtun self-defense groups. Some of these separate programs have been at times folded into the ALP, others persist outside of the control and even access of ISAF. Particularly under the leadership of Bismullah Mohammadi, a prominent Tajik commander, the notoriously corrupt and ethnically-factionalized Ministry of Interior (MoI) has also sought to legitimize and formalize its own favorite militias. The competition among these various institutional and ethnic factions raises concerns about the intensification of predatory behavior by the self-defense forces. Many other militias are simply self-generated, or have long fought for a local powerbroker, simply carrying their weapons less ostentatiously after 2002.

The performance and outcomes of these various militia programs has been highly varied, but often they are cumulatively negative, and problems abound. The experience with militias in Nangarhar illustrates some of the complexities of such efforts, and the limits to how easily they can be controlled. In 2010, the Sepoy tribe of the Achin region of Nangarhar province spontaneously decided to raise an anti-Taliban militia. Enthusiastically embraced by U.S. military command in Afghanistan and promised financial sponsorship, the tribes were incorporated into the Community Defense Initiative. Quickly, however, the Sepoy militias turned on a rival tribe – the Alisherkhel. Using U.S.-provided weapons and claiming to have U.S. backing, they “reclaimed” land disputed between the two tribes and triggered violence in large portions of the province. After a series of negotiations and efforts to reduce hostilities, a delegation of NDS, ANP, ANA, and U.S. SoFs was sent in 2011 to the area to disarm the two tribes. In the fighting that ensued, eighteen Sepoy were killed, but still only the Alisherkhel agreed to disarm, incorrectly believing that the Sepoy would hand over their weapons too. The land dispute is not resolved, though a ceasefire was extended. The experience of Achin notwithstanding, the ALP is being stood up in Nangharhar: it is already in existence in the Goshta district, but plans are under way to stand it up also in Achin and other areas.

Experience with militias in northern Afghanistan reveals other problems and complications. Three year ago in the provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan, the U.S. military created the so-called pro-government militias (PGMs) (obviously running out of ideas for names and not getting the message up there in the northern Afghanistan that these programs are not militias). Later on, a decision was made to convert the PGMs into the ALP. Many were, but because of limits on the ALP size in the area, some PGMs were left out and told to hand over their weapons and go home. Instead, they went back to their checkpoints keeping their arms – no one has dared disarm them. They are still there, running out their former PGM salary, and, according to Baghlanis from the area, are getting angrier and angrier at being left out of the Afghan government-ISAF payroll. The Baghlan residents I spoke with overwhelmingly expected that these former PGMs would resort to highway robbery and extortion when their remaining money finally fully ran out.

Weak Control Mechanisms

When compared with the other self-defense programs, the ALP has by far the strongest oversight mechanisms, and the U.S. military officials are quick to note that the ALP program is far more sophisticated and far better than the Soviet militia program. Even so, the oversight mechanisms and controls are hardly sufficient.

The ALP is supervised and trained by U.S. Special Operations Forces who are to embed with the ALP in the village or area where the ALP operates. Embedding may imply a variety of things – from living in the village for six weeks to visiting the village once a week. Training mostly consists of teaching the recruits how to handle small firearms (which they either have and know already how to handle, or are issued), medical training, and communicating with the SoFs.

Those recruited are to be vouched for by three maliks (elders) and/or a village shura (council). The maliks or shura are to determine that the ALP recruits will not secretly work for the Taliban or other anti-government elements, turn on their U.S. advisors, and abuse the local community. This control mechanism is believed to be adequate since the maliks are assumed to know the men they are recommending. The problem with this elder control mechanism is that, not infrequently, a powerbroker controls the village elders, dictating his preferences in a way that escapes international scrutiny. At other times, the village elders have no problem vouching for the militia members as long as they only extort a rival village. Finally, outsiders, such as the SoFs, often have difficulties assessing how credible an elder a person is. If they live in a village for a period of time, they may well develop a good sense of the power distribution in the locality and level of acceptance purported elders have in the community. But when they first arrive to identify the maliks who are then to identify the militiamen, any three older men with beards and turbans (or pakuls) may walk up to them and claim to be the three wise elders of the village.

The final control mechanism in the ALP program is that the district police chief is to supervise the ALP units. The problem with this mechanism is that the post of district police chief has often been associated with some of the greatest and most consistent corruption in Afghanistan. Appointments of district police chiefs are rarely based on the high moral character and outstanding professional qualifications of the individual; even the absence of a criminal record is often a bridge too far. Instead, the position is at times bought by those who can afford to pay for it (expecting to collect hefty “taxes” from the local population) or, more frequently, negotiated between Kabul and local powerbrokers, with the goal of satisfying their competing demands. Thus, the police chief’s quality of supervision of the ALP is often poor. In some areas, the problems with MoI’s supervision, such as desire to cleanse ethnic rivals from the ALP, has led the U.S. Special Operations Forces to operate via other programs, such as the PGMs to guarantee that the self-defense forces were in fact being paid and not manipulated by the MoI.

Furthermore, although the ALP likely is more closely monitored and perhaps controlled than other militia programs in Afghanistan, local Afghans rarely have the ability to distinguish among the various self-defense groups and tend to just call them all arbakai. Attributing abuses to a particular group may be especially difficult for the local population. The ALP is issued their own separate uniforms or at least arm bands, but as one Afghan civil society organizer in Nangharhar told me: “If they go to houses to demand money, they take off the uniform. They’re not stupid.” At other times, of course, various armed and criminal bands in Afghanistan do put on others’ uniforms to stop cars and extort money.

The greatest weakness in the ALP effort, and its many predecessors and concurrent programs, is that there are no established mechanisms for disarming an ALP unit that has gone rogue and predates on its own or rival communities. A formalized and diligently carried-out procedure could greatly reduce the ALP’s propensity toward abuse and increase the program’s legitimacy. When in Baghlan, for example, the ANP arrested twenty-two ALP militias for human rights violations and extortion, and they were sentenced to jail for six to seven years, the level of abuses by the ALP overall was perceived to have declined by the wider community. (The only problem was that the some members of the community believed that behind the guise of clamping down on abuses lay ethnic purging of the ALP in the area.)

A Great Variation in Outcomes: The Local Context Does Matter

The U.S. Special Operations Forces officer in charge of the ALP in an area who insisted to me that the ALP is all about local politics was of course correct. The problem is that the local context in Afghanistan is often very nasty. The structure, composition, history, and insider-outsider relations all significantly influence how well-behaved a local self-defense unit will be.

If a community is homogenous and isolated and subject to outside Taliban extortion and abuse, it may well enthusiastically welcome the creation of the ALP and the ALP may significantly improve security and the life of the community. Thus, in parts of Kandahar, for example, some communities volunteered for the ALP even before U.S. SOFs or the MoI arrived in the village to recruit the ALP.

Although such communities abused by Taliban outsiders sometimes could generate a force on their own to fight the Taliban, the benefit of the ALP structure is that it can relieve some of the logistical problems that an independently operating self-defense group may have -- the ALP units are given small arms and ammunition. The logistical support is hardly perfect: When in Wardak, for example, the Afghan Population Protection forces, one of the ALP’s other versions, ran out of ammunition due to MoI’s lack of support, and shed their uniforms to avoid being targeted by the Taliban, all the U.S. military supervisor of the program could offer was to encourage them “to put on a brave face and look like you have ammo.”[2]

The ALP also receives not only supplies, but, critically, the back-up of U.S. Special Operations Forces during a firefight. Since in many parts of Afghanistan, tribal structures have been critically weakened and communities ravaged by war, their ability to fight to the Taliban can be very limited. A SOF backup can be a life-saver for the self-defense forces if such groups come under overwhelming pressure from the Taliban. In Baghlan, for example, an ALP commander reported that the Taliban dared not attack them beyond minor harassment because the local Taliban groups knew that the ALP would call the SoFs if they came under serious Taliban attack. So the Taliban would only occasional plant IEDs or shoot at the ALP checkpoint. Of course, to the extent that the deterrent effect comes predominantly from the SOFs backup, the disturbing question arises as to what will happen with the improved security in the area and the state of the ALP when one day the U.S. Special Operations Forces are not available in the area as a back-up.

If a community is systematically disfranchised from power in an area -- for example, Ghilzai Pashtuns do not have representation in the local district government and police and army forces, such as in Uruzgan -- establishing ALP units in such a community empowers it. This empowerment is against the local Afghan government rather than the Taliban, but the community nonetheless is likely to greatly appreciate such a village-stabilization program. (The U.S. Special Operations Forces thus became the heroes of Baghlan Pashtuns groups from which they stood up ALP units, when during a firefight between the Andarabi-Tajik- dominated ANP in Baghlan and the Pashtun ALP units, they took the side of the ALP. The local Andarabi-Tajik dominated ALP had not been thrilled about how the ALP units were disturbing the Andarabis’ hold on power in the province.)

Under the best of circumstances, the ALP extends security against anti-government forces, such as the Taliban, to communities previously left to suffer, opens up roads to villages previously-deemed too dangerous to travel and hence boosts economic activity in the area, and perhaps even reduces local crime, extortion, and land theft.

Difficulties and complexities in many forms, however, tend to arise quickly when a community or an area is not homogenous, and when the Taliban or Hezb-i-Islami or other anti-government elements are not merely thuggish outsiders in the area.

Predation on host or neighboring communities can easily develop, serious abuses of human rights can take place, and the ALP may in fact undermine the security of the local community. In Kunduz or northern Farah, for example, after the ALP defeated the Taliban in their villages, they started extorting the communities and demanding taxes for themselves. Many instances of abuse by the ALP have been reported from Takhar where the ALP unit would identify its personal enemies as the Taliban for ISAF to get. Sometimes, the various ALP units, when drawn from rival communities or supported by rival warlords, turn on each other, instead of fighting the Taliban. One notorious case of such infighting took place in Uruzgan in 2010.

At other times, the negative effect on human security and perception of safety is more subtle. The establishment of an ALP unit may attract the Taliban to start attacking the unit and the community, expanding the insecurity bubble. The U.S. military considers it a sign of the ALP’s effectiveness that it draws the Taliban fire, but from the perspective of the local community, security may be considerably worse than before the creation of the local ALP outfit.

In very heterogeneous, polarized, and fractured communities, the establishment of ALP units frequently critically augments the security dilemma among the communities and triggers an armament spiral among them. Baghlan provides a prime example. The ALP units there have been drawn predominantly from the Pashtun minority in order to drain the swamp of the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami. The Pashtuns in Baghlan have felt deeply marginalized and disfranchised after 2002, especially as many government positions, including in the ANP in the area, have been dominated by former Northern Alliance members. Many Pashtun communities there have considered their villages to be extorted by the Andarabi-Tajiks-dominated ANP and power structures. The Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami, as a result, easily mobilized support among the Pashtun communities, and establishing the ALP among the same groups was seen as mechanism to reduce the Taliban strength. But rival Tajik and Uzbek communities and powerbrokers have in turn felt extremely threatened by the arming of their rivals (often one and the same as the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami) and began arming their own ethnically-based militias and lobbying the local MoI to recognize their militias as the ALP and not the Pashtuns. One such commander, who went by the nom-de-guerre Afghankush (which implies “Pashtun Killer”)[3] and had been renown for fighting “the Taliban” for several years before the ALP was stood up and for keeping the Baghlan-Kunduz road flowing, demanded that his Uzbek-militia be recognized as part of the ALP. When he was rejected, he simply announced that his men already were the ALP and were just not yet being paid. Several other warlords in the north adopted that approach, often with the backing of their governors and chiefs of police. Many Tajik and Uzbek communities and powerbrokers in the north have felt betrayed and treated unfairly as a result of the ALP program because they believed that the ALP program rewarded Taliban-supporting villages, whereas those who have been fighting the Taliban for two decades were being sidelined.

In other words, although the effects of establishing the ALP are highly contingent on local contexts, cumulatively the ALP phenomenon transcends the local context and can easily set off a widespread security dilemma within Afghanistan. Even though the ALP are physically not to travel and operate outside of their villages (of course, they violate the rule), their reputation travels among communities. What happens in one Afghan village does not stay in that Afghan village. Instead, rival communities, observing that their antagonists are being armed, seek to do the same.

Even when security improves as a result of the creation of a local ALP outfit, the robustness of that improvement may be far less than meets the eye. Sometimes security in an area improves simply because a community typically hedges its bets and pays part of its income, including what it gets through the ALP salary payments, to the Taliban. The local ALP reaches a modus vivendi with the Taliban and the Taliban reduces its attacks. Indeed, such hedging is typical of Afghan history, with local warlords, khans, and tribes siding and making peace with those they sense would prevail in a conflict, and easily breaking deals if the situation on the battlefield changes. Sometimes, such as in Logar in 2010, the accommodation between the militias and the Taliban even results in temporary improvements in security in the area and the community welcomes it. But the reduction in violence often exists only at the mercy of the Taliban and the deal collapses when the Taliban chooses to renege on it or when the external payoffs dry up and can no longer be divided among the various warring parties.

In some cases, such as in Kunduz and Baghlan, creating the ALP merely means putting the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami on the ISAF/Afghan government payroll and paying them not to fight. Buying off one’s enemies is of course another time-honored tradition in Afghanistan, and at times groups align themselves either on the basis of assessing on which side of the conflict there is more money to be made, rather than on the basis of any hardened ideological preferences or deep-seated communal rifts. But paying your enemies not to fight you can turn out to be a short-lasting solution. What happens if the ALP money suddenly dries up? An ALP commander (“former” Hezb-i-Islamic leader) answered the question for me: “It’s all about money. Now the Afghan government pays us. If the opposition starts paying us more, we switch to them.”

Ominous Future

Herein lies one of the biggest problems with the ALP. The U.S. military readily agrees that the ALP is a “temporary” solution. No one, however, knows as yet, how and when it will be retired. What happens after 2014 when even regular Afghan forces of the ANA and ANP are to be reduced by as much as 130,000 because the Afghan state will not be able to afford to pay for the current size of the ANSF? What will happen if a NDS or ANP very strongly dominated by one ethnic group after 2014 decides not to pay the ALP of rival ethnic groups? If the ALP officially persists, will Afghan Special Operations Forces be able to exercise even the current inadequate level of supervision over the ALP? How likely are such units to disarm if they told to so after 2014? If the ALP units are simply told to go home after 2014, they may well offer themselves up to the highest bidder, the warring party that is most likely to prevail in an area, or turn to crime.

Under even the best circumstances -- if after 2014 the ANA and ANP can effectively take over security in Afghanistan and prevent the country from disintegrating into an ethnically-factionalized civil war of which the Taliban will be one of many factions -- the (former) ALP will still represent a huge challenge for improving governance. Its predatory tendencies will be hard to control and in very polarized communities, the presence of (former) ALP may be the trigger of local conflict. If a source of local crime, the ALP will undermine perceptions of public safety and rule of law more broadly and legitimize actors such as the Taliban who deliver “order and justice.” Thus even when the program is performing its function of beating down the Taliban in a particular locale at a particular time, it still leaves behind armed men who can and often do challenge the already weak central government and engage in predation of local communities.

Under the worst circumstances, the (former) ALP militias will be one of the actors in a post-2014 civil war. Already many of the prominent former commanders are digging up their weapons and resurrecting their former militias. The ALP will be just one of many warring “self-defense” groups. If one takes this dire view of Afghanistan as its most likely future, one can see several reasons to continue and even augment the ALP effort. One is that yes, the militias are not a good development, but they are happening anyway, with or without ISAF’s and Afghan government’s sponsorship, so why not get into the spirit of the time and exploit them to U.S. advantage? Especially, if the civil war is believed to be coming, the concerns about ALP’s negative effects on governance and security in Afghanistan can be discarded, and instead the ALP can be seen to maximize the number and strength of groups that may oppose the Taliban and hence reduce the Taliban’s post-2014 power and territorial control. Putting many of the Taliban on the payroll may also extend the time before a civil war arrives after 2014.

Yet if one believes that a civil war is not unavoidable, that there is still a chance to stabilize Afghanistan sufficiently to avert a full-blown civil war and prevent extensive Taliban territorial control, then eagerly listening to the ALP siren song is not the way to go. Whatever limited tactical gains the ALP may bring are likely to be offset by the long-term conflict triggers it also carries within itself and the long-term negative impact on the already poor quality of governance in Afghanistan. And without improving governance in Afghanistan, it is hard to imagine how the current dispensation in Afghanistan can be sustained after 2014 even with improvements in the ANSF. Thus, if one still believes in a reasonably stable Afghanistan after 2014, then building up the ALP further is not the way to go. Instead, credible and robust mechanisms should develop right away to roll back rogue ALP units already in existence. Now is also the time to start developing a serious program of how to disarm and demobilize the ALP at the end of 2014. The United States and the international community should commit themselves to carry out that disarmament and to establish a program to divert the former ALP from predation. Such a program will likely only be credible if other militias, whether under the aegis of the United States or belonging to Afghan warlords, are also incorporated in it. For if they are not, the security dilemma will be triggered by them, just as it is currently triggered by the ALP, and the ALP units may shed their uniforms but not put down their weapons. The United States will do Afghanistan a great disservice if it rushes to stand up as many ALP units as possible before the end of 2014 and then hands them over to the Afghan government to worry about.

[1] During my recent and previous research in Afghanistan, I conducted interviews about the ALP and other self-defense programs in Afghanistan with ISAF and U.S. military officials at different levels of the chain of command in Kabul and in various regional commands, Afghan government officials at all levels of the government, Afghan Police officers, members of the Afghan Local Police, maliks, Afghan civil society organizers, businessmen, as well as ordinary Afghans such as shopkeepers. All interviews were conducted under the no-attribution rule.

I would like to thank Philipp Rotmann of the Global Public Policy Institute for his invaluable input into this article.

[2] David Axe, “Fourth Time the Charm for NATO’s Afghan Militia Plan?” World Politics Review, July 21, 2010. On the positive side, the Wardak APPP militias showed considerable restraint in getting involved in local tribal disputes, such as between the Hazaras and the Kuchis over grazing lands, and stayed out.

[3] Afghankush was assassinated by a suicide bomber in 2011.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: Omar Sobhani / Reuters

Afghanistan Trip Report IV: Crossing the Salang

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: The following article is one of a series of reports based on Vanda Felbab-Brown's fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2012. Here she describes a trip from Kabul to northern Afghanistan and the security and political situation there. Read also her recent report on the progress of Afghan security forces in Firefight in Kabul, on governance problems in Afghanistan in The Road to Jalalabad, and on the 2014 withdrawal of U.S. troops in The U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership.

The pristine white snow on the Hindu Kush mountains sparkled against the clear blue sky of a gorgeous crisp morning. At 5 a.m., my driver Ali, interpreter Mahmoud, and I had just left Kabul to drive to Baghlan. (Ali and Mahmoud are not their real names. Being known to work with Westerners can be brutally costly for Afghans – it makes them favorite targets of the Taliban.) The journey started off with a foreboding or perhaps an auspicious augur: Barely on the outskirts of Kabul, our old and rather beat-up Toyota Corolla would not start after being tanked up for the journey. The most common type of automobile in Afghanistan, a Corolla is great for keeping a low profile; and the more beat-up, the better since it is less likely to alert potential kidnappers or the Taliban that it is carrying a female foreigner. But despite my fondness for a means of transportation that disappears anonymously into the flow of Afghan traffic, the car’s struggle to start up right after being fed gasoline raised some doubts in my mind about its ability to cross the Salang Pass. Nonetheless, after some minutes of our fiddling with the engine and locals’ helping to push the car, it did kick back to life and off we went north to the mountains. I was heading to Baghlan to interview Afghan residents there about the Afghan Local Police (ALP) and other militias that abound in the area and have a critical effect on security and governance.

The Bumpy Climb: Logistics and Security North of Kabul
The provinces of Baghlan and Kunduz in northern Afghanistan have become strategically important to ISAF because one of its main logistical supply routes to Afghanistan -- the so-called Northern Distribution Network -- passes through them. Long neglected by ISAF and Afghan security forces and left to the rule of the former Northern Alliance powerbrokers, some of the northern provinces of Afghanistan have become a powder keg of ethnic tensions and an important mobilization area for the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami. Although the north has some of the most peaceful parts of Afghanistan, it also has areas, such as Baghlan and Kunduz, where the Taliban manages to recruit not just the minority Pashtuns who live there in enclaves among the Tajiks, but also Uzbeks and even some Tajiks among the many who feel disenfranchised by the post-2002 political dispensation there. That does not mean that many of the northern alienated groups or criminal bands that call themselves the Taliban do necessarily firmly align with the Quetta Shura or closely follow Gulbudin Hekmatyar’s maneuvering. Just like in southern Afghanistan, for many, the Taliban label is a flag of convenience and their alignment fleeting and loose, hiding varied resentments and ambitions. But it does mean that insecurity can be locally intense in the north. So intense, in fact, that along the supply road through Baghlan and Kunduz, there were daily attacks in 2010 and 2011, compromising a key strategic access. It is also a foreshadowing of the ethnic fighting between the dominant Tajiks and the groups that feel marginalized in the north that could come after 2014. With the exception of some Afghan government officials, the potential for civil war and ethnic infighting after 2014 was foremost on the mind of all Afghans with whom I spoke in the north. Most are deeply afraid of the future and skeptical that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will be able to fill the security void created by the drawing down of ISAF forces and their far smaller and circumscribed presence after 2014. “After NATO forces are reduced, people will be so insecure that they will not even dare to leave the shoes outside of their door,” one of my interlocutors put it.
Following a November 2011 firefight between Pakistani and ISAF soldiers and Pakistan’s closing of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for NATO trucks in retaliation, the importance of the Northern Distribution Network only increased. The road between Kabul, Kunduz, and ultimately Central Asia, on which I was setting off, is currently the only land supply route for NATO. After milking further financial payoffs and possibly other concessions out of the United States, Pakistan is likely to ultimately relent and reopen the land routes through Baluchistan and Khyber-Pashtunkwa for ISAF supply trucks. After all, its own trucking industry, an influential lobby in Pakistan and one of the few sources of employment for impoverished Pakistanis, is losing a lot of money as a result of the border closure. But until the Pakistan land routes are reopened and while only the northern access is available, NATO officials point out that in order to remove ISAF military equipment from Afghanistan in conjunction with the military drawdown schedule and the 2014 transition, a container would have to leave Afghanistan every seven minutes 24 hours a day, seven days a week from now on until 2015.

Although the road is logistically vital for ISAF, it is in terrible shape. Much of its asphalt is gone, and in large parts, especially on the northern side of the Salang Pass, the road is a few-hundred-kilometer long obstacle course of enormous puddles after rains, mud traps, and dirt “gorges” from which a car cannot climb out. Although the road was constructed to have one lane in each direction, Afghan drivers tend to approach it as a four-lane highway, madly passing each other on all sides and jostling with big supply trucks for the right of way on the cliffs of the Hindu Kush. If a car breaks down or collides with another, the whole road can be absolutely paralyzed and all movement halted for hours. Not surprisingly, the road and cliffs are littered with the corpses of trucks and cars: in parts every 100 meters or so there are remnants of a vehicle that drove off the mountain or toppled on its side on the edge of the road. Many of the wrecks are fresh. Others go back to the 1980s when the mujahideen loved to attack the road and blow up the Soviet oil supply trucks that then – just like now – crawl their way between Central Asia and Kabul. In 2005, the road, including the Salang tunnel itself, was paved with money from the Turkish government. By the winter of 2010, the road had disintegrated, but the tunnel was repaved. However, since the road carries about four times the weight a highway is supposed to withstand and, in addition to constant traffic, is subject to snow and freezing temperatures in the winter, sun and heat in the summer, and intense rain and snowmelt in the spring, the asphalt from 2010 is gone again. Discussions are under way for repaving at least parts once more, at the cost of over $60 million.
I can only hope – though I expect to be disappointed – that some of the money will be donated to building a few washrooms for women along the road. Although there are rest rooms available to women at the foothills of the mountains (not to be entered by the faint-hearted or those who cannot switch off their sensory inputs), once the road starts climbing through the spectacular sharp peaks and gorges, there are no more washrooms and no privacy of any sort whatever. For the Afghan men, that is not a problem as they simply relieve themselves along the road. But the on-the-side-of-the-road option is socially unacceptable for women who in Afghanistan, just like throughout South Asia, suffer from serious toilet-facilities discrimination. Despite the risk of dehydration and altitude sickness at the Salang Pass which lies at the height of 3878 meters, I had thus learned not to drink before setting off on the road. When I was crossing the Salang in the fall of 2010, I was stuck in the tunnel for about five hours and almost caused a heart attack to the Afghan driver and interpreter when after being on the road for more than eight hours, I finally broke down and had to go in my burqa on the side of the road. Although I violated a social taboo, a security incident by enraged Afghan men that the driver and interpreter had feared was avoided and neither I nor our party were attacked for my misbehavior. Perhaps the lucky outcome was because the tough-looking posture of my companion, a U.S. male journalist dressed in local clothes, scared off any potential social-more vigilantes. But the Afghan drivers along the road were certainly mesmerized by the sight of a woman having to relieve herself there. In turn, I was amazed by the fact that during the entire five hours on the Salang, I was the only woman who broke down, even though many Afghan women were crunched in backs and trunks of the Corollas along with their children and goats. Not one had left the car during the entire time. Being an Afghan woman requires being tough.
But whatever the bumpy Salang road lacks in comfort, it makes up in the stunning imagery. You may lose your kidneys and life on the road, but your soul will be inspired by the snow-capped peaks, the brown mountain sides coated with fresh grass and wild flowers in the spring, the fertile valley along a river that supports wheat and vegetable fields, local men on donkeys and women in burqas.

Stuck in the Mud: The Travails of Governance in Northern Afghanistan
The picturesque high view from the mountain road gives way to sharp details in the valley. The state of the road does not improve as one approaches Pul-e-Khourmi, the provincial capital of Baghlan, and the number of beggars, including female, increases greatly. Pul-e-Khourmi looks more like a neglected Afghan village, rather than a provincial capital. Indeed, mismanagement by local government officials and powerbrokers and poor governance dominated my conversations with Afghans in the province. Just like in Nangharhar and many other parts of Afghanistan, people complained about nepotism in the awarding of government positions and contracts, the incompetence of government officials, private prisons of powerbrokers, pervasive impunity, and land theft. Just like many other Afghans, Baghlanis feel that they have no way to make their voice heard other than by transforming themselves into supplicants to the powerful ones. The mechanisms of accountability are few in fact, because people cannot elect their local officials, all of whom are appointed from Kabul.
But unlike in Nangharhar, for example, the complaints about poor governance and nepotism in Baghlan are overlaid with charges of ethnic discrimination. In the Pashtun areas, such as Nangharhar, there are of course also major communal rifts -- within the Pashtun tribes and subtribes – and the Taliban adroitly exploits them. But here in the north, where the mix is Tajiks, Uzbeks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras, and where the former Northern Alliance dominates, the complaints about communal discrimination seem particularly full of acid. The Pashtuns complain that government positions, especially in the security forces, are dominated by the former Northern Alliance, and that Pashtuns do not have a fair representation. Ninety percent of the police in Baghlan, for example, are indeed Andarabi Tajiks. Even the Pashtuns who are in governing positions in the north are viewed with suspicion and dissatisfaction by many Afghans, especially Pashtuns, and seen as being approved by and subservient to Marshall Fahim, the first Vice-President of Afghanistan, and one of the most prominent northern powerbrokers. In turn, many of the Tajiks feel that the Pashtuns are getting their just comeuppance and that the Tajiks now deserve a large share of the resource pie after all the brutality they suffered during the Taliban era and the sacrifices they made in fighting the Taliban. The divisions between the communities in central Baghlan are visceral: the Pashtuns live west of the river, mainly in less fertile, rainfed areas, and the Tajiks and Uzbeks east of the river and in the more fertile, river-irrigated lands.
However, just like elsewhere in Afghanistan, the realities are complex and many different trends are taking place at the same time, hardly all of them negative. The abusive and incompetent governance that prevails in Afghanistan is the Achilles’ heel of the stabilization effort. But a younger educated generation is rising and often indicates willingness to rise above ethnic factionalism and communal patronage. One of the people I interview in Pul-e-Khourmi was a young female lawyer. Dressed in jeans, a black blazer, and fancy headscarf, she was articulate, full of energy and determination to help her country. In good English, she told me about a recent success she and the attorneys she represents had in Baghlan. For a long time, the local National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Tajik-dominated intelligence agency of Afghanistan, kept people in Baghlan in detention incommunicado, often indefinitely. She led an effort to persuade the local NDS office to allow defense attorneys, such as herself, access to the detainees. Not only did she succeed and hence significantly improve human rights in the province, she managed to do so without alienating the NDS people in the area. Since detentions by NDS are often highly skewed toward the Pashtuns, the main recruiting pool of the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami, her intervention also helped ease some of the ethnic tensions in Baghlan. And she is just one of many impressive and inspiring young Afghans I have met on this trip and during my previous ones. The question – as yet unanswered – is whether the security situation in the country can be stabilized enough that those who rise above narrow communal patronage can achieve positions of influence and whether the current narrow, exclusionary governance system can be opened up enough to allow their voices to have prominent impact on policies.

Tea in the Midst of Poppy and Bandits
Friday morning, I did not have any interviews scheduled because the morning is time for
prayer and the day for family and relaxation. Just for fun, I decided to drive to a neighboring province, Samanghan, to have a picnic at Takht-e-Rustam, a place where the Afghan equivalent of Homer, Firdousi, wrote his tragic epic poem about Afghan kings, Shahmama. When I shared the plan with a risk-management officer for a development organization in Pul-e-Khourmi, one of the few Westerners into whom I ran in Baghlan, he looked at me gently, with an expression that silently said, “Well, the Koran teaches that Muslims should be kind to the mentally ill,” and aloud stated: “You know, this is Afghanistan. People don’t come here for fun.”
But of course, as pithy as the statement is, it is also not entirely true. Historically, many Westerners came to Afghanistan for fun – whether to trek on yaks in the Wakhan or to get high on Afghanistan’s famous hashish. (Many Afghans continue to fondly indulge in the habit to escape the ravages and stress of war and grinding poverty, seeing it as a far less harmful vice than smoking tobacco.) And even today, soldiers and international civilians do come to Afghanistan for the fun of it – they sign up not just because of patriotism or the financial and career opportunities that such a deployment brings, but also because of the adrenaline rush of being in a war zone.
On that sunny Friday morning, the Takht-e-Rustam hill seemed far removed from a war zone. The hill was brightened with wild poppy and other meadow flowers. There was music in the air – from a live band that played traditional Afghan songs to the soundtracks of boomboxes to which Afghan men danced. Many families were having a picnic on top of the hill and surrounding meadows. Some women even ventured out to the picnic without a burqa. Their kids would get a huge kick out of seeing a female khariji (one of the expression for Westerners, denoting something akin to “alien”) in Afghan clothes sitting on the grass, sipping tea, and munching on walnuts, sheer pera (a Mazari sweet with pistachios), and wild sour rhubarb that locals collect in the mountains and sell along the road. The scene was quite idyllic, so full of promise of what Afghanistan could be if security were improved and sustained.
But even during those idyllic moments on top of the hill, I could not quite fully drop my guard and kept carefully watching the young men on motorcycles who in turn were watching me with a great deal of interest. Energetic local youth enticed by a Western woman breaking the social burqa rule or a lookout for the Taliban or bandits? I had been warned that there were bandits along the road and that their activity would pick up on Fridays since the Afghan National Police (ANP) presence at checkpoints often thinned out on Fridays. The police too would decide that Friday was time for prayer and rest rather than dull endless waiting at a checkpoint, only occasionally punctuated by life-threatening danger. But even though we got somewhat lost on the way back from the hill amongst the alleyways of Afghan villages and field tracks away from the main road, we ran into no danger. The mood was light, and we were singing along to a blaring soundtrack of Afghan pop we played in our Corolla.
During an interview later in the day, I learned that in the villages of Western Baghlan, some of which we had been driving through, the Taliban still today prohibits music. Even now, the locals are so afraid of the insurgents that they respect the order, eschewing playing music even during weddings, one of the most important events in their lives on which no expense would normally be spared. Nevertheless, I was told, even with such annoyances, security in Baghlan was much better now than a year ago. “We can’t play music today, but last year, before ISAF came and ANSF were increased here, there were firefights and security incidents here almost every day. Now the insecurity is pushed away from the main roads, there are fewer kidnappings too. Central Baghlan last year looked like northern Baghlan and Kunduz still do today.”
And it was further north, past Baghlan Jadid, we were heading in the afternoon to interview members of the Afghan Local Police. A local powerbroker promised to facilitate access to the ALP for me. But before the ALP interviews, it was time to procure some lunch. The choice was between eating in a restaurant in Pul-e-Khourmi, a safer area but one where I had already been seen, or in Baghlan Jadid, an area far less safe, but one where the local miscreants were not anticipating the presence of a Western woman. When before, accompanied by my driver and interpreter, I ate in a Pul-e-Khourmi restaurant overlooking a mosque and a market, I attracted considerable attention, at times bordering on consternation. Afghan restaurants are often not frequented by women, though some have a closed off family section. After much discussion weighing the risks, my interpreter and I finally settled on going to the more dangerous town but one where I had not yet been seen, preferring to minimize my exposure in any one place.
Unfortunately, the restaurant lunch plan did not pan out. The powerbroker failed to meet us as promised and the time spent waiting for him generated far more exposure than was safe – for lunch or just hanging around. However, with a typical Afghan generosity and hospitality, one of my interlocutors from the previous day came to the rescue, not only by inviting us to lunch in his home, but also by making a series of phone calls that ultimately set me up with members of the Afghan Local Police and the Taliban to interview. (For details, read the next article in the series The Afghan Local Police: “It’s Local, So It Must Be Good.” Or Is It? Hint, hint, here in Baghlan and northern Afghanistan, the ALP and the Taliban are often one and the same.)

The Tough Slog to Kabul and Release from the Mountain: A Better Future?
The drive back to Kabul turned out to be far worse than the drive north. What had taken us about seven hours going north became almost double on the return. It had been raining for several days, and the normal road puddles had enlarged into miniature highway seas. Transformed into instant amphibious vehicles, the Corollas would have to cross them at a fifty-degree tilt, desperately grabbing on the firmer edge of the road with at least one wheel, even as water reached midway up the door on the other side. Local boys and men would sit along the road in the rain and watch as entertainment the cars struggle to plod their way by. Within minutes of our departure from Pul-e-Khourmi, the rear window of our car was so covered with mud, that absolutely nothing could be seen through it. But it did not matter. Ali, normally a truck driver who as a matter of course would cross the Salang with a six-wheeler, did not feel the need to look into the rear-view mirror one single time during the fourteen hours back. Nor did he seem particularly concerned that the nonfunctioning AC did not permit him to clear the front window of fog: A Jedai knight in his own right, he somehow managed to sense the vestiges of the road enough not to drive us off into the abyss. As we climbed higher, clearing the front window became irrelevant anyway since it was snowing and so foggy up in the mountains that the normal Afghan game of chicken on the road became a game of chicken of the blind. The road had narrowed down to essentially one and a half lanes where swerving to get out of the way of oncoming downhill traffic became a matter of split-second decisions with less than a car length.
Anticipating that we may be stuck closer to the peak for hours, we stopped at a roadside shack to stack up on water and biscuits. During that ten-minute break, we witnessed a house being swept away by the rain from a side of the mountain, one of many precariously clinging to its steep slopes. I do not know if any people had been in the house during the brief moment when nature destroyed or how many died or were injured. It was just one micromisery in the sea of pain that Afghanistan can be.
The higher we climbed, the slower and more precarious the going got. The road became lined for kilometer after kilometer with parked trucks, many of which had not moved an inch for four or five days. In the final stretches before the pass, we too would be grounded in a traffic jam for an hour before moving ten meters forward. With the real possibility that we may be stuck on the mountain for the night or even longer despite the fact that we set off before sunrise, thin on supplies and running down our gasoline, bored and frustrated, and in my case also unable to get out of the car for security reasons so as to not draw attention to me, my brain would conjure up images of a Taliban attack. After all, these grounded NATO supply trucks full of gasoline would, if hit, make a splendid fireball. Alternatively, I thought, it would be really easy for kidnappers to pull me out of the car and march me off somewhere. Much better to think of other mountain activities – such as the fact that some of the expats in Kabul come to the Salang in the winter to ski.
But unlike a year and half ago when I had taken the Salang road and also was stuck on the mountain for many hours, the police at the top of the mountain were doing a much better job and handing the stalled traffic this time around. They were diligent in chasing back into line the trucks and cars that tried to cut in front, even hitting them with sticks when words of warning did not suffice. They were efficient in stopping the crawling traffic in one direction to let the other side go through for a while. And during all the long hours on the mountain, I did not see one of them ask for a bribe.
When the mountain finally released us on the other side, the road descended from the shrouded peaks of snow and bare rocks into a beautiful sunny valley of aspens and blooming redbuds and cherries along an azure blue stream. This is the Jabal Saraj area where picturesque mud and stone houses are terraced on the slopes, but look neither as poor nor as precarious as the shacks on the other side. Jabal Saraj would make a brilliant trekking area – OK, one would have to avoid the mine fields indicated on the sides of the road and up the hills.
As we wind our way down toward Kabul, hundreds of kids just released from school mosey up the road. Boys start playing soccer on the side of the brook. Six preteen girls separate from the throngs of others, cross a wooden bridge across the mountain stream, sit down under the blooming cherries, and pull out their school books to read. This particular Afghan community has come very far from the days of the 1990s civil war and the Taliban brutal order. But will the progress last beyond 2014?

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: Ahmad Masood / Reuters

Afghanistan Trip Report III: The U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership: An Important, but Ambiguous Signal

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: The following article is one of a series of reports based on Vanda Felbab-Brown's fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2012. Here she discusses the recently signed U.S.-Afghanistan strategic partnership and argues a quick draw down in U.S. troop levels will deprive Afghanistan of the tools needed to improve stability and governance. Read also her recent reports on the progress of Afghan security forces in "Firefight in Kabul," and on governance problems in Afghanistan in "The Road to Jalalabad."

The signing of a long-term strategic agreement between the United States and Afghanistan is a crucial step in the continuing effort to stabilize the Afghan nation. The agreement is meant to define the role of U.S. military forces after 2014, when U.S. military presence will be greatly reduced, and to motivate allies to continue investing militarily and economically in Afghanistan. Most importantly, the agreement seeks to reassure Afghans and Afghanistan’s neighbors that the United States will not again abandon Afghanistan, as it did in the 1980s, and allow the country to disintegrate into chaos and civil war.

Indeed, the pervasive mood among Afghans is one of uncertainty and fear about the country’s future after 2014. During a just completed trip to Afghanistan, I had the opportunity to meet Afghans from many segments of society — from villagers in the north to urban elites in the southeast. Across the board, they fear that a precipitous U.S. military withdrawal in 2014 will once again plunge Afghanistan into civil war. These national anxieties, which have ominous implications for the post-2014 political and security situation in Afghanistan, are intensifying.

But Afghanistan’s future is not determined yet. While Afghans are tired of the U.S. presence and the lack of security, they are even more tired of war. The vast majority of Afghans do not want the United States to leave in 2014, even if they seek limits on the scope of U.S. military operations and demand greater accountability for U.S. actions, especially unpopular ones such as detentions and night raids. The signed strategic agreement does in fact give ownership and far greater control over such operations to the Afghan government and security forces. It also commits the United States to a continuing military presence in Afghanistan at least through 2024 and continuing U.S. investment in country’s economic development through that date. Signing the agreement before the NATO Summit in Chicago also helps strengthen allies’ resolve to persevere in Afghanistan.

But although the strategic agreement is an important positive signal, it remains to be seen to what extent it will in fact reassure Afghans and help halt some of the negative security dynamics ramping up in the country, including pervasive hedging on all sides and preparations for a civil war. Unfortunately, the phrasing President Barack Obama employed during his speech last night continues to reflect the ambiguities and ambivalence in U.S. policy; and Afghans are bound to pick up on them. Thus, Obama juxtaposed America’s long-term commitment and reassurance with the determination to finally end the war. The White House continues to define the mission in Afghanistan, especially after 2014, in terms of narrow counterterrorism designed to prevent the reemergence of al Qaeda safe havens in the country. There is little in that definition of U.S. objectives that resonates with the Afghan people. What they want is a U.S. commitment to end the pervasive insecurity that the Afghan people experience daily that stems from a many sources—the various Taliban groups, criminal bands, and militias—and has very little to do with al Qaeda per se. The president also spoke of “steady military reductions” in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan after the end of this year. That phrasing seems to suggest that the United States will not maintain the 68,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2013 that the U.S. military would prefer. Yet too fast a reduction in U.S. military presence will critically undermine the military transition in Afghanistan, inhibit the growth and much-needed improvement of the Afghan National Security Forces, and risk undermining whatever military successes have been achieved since the surge of U.S. troops in 2009.

The Obama administration has assiduously avoided the terms nation-building or state-building to describe its objectives in Afghanistan. But despite the common belief that the Afghans want to be left alone by outsiders and by a central state, it is in fact precisely a promise of improved governance that the Afghan people want to hear. They want an Afghan state that provides basic security, not just by bombing al Qaeda camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but by reducing pervasive crime and impunity and by reducing insecurity generated by disgruntled groups and the Taliban. They want a government that delivers public goods and does not predate on its people. For they overwhelmingly believe that they live under a mafia state that acts with utter impunity.

It was thus very important that President Obama emphasized a U.S. commitment to transparency, accountability, and human rights in Afghanistan in his speech on Tuesday night. However, it remains to be seen whether the United States and the international community will prove capable of helping Afghans invigorate such processes in the country. The faster the United States draws down militarily and the more narrowly it restricts its mission to counterterrorism, the more it will deprive itself of the tools to stimulate such improvements in governance. And without these necessary improvements in governance, any security gains in Afghanistan will be extremely fragile and hard to sustain after 2014.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Afghanistan Trip Report II: The Road to Jalalabad

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: The following article is one of a series of reports based on Vanda Felbab-Brown's fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2012. Here she describes a trip from Kabul to Jalalabad. Read also her recent report on security developments in Afghanistan in Firefight in Kabul.

Dodging trucks, donkeys, pedestrians and a police convey transporting someone of importance, my driver Ahmed slowly forces a path through the madness of Afghanistan’s traffic, as he transports me from Kabul to Jalalabad in the eastern province of Nangarhar. In an effort to travel in low-profile, I am in full Afghan garb, wearing a black salwar kameez, but I keep a full burqa on the seat next to me in case I need to quickly minimize my exposure. The only aspects of my attire that would give me away as a farangi (foreigner) are my Merrel shoes. I prefer those to the Chinese plastic low-heel shoes that most Afghan women wear. When I am out on the street, the shoes are a dead giveaway that I am not Afghan, but I tell myself that if I were to be kidnapped during the two-hour drive to Jalalabad, I’d rather be kidnapped in comfortable shoes.

The roadside images alternate between shacks and modern looking buildings, men peddling carpets, tires, and vegetables and women in burqas with throngs of children. Outside of Kabul, I no longer see the Western garb of Kabul girls -- jeans and tight jackets "legitimized" by a headscarf. In the brown dust and against the brown-gray mountains, an orange tarp shades a row of shacks contacting colorful wares for sale. This is a brilliant splash of color in an otherwise monochromatic landscape. As we enter a small town, I take off my sunglasses, which allow me to see in the bright Afghan sunlight but ruin my Afghan disguise. I want to avoid calling further attention to myself in the stalled traffic.

Outside my car window, I see piles of almonds and walnuts displayed in the town’s outdoor market. They remind me of yesterday's breakfast and one of my favorite places in Kabul. Even though the café’s garden of bougainvilleas and roses is not in bloom yet, the restaurant’s Kabuli breakfast of eggs, humus, and walnuts was as wonderful as ever. Warblers were climbing up and down the branches of the café’s trees, looking for insects, while a boy on a nearby rooftop was flying a white kite. I went to the restaurant to meet an Afghan journalist whose family once lived in the militant-rife eastern province of Paktia and at one point in Iran, but have recently moved to North Waziristan. Landless and poor, he and his family have been displaced repeatedly by the many conflicts which plagued Afghanistan in recent decades. In 2002, they were drawn back to Afghanistan by the promise of peace and economic prosperity after the U.S. invasion. However, the promise failed to materialize for them, as it has failed throughout much of Afghanistan. The family ended up ensnarled in a land dispute in Paktia, forcing them to move again, this time to North Waziristan. Sadly, their new location was quickly overrun by the Haqqanis, Chechen and Arab jihadists, and the Tehrik-i-Taliban-Pakistan (TTP).

My journalist friend has crossed the North Waziristan-Khost border twice in recent months to visit his family. It is a dangerous crossing - risky he said, given the fighting between the Taliban and a local malik with his own militia. Although the Pakistani government encourages the formation of such anti-TTP militias, it largely fails to protect the elders who dare create them. Hundreds have been slaughtered by the militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas to which North Waziristan belongs. The journalist said that people in the area where his family lives were fed up with the militias. They have become abusive, extorting money from the local people. Even so, that did not mean the locals liked the Pakistani government any better – they have been neglected by it for decades, failing to provide essential economic support and social services. I asked him if the drone attacks against the militants made the people hate the United States. He answered that the drone attacks did not bother the local people, which surprised me. What angered them more, he claimed, were the militants who killed locals, claiming that they acted as informants, guiding the U.S. drone attacks.

The road to Jalalabad cuts its way through the Koh-e-Paghman mountains and follows the Kabul River. It is yet another waterway that flows to Pakistan from outside of its borders. The other main waterways originate or flow first through India, increasing Pakistan’s fear of encirclement by hostile neighbors and of being deprived of its already insufficient water supplies by thirsty or blood-thirsty neighbors. After the unusually heavy rains of the past month, the rocky and normally gray-brown mountains are covered in delightful yellow, white, and orange wildflowers, smatterings of wild red poppy and pink bushes. I am reminded of wildflower tourism in Colorado; alas, one can only dream of that in Afghanistan. Perhaps one day, tourism will re-emerge in Afghanistan, from the breathtaking mountains and valleys of Wakhan, blue mosques of Herat and Mazar, and the symbolic Torkham Gate to the wildflowers of the eastern mountains. As we travel on, birds fly across the road, and I wish once again that I had my binoculars with me. I gave up carrying them to Afghanistan about six years ago -- just try explaining to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers and the Afghan National Police (ANP) officers what a female farangi in a salwar kameez is doing with binoculars. "You're doing what? Looking for birds? What birds - you mean planes, right? You are with the Taliban?" And a burqa is way too clumsy for bird watching. I've tried it, and believe me, it is pretty much impossible to focus the binoculars on the bird through a burqa’s mesh visor.

While wildflower spotting in Colorado is wonderful, it does not have Afghanistan’s wonderfully painted trucks that haul goods and contraband from Pakistan and provide a major lifeline for the otherwise unemployed locals. Despite Afghans’ resentment of Pakistan’s incessant meddling in its affairs and continuing sponsorship of the Taliban, many eastern Afghan communities, including in the major transport hub of Jalalabad, rely on the trade with Pakistan as their main source of economic activity. Assorted vegetables and fruit are exported from Nangharhar to Pakistan, along with opium and heroin. Consumer goods of all kinds are imported into Afghanistan. The trucks decorated with bucolic images of lakes and trees are both a source of amusement on the road and a major traffic menace -- in a country that already treats road traffic as the ultimate game of chicken and Russian roulette combined.

Nor do Colorado’s roads have the caravans of Kochi people trying to squeeze their way on the one-lane highway. The van in front of us, topped with loads of bags and five Pashtun turbaned men who bravely cling to the roof, seems especially determined to run the Kochis over. These poor and often-oppressed nomads, in their stunningly pink, purple, orange, green clothes and long hair braids, are now moving with their sheep, goats, and the occasional camel from the hot Jalalabad area to Kabul's outskirts or the Shomali plain.

The people of this region often become embroiled in land disputes -- one of the pervasive characteristics of post-2002 Afghanistan and one of the key sources of conflicts. The Taliban exploit these tribal land disputes by positioning themselves on the side of the losing tribe or promising to correct land grabbing by powerbrokers. From Kabul to the arid plains of Balkh to the fertile lands around Jalalabad, land grabbing is intensifying, my Afghan interlocutors tell me. In interview after interview, people complain about being dispossessed from land through fake deeds, by bills of sale listing people long deceased as recent sellers, or simply at the barrel a gun. Government officials wrongly designate land as public and then sell it for high profits to their cronies. “Afghans are not used to investing in bonds or stock,” one Logar malik tells me. “In land is money and prestige. And those in power just steal it.”

Land and house prices have been collapsing all around Afghanistan -- recently shrinking by as much fifty percent, Afghans tell me. The price collapse is attributed largely to the tremendous uncertainly and fear of the 2014 transition and reduction in foreign troop presence, but the drop is also connected to the widespread land grabs and speculation, both of which go on unchecked. The pervasive lack of titles also makes it difficult to get credit for land development. For many farmers in Nangarhar, the only people who will lend them money are the unofficial moneylenders who demand guarantees in opium – this is one of many reasons why people feel compelled to cultivate poppy. USAID is trying to improve land cadastres in Afghanistan, including in Nangarhar, but it is slow going and often stirs a political hornets’ nest.

In Sarobi town, I try to persuade my driver to stop at one of the stalls hawking Kochi clothing so I can buy myself a Kochi shawl. Ahmed, however, is vehemently against the idea of stopping and me getting out of the car, even though there are many ANP officers around. He thinks the area is too dangerous. The Sarobi district, where the French ISAF contingent fought some tough battles against the Taliban and suffered difficult casualties, does not have a reputation for tranquility in the eyes of my driver. He is probably too cautious -- I hardly think that I would be kidnapped or that we would be hit during a ten-minute transaction over the shawl, even with the obligatory bargaining over the price. And I doubt that even the notoriously corrupt and abusive ANP would dare extort us for a bribe in so blatant manner in the midst of so many people. But then again, there is always the option of radioing ahead to the next checkpoint behind a mountain curve that a juicy a source of "tolls" is coming their way. I decide to respect Ahmed’s judgment and forgo buying the scarf. After all, he is taking substantial risks transporting a lone female farangi around Afghanistan.

As we enter Jalalabad, I pull my headscarf tightly around my head. I just never got the hang of fastening it even remotely as well as Afghan women do. Mine inevitably loosens and starts slipping down. I adjust the headscarf since it is once again important to keep as low a profile as possible in the dense Jalalabad traffic. A major business hub, second perhaps only to Kabul, the city has become notorious for kidnapping and extortion. Ransom charges for relatives of prominent businessmen go between $200,000 and $300,000, a source in Jalalabad tells me, looking around furtively to make sure that he is not overheard. Prominent powerbrokers are often behind criminal gangs. Sometimes they are high government officials -- several from Jalalabad are notorious -- but they always enjoy immunity. Even when murder, kidnapping, and extortion charges are levied, they escape prison terms. Crime is wildly on the rise in the city, my source complains. I ask him if the police are trying to crack down on it, but he just laughs. The government is often behind the crime; it is weak and corrupt, he maintains. When I later interview an official at the police headquarters in Jalalabad and ask him what the key priority of the ANP in the province is, he tells me it is to win the trust of the people. I inquire what the police in the city can do to accomplish that. He replies that in Jalalabad, the police already have the trust of the people.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: Brookings Institution

Afghanistan Field Trip Report I: Firefight in Kabul

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: The following article is the first in a series of reports based on Vanda Felbab-Brown's fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2012. Here she recounts her first-hand impressions of this week’s coordinated attacks in Kabul and their implications for the future of Afghan security.

Just to report that I'm alive but a bit bleary-eyed having spent most of the past 20 hours pinned down by the firefight and attacks in Kabul. Right now – about 1:45pm in Kabul - areas of the city are still under lockdown and security operations are still taking place. NATO and Afghan forces caught another attacker downtown still a few hours ago and continue to search for more.

Below are some details about what happened during the past 24 hours. I'm currently participating in a NATO-sponsored trip of opinion leaders from the United States, Europe, and Australia, who are all experts on Afghanistan and have been here many times. In a few days, the NATO-sponsored trip will be over, but I will stay in Afghanistan further and continue to travel and do research on my own.

My colleagues and I left the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters Sunday morning on what started as a breezy, bright day. After meeting with some Afghan journalists, we were planning to visit the Peace Council, an institution established to support the Afghan government negotiations with the Taliban and other insurgents. Unfortunately, our meeting was canceled because of the the insurgent groups - a delegation from Gulbudin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami arrived to meet with the Minister Advisor to the Afghan President on Home Security & Secretary-General to the High Peace Council of Afghanistan, Mohammed Stanekzai. (President Karzai's office later announced that the delegation was also received at the Arg Palace.) Negotiations with Hekmatyar have been on and off for three years at least, and many politicians and powerbrokers associated with Hezb-i-Islami have positions of official and unofficial power in Afghanistan.

Our group then went to the Ministry of Mines to meet with the deputy minister, Mir Ahmad Javid, a very young impressive man determined to direct the ministry toward good governance and sustainable development. Under the leadership of Minister Wahidullah Shahrani and Mir Ahmad Javid, the Ministry is working hard to reform itself from once being a ministry known for a very corrupt deal selling one of Afghanistan's major copper mines - Aynak -- to a Chinese company to one of the most progressive and reformist ministries in Afghanistan. Following the 45-minute meeting at the Ministry of Mines, we were stopped by guards who said that attacks were underway in the area and that we should not leave the building.

We spent the next eight hours at the Ministry - one of the least likely buildings to be targeted by attacks in the Wazir Akbar Khan quarter of Kabul where ISAF headquarters, embassies, and many NGOs are located. Although we were only about 400 meters away from ISAF HQ, we could not move from the Ministry to ISAF HQ because the ISAF compound and in fact much of Wazir Akbar Khan went into immediate lockdown. No internationals and few Afghan civilians were moving on the streets. Technically, the locals were not supposed to be moving on the streets either, but many do not take the lockdown requirements seriously and are no longer fazed by attacks. Surprisingly, while RPG explosions and gunfire were taking place throughout the quarter and the nearby German, British, Russian embassies, the ISAF HQ, the Afghan Parliament, and the Kabul Star Hotel were under attack, some Afghan civilians continued digging ditches (which somewhat eerily resembled graves), selling their wares, and walking in the streets, seemingly inured to the attacks.

After six hours of attacks, most ministry officials left. Ministry guards eventually asked us to move out of the room we had been staying in, which was unfortunate since it had a TV broadcasting Al Jazeera's coverage of the attacks going on around us in Kabul. Most of our blackberry batteries had since run down and our information became more limited.

Another hour later, we were out of water and dinner started to sound like a really good idea. We ate lunch earlier in the day, after persuading our Afghan drivers to stop at a kebab place. We were using regular cars, not military protected vehicles, which allowed us greater access to Afghan civilians and local markets. Lunch was a faint memory now. At that point, we tried to persuade the guards at the Ministry to allow our two Afghan drivers to leave the compound, go to a kebab place, and come back with food. Unfortunately, that request ended our stay at the Ministry of Mines since it brought us to the attention of the Afghan National Army unit commander just outside of the ministry’s gate. For the first time in eight hours, the ANA commander became aware that six VIP farangis (foreigners) were holed up in the ministry. That realized made the commander extremely displeased. First, he strongly berated the forlorn ministry guards, who were as unfazed by the attacks throughout the day as the Afghan civilians, for not informing him of our presence. Then he ordered us out of the compound.

That set off a round of back and forth calls with ISAF HQ. Our ISAF handlers were still under lockdown themselves. They did not want us to move and would not have allowed us to enter their compound anyway, even though it was just 400 meters away. However, the ANA commander insisted that we get out of the ministry building immediately. He wanted us off his hands and out of his responsibility. ISAF then considered allowing us to drive or walk to ISAF, but after the first checkpoint, we would still have to walk ways to our quarters. There could have been unexploded ordnance along the way since some RPG fire hit ISAF HQ. (Thankfully, no one was injured.) Perhaps the greatest security danger came from accidently provoking friendly fire from Afghan forces patrolling the streets as firefights were still going on, major buildings were under attacks, and rumors of more suicide bombers moving on around the city were going on.

Over the course of the past several hours, I had suggested that we move to Serena Hotel, one of the luxury hotels in Kabul, also only 400 meters from the Ministry of Mines and in the opposite direction of ISAF HQ. Since it had been a popular Taliban target in the past (in 2008, the Taliban attacked the hotel and killed six people and injured another six), but NATO preferred that we did made no movements on the streets. However, now that the ANA kicked us out of the Ministry of Mines, ISAF security had no choice but to agree to our move to the Serena. So we jumped into our two cars and made a mad dash for the Serena Hotel. Although we only had to travel a very short distance, we managed to come within a few inches of a collision with another civilian vehicle, which apparently was moving unhindered and at high speed down the street.

When we arrived at the front gates of the Serena Hotel, the Afghan National Police (ANP) officers at the checkpoint became extremely agitated pointing their machine guns on us – understandably given that our two cars arrived during the middle of a siege and could have believed that a suicide bomber was in the car. We rolled down the car windows and started waving and telling them we were Westerners and that they should not shoot. After a few tense moments, all was resolved and we got safely into Serena.

In a somewhat surreal moment given that firefights were going on around, we spent a good amount of time negotiating with the receptionist over where we could get NATO's rate for Serena's pricey rooms. After a rather opulent dinner - given the circumstances of the firefight and Afghan poverty - we checked into our rooms. As luck would have it, I wound up alone in a junior suite in a distant wing of the hotel, far from the rest of my party. While treated to a junior suite, I also ended up on the side of the hotel closest to major firefights, explosions, armored truck movements, and chopper flyways – all just outside my windows. The action kicked off between the witching hour and the wee hours of the morning and lasted until about 6:30am, guaranteeing I would not get one minute of sleep. Moreover, in the first hour of the firefight, the gunfire was so close that it was not clear whether Serena itself was under attack.

Given the particulars of my accommodations, I decided to lie in bed fully dressed, just in case a quick getaway was needed. I watched Al Jazeera's coverage of the war in Sudan and the environmental problems in Australia and listened to the firefights taking place outside my windows. At 8am, I met up with my colleagues for breakfast. All of them were outrageously bright-eyed and well-rested, having slept through the night and having not heard one single gunshot.

Lessons learned? Always carry a spare cell phone battery in your emergency grab bag. Always carry the emergency grab bag with you - it really isn’t that useful if you don’t have the emergency bag with you during an emergency. And finally, always ask the hotel receptionist if your room is on the side of the hotel facing the gunfire.

Serious analysis of the event: The attacks were spectacular in their level of coordination and the sheer number of attacks carried out in Kabul and across Afghanistan. There was also a very obvious and serious intelligence failure. President Karzai has blamed the intelligence failure on ISAF, but the Afghan security agencies need to look deeply into themselves instead of engaging in finger pointing and fighting among the National Directory of Security, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Interior.

Equally spectacular and surprising was the very small number of civilian casualties. The attacks will likely be seen as more effective in having a psychological impact - which of course is the game of the insurgents - than in causing much physical disruption or many casualties. Given that the number of civilian casualties was so low, one has to wonder whether that outcome was on purpose. Possibly the attackers were following instructions from Mullah Omar to keep the Afghan civilian casualties low. Was it, in fact, the Quetta Shura who carried out the attacks imitating the Haqqanis? Or did the Haqqanis themselves conduct the attacks -- the modus operandi indicates the Haqqanis, Kabul is where the Haqqanis tend to strike. However, the Haqqanis are often motivated to cause many more casualties. Certainly it would not have been terribly difficult to achieve a far greater level of casualties than turned out to be the case.

The ANSF, particularly the special commando forces of the Afghan National Police, seemed to perform well (our experience with the ANA commander notwithstanding). Certainly, they performed much better than during the attacks on the Intercontinental Hotel in June 2011, when NATO helicopters played a far more important role in ending the siege than during the current attack. The ANP forces were also able to maintain better personal security and did not charge headlong into fire and certain death, and they were able to maintain better command and control throughout. Did they perform better than during the attack on the US Embassy in September 2011? That is much harder to say, but the full verdict on the quality of the ANSF performance is still out.

The ANSF is clearly making progress, but it still continues to be dependent on ISAF support in many critical areas, such as air support, intelligence, command and control, medi-vac, and other specialty enablers. Moreover, much yet needs to improve in reducing ethnic and patronage factionalization within the ANA and similar patronage and generalized corruption within the ANP in order for the Afghan security forces not to splinter after the 2014 reduction in foreign troop presence and the much more severe secure and legitimacy pressures the institutions will then face.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Engaging Humanitarian Actors in Geneva

Elizabeth Ferris — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:12:00 -0500

Traveling to Geneva isn’t as adventurous as going to Haiti, Uganda, Fiji, Japan or Australia (some of my other trips this past year). But as the humanitarian capital of the world, Geneva offers opportunities to engage with practitioners working with the United Nations, Red Cross/Crescent movement and NGOs and to hear about burning issues where our research can help improve humanitarian response. Unlike most other programs at Brookings, the main target audience for the work of the IDP Project is the international humanitarian community, and there’s no better place to engage those humanitarian actors on policy issues than in Geneva.

I participated in a number of formal and informal meetings over several days in Geneva and was struck by several themes that emerged in those discussions. One issue that came up repeatedly was the question of durable solutions for internally displaced persons. What’s the relationship between solutions for IDPs and efforts to end international refugee crises? What are the characteristics of truly durable solutions? When can you say that displacement has ended? We spent a few years working on the latter issue, eventually coming up with the Framework for Durable Solutions – a framework that was endorsed by the highest humanitarian coordinating body, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee. But it’s one thing to come up with a standard and another to apply it in concrete situations. It isn’t enough for IDPs simply to return to their communities for the conclusion to be drawn that displacement has ended. The Framework states that displacement can be said to have ended if people no longer face discrimination as a result of their displacement. But determining whether or not this has been achieved is tricky. And there are durable solutions other than return – IDPs may decide to settle where they are or to move elsewhere in the country to begin new lives. Finding durable solutions is important to governments who are often anxious to say that the post-conflict situation has returned to normal. It’s important to humanitarian agencies who can phase out their assistance to IDPs once displacement has ended. And, most of all, of course, it’s important to IDPs to be able to get on with their lives. But the fact that the humanitarian actors in Geneva are still raising questions about how to support durable solutions makes me think that we need to beef up our research work on durable solutions so that the Framework’s recommendations can be translated into concrete and effective efforts in the field.

Another hot issue is how to respond to “non-camp” IDPs who make up some two-thirds of the world’s displaced. Displaced people living in camps are more visible than those who live dispersed in communities – for example, living with host families or living on the margins of urban areas. Sometimes these non-camp IDPs, as they are called, don’t want to be identified as displaced, making it difficult for humanitarian actors to assist them. And sometimes it could put them at risk if humanitarian actors singled them out from their neighbors for assistance. We’ve just finished up some research on host communities – in Colombia and Azerbaijan – and it felt good to be able to contribute some concrete evidence to the discussions. But there’s still a lot to be done. In particular, these discussions highlighted the need for further work on the urban nature of displacement, particularly on an issue that no one is looking at but which is bound to become more important in the future: the role of municipal governments.

The meetings in Geneva weren’t all informal, of course. We launched our new 350-page report, From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National Approaches to Internal Displacement, at the Swiss mission in Geneva, which reviews 15 governments’ actions toward people displaced within their territories. While the report was well-received in Washington, the questions from participants in Geneva were much more action-oriented. “What’s the most important initial step for governments to take?” one participant asked. A UN participant asked, “How can we support governments to adopt good policies toward IDPs?” A representative of a donor government asked: ‘What examples did you find of donor governments working together to support good policies toward IDPs?’ It was wonderful to think that this multi-year research project was providing some concrete advice to those in a position to influence policies potentially affecting millions of people.

When we arrived in Geneva with hundreds of pounds of our publications – not only shipping them in advance but carrying as many heavy bags of documents as we dared – we wondered what in the world we would do with any that were left over. We needn’t have worried. All of our publications were grabbed up by Geneva-based staff eager to have them and to share them with colleagues. Next time we’ll bring more copies. The research we do is needed in the world’s humanitarian capital.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

Prospects for Democracy in Egypt

Martin S. Indyk — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:01:00 -0500

There's a conventional wisdom in the United States that Arabs are incapable of sustaining a true Western-style, liberal democracy. It will take them hundreds of years to acquire a "democratic culture," the argument goes. And in the meantime new authoritarian regimes -- either Islamist or military -- will replace the ones that have been overthrown in the past year and give us all a lesson in "Arab democracy." Advocates of this view were the first to announce, with all-knowing smiles, that the Arab Spring had become an Arab Winter. When Islamist parties won free and mostly fair elections in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco in recent months, the proponents of this view had an "I told you so" moment and they were quick to denounce anybody who said otherwise as hopelessly naive.

But this comfortable, superior, view of the dramatic developments that have swept the Arab world in the past year is based on ignorance rather than expertise. A recent visit to Cairo with Shadi Hamid (the director of research at the Brookings Doha Center), in which we were able to meet with a broad cross-section of the new Egyptian political class -- from the head of the Salafi Al-Nour Party on the far right, to disaffected young revolutionaries on the far left, from presidential candidates to Muslim Brotherhood representatives, from newly-elected liberal parliamentarians to female Islamists -- reveals a very different reality.

After a prolonged hibernation, politics has broken out in Cairo, the capital of the Arab Awakenings. For the first time in six decades people are acquiring a taste for freedom and, yes, Western-style democratic politics. The issues they debate so vigorously are critical to the shape of Egypt's democratic future: What will be the residual powers of the Egyptian military? What's the best model for dividing powers between the Presidency and the Parliament? What revisions should be made to the Constitution to ensure democratic rule?

At the same time, the newly-elected parties are busy engaging in the horse-trading necessary to coalition politics, since no one party gained a majority (the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party won around 47 percent of the vote; the Salafi Al-Nour Party won 25 percent, and a variety of liberal parties won the rest.). We were treated to an amazing sight: Salafi religious purists attempting to negotiate an alliance with liberal secularists. How did they justify such a pragmatic deal? The enemy of my enemy is my friend, one of them explained to us. They can both agree on a short-term political agenda: countering the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and getting the army out of politics. And what about the imposition of Sharia law? The leader of the Salafi Al-Nour Party noted that his party is comfortable with the conservative nature of Egyptian society so a campaign to impose sharia law is unnecessary. They can be satisfied (at least for the time being) with the existing language of Article 2 of the Constitution which states that the "principles" of Islamic shariah will guide the state.

This kind of pragmatic politics is deeply disturbing to the "Costa Salafis" -- a young generation of Salafis whose makeshift headquarters is in a Costa cafe. They denounce their elders not so much for being willing to compromise, which they readily accept as part of the new politics, but of failing to articulate through "fatwas" the religious basis for those compromises. It's as if the Salafi leadership, propelled onto the political stage for the first time, has become unplugged and feels able to do whatever is necessary in the political realm to protect its community of social conservatives. They reminded me of the religious parties in Israel!

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood is busy making its own compromises with the military and with other liberal parties that would enable its Freedom and Justice Party to build a governing and empowered coalition (at the moment, they can control the parliament but until its powers are defined in the constitution and the military hands over power, they cannot control the government). Whereas the Salafis are looking to constrain the Muslim Brotherhood, the MB is focused on how to ease fears of its intentions. After operating for eighty years in the political wilderness, the MB has learned just how fragile this moment could turn out to be. That's why its leadership is more willing to compromise with the military than the other parties to its left and right. Consequently, the other parties fear that the MB will sell them out to the military in some sweetheart deal that compromises the revolution and their abilities to use democratic rules of the game to constrain the MB and hold the military accountable.

This tension will likely manifest itself in the massive demonstrations that are expected on January 25 in Tahrir Square to commemorate the first anniversary of the Revolution. The military and the MB have called for a celebration, complete with party balloons and patriotic songs. Youth activists and some liberal parties, particularly exercised by the eighty some demonstrators who were killed by the police and the army in crackdowns in November and December last year, are calling for a demonstration against military rule. Some of the far-left revolutionary youth are calling for a campaign of violence.

The way the January 25 demonstrations play out will be only one of the ways in which "square politics" and "party politics" interact in Egypt's newly dynamic democracy. All the parties feel that they can claim legitimacy from the people's mandates that they have received in the elections. This empowers them to stand up to the military in demanding that it leave the political arena promptly and allow Egyptian democracy to have its day. If the military focuses only on protecting its narrow interests (e.g., retaining its business interests, claiming immunity from prosecution for past actions, demanding only responsibility for protecting the state's borders), then a reasonable compromise can be fashioned. However, if the military insists on specifying reserve powers in the constitution and protecting its budget from civilian oversight, then the people know the way back to Tahrir Square. As one newly-elected parliamentarian put it: "We are legitimate now; the army is not."

And what about the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty? We didn't raise the issue -- they did. It came up in most conversations in the following way: "We have been elected by the people. We're responsible to them. The people want stability, above all. They want the police back in the streets and calm and predictability restored to their daily lives. We don't like the way Israel treats the Palestinians. We don't like the price that Israel pays for Egyptian gas. But we're not going to mess with the peace treaty." That sentiment is so widely shared that one of the heads of the Muslim Brotherhood could declare to the New York Times last week that the peace treaty is a "commitment of the state," and therefore will be respected.

The sense of responsibility that rests on the shoulders of those who would govern 87 million people is palpable. They know the severe economic straits that they will have to confront. They know that neither tourists nor foreign investment will return to Egypt unless there is a clear commitment to stability. And they know the people will not forgive them if they fail to address their basic needs for order, jobs and housing. In short, newly-elected Egyptian politicians -- the Muslim Brotherhood first and foremost -- understand that they have to make a choice between feeding the people and fighting Israel, and for the time being they have made a conscious choice of bread over bombs.

The fact that Palestine is not a priority for the Egyptian people has been manifest since the early days of the revolution. It was underscored for me during a lecture I gave at the American University in Cairo, just off Tahrir Square. A Palestinian student, draped in a Palestinian flag, stood with a makeshift banner in silent protest at the front of the hall. Despite this prominent reminder, during the ensuing ninety-minute Q&A session with students and journalists no-one asked a question about Palestine.

To be sure, there's always the risk that populist politicians will outbid each other in their demagoguery on the Palestinian issue, especially if Israeli-Palestinian violence flares. But Israel is particularly sensitive to this possibility and the Muslim Brotherhood is apparently signaling its Hamas branch to keep things quiet too. (With 350 trucks a day passing from Israel into Gaza, and smuggling of weapons through the tunnels continuing apace, Hamas has its own reasons for maintaining the current de facto ceasefire with Israel.)

What was perhaps most striking to me, however, was the attitude of the new political class to the United States. I had expected to encounter hostility -- after all the United States had been Mubarak's staunch ally through the three decades of his Pharaohnic rule. I had assumed that the Islamist politicians in particular would be antagonistic towards American influence in post-revolutionary Egypt, just as the Iranian clerics have manifested intense antagonism towards the United States since their revolution. Yet Egypt's Islamists all seemed keen to engage with the United States government. The Muslim Brotherhood was trying to understand President Obama's intentions in demanding that the military hand over power to civilian (i.e. Muslim Brotherhood) rule, "expeditiously." They weren't sure how to deal with the fact that Bill Burns, the Deputy Secretary of State, had just met with their leadership. But one thing they were very certain about -- they need U.S. economic assistance and U.S. help in mobilizing international assistance. They were therefore quite anxious to know how Congress would treat them.

Because of this new U.S. Government engagement with their arch-rivals, the Salafis too are seeking American recognition. Their leaders are keen to come to Washington to explain their intentions. They even appear willing to engage with Israel to establish their bona fides -- one of their leaders recently gave an interview to Israeli Army Radio.

Ironically, the Egyptian military government (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) is manifesting much greater hostility toward the United States, despite the fact that its troops are armed, trained and paid for by the American taxpayer. Apparently, stung by Obama's demand that the generals relinquish power forthwith, the SCAF government is harassing American democracy-promotion NGOs and feeding an anti-American campaign in the state-controlled press.

To be sure, among Islamists there is still a good deal of suspicion about American intentions. If Egypt had the oil resources of Iran or Saudi Arabia their attitude would probably be quite different. But they are conscious that nobody else is rushing to bail them out. They ask anxiously what has happened to the billions of dollars pledged by their oil-rich Gulf Arab brothers. They play with the idea of turning to Iran before admitting that it probably has little money to spare and asking why the United States isn't intervening militarily in Syria to protect Sunnis there against the brutality of the Iranian-backed Assad regime.

In short, what is happening in Egypt confounds expectations and renders dismissive assumptions about its democratic revolution at best premature, at worst both wrong and misleading as a guide to appropriate American (and Israeli) policy. Free elections and dire circumstances have quickly generated a surprising pragmatism among Egypt's newly empowered political actors. They understand that they need the goodwill of the United States. At a time of supposed decline in American influence in the Middle East, we suddenly find ourselves with new possibilities in democratic Egypt -- the largest, military most powerful, culturally most influential, geostrategically most important country in the Arab world.

Authors

Martin S. Indyk

Cuba Is Changing, Slowly but Surely

Ted Piccone — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:23:00 -0500

As I sat on the curb in front of central Havana’s Capitolio, the impressive domed hall that resembles the U.S. Capitol building, and watched the 1950s-era Plymouths and Soviet-made Ladas go belching by, I was sure I had entered a surreal time warp a mere one-hour flight from Miami. And yet, after a week of meetings with Cuban and foreign diplomats, journalists, academics and artists, I became convinced that Cuba, indeed, is changing in many ways.

As a relative newcomer to the intricacies of the Cuba question, I was immediately struck by Cuba’s unique blend of decaying splendor, cultural prosperity, restricted freedoms and relative poverty. As everyone knows, Cuba’s highly centralized system, with its impressive achievements in health, education and the arts, is still recovering from the loss of massive Soviet subsidies, hurricanes and a steady outflow of its well-educated workforce. Creditors in China and elsewhere are growing tired of underwriting Cuba’s struggling economy as it tries to move away from its ossified past and into the 21st century. So something had to be done about liberalizing the economy.

A closer look, however, reveals something more profound—a wholesale mental shift, outlined clearly by President Raul Castro over the last two years, that the time has come to move the Cuban people from wholesale dependence on the state to a new era of individual responsibility and citizenship.

This is going to take time. The economic reforms or “updating” of Cuba’s Soviet-style economic system, approved last spring at the Communist Party’s first National Congress in 14 years, are just beginning to be enacted. They include an expansion of licenses for private enterprise (over 350,000 have been granted), opening more idle land to farmers and cooperatives, allowing businesses to hire employees, empowering people to buy and sell their houses and cars, and opening new lines of credit with no legal ceilings on how much Cubans can borrow. Non-state actors are allowed now to sell unlimited services and commodities directly to state-owned enterprises and joint ventures, thereby opening new channels of commercial activity between farmers and tourist hotels, for example. Think Viet Nam or China. The reforms include tough measures too, like shrinking the buying power of the longstanding ration card that every Cuban gets to purchase subsidized basic goods, cutting unemployment benefits, and eventually dismissing anywhere from 500,000 to one million employees from the state sector as bureaucratic middlemen become obsolete and tax revenues rise.

These changes, while painful, are reason enough to be optimistic about Cuba’s economic future. But something much more fundamental is at work—a turn away from government control of pricing and subsidizing products throughout the economy to a more decentralized framework of subsidizing persons based on need. At heart, the Castro government is prepared to move Cuba from a society based on equity of results to equality of opportunity, infused with a culture of humanism. Not that Cuba’s system ever offered true equality, as one taxi driver reminded me as we drove down Havana’s famous seaside Malecon. The door, however, is now opening wider to the inevitable rise in inequality that comes from capitalism, even restrained forms of it. Whether one is able to prosper as a self-employed restauranteur, or is the beneficiary of generous relatives sending remittances and goods home from Miami, new gradations in Cuba’s economic and social strata are on the way. As long as someone arrives at their wealth legally and pays their taxes, assured one senior party official, they are free to become rich.

The big question for Cuba’s leaders today is whether they can bring their people with them down this new, uncertain path after five decades of Cuban-style communism. If reforms happen too quickly, it could cause excessive dislocation and unhappiness and potentially destabilize the regime. Already bureaucrats who have something to lose under the new system are resisting change, much to Raul Castro’s chagrin. If the pace of change is too slow, on the other hand, budding entrepreneurs, the middle class and disaffected youth, who have no overt commitment to the values of the 1959 revolution, may give up sooner and head to greener pastures in the United States, Spain or Canada. As it is, Cubans are leaving the island in droves to join their families in Florida and beyond, beneficiaries of U.S. policies that grant Cubans preferred immigration benefits once their feet reach American soil, and of Spanish laws that grant some Cubans Spanish citizenship.

The trick for party officials, then, is to demonstrate enough tangible improvements that Cubans will maintain faith in their ability to lead the country even after the Castros leave the scene. This explains the Communist Party’s determined effort to intensify popular consultations throughout the island and to keep up the momentum and rhetoric of slow but steady change. “In everything we do,” said one official, “we will try to be inclusive.”

There is, indeed, a daunting list of challenges ahead. Cuban officials are working overtime to update legal codes and systems to conform to the new economic policies. A revised tax code is being drafted as well as designs for a new labor system that will handle the growing category of self-employed workers not currently covered by Cuba’s labor code. A massive education campaign is needed not only to inform and consult the general public but to explain to local officials and civil servants how this is all going to work. New rules for foreign investment remain unfinished business. And major investment is needed to update Cuba’s sagging infrastructure, especially in the telecommunications sector where cell phones and internet penetration remain the lowest in the hemisphere.

One area where Cuba seems to be moving in a positive direction is tourism. From 1990 to 2010, the estimated number of tourists has risen from 360,000 to 2.66 million. In addition, thanks to President Obama’s decision to allow Cuban-American families to visit the island and send remittances as much as they want, Cubans have received over 400,000 visits and roughly $2 billion from relatives in the United States. These are proving to be important sources of currency and commerce that are helping families cope with reduced subsidies and breathe life in the burgeoning private sector. A walk through crowded Old Havana, where construction crews are busy restoring one of the Americas’ great colonial treasures, offers compelling evidence that Cuba can be a strong magnet for Europeans, Canadians, Chinese and—some day—hundreds of thousands of American visitors. And Pope Benedict’s visit in late March will shine an international spotlight on a Cuba slowly opening its doors to the world, yes, but more importantly, to an increasingly vocal and confident Catholic Church intent on securing a more prominent and relevant place in Cuban society.

For now, Cuba’s slow-motion evolution toward a hybrid phase of economic liberalization and political control remains a work in progress. The next Communist Party conference to be held later this month is likely to bring only modest changes in the regime’s aging leadership, for example, but promises of adopting term limits for senior government officials appear all but certain to be fulfilled. Raul Castro, a military man who believes in discipline, organization and institutions, has instituted regular cabinet meetings and clear lines of communication. In this sense, he is no Fidel. These, too, are signs of change that will, with time, make long overdue reconciliation with the United States inevitable.

Authors

Ted Piccone