Last month, Army Colonel Randy George completed a year-long tour leading the nearly 5800 soldiers of Task Force Mountain Warrior in some of Afghanistan’s most violent and vexing areas: Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces, a mountainous part of the country home to about 3.7 million people, 33 tribes and sub-tribes, and over 300 kilometers’ worth of porous border with tribal Pakistan. After a yearlong effort to learn how the locals perceived the obstacles to their future, George prepared some briefing slides attempting to distill popular local sentiments. (He did not make any broader judgment about any other areas of Afghanistan.) Danger Room was recently able to review some of those slides and take notes on their contents, although we weren’t permitted to take them or reproduce them.
George titled of those slides “How Locals Ranked The Enemies To Progress.” Through the locals’ eyes, the slide reported four big challenges. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban rank dead last. A “Corrupt and Ineffective Government” is number one.
Now recall that it’s General David Petraeus’ first week of work in command of the Afghanistan war. He’s got no shortage of challenges: convincing the Afghan people that the NATO coalition acts in its best interest; rolling back insurgent gains; working with an Afghan government of dubious competence and integrity; and doing it all before 30,000 surge troops (allegedly) start coming home in July 2011. Perhaps nowhere in Afghanistan do all these challenges combine and metastasize as ominously as in the area George recently departed.
There’s disaffection for the central government in the area known as “N2KL” (for Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces). There’s outrage over government officials who charge bribes for the provision of government services. And there’s resentment over “illegitimate” or “non-existent” rule of law. The government is seen as “Un-Islamic and People Don’t Want to Connect,” George’s slide notes.
The second and third problems roiling are the dual challenges of “Criminal Networks and Graft” and the government’s “Lack of Inclusion of Respected Leaders at the Local Level.” The area has natural resources — like timber with high-grade cedar — that could serve as economic drivers. But as the Wall Street Journal has documented, in 2006 the Karzai government instituted a ban on logging as a questionable save-the-forests maneuver. Unsurprisingly, logging didn’t stop. It just went underground and became illicit, benefiting the insurgency and reinforcing what George’s slide called a “take what you can get when you can get it” mentality that the locals resent. (Petraeus alluded to the problematic nature of the government’s attitude to logging in a congressional hearing in mid-June, before President Obama tapped him to run the Afghanistan war.)
If the government included or listened to local potentates respected by the community, maybe it wouldn’t press forward with alienating measures like the logging ban. But instead, the slide reads, it “injects unfair and unacceptable personalities into local politics,” and its district sub-governors and the central government “do not reach out to connect” to the population.
By: Brant
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