Grim footage from Iraq is broadcast into Australian homes on the TV news each night. The scenes of car bombings and kidnaps appear so regularly that it’s easy to switch off. Yet there’s another trouble spot involving Australian troops and seemingly intractable cultural differences that is often sidelined by the Iraq war. Afghanistan has become ‘the other conflict’, relegated to the margins of the national consciousness. In this spotlight on a nation in turmoil, ANU experts analyse different aspects of Afghanistan’s predicament.

Afghanistan’s troubles
- Amin Saikal

After more than five years of Afghanistan being placed on the path of post-Taliban reconstruction, stability and security, the country still faces a dire situation. Many Afghans have become disillusioned with their government and its international backers, and the Taliban and their supporters have rebuilt their fighting capacity with more vengeance than ever before. The US and its allies have found it imperative to deploy more troops, invest more money and put pressure on Pakistan to prevent the Taliban’s cross-border raids, in order to prevent Afghanistan sliding down the same path as Iraq. What are the prospects for Afghanistan?

The fact that the Afghan situation has worsened over the last two years is largely because of a number of factors, but three of them are critical. The first is that the government of Hamid Karzai has not been able to get its act together to build a unified ruling elite and a clean, efficient and effective system of governance. The elite has become increasingly divided and locked in serious infighting, with a focus on promoting individual rather than national interests, and personalising rather than institutionalising politics. Nepotism, bribery, backstabbing and character assassination have become the order of the day. Sadly enough, today many of those in power are guided more by their ethnic, entrepreneurial instincts and the need to enrich themselves and preserve their positions than by what is required to advance the long-term stability and security of Afghanistan. It is indeed the politics of ‘dog’s breakfast’ that has come to prevail in the country.

The second is that the US and its allies failed from the beginning to grasp the complexities of Afghanistan as a country whose basic fabrics had been pulverised after 24 years of Soviet invasion, Pakistan-backed Taliban rule and domestic bloodshed. While ignoring the views of many specialists on Afghanistan, Washington decided to rebuild, stabilise and secure Afghanistan with as little military deployment and financial assistance as possible. It contended with deployment of 10,000 American troops – charged mainly with the task of hunting Osama Bin Laden and his operatives – and a 5,000 strong International Assistance Security Force (ISAF) from its mainly European allies, operating only in Kabul in support of the Karzai government. Then Secretary of State Collin Powell also declared that Afghanistan did not need a Marshall Plan because a small amount of money could go a long way in a country like Afghanistan. By 2004, the Bush Administration realised the need for expanding American troops, which now number around 20,000, and the ISAF, which is now about 15,000 under NATO’s command, and supported the need for more reconstruction aid. However, its original decision left the field wide open for the Taliban and their Al Qaeda and Pakistani allies, as well as poppy growers, drug traffickers and local power holders (popularly known as warlords), to rebuild their positions at the cost of building national unity, security and reconstruction. The adventure into Iraq simply relegated Afghanistan into a secondary place on the list of American strategic priorities.

The third is that Washington underestimated the degree of the destructive role that Pakistan had played in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule and the potential that it had to renew such a role in the post-Taliban period. It adopted Islamabad as partner in the war on terror and remained satisfied that Pakistan would not misbehave any more. It accepted President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration to a policy of non-interference in Afghanistan at face value, but ignored the fact that Musharraf could not easily cut off Pakistan’s past deep involvement in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s military intelligence agency (Inter Services Intelligence or ISI), which functions as a government within a government, and the radical Islamic political forces that dominate the politics of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier and Baluchestan provinces on the border with Afghanistan continued to remain loyal to the Taliban as a force which Pakistan could leverage when all foreign troops pulled out of Afghanistan.

The US and its allies did not make the efforts necessary to secure the long and treacherous Afghan-Pakistan border. They failed to deploy sufficient forces, equipped with all the necessary advanced ground and air combat and surveillance means, along the border and to prompt Pakistan to renegotiate the border with clear demarcation – an issue which has been a major point of dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan ever since the creation of the latter in 1947.
Unless substantial progress is made in these areas, no matter how much more military and non-military the US and its allies now pour into Afghanistan, the country remains at the risk of unravelling. The US and its allies will do well by the Afghan people, if they could urgently focus on administrative reforms, reconstruction and border security.

*Amin Saikal is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at ANU

Australia’s military commitment
- Hugh White

Afghanistan is a dangerous place. Ask any Canadian: in the last few years, 55 of their soldiers have been killed there. Now almost 1,000 members of the Australian Defence Force are serving in Afghanistan. They are there, under a broad multinational coalition led by NATO, to “help Afghanistan’s democratically elected government create a secure and stable environment in that country”. That sounds reasonable. It is easy to agree that the people of Afghanistan deserve our help, and that a stable and democratic Afghanistan would be in Australia’s interests. But how exactly are our troops meant to achieve this mission? We can only justify sending Australian troops in harm’s way in such a dangerous place if there is a real chance their presence will make a difference. Alas, that is far from being clear.

Australia’s military effort in Afghanistan is now focused on a Reconstruction Task Force in Oruzgan Province in Afghanistan’s southeast – an area facing a strong Taliban resurgence. The role of our forces there is to defeat the Taliban by winning hearts and minds through civil engineering. In the capital, Tarin Kowt, they have rewired and replumbed the hospital and renovated the high school. They are building a causeway over the river and teaching Afghans the art of woodwork. They work under tough and dangerous conditions. So far the Australian Defence Force (ADF) has suffered only one fatality in Afghanistan, back in 2003. But we have been very lucky indeed to escape more casualties so far, and the risks are clearly growing. In May, the Government sent an additional 300 troops to increase protection for the Reconstruction Task Force, and we can assume that their roles will include fairly aggressive patrolling against Taliban forces around Tarin Kowt. The chances of serious casualties must be increasing quite sharply.

It is worth asking how Australian would feel if our contingent started taking casualties on the scale that the Canadians have suffered. Not surprisingly, Canadians back home are starting to ask what exactly is being achieved at this terrible cost and whether it is worth paying. Any decision to put troops in harm’s way needs to be based on two careful judgements – first that the objective is worthwhile in itself, and second that it is realistically achievable with the resources available. For the time being, Australians seem to accept that trying to help Afghanistan is a worthwhile objective – at least compared with Iraq. But that is easy to say when the cost is measured only in dollars. It would be much harder if and when, as for the Canadians, it starts to be measured in lives. Then we would start asking much more seriously whether the objective is worth the cost we are paying, and whether even when we pay that cost there is any realistic hope of achieving our goals.

And here we must be unsentimental. Sadly, the ADF’s mission in Tarin Kowt will most probably fail. The likelihood is that when our forces eventually withdraw, Afghanistan will remain much as it is today. Little if anything will have been achieved. This is not the fault of the ADF. There is no reason to doubt that the men and women deployed on Operation Slipper are doing the specific jobs they have been given very well. The question is whether their work can help in any material way to achieve the Government’s wider strategic objective. How exactly is any of the well-meant work now being done in and around Tarin Kowt meant to defeat the Taliban, strengthen the Kabul Government or sway political, religious and social alignments in this part Afghanistan? Are the people of Oruzgan, triangulated by such complex forces of family, faith and tribe, to be transformed by a replumbed hospital or a four-week course in carpentry delivered by an alien force of heavily armed infidels? What possible reason is there to believe that any of this will make a difference? And if it will not, why risk lives doing it?

Of course we are in good company. Lots of other like-minded countries are there helping in Afghanistan, because like us they believe the Afghans need and deserve our help. But none are prepared to make the kind of really major effort needed to give the operation a chance of long-term success. It may be that nothing the international community can do will solve Afghanistan’s problems, but only an intervention many times the scale and intensity of the current effort would have a serious chance of success. So the well-meaning futility of our efforts in Tarin Kowt is arguably replicated across Afghanistan.
Some will say that we are not there to help the Afghans, but to prevent terrorism. But if that is true we are equally heading for failure because we are fighting in the wrong country. The epicentre of extremist terrorism today is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. We might well feel sympathetic to the Afghans in their plight, but before we risk the lives of young Australian by sending them there to build roads and hospitals we need to ask whether this will make any real difference. If it will not, we’d better think again.

* Professor Hugh White is the Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU

Capacity building: Notes from the field
- William Maley

In many of the endeavours to reconstitute functioning institutions in disrupted states, there is much talk about ‘capacity building’. This makes a great deal of sense, for donor countries often embark on assistance programs with at least some kind of exit strategy in mind, and no state can long permit core administrative functions to be externally executed. In addition, international staff can be extremely expensive to deploy and enhanced local capacity can provide a cost-effective and sustainable solution to many pressing challenges. Yet for all that, it is often the case that capacity building is sorely neglected as an element of peace-building. ‘Quick impact projects’ (QUIPS) can seem an easy route to building up support for a new government, without the need for long-term entanglement with complex communities. Very frequently the delivery of assistance is in the hands of international staff who lack local language skills and whose short-term contracts militate against deep engagement with the locals.

Afghanistan since 2001 has been caught up in a major exercise in state-building, but one driven by conflicting motives and priorities. For some donors, in particular the US and its allies, ‘state-building’ is a component of a struggle against terrorist groups with global reach, substantially directed at preventing the re-emergence of Afghanistan as a haven for radical extremism. A central focus of this kind of state-building has been the establishment of a new Afghan National Army. The discharge of welfare functions has been much less significant a focus and much assistance for ‘state-like’ activities has by-passed the Afghan government altogether. Indeed, over 75 per cent of such aid has gone directly to the UN system, NGOs or private commercial contracts, creating the impression in many parts of Afghanistan that the state is almost totally ineffectual.

There are, however, some areas of state activity that cannot easily be privately delivered and diplomacy is one of them. Representing a country abroad, and communicating the wishes of its government, is a core state responsibility, recognised in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. It is also an area where ANU has been able to play a role in contributing to local capacity building. This began in December 2005, when a four-man delegation consisting of Professor Amin Saikal and Ahmad Shayeq Qassem of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (The Middle East and Central Asia) and myself and Tony Godfrey-Smith of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy ran a training program in Kabul for officials of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The program covered recent developments in diplomatic practice and was delivered in both English and Persian.

In late 2006, the UN Development Program approached the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy to undertake the task of reviewing the entire curriculum of basic training for the Foreign Ministry. This led to my travelling to Kabul in March and April 2007, first to review the current content of courses, and then to expand the offerings beyond the pilot program which had been used up to that point. This was an interesting challenge, but a rewarding one. Given the difficulties of budgeting in Afghanistan, it was necessary to design courses without knowing for certain who might be available to offer them. As an exercise for separating the core from the periphery in the study of diplomacy it nevertheless proved valuable. The end result was twelve new courses, built around materials available to students in the library of the Ministry’s Institute of Diplomacy and designed to equip young trainees to go on their first postings with their eyes open.

Nonetheless, an exercise of this kind also highlights some of the difficulties of capacity building. First, the design of a new program is different from its implementation.
Fortunately, a wider change-management process is under way at the Ministry, and I was able to share the output of our work not only with the staff of the Institute of Diplomacy and the UN Development Program, but also with the external consultants tasked with carrying that process through to its conclusion. Second, training is only one part of a process of building an effective staff. It sits uneasily between recruitment, on the one hand, and career placement on the other. Unless merit is the criterion used for recruitment and posting of staff, training is likely to contribute only modestly to the development of local capacity. The lesson here is simple, but sobering and important. Capacity-building is often overlooked, but it is not just a task for donors. It depends also on the willingness of indigenous ‘state-builders’ to play their parts. If they do not, aid will end up being squandered.

* Professor William Maley is Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at ANU, and author of The Afghanistan Wars (2002) and Rescuing Afghanistan (2006).

The rugs of war
- Nigel Lendon and Tim Bonyhady

“Life without art is death” is an inscription found in one of the ‘war rugs’ of Afghanistan.

Such expressions motivate the art of the semi-nomadic people of western and northern Afghanistan who have been telling their stories of conflict and survival through the medium of the knotted carpet for almost three decades. Two ANU academics are working to uncover the complex character and origins of this tradition with a project investigating the history, iconography, production and distribution of this unique type of carpet.

Tim Bonyhady, the Director of the Centre for Environmental Law, and Nigel Lendon, Associate Head of the School of Art encountered war rugs when the textiles began to appear in dealers’ shops in the late 1980s. Almost immediately after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, traditional rug makers began to incorporate war imagery including planes, helicopters, maps and weapons into their traditional designs.

The earliest war rugs depicting scenes of the Soviet invasion were first made in Afghanistan and later in refugee camps in both Iran and Pakistan. Bonyhady has suggested that the market for the rugs during the 1980s and 1990s was greater in Peshawar in Pakistan than in any Afghan city because of the larger foreign presence: “This was the base of Afghan resistance to the Soviets, a key point on the arms pipeline to the mujahideen and the location of many international aid agencies.”

Throughout the past 30 years, the rug designs have been adapted to reflect the impact of occupation and subsequently the civil wars and internal conflicts which have dominated the recent history of Afghanistan. Current visitors to the region are now more likely to buy war rugs showing the Twin Towers, American flags and recent battle scenes which have been part of the ‘War on Terror’. The main source of customers for the rug producers is now in Kabul, but the market largely consists of foreigners visiting the region because of the military presence – the American soldiers, members of the International Security and Assistance Force, journalists and aid workers.

Bonyhady and Lendon curated two Australian exhibitions of war rugs in Canberra and Adelaide in 2003 and 2004, which led them to initiate the Rugs of War project, which secured an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant in 2006. The project aims to produce new texts and online publications to tell the story of this innovative variation to the traditional art forms of the region.

The project’s methodology has developed out of a blog which hosts images and comment from private collectors in North America and Europe. According to Lendon, this has been indispensable tool in locating works in collections and forming a global network to address the analysis of the imagery and social impact of the rugs. “The blog has rapidly started to fill the gaps in our knowledge and over time we’ve built up a comprehensive online database of images and references.”

The blog includes the catalogue of the original exhibition in 2003, which displays images of war rugs from the 1980s through to 2002 and includes modern updates of ancient narratives as well as responses to the events of the attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001.

The Rugs of War research to date has focused on accessing and documenting the works themselves and understanding their patterns of dissemination as they find their way around the globe. In the second phase of the project Lendon intends to complement this preparatory work with visits to the region. “We still don’t know, in any ethnographic sense, who designs, produces or sells the rugs,” he says.

The researchers are planning to visit Afghanistan and eastern Iran later in 2007 and Pakistan in 2008, as well as do further work in European and American archives and collections. “The project is motivated by the sense that these are anonymous expressions of war and conflict yet perhaps the greatest tradition of war art of the 20th century,” Lendon says. “To complete the picture it will be necessary to seek to make contact with the people who produce the rugs and to confirm the circumstances of their production.”

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ANU Reporter 
Winter 2007