MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL

Reality check on Afghanistan IX

On August 26, two suicide bombers killed 72 Afghans and 13 members of the US military at Kabul airport amid evacuation efforts. The Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghanistan affiliate of ISIL (ISIS), claimed responsibility for the brutal attack and thus put itself in the international media spotlight.

Although foreign media started paying attention to this group only now, ISKP has been terrorising Afghans since 2015 and it will continue to do so after the August 31 withdrawal of US troops.

There are two aspects of this attack that need to be considered. First, ISKP attacked the airport primarily to discredit its rival, the Taliban, in yet another escalation of the larger conflict between Sunni extremist armed groups. Second, ISKP made it clear that the Taliban will find it hard to keep its promises to ensure the safety and security of civilians, especially women and minorities under its rule.

The emergence of ISIL, the umbrella organisation that includes ISKP, has often been attributed to sectarian dynamics and Sunni-Shia conflicts from the Arab world to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The problem with blaming violent conflict in this region on tensions between the two sects is that it ignores how the armed group has had a long, bloody legacy of stoking intra-Sunni conflict.

ISIL was formed by defectors from al-Qaeda in 2014 in Syria who then attacked their parent organisation and its Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra. ISKP was formed primarily by defectors from the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2015, who then went on to attack the Afghan branch. In both cases, the defectors considered their former organisations not extreme enough or not committed enough to attack fellow Sunnis, who they considered deviants, or Shia Muslims.

Essentially the conflict between ISIL and its affiliates on one hand, and al-Qaeda and the Taliban on the other, represents an oft-ignored intra-Sunni conflict among extremist groups. Both Syria and Afghanistan are zones of insecurity that have allowed the formation of multiple extremist non-state actors, essentially religious warlords. Since these non-state actors are so close ideologically, their legitimacy is threatened as long as the other rival exists, and thus must be eliminated immediately. Defeating their violent competitors delivers the benefits of monopolising the jihadist narrative as well as gaining new recruits.

This is the conflict ISKP is gearing up for with the Taliban, as the US withdraws. While ISKP numbers have dwindled to 2,000, it can still challenge the legitimacy of the estimated 60,000-strong Taliban. With its forces spread thin across Afghanistan, the Taliban would be particularly vulnerable to violent terror tactics by its splinter.

The roots of the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan can be traced to the austere Deobandi school, a South Asian Islamist revivalist movement. In the 1980s, the Sipah-e-Sahaba organisation formed in Pakistan, breaking away from the main Deobandi movement, to focus primarily on an anti-Shia platform. Another group known as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi split from this group in the 1990s, claiming its parent group had deviated from the original anti-Shia platform. Defectors from this group would later join IKSP, attracted by its more brutal anti-Shia campaign.

The brunt of the violence by these groups has been borne by the Hazara, a Shia ethnic minority group, living in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The community has been historically victimised by different Afghan rulers, most famously by Abdurrahman Khan who sought to completely eradicate it in the 1890s.

A century later this community endured violence by the Taliban as it sought to establish its rule over Afghanistan. In 1998, the armed group massacred thousands of Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif in retribution for the killing of its fighters following a failed attempt to capture the city the year before.

After ISKP emerged, the Hazara community became one of its main targets. Some of its most brazen attacks include a May 2020 massacre at a maternity hospital in a majority Shia Muslim district of Kabul, killing more than 20 people, including newborn babies and mothers. A year later, in May 2021, it launched an attack at a school in the same district, killing at least 90 people, most of them schoolgirls.

Calling this a “sectarian conflict” would be inaccurate because that would suggest equality between the two sides. It would also obfuscate the racism that along with anti-Shia sentiment drives the attacks on the community, which has long been wrongly considered “non-indigenous” to Afghanistan by other ethnic groups.

This is also reflected in the fact that the US-backed Afghan government never prioritised the safety of the Hazara and in fact, some of its members were known to discriminate against the community.

The Taliban leaders have repeatedly said the rights of minorities and women will be protected. However, whether the leaders can keep their own fighters under control and discipline them when they break their orders remains to be seen.

What is certain is that the Taliban will find it extremely difficult to rein in ISKP and eliminate its appeal among more extreme elements of the Afghan society and its own ranks.

As for the US, the bloody attack on August 26 gave ammunition for Biden administration’s retaliation, which might ultimately complicate the plans for a full military withdrawal and potentially even harm relations with the Taliban itself.

NB. The Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), has claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks in Kabul this week.

ISKP said its suicide bombers singled out “translators and collaborators with the American army” in the attacks on Thursday evening.

Also among the dead were 28 Taliban members, according to the group that is now ruling Afghanistan.

ISKP is known as an offshoot of the ISIL (ISIS) armed group that claimed to be seeking to establish an Islamic “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria.

Khorasan refers to a historical region under an ancient caliphate that once included parts of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Turkmenistan.

The armed group was formed in 2014 by breakaway fighters of the Pakistan Taliban and fighters from Afghanistan who pledged allegiance to the late ISIL leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

ISKP has strong roots in northeastern Afghanistan but set up sleeper cells in Kabul and other provinces.

They are adversaries of the Taliban, with different teachings of strict Sunni beliefs.

In a 2014 interview, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, said the ISKP is “not actually a separate group”, but rather a contingent of al-Qaeda members coming from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

Since its inception, some of the most hardline ISKP fighters have travelled from Afghanistan to Iraq and Syria to fight for ISIL, as well as plot attacks on Western targets.

While it is not clear how many fighters have joined the group, ISKP has been responsible for some of the worst attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years, killing people at mosques, public squares and even hospitals.

A bloody attack on a maternity ward in Kabul in May 2020 that killed 24 people, including women and infants, was also blamed on the group.

ISKP has been critical of any cooperation between the Taliban and the United States, including the deals struck in order to withdraw foreign troops.

The ISKP might be be using the attacks as propaganda. The end-game of ISKP, or ISIL/ISIS in general wherever it operates, doesn’t have to be an immediate strategic goal. They carry out these operations with the intention of causing as much carnage as possible for the purpose of showing that they are still around, that they are still a threat. Their modus operandi is very similar to Daesh in Iraq and Syria.

PALESTINA

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL

AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas

quinta-feira, 26 de agosto de 2021

Reality check on Afghanistan VIII

Many have been drawing parallels between Saigon in 1975 and Kabul in 2021. However, they may be misleading.

On April 23, 1975, United States President Gerald Ford proclaimed that the war in Vietnam was “finished as far as [the United States of] America is concerned”. A few days later, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces while the US rushed its military and diplomatic personnel out of the country. The president’s words landed like shells of cold indifference on the ears of the South Vietnamese who had been promised support by successive US administrations, including Ford’s.

Around half a century later, another US withdrawal agonises a country. A two-decade-long war has ended with the US hurrying its exit from Afghanistan. The Taliban has taken over Kabul and the people are running over each other to flee the country. President Joe Biden has said that he does not regret withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and that the objectives of the war have been met.

We wonder which, since the goals of wiping out terrorism, nation building, political stability and peace stand like a ruin in the face of the empire.

Many analogies are being made between these two invasions, occupation and wars to the locals. Parallels are being drawn between similar images of helicopters airlifting US diplomatic staff. Such comparisons, however, on the one hand, overlook the international developments of the last 50 years, and on the other, risk humanising the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan. The only similarity in these two cases is that they were both brought about by US imperialism and its failure to live up to its claims.

In the Vietnam War, taking place at the height of the Cold War, each warring party was backed by a foreign power. The US’s enemy in that war was the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North) which was seen as a legitimate force by half the world. Even within Europe and the US itself there were coherent political youth formations with leftist tilts which vigorously protested against the American occupation of Vietnam. These formations were popularised as counterculture.

There have been some who opposed the US war in Afghanistan as well, but this opposition has largely been unable to form any type of international solidarity that could side with the Taliban. Within the US, such voices predominantly come from the people belonging to existing mainstream political formations, failing to create an impact as huge as the anti-Vietnam War protests. They express exhaustion at the never-ending war more than they highlight and condemn the imperialist intervention in a faraway country.

Additionally, there is no proportionate power backing the Taliban and the USA have had total control of the narrative from beginning to end.

This time, the American empire was up against its own history. Just like it did with Al Qaeda, the US weaponised the Islamist extremist forces to make Afghanistan the Vietnam of the Soviets. When it finally succeeded in arming the Taliban to the teeth, it was caught in a quandary of being the sole hegemon, having a trillion-dollar war machine with nobody to fight – Moscow, feeling that they were no longer welcome, just pulled out after having improved the country’s infrastructure.

This was the time when Islamic fundamentalism surfaced as a major threat to Pax Americana. Then, the US built a new narrative and started mobilising its international order to fight this enemy «to defend democracy and liberal internationalism». But this enemy was manufactured by the US itself in the first place. Unlike the communist party of Vietnam, the Taliban is a ghost from the USA’s own past. Just like Bin Laden.

Afghanistan also occupies a different place in the international humanitarian value system. The international civil society entirely buys the narrative that the Taliban is a bigger threat to human rights than the US occupation. Although the US is devising ways to recognise the new Taliban setup in Afghanistan for purposes pertaining to politics and commerce, it controls the narrative and there will remain hesitation in treating the regime like a normal one, since Westerners love to give lessons.

The politics of human rights in Afghanistan’s case is subject to greater perplexity. Picturing Mullah Baradar, the chief Taliban negotiator, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on account of the Doha Peace Deal does not serve the political commerce of the «altruistic» West. Whereas the same prize was conveniently conferred upon Lu Duc Tho of North Vietnam for negotiating peace through the Paris Accords (1973).

The US that left Vietnam was an empire yet to experience its peak moment. President Ford in the same speech said, “These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world”. Contrastingly Biden speaks from a position of delusion and exhaustion. Afghans “have got to fight for themselves”, said the president who previously added insult to injury by saying that the US did not go to Afghanistan to nation build. Is he really admitting that it went to nation destroy, then ?

The fact is that the Afghanistan war «adventure» represents an United States of America that is defeated by an enemy of its own making and the triumphs of its own past.

This predicament should not be used to humanise a force that is anti-people and anti-culture. The Taliban should not be given its anti-imperialism and post-colonial moment if it doesn’t prove worthy of it, of course.

To make a long story short, if anything, Kabul is a far bigger embarrassment than Saigon, and the era succeeding this occupation will be deadlier than the post-US Vietnam war. It will take ages for the whole region to recover from this conquest.

PALESTINA

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL

quarta-feira, 25 de agosto de 2021

Reality check on Afghanistan VII

I’ve spoken about the danger of terrorism, but there is also the danger of an increase of drug trafficking to Europe.

Afghanistan is already the world’s largest supplier of opium. But opium, which is used to make heroin, is not the only illegal drug that the war-torn nation is producing.

Over the past four years, Afghans have also been getting better at making methamphetamine, known colloquially as speed, crystal or meth.

In some parts of Afghanistan, methamphetamine output already appears to be outpacing that of opium. But, researchers have argued, not enough attention has been paid to the burgeoning illegal drug trade.

Now, with the US withdrawal, some European Union authorities worry that illegal Afghan methamphetamine might pose an increasing danger to Europe.

“The German federal police is intensively monitoring the situation,” a spokesperson from the authority said, “because methamphetamine has been produced in large quantities in Afghanistan for several years now, and because of the danger that it could also reach the German or European market via traditional heroin smuggling routes.”

According to Philip Berry, a lecturer at King’s College and author of The War on Drugs and Anglo-American Relations: Lessons from Afghanistan, 2001-2011: “If Afghanistan’s methamphetamine industry continues to expand, there is the potential that Europe, along with other international markets, will become a more prominent destination.”

Afghans started making methamphetamine seriously only about four years ago, according to a November 2020 report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).

There had been reports of Afghans “cooking” meth up in kitchen-sized laboratories since 2013, extracting it from over-the-counter medicines such as cough syrups. But this process is complicated, dangerous and requires chemistry skills.

It was when locals discovered they could extract methamphetamine from a local plant that production seems to have really taken off.

Ephedra, called bandak or oman locally, is a perennial grass easily harvested from local hillsides. Once used for firewood or to treat kidney ailments, it is now picked, packed and dried, then chemically treated to extract ephedrine.

The latter process is simple and comparatively cheap. In a second, more complex step, the processed ephedra is used to make methamphetamine crystals.

“The data available suggests that Afghanistan has in a short period of time become a producer and supplier of relatively large quantities of low-cost ephedrine and methamphetamine,” the EMCDDA researchers warned. “The potential scale of ephedrine and methamphetamine production … the income it generates and the speed at which it has emerged, are both surprising and worrying.”

They cautioned that meth manufacture may soon come to rival opium production in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is already known to supply more than 80 percent of the world’s opium and Europe is the biggest market, with heroin smuggled in mostly through the Balkan states and Turkey.

In 2019, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported that the overall value of economic activity around opiates for export in Afghanistan was worth anywhere between $1.1bn and $2bn (nearly 1.7 billion euros), which is equal to up to 11 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Afghan methamphetamine is catching up.

A study published this month by the UK-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) looked at how the Taliban was funded in the southwestern province of Nimruz, on the Iranian border.

Most of its income is from taxing legal goods crossing the border – and not illegal drugs.

But the ODI also concluded that, in terms of tonnage, more methamphetamine was being produced in, or moving through, the province than opium.

Evidence from various quarters – including satellite imaging of potential meth production facilities, on-the-ground interviews and shipments seized by police in different parts of the world, including in Turkey and on the Iran-Pakistan border – points to a rapidly growing methamphetamine trade.

Afghan methamphetamine has also made inroads into international markets. It has already been discovered by authorities in Africa, Australia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

There are unconfirmed reports that some could have reached Europe, too.

“We believe that some [Afghan methamphetamine] has gone to Turkey,” said Laurent Laniel, an EMCDDA analyst focused on drug production and trafficking. “And if it reaches Turkey, then we assume that some will get to Europe.”

But Mansfield – an independent consultant who authored A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan and has been researching and regualarly visiting Afghanistan since 1997 - argued that Afghan meth has not had enough attention from European government agencies : “There needs to be a more systematic approach to testing. Most agencies just test a substance to see if it’s meth and for its quality. They don’t tend to test whether it’s made from the ephedra plant or from pharmaceuticals.”

For example, although it has shared some concerns, the German federal police’s forensics department, which regularly examines seized drug shipments, has yet to test whether the meth it comes across is from Afghanistan. And its officials say the department is unlikely to do so unless it receives a legal request or order from a body such as the UNODC.

Currently, Australian law enforcement is among the few agencies testing to see if methamphetamine they catch is derived from Afghan ephedra plants.

All the experts interviewed say it was impossible to know whether more methamphetamine or opium would head to Europe under the Taliban’s rule.

Last week, a Taliban spokesman promised to ban drug smuggling and production. Which is an unsurprising attempt to position itself as a legitimate government, has pledged to ban narcotics production and smuggling. They may attempt to use narcotics control to gain international recognition and development funding.

Even if they do ban narcotics, there must be appropriate mitigation strategies to sustain the mesure.

A more important factor is how the Afghan economy performs from now on. Economic collapse could stimulate the production of more illicit drugs. If there is no way to fund a government, there won’t be any more government jobs. A lot of people may head back to the land. Opium poppy cultivation is a very labour-intensive job. If there’s more labour, there might be more opium.

Whether that happens will be a function of how the Taliban chooses to run the country and how Western donors choose to engage with the Taliban.

The exodus of Afghan executives and intellectuals plus the imposition of widespread sanctions could well fuel an economic crisis that would lead to large numbers of refugees and increased levels of drug production, that would undoubtedly impact the region and Europe.

PALESTINA

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL