The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN)

Using drones to carry out targeted killings has become an integral part of the United States’ ‘war on terror’. Afghanistan in the late 1990s was the laboratory where the US developed armed drones as it searched for a way to deal with Osama bin Laden who was then ordering attacks on American targets from his safe haven in Kandahar. At that time, Washington was uneasy about ordering an assassination, especially one likely to result in civilian casualties. After 9/11, such doubts disappeared and it embraced drones, using them to carry out targeted killings of Islamist militants in many countries. In this first of two dispatches, AAN’s Kate Clark looks at armed drones in Afghanistan.

A second dispatch will look at the expansion of America’s targeted killing by drone programme in the war on terror and asks whether Afghanistan might in the future see a US ‘drone-only’ or ‘drone-mainly’ mission of the sort seen in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Bin Laden and the birth of drone warfare

The project to create armed drones grew out of the need felt by Washington to eliminate the threat posed by bin Laden. In the late 1990s, he was orchestrating attacks on American targets while living under Taleban protection. US options were limited by a presidential standing order banning assassinations (1) which meant the CIA was legally bound to plan an operation with detention as its sole aim. Additionally, CIA officials were worried about the women and children living in bin Laden’s compound – visible on satellite footage – who would be harmed if the capture operation turned into a firefight. “[CIA officers,” reported Steve Coll, “found themselves pulled into emotional debates about legal authorities and the potential for civilian casualties…” (2) (p 393)

In 1998, bin Laden ordered attacks on two American embassies in east Africa and Washington responded with Cruise missile strikes on training camps in Khost (which it said was an act of self-defence, not an assassination attempt). Even after that, however, Washington hesitated about making another attempt to kill the al Qaeda leader. The CIA insisted on definitive legal cover from the White House that officers would not later be charged with having carried out an ‘illegal’ assassination. Uneasiness was exacerbated by the fact that officials could never identify bin Laden with enough confidence to go ahead with a missile strike and they were still worried about killing women and children. Ahmad Shah Massud’s intelligence aides scorned this hesitation, reported Coll, portraying it as the US insisting on “capturing the king without disturbing the pawns.” (p535)

It was the need for accurate, absolutely up-to-date information about the target that drove the development of armed drones. They had already been used for surveillance in the Balkans, but now the decision was taken to increase their range and reliability and to arm them. Shortening the wait between target identification and strike, it was thought, would reduce the possibility of a precise strike with minimum ‘collateral damage’.

In the end, killing bin Laden by drone became feasible just as al Qaeda launched its attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. The US responded with a full military assault on al Qaeda and its hosts, the Taleban, and the first armed drone strike came that autumn, in Afghanistan, with an attempt to kill Taleban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar (see here). This time, there was no debate about legality: this was not now an assassination, but the lawful killing of a combatant during wartime.

Armed drones have been used ever since by the US in its ‘war on terror’, for both targeted killings and air support for troops on the ground. They have been deployed in Afghanistan, in Iraq after the 2003 invasion and more recently in Libya, and against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (for information about strikes in these three countries, see the Airwars website). Drones have also been used for targeted killings of al Qaeda and what the US calls ‘associated forces’ in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Targeted killings by drone have become, former director of the CIA Michael Hayden said, “part of the American way of war.”

Since 2001, the US has asserted its legal right to kill hostile non-state actors if their host government is “unwilling or unable” to deal with the threat. The concerns which agonised the CIA and the White House over killing bin Laden, before 9/11 – whether targeted killings were legal and the danger of civilians being harmed in an assassination attempt – are now dismissed or downplayed by Washington. (This will be looked at in more detail in the second dispatch in this mini-series).

Drones in Afghanistan

Armed drones have been flown for more than fifteen years in Afghanistan. Yet data about them is scarce. Statistics for all aircraft flown by the United States, which, since 2014, has been the only foreign state carrying out combat operations in Afghanistan, are not disaggregated; we know only the numbers for the total air sorties flown and munitions dropped by all US aircraft. It had been believed that the statistics – even though not disaggregated to distinguish drones from other aircraft – were good. The US Air Force has been collating and publishing them for several years. (Note for anyone following this issue: the URL has recently been changed slightly; this one works.) However, the Military Times recently revealed that data for aircraft operated by the army in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria has been excluded from these statistics. The discrepancy is large: in Afghanistan, in 2016, for example, 615 strikes had been reported, but including strikes from army aircraft, the number rose to 1,017. Still, although some of those extra strikes will have been by drones – the Military Times reported that the US army was flying MQ-1 Gray Eagles to help provide “lethal support” (3) – it seems the bulk of the extra airstrikes came from Apache helicopters.

Working out who flies what and under whose command is difficult. Generally, air strikes can be ordered, according to a military spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan who spoke to the Military Times, for “self defense, counter terror and strategic effects, which may be required when senior commanders believe U.S. firepower could help turn the tide in regions deemed vital to Afghanistan’s broader stability.” Senior commanders have told AAN this, for example, might be preventing a district or provincial centre falling to the Taleban. Those who have access to airpower, including drones, on the US side are: the US Air Force, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which is the key player in counter-terrorism and particularly US targeted killings operations in Afghanistan, and the army. The CIA has a close working relationship with JSOC; in the past (and possibly still?), this included pooling intelligence and drawing up lists of targets for kill/capture operations. (4) The CIA also flies drones across the border to carry out targeted killings in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The use of covert Agency drones was important because of Islamabad’s claims to be hostile to the US strikes. (There will be more detail on this in AAN’s second dispatch on armed drones.)

Josh Smith, former Kabul correspondent with the independent US military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and now with Reuters, has reported that the US Air Force flies MQ-9 Reapers and MQ-1 Predators out of American bases in Kandahar and Jalalabad. He told AAN that pilots and operators on the ground guide the drones in and out for take off and landing, but unless the mission is very local, for example, base protection, once a drone is in flight, control is handed over to other operators, almost all in the United States. The main hub is Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, but there are also a small number of control stations in other locations. “Pilots at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, for example,” he said “flew most of the Air Force Special Operations Command missions.” Air force drone operators told Smith that they fly drones and conventional aircraft “for a range of customers.” That could include JSOC, the CIA (see also this piece) and the army, although all also have their own drones and pilots.

Between 2008 and 2014, before NATO’s transition to the non-combat, ‘train, advise, assist’ Resolute Support mission, the UK also flew armed drones in Afghanistan, with strikes made in 16 of the 34 provinces. These were “only,” said the Ministry of Defence, “in support of coalition ground forces”(see here). The Afghan Air Force now also has drones for surveillance. Members of the Taleban’s media branch recently posted pictures of what they say are their drones in action, carrying out surveillance in Afghanistan.

Drones and civilian casualties

Trying to determine the impact of drone strikes in Afghanistan is difficult. The scarcity of drone specific data and the sheer amount of other weaponry around makes singling out the effects of drones per se very difficult. Any air strike could have been carried out by a drone or another aircraft – it can be difficult to tell from the ground. Moreover, targeted killings have been carried out not only through airstrikes, but also in night raids (although here there is an aim to capture or kill). Both tactics proved controversial, but it was civilian casualties and the invasion of people’s homes that were upsetting, rather than the use of drones.

UNAMA, in its tracking of civilian casualties, does not separate those caused by drones from other aircraft. Indeed, it would not be able to disaggregate the figures without the US providing the information, if it wanted to.

There has been discussion about whether drones are or should be better than other aircraft in reducing the risk of killing civilians when making a strike. Supporters of drones and even some detractors point out that, because drones can loiter in ways that planes cannot, they allow for ‘tactical patience’ and more accurate targeting. All things being equal, therefore, there is less likelihood for civilians to be harmed. However, one study with access to classified military data which was able to compare strikes from drones and aircraft in Afghanistan (mid-2010 to mid-2011) found that drones were then causing ten times more civilian casualties. Co-author Sarah Holewinski of the non-governmental organisation Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Guardian the disparity was a result of fighter pilots getting more training in avoiding civilian casualties: “‘These findings show us that it’s not about the technology, it’s about how the technology is used,’ Holewinski said. ‘Drones aren’t magically better at avoiding civilians than fighter jets. When pilots flying jets were given clear directives and training on civilian protection, they were able to lower civilian casualty rates.’”

There are other ways in which civilian casualties may be increased or reduced by the use of drones, although, here we can only speak speak about air power in general because the data for drones and other aircraft is not disaggregated. Reduction in international air cover generally since 2014, for example, has resulted, indirectly, in an overall increase in the number of civilians killed and injured in the Afghan conflict (see UNAMA report here and AAN reporting here. This is because the Taleban, no longer fearing attack from the skies, have been able to mass in ways that would previously have been suicidal. It has become possible for them to launch ground engagements and threaten Afghan towns and cities, pushing up the total number of civilians killed and injured in the conflict to new records.

However, the data also shows that having a ‘pro-government’ aerial capability does not necessarily safeguard civilians. In 2016, air strikes killed and injured more civilians than in any year since at least 2009 when UNAMA started systematic documentation. UNAMA attributed about 40 per cent of the 2016 casualties caused by air strikes to the Afghan air force and about 40 per cent to the US air force (with the other 20 per cent not attributable to either party, but caused by one of them) (See the UNAMA annual report here and AAN’s analysis here). The situation is grave enough for UNAMA to have called for an immediate halt to strikes by armed aircraft in civilian-populated areas and for “clear tactical directives, rules of engagement and other procedures” to be adopted. In many of those intervening years, far more sorties were flown and strikes made, so what is pushing the numbers up?

On the US side, successive military commanders had made it more difficult for air strikes to be ordered, putting in place new sets of precautions and conditions. These led to successive drops in the number of civilians killed and injured in air strikes (for detail, see here and here). It seems the sharp rise in civilian casualties caused by US air operations in 2016 was probably due to poorer intelligence (fewer ground troops means the US is not as knowledgeable as it used to be) and/or failure to follow procedures. The latter was the case with the strike on the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz in October 2015 and the strike on Buz-e Kandahari village, again in Kunduz on 2-3 November 2016 (in each attack, about 30 civilians were killed and another 30 injured). In both cases, UNAMA and others questioned whether the US had breached the Laws of Armed Conflict.

On the Afghan side, it seems casualties are coming from failures to distinguish civilian from military targets, including recklessly firing at Taleban despite the harm bound to come to civilians (again, both potential breaches in the Laws of Armed Conflict). On 9 August 2016 in Nawa Barakzai district in Helmand, for example, UNAMA describes how Afghan air force helicopters tracked Taleban into residential compound and fired munitions, killing and injuring women and children.

So, in 2016, we saw sharp rises in civilians killed and injured by the most sophisticated air force in the world and one of the least – Afghan air strikes are often from machine guns mounted on helicopters. It was not the weaponry itself that was the crucial factor, but rather, mission aims and guidelines, training and intelligence. As a factor determining the numbers of civilian casualties, at least currently in Afghanistan, whether armed drones are used or not, seems to be a minor consideration. Moreover, if they are causing any variation, the distinction is not visible to anyone outside the US military.

Living under drones

 Just one study has managed to delve at all into the impact of drones on communities in Afghanistan. In autumn 2015, field interviews were carried out for Durham University with people living in two (un-named) districts of Nangarhar which had seen a “surge” in drone use. It is a preliminary study (the authors are currently finishing a longer research paper), but nevertheless, gives some pointers to how Afghan civilians may experience drones. In the two districts, said the study’s authors, the population is largely Pashtun and has a “notable history of support and loyalties towards Kabul.” They found that:

Drone strikes receive widespread support, as long as they effectively and accurately target Taliban, Daesh and elements from Pakistan believed to create and perpetuate these groups. Indeed, these insurgent and terror-group elements are clearly seen by citizens in the fieldwork areas as their enemies – and enemies of Afghanistan.

Respondents believed drones were “supremely accurate” and praised them for instilling fear in Taleban and Daesh members, thereby disrupting their movement and activities. However, it was the simultaneous menace of both insurgent groups and drones on respondents’ everyday life which the authors of the study found revelatory:

Fear of becoming caught up in a drone strike as a result of running livestock, collecting firewood in the mountains or cultivating fields where insurgent groups hide and pass through is economically damaging and encouraging depopulation. Activities that manifest and reinforce important social ties and networks are curtailed by the presence and fear of drones. This includes: providing hospitality to strangers who visit homes and may turn out to be Taliban; gathering to celebrate weddings; observing funerals; discussing the day’s issues at night after subsistence work; and simply moving around the village after dark.

 In other words, even if drone strikes were successfully targeting Taleban and other combatants, and this was popular among civilians, this was not creating the conditions for anything like a resumption of ‘normal life’. Nor did the killings feel like a victory for those on the ground.

The character of drone use in places like Nangarhar, said the Durham University study “is becoming more like that across the border in FATA.” This refers to a model where drones are used for targeted killings in a narrow, counter-terrorism mission aimed not at stabilising Afghanistan, with an eye to “restoring and reinforcing viable and effective governance, social and economic structures,” but at “containing the ability of Afghanistan-based terror-related groups to commit acts of violence beyond its borders, especially in areas central to US and wider western interests.” These two aims have, since 2001, always co-existed in the international military mission in Afghanistan, but the authors of the Durham study believe that in places like Nangarhar the narrow counter-terrorism mission has become dominant.

Nangarhar is a particular case in Afghanistan, a province where the situation on the ground most closely resembles the tribal areas of Pakistan, with a widespread, but fragmented armed opposition, a relatively weak Taleban and a plethora of Afghan and foreign jihadist groups (see AAN reporting here. US military operations in Nangarhar are not particularly representative of how it operates elsewhere in Afghanistan. However, it may suggest what a narrow US counter-terrorism mission could look like.

Constraints on US combat operations were written into the US-Afghanistan Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) (see here), signed in September 2014; they were limited to strikes on “al Qaeda and its affiliates.” This led to a concentration of US air strikes on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, especially Nangarhar, where foreign jihadists are most active. (The US was also still playing its part in the non-combat NATO mission to support Afghan National Security Forces.) In June 2016, President Barack Obama, with Afghan agreement, did broaden out US targeting, allowing for strikes on Taleban and in support of Afghan troops and air strikes have been used more widely since. Even so, there are worrying aspects to US air strikes in Nangarhar. One to watch in 2017 will be civilian casualties. In 2016 UNAMA noted, there were “considerable increases in civilian casualties caused solely by international military forces in Nangarhar province.” 89 civilians were killed or injured in 13 aerial operations in 2016 compared to 18 during 10 aerial operations in 2015.

Looking ahead

For the most part, the use of US drones in the Afghan conflict has not been visible or controversial. This is in sharp contrast to their deployment in FATA, and also in Yemen and Somalia. In those three countries, where the US has conducted a ‘drone only’ or drone mainly’ mission to carry out targeted killings, there has been a fierce debate about their legality, effectiveness and impact on civilians.

A second dispatch in this mini-series will look at why and how the US drone programme expanded after that first drone strike in Afghanistan in October 2001. It will also examine the experiences of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia and ask whether the ‘FATA model’ of drone use could be seen in the future in Afghanistan.

Edited by Sari Kouvo and Borhan Osman

 

 

(1) President Gerald Ford banned assassinations after various CIA scandals emerged after Watergate, including the Agency’s repeated attempts to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro. The ban was reinforced by Ford’s two successors. President Ronald Reagan’s version) said: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

(2) Steve Coll Ghost Wars: the Secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Withdrawal to September 10, 2001, Penguin Books: London (2004).

(3) The military spokesman also included RQ-7 Shadows as one of the aircraft used by the army to provide “lethal support.” This model is actually used for surveillance, not targeting.

(4) In 2012, at the height of US kill or capture operations, the author wrote:

At the forward headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC at Bagram, where intelligence from multiple sources – the military, CIA, detainee interrogations, drone footage and intercepts – is collated, a joint targeting working group meets weekly. It has direct input from the Combined Forces Command and its divisional HQ, as well as lawyers, operational command and intelligence units, including the CIA and it places men deemed to be ‘insurgent leaders’ on the Joint Prioritised Effects List (JPEL) for capture or targeted killing.

 

Badghis, a far-flung province in the west of the country, was the bad surprise in the 2016 Afghanistan Opium Survey of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. The poppy cultivation area in Badghis increased almost by 200 percent compared to 2015, contributing significantly to the overall countrywide increase of ten per cent. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica looks at Badghis as a case study of how a remote and neglected province became a breeding ground for the insurgency and an increasingly important hub for the Afghan drug economy, and at how administrative tussles – about which province (Badghis or Faryab) some key militancy-ridden districts belong to – exacerbate these issues (with input from Thomas Ruttig and Obaid Ali).

Afghanistan opium trends

An unprecedented increase in opium poppy cultivation has been documented in Badghis for 2016, a remote western province that is largely underreported – even more so after the Spanish Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) there closed in 2013. The acreage under poppy cultivation increased almost by 200 percent, from 12,891 hectares in 2015 to 35,234 hectares in 2016, and significantly contributed to the countrywide increase of ten per cent. This was reported in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) 2016 Opium Survey released in December 2016. The Badghis increase was so substantial that the province now ranks second on the list of Afghanistan’s poppy- growing provinces, immediately after the decades-long frontrunner, Helmand. For the last ten years, the second place had ‘traditionally’ been occupied by Kandahar or Farah and, earlier (between 2002 and 2004), Nangrahar. (1)

Much of the 2016 Badghis rise happened in Ghormach district in the province’s remote north. It had already overtaken Bala Murghab as the leading opium poppy cultivating district in the province in 2015 and harboured almost half of the province’s cultivation area in 2016, with 17,594 hectares. Together Ghormach and Bala Murghab accounted for 85 per cent of Badghis’ poppy cultivation area.

An international drug control expert also pointed out to AAN that the 2016 increase in Badghis and, in particular in Ghormach, could be linked to the decrease in Helmand, where the security situation deteriorated so significantly (see AAN 2016 reporting on Helmand here and here) that farmers could not even go to work in their fields. According to information that this expert shared with AAN, Badghis’s good climate and its remoteness inspired a number of farmers from Helmand to come to Badghis in 2016 and rent fields to plant opium, offering in return to teach and train Badghis’s farmers in opium cultivation.

A similar trend was reported by UNODC in Qaisar, the district in Faryab province neighbouring Ghormach in Badghis province. Qaisar accounted for almost 90 per cent of the cultivation in Faryab, with 2,742 out of 2,923 hectares. Both districts also share a similar ethnic profile: While Ghormach is predominantly Pashtun, Qaisar district has many Pashto speaking villages, and the ethnic affiliation paves the ground for people from both districts swiftly moving between them. In addition to the fact that both districts are highly contested, they also host flourishing opium markets. Jahri-e Siah, an area around 30 kilometres south of the Ghormach district centre towards Qaisar, has a long history of insurgency (it is a mountain valley, with no villages in it) and has dozens of makeshift drugs and weapons markets. It is one of the main hotspots were smugglers from Qaisar come to exchange drugs and weapons for cash. A market in Qaisar district called Bazar-e Shakh has been under Taleban control for the past two years. AAN was told by locals that dealers and smugglers from Bazar-e Shakh frequently visit Jahri-ye Siah to barter items.

Badghis as buffer zone and target of boycott

Situated northeast of Herat province, with a regional centre of the same name (see AAN reporting here, here and here), Badghis borders the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan in the west and Faryab province in the northeast. Far from the capital, Kabul, it had never been a location that was strategically important in the struggles for domination over Afghanistan. But as part of Afghanistan’s western region, it played a role in regional power struggles.

As such, it was claimed by anti-Soviet resistance-leader-turned-provincial-governor Ismail Khan. Between 1992 and 1995, he held it as a part of his own regional dominion carved out during the factional wars of the 1990s. There, he proclaimed himself the amir of western Afghanistan. A Farsiwan (Persian speaker) from the south of Herat province, he is associated with the Tajik-dominated, former mujahedin party of Jamiat-e Islami. Never fully comfortable with Jamiat’s traditional Panjshiri and Badakhshi leaders, he was far enough from them to maintain his own grip in this region of Afghanistan.

Geographically sandwiched between his area of influence and that of the Uzbek leader of the Jombesh-e Melli party, Abdulrashid Dostum (from the northern province of Jawzjan), Badghis also played a buffer role between them for most of its recent history. This was particularly true for the two northern districts of Bala Murghab and Ghormach; Jamiat controlled most of the remaining provincial territory. In 1996, Badghis became the first Afghan province at the country’s northern border to be taken by the Taleban, after the fall of Herat and of Ismail Khan’s dominion in 1995.

After the fall of Taleban regime in 2001, Badghis came under Ismail Khan’s and Jamiat’s control again, and they dominated the political scene there until 2005. Ismail Khan was confirmed as Herat’s provincial governor by the Karzai administration in 2001. Two local Tajik militias, one led by Zaher Naebzada and his brothers from Bala Murghab district and the other by Muhammed Arefi from Ab Kamari, helped Ismail Khan reinstate his control over most of Badghis. In return they acquired important provincial government posts in post-2001 Afghanistan. While Arefi was appointed the provincial governor of Badghis in 2001, the Naebzada brothers received prominent posts with the Afghan security forces. (Later, between 2008 and 2010, Arefi served in a less prominent position as the provincial director of the Ministry of Agriculture.) One of the Naebzada brothers became the police chief in Muqur district; another one, Amir Shah Naebzada, became first provincial police chief and then the head of the border police for northern Herat and Badghis, and a third one, Dost Muhammad Naebzada, returned to his former post as National Directorate of Security chief in the province.

In 2004, however, an important change in the political landscape happened due to President Karzai’s efforts to curtail the power of Ismail Khan. In this conflict, the Naebzada brothers took the central government’s side, and their strongest, Zaher Naebzada, was appointed head of the army (then officially ‘Afghan Militia Forces’) division in Herat. Fighting broke out two times, in March and August 2004, during which (in March) Ismail Khan’s son Mir Wais Seddiq – then a minister in the Karzai cabinet – was killed by Naebzada’s forces in Herat city, creating a personal enmity. (More about these events in a 2004 paper by Antonio Giustozzi published by the London School of Economics.)

After Ismail Khan was removed from his position in Herat (in 2004), he finally accepted a post as the Minister of Energy and Water in Kabul (in 2005) and used this position to take revenge on the Badghis militia commanders. According to a 2010 intelligence assessment of Bala Murghab district he vowed to “keep Badghis in the stone-age” and “successfully blocked any significant development projects for the province.” Zaher Naebzada had to give up his military position in Herat in 2004 and planned to run in the 2005 parliamentary elections but died – according to Afghan media reports – in a car accident in Herat in June that year. (2)

At the periphery of international attention

Spain, the NATO member that established the local PRT in 2005, with its contribution to the province of around 50 million Euros annually, was not able to compensate on the development side. (3) Non-existing road infrastructure in the province limited its reach to the provincial capital, Qala-ye Now, in the province’s south, far from the remote and problematic northern districts of Ghormach and Bala Murghab where insurgent and criminal activities grew and made an outreach there even more difficult. Warmly welcoming at first, the local population soon became disillusioned about the Spanish engagement, with its limited resources and impact (see previous AAN analysis on Badghis). A number of intelligence reports from 2006 and 2007 (see here and here) pointed at wide-spread corruption and district and provincial officials’ involvement and/or complicity in the growing opium cultivation and trafficking business. A 2007 cable emphasised that the “governor-led eradication (GLE) program enhanced [a] former governor’s [referring to corrupt and unpopular Governor Muhammed Nasim Tokhi who acted for only some months in 2007] ability to extort protection money; poppy was openly cultivated across large parts of the province.”

The Taleban who were pushed out of the southern districts of the province after 2001 by the Jamiati forces, found sanctuary mainly in the northern Bala Murghab district. The first news of Taleban in Badghis appeared in 2003, when Reuters based on information from government sources, reported the arrest of Mullah Badr, the governor of Badghis province during the Taleban regime. Although a 2006 intelligence report expressed concern about ex-Taleban “now residing” not only in Bala Murghab but also in Ghormach and about “anti-government Pashtun[s] fleeing the conflict-ridden situation in the South [of Afghanistan] to temporarily take refuge in Badghis,” it was already evident in June 2007, when Taleban attacked police positions in the Bala Murghab and Ghormach districts (see here) that they had re-established a critical foothold in the province. According to a report by the Long War Journal, a terrorism watch outlet, a new shadow governor for Badghis, Mullah Dastagir, had been appointed by the Taleban’s Quetta shura in October 2008. (He had been active in the province before, was captured and held by the National Security Directorate in early 2008, but was released on President Karzai’s orders only some months later.) He was finally killed by US troops in February 2009; Mullah Ismail replaced him. As summarised in an AREU case study,

… the Taliban insurgency in Badghis was greatly understated when it started in 2003 in a large Pashtun pocket in the districts of Ghormach and Bala Murghab, where it remobilised old Taliban networks from the 1990s […] Despite suffering heavy losses over the years, with their leadership being repeatedly decapitated, the Taliban have shown resilience […] the Taliban have faced no organised opposition and are now able to assert their exclusive control at least over most of Ghormach and Bala Murghab, where they have set up parallel shadow governance structures.

Over time, insurgents in Ghormach (4) and Bala Murghab made good use of the limited development aid, the absence of international and national security troops, inter-factional fighting and human rights abuses by local militias and restored their power base in these two districts. (5)

Ghormach – an administrative tussle

Ghormach’s administrative location – whether it belongs to Badghis (as it traditionally has) or Faryab – is also a bit of a mystery, and this has made coordinating military and development activity a problem. A policy advisor with the Afghan Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG) told AAN via an email exchange that “Ghormach has been a district of Faryab province for a few years now” and that “President Karzai in a decree transferred the district administratively and fiscally to Faryab.” He was unable to name the year in which this happened or the number of the decree, but insisted that “it is now part of Faryab.”

According to local accounts, the central government made the district ‘temporarily’ part of Faryab in 2007. This corresponds with the ISAF decision to have Norwegian troops from Faryab patrolling the district, starting in 2007 with Operation Harekate Yolo II; Norway also started humanitarian work there in 2008 (see the 2016 Norwegian Afghanistan mission report, p 110). This indicates that Ghormach was transferred to Faryab mainly because of NATO/ISAF operational and logistic requirements. The Spanish troops were unable to patrol Ghormach: According to this 2010 AAN dispatch “the road was in such a bad conditions that the troops needed more than eight hours to reach the district[s] in the northwest”, while the ISAF troops under the regional command north saw the necessity of acting against the Taleban bases there from where they constantly attacked districts in Faryab.

According to this intelligence cable from 2010, the governor of Faryab, however, did not consider Ghormach part of his province. This might have been for practical, budgetary reasons. According to the same source, “the Governor considers Faryab to be poppy-free,” and Ghormach’s thriving poppy cultivation would undermine this status and the funding linked to it. UNODC took the same approach; in 2009 it declared Faryab poppy-free again and, as a result, Faryab received “Good Performers’ Initiative” funding. In the 2009 provincial council elections and the 2010 parliamentary elections, however, Ghormach also still figured under Badghis (for 2009 see this AAN analysis and for 2010, this IEC report). This raises the question of whether the administrative transfer of Ghormach has actually ever been decreed. (6)

Nevertheless, Ghormach continued to be a stronghold of the insurgency. Although the government managed to hold some control over the district centre after 2014, most of the district remained out of the government’s reach. In 2015 and 2016, first vice president Dostum twice personally led ANSF counteroffensives in Ghormach (see more in the forthcoming AAN dispatch about Non-Pashtun [Uzbek] Taleban), but both times the re-established ANSF’s hold of the district centre did not last long.

From their Ghormach stronghold, the Taleban can intensify attacks into Faryab province to the east (read AAN previous analysis here and here). It also allows them to control part of the paved highway between Faryab and Badghis, a section of the ring road that connects the north to the west and on to Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul, in line with the Taleban strategy to control the main road infrastructure in the north (see AAN previous analysis here).

How Badghis gradually became a top poppy province

The 2016 the increase in area under opium poppy cultivation in Badghis was mainly due to the deteriorating security situation. Since 2015, the frequency of armed clashes between insurgents and government forces increased, creating an ideal situation for a poppy boom. Government forces were preoccupied defending district centres, but they also de facto did not control most of the northern districts’ territory, and no eradication had been carried out in Badghis since 2014. (7) In turn, this caused a spread of cultivation, including to fields “close to, and in the district centres,” UNODC observed.

Badghis poppy cultivation 2005-16. AAN based on UNODC data (CC).

In the past, cultivation in Badghis had been kept afield from the district centres. As noted in an intelligence cable from 2007, “most farmers have planted their poppy behind large mud walls or at least 20 meters away from main roads, but many of these fields are readily apparent from major roadways and are located within 20 kilometres of the district capital.” Although cultivation in Badghis had been on the increase as early as between 2005 and 2007, it was relatively low, compared to the 2016 quantities. (The peak level of 2007, is almost nine times lower than the current level; see graph above). (8)

Nevertheless, the first escalation in the area under opium poppy cultivation, between 2005 and 2007, was closely linked to in-country labour migration. A 2006 intelligence report on poppy cultivation in Badghis pointed out that “many unoccupied youth are traveling to the south [of Afghanistan] to work in poppy cultivation and distribution.” A prominent elder from Badghis also described to AAN how farmers over the years had enjoyed “capacity building” in how to grow and harvest poppy: labourers travelling south to work brought back new skills to their home province (see AAN previous reporting here). He also blamed the increase in cultivation on the classic dilemma facing farmers in an insurgency-plagued province: whether to try getting non-opium produce to faraway markets (in Herat or Mazar-e Sharif) through insecure areas or to wait for the opium traders, who will buy the harvest directly, to come to the door.

The surge in cultivation was shortly interrupted by the severe drought in Badghis in 2008, which caused the failure of the entire rain-fed poppy crop and resulted in a large decrease. The cultivation, nevertheless, picked up again in 2009, partially because of the lack of other employment opportunities and partially due to losses that the 2008 drought caused. Lower levels of cultivations between 2010 and 2013 corresponded with the ‘surge’ in foreign – mainly US – troops, as well as the establishment of the Forward Operating Base “Todd” in Bala Murghab in 2009, following the transfer of Ghormach under the security oversight of the Norwegian-run PRT in Faryab.

This was short lived, nevertheless. In 2014, as soon as the security transition in the country was over, opium poppy cultivation surpassed the 2009 peak level of 5,011 hectares. In 2015, the cultivation area doubled to over 12,000 hectares. By 2015, each of seven Badghis districts (including Ghormach) was cultivating poppy opium (even in the district of Qale-ye Now, where the Spanish provincial reconstruction team had been located, opium poppy has been cultivated persistently since 2009). Ghormach and Bala Murghab, nevertheless, are the two initial and the two most persistent opium cultivating districts.

Poverty and the 2016 poppy boom

The massive 2016 poppy spread in Badghis happened mainly at the expense of grain cultivation. Badghis, which traditionally grows wheat, barley and maize, “produces surplus wheat even in average years,” according to the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture and Livelihoods (MAIL) and the World Food Programme (WFP). A UNODC opium survey expert explained to AAN that “in Badghis province, as in other parts of Afghanistan, poppy is usually cultivated in the same fields with wheat. […] The 2016 satellite images for Badghis [however] revealed the fields exclusively planted with opium.” This was true for most of the province’s irrigated and rain-fed fields. If approximately 113,212 hectares of land in Badghis are used for agricultural purposes (according to a 2008 USAID agricultural profile of the province), this would imply that in 2016 opium poppy had been planted on almost one third of it.

The opium fields of Badghis were also healthier this year, the UNODC satellite images indicated. This implied recent crop-rotation (ie from wheat to opium poppy) and that the late spring harvest looked (in Ghormach usually in the third and fourth week of May) to be promisingly rich. The UN drugs agency estimates that poppy planted in the province in 2016 could produce as much as 786 metric tons of opium – only 14 metric tons less than what the entire Afghan production was under the mujahedin in 1989 (see 2006 UNODC analysis of the Afghan drug industry). This would also equal one sixth of the country’s overall production estimate (the potential opium production in Afghanistan increased by 43 per cent in 2016, to 4,800 metric tons) or over two-thirds of the potential opium production of the entire western region. (UNODC estimated that Badghis, Farah, Ghor, Herat and Nimroz jointly could produce of 1,139 metric tons of opium in 2016.)

The farm-gate value of the opium in Badghis was also high in 2016: one kilogram of dry opium was going for 259 USD – the highest farm-gate value countrywide – as reported by the farmers in the west to UNODC. (UNODC estimated that the total farm-gate value of opium production countrywide in 2016 amounted to 898 million USD, an increase by 57 per cent from its 2015 level.) The Badghis’ opium trade value, estimated by the UN agency, stands at 209 million USD; a kilogram of dry opium was worth for 267 USD in the western region in August 2016, as reported by opium traders (Badghis mainly exports opiates to Turkmenistan and to an extent via Herat to Iran; see UNODC Opium Survey 2008). Badghis is one of the poorest provinces of Afghanistan, with a poverty rate slightly higher than the national average (at 38.6 per cent according to the 2011–12 National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment). The high profits from opium trade make a strong case for Badghis farmers to plant opium poppy at the expense of grain.

The drug networks

A key for Badghis’s flourishing drug trade is the province’s proximity to Turkmenistan, a country which is also an extension of the Balkan drug trafficking route. (The Balkan route refers here to the drug trafficking channel to Europe, which at its European end mainly crosses via the Balkan countries – Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Turkey; see 2012 UNODC study on the northern route of the Afghan opiates trade.) Although relatively small quantities are exported to Turkmenistan compared to shipments to Pakistan or Tajikistan, this route plays an important role in transnational organised crime. (UNODC estimates that around 40 per cent of Afghan opiates are trafficked through the southern route, ie Pakistan; 30 per cent via the northern route, ie Tajikistan, and the remaining 30 per cent via the western route, ie Turkmenistan and Iran. The drugs trafficked via the western route are destined for European illicit markets.)

Four of seven Badghis districts border Turkmenistan: Muqur, Ghormach, Bala Murghab and Ab Kamari, with only one small official border crossing at the village of Murichaq in Bala Murghab district. Turkmen authorities, according to UNODC, have reported seizures of opiates – mostly opium – presumably originating from the border areas of Badghis in Afghanistan, and most probably from Murichaq. Nevertheless, given the lack of official information from Turkmenistan, assessing the amounts of drugs trafficked via Badghis is difficult. UNODC reported that “refined opium products including morphine and heroin are smuggled from Murghab into Turkmenistan […] as well as into neighbouring provinces, such as Herat.” According to a military intelligence assessment from 2010, Badghis also had established heroin-processing facilities: “Some narcotics barons have moved not only their smuggling operations into Badghis, but some of the actual heroin processing.”

The Naebzada clan, according to the same assessment, is involved in drug trafficking, although there are possibly other, smaller players. The Naebzada network and clan members’ positions in the security forces makes them a textbook enabler for cross-border trafficking. Their profile also fits the transformed model of Afghan organised crime. According to this UNODC study, the transformation of Afghan organised crime transpired in 2003 and among other things included a consolidation, characterised by limiting the number of operators to create a few larger and more powerful ones; the emergence of clearly organised criminal groups as opposed to individual “smugglers” or “traffickers”; a symbiotic relationship between government, business, and criminal individuals/operators and the rise of a criminal protection industry.

The Taleban, who control most of the territory in the key growing districts such as Murghab and Ghormach, also play a role in the drug trade. Additionally, the remoteness of Badghis kept the local Taleban isolated from the rest of the movement, yet dependent on insecure and long supply lines from Pakistan, according to a 2016 AREU study. The opening of supply channels via Iran and Central Asia are considered crucial in this respect. The “Bala Murghab mafia,” according to the 2010 intelligence assessment, operates as the shadow government of the district and “[they] are separate, not mutually exclusive, from the Taliban.” As reported in a UN provincial report from 2009, “Taleban groups protect the poppy field and receive financial support as a result of this.” The same provincial report found that senior officials within the police, border police and NDS have links with drug traffickers and facilitate the safe transfer of drugs from districts, using border police and national police vehicles.

Although in December 2010 a senior police officer was sentenced by the US-sponsored Criminal Justice Task Force (CJTF) to ten years in prison for aiding drug traffickers in western Afghanistan and an appeal court of the task force upheld the conviction of the border police commander who was fined 14,000 USD for abusing his official authority (he was responsible for control of Badghis, Farah and Herat border crossings and misused his position to help traffickers smuggle narcotics to Turkmenistan and Iran; see Pajhwok news here), it is unlikely that the drug network was severely upset or damaged. On the contrary, the increase in the cultivation area and the expected output in Badghis may indicate that the province is becoming an even more significant drug trafficking centre, with its own drug networks that have established and developed their own contacts with groups operating in Central Asia and Europe.

A grim prospect for Badghis

The increase in opium poppy cultivation in Badghis may have not triggered a national alarm, as the whole 2016 UNODC Opium Survey went almost unnoticed. But it serves as a case study of how a forgotten and far-flung province has been slipping from both the government’s control and agenda. The small amount of aid and the uneven distribution of it between the province’s districts, the growing insurgents’ presence in its northern part and Ismail Khan’s policy of keeping it isolated from resources certainly have made poor and remote Badghis the most miserable province in the west of the country. This unrewarding position, nevertheless, also made it fertile ground for burgeoning local organised criminal groups and flourishing drug trafficking that cut across ideological and political lines. (9)

If, however, the trend of planting more opium at the expense of wheat is to continue, Badghis could face the fate of Farah province, which had only one year of wheat surplus in the last ten years and a corresponding increase in poppy cultivation and in insurgency. Farmers in Badghis may have done better in financial terms by planting more opium in 2016, but in the long run this will have a devastating impact on local agriculture.

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Joyce Maxwell.

 

(1) The overall area used to farm opium poppy in Afghanistan increased by 10 per cent, from 183,000 hectares in 2015 to 201,000 hectares in 2016, according to the UNODC 2016 Opium Survey. Although this did not reach the record high of 2014 (when an estimated 224,000 hectares were planted with opium poppy), the 2016 cultivation levels are among the three highest recorded in Afghanistan (after 2014 and 2009, with 209,000 hectares). UNODC also recorded small decreases in traditional poppy growing provinces such as Helmand and Kandahar (by 7 and 3 per cent respectively). The larger 2016 acreage was coupled with better farming conditions, too. These included better crop rotation in Helmand province (poppy cultivation inside the former Food Zone, which ended in 2012, increased by 11 per cent in 2016), which in turn resulted in a higher yield per hectare (the average opium yield amounted to 23.8 kilograms per hectare; 30 per cent higher than in 2015) and an increase in overall production.

(2) According to a report received by one of the authors from a Herat-based western source then, Zaher Naebzada was “shot.”

(3) The Barcelona-based International Catalan Institute for Peace (ICIP) estimated that Spain invested over three billion Euros in military and around 460 million Euros in development spending in Afghanistan in the period from 2005 to 2013 (see here).

(4) Ghormach district has been an insurgency stronghold for decades. Control over it had already been contested by stiff mujahedin activity during the 1980s Soviet occupation which was reported on frequently in the regime’s press, as AAN co-director Thomas Ruttig remembers. When the government of Dr Najibullah held parliamentary elections in April 1988, as part of his ‘national reconciliation’ (Ashti-ye melli) programme, he reserved parliamentary seats in several districts for mujahedin representatives in an (ultimately unsuccessfully) attempt to lure them over into a ‘coalition government.’ Ghormach was one of those districts, indirectly indicating strong mujahedin presence.

(5) Some reports indicate large-scale human rights abuses, including rapes, in Badghis in 2003 during a conflict between the two warlords (see this 2010 Chatham House paper).

(6) According to UNODC, which consults with the government on provincial boundaries for its opium survey, official administrative transfer of Ghormach district to Faryab province is expected to take place in 2017.

(7) According to the UNODC Opium Survey 2016, “[T]his year no eradication was carried out in western region with exception of one hectare in Nimroz province.” The total eradication of opium poppy countrywide decreased by 91 per cent in 2016, to 355 hectares.

(8) Opium poppy cultivation in Badghis was first reported in 2000. The province had a poppy-free status in 2001, when the Taleban proclaimed a total ban on poppy cultivation that was widely heeded. (For more informed view on the Taleban ban, see this 2011 AAN thematic report, with SWP Berlin think tank, by German scholar Citha D. Maass on Afghanistan’s Drug Career. The cultivation made a comeback in 2002 and until 2004 remained under 1,000 hectares (in 2002, 22 hectares; in 2003, 170 hectares; in 2004, 614 hectares).

(9) Drug trafficking across ethnic, ideological and political lines has been an established practice for the past 20 plus years. It had already been documented during the civil war between the Taleban and the Northern Alliance in the late 1990s, when opium produced in Taleban areas was trafficked through Northern Alliance–controlled areas (see UNODC Afghanistan Opium Poppy Survey 2000).

 

Germany led in Europe in almost all categories of incoming refugees and asylum applications in 2015 and 2016, both in absolute and relative figures. Roughly six out of ten migrants who came to Europe ended up in Germany. Afghans were strongly represented in all those categories. This prompted the German government to change its 2015 asylum policy, which was widely seen as generous overall, towards more rigidity. It even applied specific measures to make the country less attractive for Afghan refugees, with the aim of decreasing their number. It also took the lead in pushing the Afghan government to readmit rejected asylum seekers. This made Afghans – in contrast to Syrians, Iraqis and Eritreans – ‘second class asylum seekers’, finds AAN co-director Thomas Ruttig in this last of a three-part dispatch series. At the end, he draws some conclusions from all three parts of this series.

All statistical data on Germany in this part of the dispatch are from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (German acronym: BAMF) and the 2015 Migration Report of the federal government, published in December 2016, unless stated otherwise.

The research for this dispatch is funded by the Kabul office of the German foundation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and is a part of a dispatch series for a joint publication with FES. See also the paper ‘We Knew They Had No Future in Kabul”: Why and How Afghan Families Decide to Leave’ that was part of an earlier project with FES.

The figures

The number of Afghans who came to Germany to seek asylum in 2015 and 2016 officially stands at 202,668 (154,046 or 14.0 per cent of all arrivals for 2015 and 48,622 or 15.1 per cent for 2016). These figures, however, are based on the data from a special computing system called EASY, introduced during the 2015 peak influx (and known to be prone to shortcomings, such as double registrations), and had to be corrected in September 2016. Then the German government revised the figure for all asylum seekers that arrived in 2015 from 1.1 million to 890,000, downwards by around 20 percent (media report here). Replying to an AAN query, the spokeswomen of the interior ministry explained by e-mail that on 16 January 2017, “It is impossible, unfortunately, to specify the figure of the 890,000 according to individual nationalities.”

This means there is no reliable total for how many Afghans actually came to Germany in 2015. What can only be assumed is that it is likely also lower than the 202,668 calculated above; if the 20 per cent error margin was used, this would put the number closer to 160,000. (1) The government’s 2015 Migration Report has only 94,902 Afghans “settling” in Germany that year, a category that includes asylum seekers. (The net increase was even lower, at 89,931, indicating a registered outmigration of almost 5,000 Afghans in the same year.) For the other groups that fall into that category – labour migrants, family reunions, students and others, including so-called local employees who had worked for “German authorities” in Afghanistan (this includes the army, intelligence and civilian authorities) (2) – only 1,423 visas were granted by the German embassy in Kabul in 2016 (by mid-November). From that it can be concluded that an overwhelming majority of the almost 95,000 Afghans that “settled” in Germany in 2015 were asylum seekers – but again this number differs from the EASY system and BAMF figures published.

The number of Afghans who formally requested asylum probably reflects the extent of the rise of the Afghan diaspora in 2015/16 more correctly: the total for both years is 158,394. (It is likely, though, that it includes some who had come into the country before the 2015 migration peak and used this cover in an attempt to legalise their stay. Others might not have applied yet.) While the numbers of Afghans applying for asylum was relatively low in the years immediately before 2015 (2013: 8,240 cases; 2014: 9,673 cases), a large Afghan community of 126,334 persons (figure from 2009) already was in the country. It included many who had fled from war and a series of repressive regimes in the 1980s and 1990s (see here), but around 40 per cent of them (49,081) had already received a German passport by then, showing the degree of integration into German society. Remarkably, these Afghan immigrants did not have to face the high degree of anti-immigrant hatred exhibited in 2015/16.

According to recent official figures, Afghan citizens living in Germany numbered 246,954 by 30 September 2016 – this includes everyone with a permanent residence permit (6.6 per cent) or any type of temporary residence permit (71.0 per cent). (3) More than one third (91,359) were children under 18 years of age. From these figures can be concluded that between 2009 and 2016 the net growth of the Afghan community in Germany (including all asylum seekers) was 120,000 people.

In 2015, around one fifth of the Afghans arriving throughout this year (31,382) were able to formally apply for asylum. This led to a large backlog of Afghans (and other nationalities) registered in the EASY system but not yet officially asylum seekers; the German authorities started processing their number only in 2016. Therefore, while 48,622 more Afghan asylum seekers entered Germany in 2016, the number of Afghans applying for asylum rose to 127,012 in the same year (17.6 per cent of all countries of origin), including newcomers from 2015 and 2016 and older cases. (Already 364,664 asylum cases were pending from all countries of origin by 31 December 2015; the accessible Eurostat data does not contain pending cases per country of origin.)

The number of Afghan first asylum applicants stood at 158,394 at the end of 2016 – the second largest group among all countries of origin after the Syrians. Among those Afghan applications, 4,744 were unaccompanied minors in 2015 and 7,509 in the first half year of 2016. This was the highest number among all countries of origin. (There is no country-specific data about this category in the reports for the entire year of 2016, see also here)

Of the 2015 and 2016 Afghan asylum applications, altogether 74,212 were decided upon in the first instance in both years. In 2015, 5,966 Afghan asylum cases were decided in the first instance, (4) while this number rose more than tenfold to 68,246 in 2016. But despite this rise, more than half of all applications were still pending.

In 2015, 2,842 of those cases ended positively; 48 Afghans received full political asylum, 1,660 refugee status, 325 subsidiary protection and 809 were granted Abschiebeverbot (temporary leave to stay; a literal translation from German sounds even stronger: “ban from deportation”). Although Abschiebeverbot legally is not a protection title and therefore can be revoked on short notice, it is officially counted under the “protection rate” (Schutzquote). This added up to a protection rate for Afghans of 47.6 per cent in 2015. (This rate had been 47.9 per cent in 2013 and 46.7 per cent in 2014.)

In 2016, not only absolute figures but also the protection rate rose significantly. Of the 68,246 Afghan cases that came to a decision, 38,090 ended positively (80 with full political asylum; 13,733 with refugee status; 5,836 with subsidiary protection and 18,441 with Abschiebeverbot), leading to a protection rate for Afghans of 55.8 per cent. (5) The latter was still well under the average rate for all countries of origin: 62.4 per cent. Altogether, the cases of 25,636 Afghan asylum applicants were refused in 2015 and 2016 while those of 7,644 others were decided “in other ways.” (This legal category mainly refers to “Dublin cases.”) (6) Human rights NGOs in Germany argue that those cases should not be counted for the “protection rate,” as they are not decided upon on substantial reasons but finalised procedurally only. Doing so, this rate would raise for Afghans from the official 55.2 to 61.5 per cent. Why this is relevant, we shall see below.

At the same time, as a result of the reintroduced border controls, the number of migrants who were refused entry into the country at its borders rose in 2016. The Federal Police reported 21,200 cases, but no countries of origin were given. An earlier report covering the first half of 2016, with 13,324 such cases, said that every fourth person was an Afghan, including, according to another media report 458 under-age persons, “most of them” from Afghanistan.

Slowing down Afghan cases

At the end of 2016, 417,076 asylum applications from all countries of origin were pending in Germany, a rise compared to a year earlier. (A large number of these cases are likely remaining from before the peak influx in the second half of 2015; there were already 150,257 pending cases – from all countries of origin – at the end of 2014.)

Almost one quarter of all first-instance pending cases (101,382) were those of Afghans, the largest number among all countries of origin – and clearly (by 40 per cent) above their percentage among all asylum seekers. Afghans also had a relatively high number of pending follow-up cases (1,474 in the second and third instance) at that time. This resulted from a government decision to prioritise cases that were easy to decide (from countries that either were declared safe – with a likely rejection – or those with a high acceptance quota such as Syria and Eritrea). Afghanistan fell between, leading to a situation where relatively few Afghans cases were decided and where the duration of an Afghan case was almost three times that of the overall average in March 2016: 15 versus 5.2 months (reported here). That led to a series of 560 legal actions for failure to act submitted by Afghan asylum applicants in the first quarter of 2016.

Afghans were also the largest national group in 2016 among asylum seekers who ended up with a form of ‘lower quality’ protection, ie subsidiary protection (5,836 cases) and Abschiebungsverbot (18,441), indicating that they found it more difficult to receive full political asylum or refugee status according to the Geneva Convention. Full political asylum was awarded in only 80 (around 0.1 per cent) and refugee status in 13,733 (around 15 per cent) of all Afghan cases (68,562) that were decided in 2016. (7)

The German-Afghan migration ‘agreement’

To decrease numbers of asylum seekers in general, the German government did not only take steps to keep refugees away from its own borders – for example by initiating the EU-Turkey deal – it also adopted various measures to make asylum in Germany less attractive. Legislation governing asylum, residence and integration has been tightened twice since October 2015. Several states reintroduced compulsory residence for asylum seekers. As a result, they are restricted to looking for accommodation in a limited area on an already tight market, and they lose social welfare if they violate the new regulations. This provision also prevents them from moving in with relatives outside their ‘area of residence’. A third legislation package that included plans to further reduce in-cash support for individual asylum seekers was rejected by the upper house of parliament on 16 December 2016. In Afghanistan itself, the government (like the Australian and the Austrian ones) launched campaigns to discourage more Afghans from leaving the country.

With its bilateral ‘readmission’ agreement with the Afghan government – signed on the same day as the EU-Afghan “Joint Way Forward” framework document, 3 October 2016 – the government in Berlin opened the way to more ‘returns’ of rejected Afghan asylum seekers. The agreement is called “Joint Declaration of Intent on Cooperation in the Field of Migration,” but its text has not been published (AAN has seen a copy in English). AAN also has learned in Kabul that the Afghan government had asked that the document not be called an “agreement,” as in that case it would have to be submitted to the Afghan parliament where approval was far from sure – see the events around the Swedish agreement mentioned in part 1 of this series (see also here).

In their agreement, both governments stress that they see “voluntary return” as the “preferred way of fulfilling the obligation [of rejected asylum seekers] to leave the country” and commit to protect “asylum seekers and refugees rights” according to international law. Germany further guarantees that it “will continue to grant protection to those (…) who are entitled to it under German law.” At the same time, both sides agree “that effective enforcement measures need to be taken in a timely fashion, if the voluntary return does not take place within the given time limit.” The agreement also states that voluntary returnees “will receive all available benefits from current programmes” and “will have the right to apply for any future return programme.”

The agreement indeed sounds as if the German federal government wants to push Afghan asylum seekers to opt for voluntary return (and the – not too generous (8) – attached financial incentives) even before their cases are definitely decided, including the appeal option that is open to each applicant when rejected in the first instance. The threat behind it is clear: Leave and take the assistance offered before you are rejected and returned without any assistance. This approach is heavily criticised by non-governmental organisations in Germany. In 2016, 3,159 Afghans in Germany took this option.

Afghanistan: Safe for deportations?

Starting in late 2015, the German government singled out the Afghans for particular treatment. This has to do with widespread Afghanistan fatigue in Germany’s political class, parts of the media and the public. Federal interior minister Thomas de Maizière, who is from chancellor Angela Merkel’s party and has the lead in her cabinet on migration-related issues, put it into words when he stated on 28 October 2015 (my transcript and translation from a video, here)

German soldiers and police contribute to make Afghanistan secure. Much development aid went to Afghanistan. So one can expect that the Afghans stay in their country.

In the same press conference, he called it “unacceptable” that Afghans were the second largest group among incoming migrants (at that point this was true for all of Europe, but not for Germany where they were still only the fourth largest group). At a meeting of EU interior ministers on 9 November 2015, he announced, “We want that the signal gets to Afghanistan: ‘Stay there! We will send you out of Europe (…) directly back to Afghanistan!’” Later in the same month he stated: “When you deport, more people also depart voluntarily.” (see here)

This approach is based on a combination of two assessments by the government of the situation in Afghanistan that are, however, challenged by many in Germany. This includes members of Merkel’s own government and MPs who belong to the smaller social-democrat coalition partner and governments of some of Germany’s federated states (the Länder), not to mention NGOs and the opposition.

The government’s first claim is that Afghans have “low chances to stay” (geringe Bleibechance) in Germany, based on its decision that such a definition applies for any nationality of asylum seekers with a “protection rate” of under 50 per cent in the previous period of six months (formerly one year). Afghans, between 2013 and 2015 had a rate of (just) below 50 per cent (but above it in 2016). This method is sharply criticised by non-governmental organisations working with asylum seekers. The biggest of them, Pro Asyl, says that a “sociological” grouping of immigrants prejudices the outcomes of their cases and, as a consequence, undermines the constitutional principle that asylum cases need to be decided on an individual basis – an accusation that the government vehemently denies but which plenty of cases prove to be true (see remarks about the “Memorandum for a Fair and Accurate Asylum Procedure” below).

Secondly, the German government projects Afghanistan, at least in part, as a country safe enough to receive rejected asylum seekers. This is doubted, significantly, by a number of governments of the German federated states (the Länder) and challenged in the “Memorandum for a Fair and Accurate Asylum Procedure in Germany” (see here) published by Pro Asyl and 11 other social, human rights and legal organisations in late 2016. The authors state, among other things, that “changes in legislation and political directives influence decision making by the [BAMF], while the situation in the particular countries of origin did not significantly change.” In their view, it should be the situation in the country of origin and individual circumstances in each case on which decisions about asylum are taken, not domestic political considerations.

Meanwhile, the December 2016 terrorist attack in Berlin, the October 2016 rape and killing of a young woman in Freiburg by an Afghan immigrant and the July 2016 amok run by a young Afghan in a train increased pressure to deport “criminals” among the asylum seekers. (9) Now, the threshold for deportation is rather low at times, as shown in the case of an Afghan who was scheduled for deportation after he was fined for throwing a beer mug during a brawl at a local festival (without injuring anyone) (see here); it is not clear whether he has already been returned. Among the 60 Afghans on the first two charter flights, in December 2016 and January 2017, of involuntary returnees was a number of criminals, according to the German government, but it gave no further details. As German media reported, the Afghan authorities were not made aware of this fact.

Afghans as ‘second-class’ asylum seekers

This government policy has contributed to a political climate in which Afghans are increasingly seen as not fully entitled to protection and as economic migrants, not refugees fleeing from war. Susan Fratzke of the Migration Policy Institute Europe, headquartered in Brussels, said, “There’s definitely a distinction being made, at least in the public mind, [about] nationalities who are considered to be ‘legitimate,’ as refugees.” This is reflected by the treatment of Afghans by local administrations that, under the German federal system, deal with the accommodation of asylum seekers and their inclusion into measures furthering their integration, such as through language courses which, in turn, are key prerequisites for gaining access to the job market if granted protection. (10)

There are plenty of reports in the German media, by NGOs and the still large number of volunteers that Afghans are increasingly excluded from such measures. The northern port city of Stralsund, for example, has moved Afghan refugees “for organisational reasons” out of apartments back into mass accommodation facilities (see here). In the state of Bavaria, the interior ministry issued a regulation in late 2016 that limits the hand-out of work permits for asylum seekers from countries with a “low chance to stay.” Volunteers from the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and from areas around Munich have even told the press that some local authorities have actively started withdrawing already granted work permits “particularly from Afghans and Pakistanis.”

Inequality in the treatment of Afghans (and others) also extends to the BAMF, the governmental authority under the federal interior ministry that evaluates and takes decisions about asylum applications. The memorandum already quoted above lists a number of such examples:

• asylum seekers being inadequately informed about their rights and duties;
• asylum seekers having insufficient access to legal advice and representation;
• speeded-up procedures blocking effective access to due process and negatively impacting accuracy and fairness in the process;
• BAMF officials not fulfilling their fiduciary duty vis-à-vis applicants;
• hearings being held in an “interrogation-like” atmosphere;
• personal circumstances of applicants being insufficiently considered;
• officials “not approach[ing] the hearing objectively and without bias”;
• translations being inexact, harming the applicant’s chances of success; and
• the “use of text modules” in hearing verdicts, showing that decision-takers did not sufficiently consider individual cases.

There were cases, the authors further wrote, with “improper deliberations in rulings that led to the suspicion that responsible BAMF officials were aiming from the beginning to reject the asylum application.” (11)

Also the renowned Hamburg-based weekly Die Zeit, in in-depth research into the German asylum practice vis-à-vis Afghans, published in November 2016, quoted an anonymous BAMF staff member as saying that “it is politically desired that now many Afghans are rejected.”

Furthermore, Pro Asyl calls the German authorities’ behaviour an “unofficial but systematic strategy of discouragement.” It also accuses them of deliberate “duping and wrongly advising” asylum applicants in order to make them take the ‘voluntary’ return option (quoted here). This seems to work: Now that almost 3,200 Afghans have ‘voluntarily’ returned in 2016 (tenfold the 2015 figure), one fourth of those 12,539 Afghans “required to leave” (see here) – the official term for finally rejected asylum seekers – could already be outside the country. (The categories, however, do not fully overlap; various media reports speak of individual Afghans who gave up before they had fully exhausted the legal asylum procedure and particularly the option to appeal.) NGOs such as Pro Asyl warn asylum seekers not to prematurely throw away the chance to be granted protection.

Even media leaning to the conservative side, such as Focus magazine, called the result of the German asylum policy a “two-class society among refugees”.

A climate of fear and doubts

All this has created an atmosphere of fear among Afghan asylum seekers. Volunteers in Hamburg, for example, told AAN that young Afghan men, particularly, were leaving jobs and vocational training “and going underground, saying ‘this does not make sense anymore if we are deported anyway.’” There are recurrent reports about suicide attempts, linked with the December 2016 deportations but also during previous individual, then abolished deportation attempts (media reports here and here).

The government’s approach needs to be put into the context of the domestic policy debate before the upcoming general elections in September 2017 and a situation in which, for the first time in decades, an anti-immigrant party looks prone to enter the federal parliament, the Bundestag. Particularly because the German-Afghan ‘readmission’ agreement will unfold simultaneously with the election campaign. Its text stipulates that in an “initial phase of six months (…), it is necessary to limit the number of returnees per flight for involuntary return operations (…) to 50.” This covers the period from the date of signature, 2 October 2016, to 2 April 2017. Although no frequency for the flights is explicitly stipulated for the initial phase, the agreement allows the number of flights and returnees to increase from April 2017 onwards.

Immediately after the agreement with Afghanistan was signed, minister de Maizière sent a letter to the interior ministers of the Länder (the states in Germany’s federal system) ( see here) demanding its implementation “without delay (…), now that we have a considerably better base to work on.” But it took till December for the first flight to depart, as some Länder refused to cooperate. One of the main reasons is that they are sceptical about the federal government’s assessment of the security situation in Afghanistan and, as a consequence, of the feasibility of enforced returns. The first return flights, however, were preceded by the revocation of an informal Abschiebestopp (leave to remain; see here) that had been in force for rejected Afghan asylum seekers for over ten years, agreed upon by the Interior Minister Conference of the Länder. In late 2015, under pressure from the federal interior ministry – and its description of parts of Afghanistan as “sufficiently secure” – individual states declared the Abschiebestopp over, starting with social democrat-governed Hamburg. (Hamburg, a port city, traditionally has the largest Afghan community in Germany.) Other states, however, publicly stated that they would stick to their decision to not support ‘involuntary returns’ of Afghans. These reportedly include Berlin, Rhineland-Palatinum, Lower Saxony, Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein. Anne Spiegel, Rhineland-Palatinum’s minister responsible for integration, said in November 2016, “I continue to look at deportations to Afghanistan with extreme scepticism because of the security situation there” – indicating a lack of trust in the federal government’s assessment.

In November already, the German Länder Interior Minister Conference had urged the federal government to update its Afghanistan assessment “in cooperation with UNHCR and IOM.” The resulting UNHCR report (only available in German, here) contradicted the government’s assessment in “diplomatic but nevertheless unambiguous words,” as one German newspaper wrote. IOM’s official answer is not known yet, but its director general, in an interview with a German newspaper in December 2016, supported the government’s stance. Following this ambiguous outcome, Schleswig-Holstein’s interior minister urged his Länder colleagues to temporarily renew the Abschiebestopp until the assessment of the Afghan situation has been clarified.

Will Germany treat Afghans fairly again?

Now it remains to be seen whether the latest development, particularly the rise of the Afghans’ 2016 protection quota to over 50 per cent, will have political repercussions and restore fair access to integration and language courses, work permits and access to jobs and vocational training for Afghan asylum seekers. An analyst of a large NGO working in the field who asked AAN not to be named quoted contacts in BAMF as saying that the agency had so far processed Afghan families’ applications who have a higher chance of recognition but that currently – since December 2016 – hearing of single Afghan men are being held and that BAMF therefore expects the “protection” rate to steeply drop again. Therefore, he was told, “it was not worthwhile” to change the “bad chances to stay” assessment for Afghans. The federal interior ministry also told the Dari programme of Deutsche Welle radio in early December 2016 that the 2016 increase in the “protection rate” would not result in a reopening of the doors of integration courses for Afghans. Publicly –in answer to an oral question in parliament on 17 January 2017 – the government’s spokesman was more diplomatic and said that this question is currently “considered.”

Some conclusions

The dropping number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe after the peak in the second half of 2015 reflects that the combination of closed and reinforced borders, tightened laws, lowering standards of humanitarian and integration measures and their treatment as ‘second-class asylum seekers’ in some countries, a general atmosphere of discouragement for incoming Afghan migrants and the system of readmission agreements has worked, from governments’ point of view. The EU-Turkey deal has particularly affected Afghans while it did not work on Syrians. This is demonstrated by the over proportional drop in the number of incoming Afghans in 2016, particularly from March onwards. But these measures have not stopped Afghans fleeing their country in general; the difference is that Afghans do not reach Europe easily anymore. Many might have been discouraged from starting the long, dangerous journey with its uncertain outcome while others are stuck at the closed borders with no – or a much more difficult and dangerous – way forward, and no willingness to go back. Particularly for those migrants, conditions have considerably deteriorated. AAN colleagues Martine van Bijlert and Jelena Bjelica have described this in detail from Serbia (their most recent dispatch here).

The general drop in incoming asylum seekers in 2016 in Germany has had a side effect. According to Günter Burkhardt, the chief executive of Pro Asyl, the largest German NGO working on migration, “in Germany now accommodation facilities are standing empty, while in Greece refugees live in the streets and often even do not get the chance to register their asylum request.” This shows that also Germany fails to show solidarity with other EU countries, despite its better general performance compared to most others.

In Afghanistan’s case, the on-going exodus (not only) to Europe reflects an unchanged – and partially even worsening – general security situation in the country. The combination of a lack of security and fears of an uncertain future, after four decades of war, continue to motivate people to leave (see AAN analysis from our project with the FES here). Under these circumstances, deportations to Afghanistan are highly problematic. This is indirectly reflected in the policies of European governments who have, in 2015 and 2016 annually carried out less deportations to Afghanistan in the previous years.

Nevertheless, the support for voluntary returnees – that covers a short transition period at best – and the even lower support for the forcibly deported show that the multi- and bilateral readmission agreements that declare that integration programmes should be set up have not translated into visible action yet at this point. They also cannot substitute for still needed comprehensive and long-term political and financial investments to remove the main trigger of the exodus, the on-going war, and to address the underlying socio-economic causes of it. Not least, this will require the Afghan state to drastically improve its own performance vis-à-vis its populace.

 

The earlier parts of the FES-funded AAN dispatch series are:

• Fazal Muzhary and Jelena Bjelica, “Afghan Exodus: Can the Afghan government deal with more returnees from Europe?” 31 October 2016

Afghan Exodus: Can the Afghan government deal with more returnees from Europe?

• Noah Arjomand, “An Afghan Exodus: Smuggling networks, migration and settlement patterns in Turkey,” 10 September 2016

Afghan Exodus: Smuggling networks, migration and settlement patterns in Turkey

 

 

(1) As already stated in part 1 of this dispatch series, the German government nevertheless continues to use the uncorrected figure in the annual asylum report for 2016, published in January 2017 (see here). The most recent migration report, published in December 2016, contains the correction.

(2) According to the report, 771 visas for Afghan local employees were granted in 2015, adding up to almost 2,000 persons, including family members.

(3) The category for the remaining 22.5 per cent (“others”) is not explained but it can be assumed that these are asylum seekers with pending cases. Afghans living in Germany illegally obviously are not covered here; AAN also has not come across any figure or even estimates.

(4) Surprisingly enough, the federal government gave completely different figures for 2015 in an answer to a parliamentarian query in November 2016, namely 31,902 decided cases, ie five times more than in the BAMF annual report. Also the data for 2015 in the related table on p 21 does not add up at all.

(5) The figures for under-age Afghans in the first half of 2016 were as follows: Decisions were made about only 331 cases; in 98 cases refugee status, in 25 subsidiary protection and in 112 Abschiebungsverbot was granted. This results in a protection ratio of 71 per cent. 38 applications were rejected and 58 closed otherwise, based on the Dublin provision or other regulations. Processing those cases took 10.6 months on average – while the average for all under-age cases stood at 7.4 months.

(6) Those NGOs particularly challenge the inclusion of the so-called Dublin cases, as this pushes the protection rate down, as these cases do not involve a “substantial” decision (ie whether the applicant is entitled to any form of protection or not) and, when included, strengthen the percentage of cases that did not end with a form of protection. They suggest that an “adjusted protection rate” is used instead that excludes the Dublin cases altogether. This would have brought the protection rate for Afghan over the 50 per cent threshold already in 2015 and put them in the category of good “chances to stay” instead of bad ones, with all repercussions for integration.

(7) At the same time, the number of Afghan asylum applications started dropping significantly in the second half of the year: from the peak in August 2016 (19,840 applications) to 14,434 (September), 5,351 (October), 2,937 (November) and finally 1,822 (December) – ie their number went down to less than 10 per cent within half a year. It was not clear whether this was due to a new procedural approach or because the number of Afghans without an asylum application was exhausted. Refugee legal activists, however, told AAN that German authorities had prioritised the cases of families, which also explains the increased protection rate, and that they now were preparing to process the (larger number of) cases of single men in what is expected to result in a much lower protection rate again.

(8) Under the IOM-managed REAG/GARP programme (see here), for Afghans transportation costs by plane is covered or travel assistance of 200 Euro per adult/youth and 100 Euro per child under 12 years of age can be paid. An IOM official spoke of about 700 Euros in cash at the airport before departing Germany when talking to AAN; additionally BAMF compiles a list of persons eligible for additional financial support in Afghanistan through the IOM office in the range of an equivalent of 800–2,500 Euros, s/he told AAN. According to REAP/GARP, voluntary returnees can also apply for start-up cash of 500 Euros per adult/youth and 250 Euros per child under the age of 12 – with a maximum amount of 1,500 Euros to families that are so-called “Dublin cases,” ie are “required to leave” not to their country of origin but to the EU country where they had been first registered upon entry.

(9) Current law already provides that those asylum seekers are exempted from protection from deportation whose presence is a threat either “to the security of the country” or “to the general public.” Now some politicians (not only from the neo-populist right wing) suggest allowing deportation for minor offenses, including repeatedly riding public transport without a ticket or breaching limitations of residence.

(10) A Swiss study has found (based on quantitative research of cases between 1994 and 2004 in this country, quoted here) that a long duration between the asylum application and the decision about it “significantly reduces” the likelihood of finally accepted asylum seekers to find a job.

(11) Many of the shortcomings pointed out in the NGOs’ memorandum were already mentioned in an earlier version in 2005 and, the authors stated, have therefore to be considered “structural deficiencies in the German asylum procedure.” They add that “over-long” procedures in individual asylum cases did “not only exist since the rise in the number of asylum applications” in 2015.

The situation and number of Afghan migrants in Europe differed from country to country in 2016. The division lay, roughly, along the Alps. To the south, the number of incoming migrants, though still high, dropped but requests for asylum continued to rise in some countries. Living conditions, meanwhile, deteriorated sharply. To the north, much fewer new Afghan migrants arrived – particularly after the March 2016 EU-Turkey deal on migration – while the number of asylum requests also grew in certain countries while they fell sharply in others. The general treatment of and sentiment towards migrants became less generous. Among those Afghans stuck along borders in the south or threatened with deportation in the north, hopelessness has been growing. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig gives an overview. (See part 1 – on figures, trends and a changed environment here: Afghan Exodus: Afghan asylum seekers in Europe (1) – the changing situation). Part 3, a case study of Germany, will follow in two days.)

The following colleagues provided detail, mainly about their home countries: Kaisa Pylkkanen (Finland), Fabrizio Foschini (Italy) and the Guardian’s Sune Engel Rasmussen (Denmark); AAN colleagues Martine van Bijlert (Netherlands), Kate Clark (UK), Jelena Bjelica (Serbia, Romania, Croatia and Hungary) as well as Sari Kouvo and Ann Wilkens from the AAN advisory board (Sweden).

The research for this dispatch is funded by the Kabul office of the German foundation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and is a part of a dispatch series for a joint publication with FES. See also the paper ‘“We Knew They Had No Future in Kabul”: Why and How Afghan Families Decide to Leave’ that was part of an earlier project with FES.

The situation for Afghans in Mediterranean countries

As a result of tighter border controls and stricter migrations policies, many refugees are now stuck between the almost hermetically closed outer borders of the EU as well as between individual EU countries. A significant number of them are Afghans; most of them are now stranded in Turkey, Greece and Serbia. (The countries on the Iberian peninsula do not play a role here as they are too far from the main entry route across the Aegean Sea in the eastern Mediterranean region.)

Turkey

Turkey hosted between 111,000 and 160,000 Afghan migrants in the summer of 2016. (1) As AAN reported in September 2016, they came with different strategies and aims. Many thousands of them have stayed in Turkey and built an expatriate community that both aids and exploits those passing through. Some of them diversified their ‘business’ following the EU-Turkey deal, branching out into a broad array of activities, from renting out accommodation and arranging jobs for their compatriots, to drug-running. Others have opted for legal resettlement in Turkey. The country operates several ‘deportation centres’, including in Pehlivanköy in the European part and Erzurum on the north coast (see here) as well as in the extreme east, near the borders with Syria and Iran. Access for UNHCR, journalists and volunteers is limited.

Greece

Greece has become one of the main victims of the EU’s failure to develop a distribution system for arriving asylum seekers among its member states. While more asylum seekers arrived in 2016 (although in lower numbers than in 2015), only a small number of them were relocated to other EU countries (for more figures, see part 1 of this dispatch).

As a result of this failure – as well as the fences built along parts of its Turkish land border near the triangle with Bulgaria – there were 63,000 migrants stuck in Greece as of December 2016, 49,000 of them on its mainland in over forty camps. Around 3,000 of the total were children. Accommodation facilities are overcrowded, with people sleeping outdoors and many without access to drinking water. This is particularly the case on the Greek islands near the Turkish coast from where most of the Afghan migrants in 2015 crossed over into the EU, but also in the capital, Athens. (This website has some vivid visual impressions about the situation on the Greek mainland) It has been repeatedly reported how under-age refugees, among them Afghan boys, have been forced into the sex trade. The EU, according to this report, does not want Greece to ferry any migrants to its mainland, as this could be interpreted as a reopening of the Aegean route.

The overcrowded conditions have led to several riots in camps, growing tensions with parts of the local population and attacks by anti-immigrant groups. According to a media report in December 2016, 13,000 of those registered in Greek refugee camps are unaccounted for and could have slipped further north into Europe, according to European immigration officials. At the same time, there is still a wide array of volunteer support for the migrants (see here and here).

Again, there is no official data on how many Afghans are among the migrants in Greece (read here or here). The number of Afghan asylum seekers was relatively low, along the 2015 figure which was 1,545. (2) But given what is known, Afghans make up a more significant number of those staying there.

According to the UNHCR, one measure by the Greek asylum authority was important “for Afghans in particular”: a re-registration campaign that was started on 8 June 2016 open to those who entered Greece between 1 January 2015 and 20 March 2016. As a result, over 15,500 asylum-seekers on the Greek mainland received temporary cards, valid for one year, that allow them to reside legally in Greece while awaiting a final decision on their asylum applications. It also gives them the right to access services and should help identify those eligible for family reunification or relocation. The particular importance for Afghans point to their significant number, but also to their dire situation as, according to the UNHCR, the initial entry documents of most of them, known as “police notes,” had expired. As a result, their presence in Greece had technically become illegal, which could have resulted in arrest and possible deportation. A likely result of this was that Greece had the second largest number of Afghans voluntarily returning to their country in 2016 after Germany; this number rose from 152 in 2015 to 1,257 in 2016, according to IOM figures.

Many Afghans are thought to have applied for these cards mainly to avoid possible deportation to Turkey, as many still aim to travel onwards if the chance arises. Deportations from Greece to Turkey have, however, not happened – apart from a few exceptions – as Greece does not consider Turkey a safe third country.

Italy

In Italy, Afghans have not even been among the top 10 nationalities of asylum seekers since 2012 (here, p 89). Their numbers have grown steadily, however, over the last few years, peaking in 2015 with 3,975 applicants. The closure of the Balkan route in early 2016 stopped that trend again. Asylum requests by Afghans per month fell from 665 in January 2016 to 118 in August. Although their number started to grow again in later months, altogether fewer Afghans are likely to have applied for asylum at the end of 2016, compared to 2015.

Numbers of Afghan asylum seekers may be relatively low, however the recognition rate for them in Italy is high (over 97 per cent in 2015, with 3,280 Afghans granted protection). Most of the Afghans arrive and apply for asylum in north-eastern Italy. Trieste, and on a smaller scale Udine and Gorizia, on the eastern border with Slovenia, host a comparative majority of Afghan refugees. (3) Afghan asylum applicants usually wait around six to nine months before their asylum hearing. After the recognition, the duration of state support can vary from a few days to more than a year, depending on the area and the type of reception facility the refugees are hosted. (4) Some Italian prefectures allow them to remain in the reception system with the same benefits granted before the hearing for up to six months after the recognition, while others urge them to become fully independent the very day they are issued their asylum documents. Only a fraction of those who receive the protection can, once they exit this primary reception system, access specific projects known as SPRAR, that provide refugees with additional state support of up to one year and spread across the country.

In addition to the Afghans who travel directly to Italy, there is a sizeable back-flow of “Dublin cases” (5) from central and northern European countries. The BBC reported in September 2016 that in the northern province of Udine alone, there had been about 5,000 migrants entering from Austria since the start of that year alone, “about 90% of them… from Pakistan or Afghanistan and “the overwhelming majority” young men. Most of these Dublin cases eventually obtain protection in Italy, at the price of longer waiting times and considerable stress over the fear of being sent back if there is another country of first entry, from where they would often face a further deportation to Afghanistan.

For the most part, Afghans asylum seekers in Italy were until now transitory refugees many of whom, even after they had obtained their asylum documents, continued to try to reach Scandinavian countries, Germany or the UK. Apart from some early Hazara refugees who came in the 1990s, Italy does not have a large Afghan diaspora into which substantial numbers of newcomers could easily integrate and access the job market. Although this may slowly be changing, especially in big cities such as Rome or Milan, these communities’ capacity may not be sufficient to accommodate the growing number of Afghans with Italian asylum documents who have returned in the last two years after facing increasing difficulties in finding residence and work – even informally – in other European and who, in Italy, are now quickly being exited from the reception system.

Serbia

Serbia hosted between 6,200 and 10,000 migrants by the end of November 2016, as more continued to arrive despite the closure of the Balkan route in early 2016 (see AAN reporting here). By 31 October 2016, the Serbian Asylum Office had registered 10,201 individuals who expressed their intention to seek asylum, of whom 4,447 were Afghans. According to Serbian policy, a foreigner can express “the intention to seek asylum”; s/he is then “recorded” (rather than registered). The asylum seeker then needs to report to an asylum official or asylum centre within 72 hours to register the actual request (see also here).

A recent media report from Belgrade said that, according to the local branch of Save The Children, on average 100 additional refugees had entered the country per day throughout December 2016, many of them Afghans. In total 40 per cent were children and one quarter of these children were unaccompanied; an estimated 75 per cent of the unaccompanied children came from Afghanistan. The newspaper reported about a group of children who were respectively three, nine, ten and eleven years old. In August 2016, it was reported that “a hunter” in Serbia had shot a 20-year old Afghan refugee who had illegally crossed the Bulgarian border.

UNHCR Serbia, in its updated report of December 2016, said it and its partners had “encountered” around 6,900 refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants in the country. Over 5,500 (ie 80 per cent) were accommodated in thirteen governmental facilities, while the remainder were sleeping rough in Belgrade’s city centre or at the border with Hungary. UNHCR Serbia estimates that 25 per cent of the former (ca 1,500) are Afghans, while they constitute a majority of the latter (ie at least 700).

Bulgaria

Bulgaria, where a small part of the border with Turkey has not yet been fenced, has become one of the last entry points into the EU from Turkey. But it is not an easy access route. The Politico blog called the country “Europe’s most hostile port of entry.”

By November 2016, Bulgaria reportedly had 13,000 migrants within its territory, “most of them Afghans.” There is a growing number of reports about sub-standard government facilities for them as well as about maltreatment by security forces. Human Rights Watch, Oxfam and other organisations have reported how Bulgarian law enforcement officials subject asylum seekers to violence at the Turkish, Romanian and Serbian borders; refugees regularly report beatings and dog bites, having their money and personal belongings stolen and a “lack of adequate food and unsanitary conditions” in detention facilities. A number of migrants AAN encountered in Belgrade in June and November 2016 reported similar incidents (see reports here and here)

The Bulgarian government, like the Hungarian government, further condones paramilitary vigilante groups, some of them self-employed, others funded by the government, which hunt illegal migrants. These groups even attract activists from other EU countries’ right-wing nationalist groups and are regularly accused of violence against migrants.

In November, riots broke out at Bulgaria’s largest camp, Harmanli, near the Turkish and Greek border. It was inhabited, at that point, by 3,000 people, most of them reportedly Afghan. The place had been beset by anti-immigrant groups, and the authorities had reacted by curbing the migrants’ right of movement. Following the riots, the Bulgarian government took a number of measures to lower the number of migrants. Similarly to Greece, Bulgaria started urging incoming migrants to apply for asylum upon arrival. As a result, applications increased by 82 per cent from the second to the third quarters of 2016, to an absolute figure of 6,365 – almost half of the new applicants (3,145) coming from Afghanistan. It also started pushing for a bilateral readmission agreement with Afghanistan that would allow it to send back rejected asylum seekers. According to media reports, Bulgaria cooperates closely with Turkey: Turkey takes back refugees who pass the bilateral border illegally, are picked up on the Bulgarian side and immediately returned. It is unclear which refugees are allowed in to request asylum and which are immediately returned.

Romania

EU member-country Romania did not play much of a role as a transit country, as long as the Balkan route was open. Reaching Romania via Bulgaria would require crossing the River Danube. Throughout 2015, 96 Afghans filed an asylum application there, out of a total of 1267 applicants (see here and here). Figures dropped even further in 2016, with only ten Afghans applying in each of the first and the second quarters, and 30 in the third quarter of 2016.

Romania could potentially become part of a secondary route, due to the daily changes in the movement strategies in the Balkan countries, as it has not yet closed its borders. Romania – in line with Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – voted against compulsory EU reception quotas for asylum seekers in September 2015 (see here for political background). On a national level, however, measures were taken to raise the capacity on the border and to offer basic supplies as well as medical and humanitarian aid, in case more migrants started coming.

Croatia

Croatia was a major transit country along the Balkan corridor, but has become relative quiet again following its closure. There is some permeability at the border between Serbia and Croatia (see AAN reporting here), but only a small number of Afghans applied for asylum in Croatia in 2015. Of the six who did so in 2015, four were rejected, one was give refugee status, and one case seems to be pending. In 2016, the number of applications rose to 370 (first to third quarter).

The central divide: Austria and Hungary

Austria and Hungary constitute a divide between the south and the north, but at the same time the Balkan route extends into both countries. Both countries were among the top receivers in 2015 and were still processing large numbers of that year’s asylum seekers in 2016. Hungary adopted a very harsh attitude to prevent new arrivals from coming in, while Austria took a comparatively more moderate stance (more detail on legal changes in part 1: here). Germany also belongs in this group (more detail in the case study in part 3).

Austria

In 2015, Austria received the fourth-highest number of asylum applicants (88,900) from all countries of origin (see here), following Germany, Sweden and Hungary. In 2016, although numbers of all asylum seekers – including Afghans – dropped, it remained the fifth largest recipient country, and the second largest for Afghans in terms of new asylum requests. It was unclear how many of these large numbers of individuals ended up staying in the country; in 2015, half of all migrants entering Austria subsequently left the country again, according to official government figures.

Numbers of Afghan asylum applicants went down by more than half, from 24,480 in 2015 (among them 4,000 unaccompanied minors in the first half of the year alone) to 11,289 by the end of November 2016. The number of unaccompanied minors dropped particularly sharply, to 287. Afghans – of whom there is a 35,000-strong community in Austria – are relatively well integrated. 3,800 of them (11 per cent) had a taxable job, ie one not in the low-wage sector, in mid-2016.

Hungary

Hungary, in 2015, received a total of 174,400 asylum applications – the second-most of any European country – of which 45,600 came from Afghanistan. Most of those who had entered Hungary in 2015 never intended to stay, transiting Hungary on their way to Western Europe, without ever registering.

In 2016, Hungary dropped out of Europe’s top ten, receiving 28,803 asylum applications, 38 per cent of them from Afghans (almost 11,000) (source: here). This decrease was largely a result of Hungary’s decision to fence its entire southern borders (with Serbia and Croatia) to implement toughened laws that, in essence, violate EU legislation. In July 2016, a new law came into force that allows the Hungarian police to automatically ‘push back’ anyone who is caught within eight kilometres of the border – without registering their data or allowing them to submit an asylum claim. In early 2017, the government introduced mandatory detention for all migrants that begin the asylum procedure.

Of the 2015 applicants, only 146 were granted asylum, according to government statistics quoted in this report. Another 362 were permitted to stay, but unlike recognised asylum seekers, they do not receive state subsidies. The comparatively low number of asylum applicants given by Hungary is very likely limited to those who managed to enter illegally, were caught and then asked for asylum.

With the border closed on the Serbian side, Hungary has still allowed a small ‘opening’ through which migrants can enter to apply for asylum – but in very limited numbers and under extremely harsh conditions. Since October 2016, a decreasing number of migrants – currently 20 migrants per working day (a maximum of 100 per week, down from originally around 700 per week) – are allowed to register an asylum request at the Horgoš and Kelebija border crossings. The process prioritises families with children and unaccompanied women, as they have the greatest chance of success, while largely overlooking single men (who constitute the majority of Afghans in Serbia). The number of overall asylum cases registered in Hungary amounted to 1,610 cases in the third quarter of 2016, dropping significantly from the first (6,830) and second quarters (14,915).

These asylum claims at the border can, according to Human Rights Watch, be dismissed under Hungarian law without any consideration of the merits of the case, and often are, within the space of a single day, since Hungary has declared Serbia a safe third country – so far, the only EU country to do so. In early 2017, reports emerged that migrants were being kept in the ‘no-man’s land’ right next to its fence in freezing temperatures.

Afghans in selected ‘northern’ EU countries

After the closure of the Balkan route and the implementation of the EU-Turkey deal in early 2016, the number of asylum seekers – and Afghan among them – dropped significantly in the EU countries north of the Alps. This includes the three Nordic EU member-countries, the three Benelux countries and Austria, all of which had registered particularly high numbers in 2015, as large numbers of migrants were ferried through the Balkans and into the EU.

In the northern and some north-western EU countries, the numbers of Afghan asylum seekers dropped significantly between the fourth quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. This seems to have been a result of both border controls reinstated in late 2015 (while further south, mainly in Germany and Austria, migrants continued to arrive in large numbers) and, possibly, a more speedy registration process than in 2015. Between 2015 and 2016, numbers in Finland decreased by 89 per cent, from 4,300 to 490; in the Netherlands by 69 per cent, from 1,950 to 600; in Denmark by 58 per cent, from 1,680 to 620; and in non-EU Norway by 97 per cent, from 4,905 to 150. Over the second and third quarters, these figures dropped even further: in Finland to 60 and 80; in Norway to 80 and 85; in Denmark to 280 and 130; in the Netherlands to 170 (third quarter figures were not available, as Afghanistan was not in the top-five countries of origin anymore). The same was true in Sweden, although on a higher level, where numbers dropped by over 90 per cent, from over 41,500 in total in 2015 to 2,969 in 2016.

Sweden

Sweden closed its borders and tightened its asylum laws in general leading to a general drop in asylum applications, including from Afghans. The 2016 figure of Afghan asylum seekers was closer again to the 2014 level when 3,104 Afghans lodged such an application. The January 2017 this figure was at 193 applications, suggesting that the 2016 level has stabilised. In the peak year of 2015, Sweden had a particularly high number of Afghan minors who applied for asylum. These 23,480 cases represented more than half of all Afghan cases (see earlier AAN analysis here). This figure dropped to 665 in 2016.

Asylum seekers in Sweden from 2010 to 2017

Between January and October 2016, in 44 per cent of Afghan asylum cases, residency permits were granted. For January 2017 (with 669 cases decided) this rate was almost unchanged at 45 per cent. In the same months, the acceptation rate for minors was at 82 per cent (with 191 cases, Afghanistan representing almost half of all 439 asylum cases of minors). By 1 February 2017, the country had altogether 36,895 Afghans living in the reception centres of the migration authorities, among them 17,195 unaccompanied minors. (Find a table showing the number of Afghan asylum applicants in the country between 2000 and 2015: here)

A reassessment by the Swedish government of the security situation in Afghanistan (in the form of a directive from the migration authority, see here), however, concluded that security had deteriorated overall, but that the conflict affected different parts of the country and different population groups in different ways. At the same time, the Swedish publish perception about and compassion with Afghans in Sweden has deteriorated due to the involvement of Afghan asylum seekers in some highly publicised crimes, including battering and sexual offences (media reports here, here, and here).

For some in the particular group of unaccompanied minors, the government brought improvements on the way in 2016. It suggested that the minors whose asylum applications had been rejected and who would be deported when they reached 18 years of age, could stay to finish their secondary schooling (see here). They would also be granted residency if they had been able to find employment. By the end of November 2016, around 1,600 asylum applications by minors were approved, while around 500 were rejected. The government’s suggestion would only apply to those who were already in secondary school. The suggestion needs parliamentary approval. By the end of November 2016, around 1,600 asylum applications by Afghan minors were approved, while around 500 were rejected. This indicates a substantive backlog of such cases that still need to be processed.

The tighter asylum laws in general, together with increasing tendency by the asylum authorities to carry out age reviews resulting in ‘minors’ being re-defined as ‘adults’ and thereby eligible for deportation, has put increasing pressure on young, Afghan asylum seekers. The fact that some of the Afghans resided in Iran before attempting to seek asylum in Sweden, but will be deported to Afghanistan if their asylum claims are rejected adds to the pressure. Groups working with asylum seekers, including the non-profit organisation Ensamkommandes förbund and the network of Vi står inte ut have warned against depression, suicide attempts and suicides among especially young, Afghan male asylum seekers. Reuters reported about one case of a young Afghan already last year. In April 2016, Mustafa Ansari committed suicide in the centre for young asylum-seekers in the southern Swedish village of Svangsta. The report said: “Ansari, who had no papers […] was described in the autopsy as 17” and that “he was suffering from depression and bipolar disorder. Friends say he desperately missed his family. He waited months for a meeting to process his claim, but the agency cancelled one meeting and messed up the venue for the other” (see here). Later in 2016, one of the main Swedish newspapers, Dagens Nyheter reported that close to 40 per cent of the unaccompanied minors (many of whom are Afghans) seeking psychiatric support with health services in Stockholm had suicidal thoughts. Reuters quoted Swedish migration agency records that showed asylum-seekers threatened or attempted suicide at least 500 times between January 2014 and end-August 2016.

The trend has continued in 2017. Ahmad Zaki Khalil, an Afghan working with asylum seekers in Sweden told the BBC’s Farsi service on 8 February 2017 that the three last suicides happened in January, and on 4 and 7 February. He was quoted as saying that he believed the lack of papers that proof they were minors might have been the reason for the three youth’s suicides. On 9 February 2017 the website Norway Today quoted Mahboba Madadi from Ensamkommandes forbund as saying that “in recent weeks, seven people attempted to commit suicide and three of them succeeded. They were all from Afghanistan, all boys […]. The migrants were all under 18 and were at different housing centres across Sweden. Khalil was quoted as saying he believed that the lack of papers proving their status as minors may have be the reason for the recent suicide attempts. In early February, the Swedish mainstream daily Göteborgs-Posten (one report here) raised an alarm that the suicides were not only planned individually, but that “group suicides” among “refugee children” were planned over social media.

Netherlands

The Netherlands had a relatively low number of Afghan asylum seekers. During 2015, a total of 2,680 Afghans requested asylum (6.0% of all 45,035 cases) according to government figures. This number includes first-time asylum requests (2,550), repeated requests (310) and requests for family reunification (85). In 2016, until 30 November, the total number of asylum requests had dropped by more than half, to 18,695, while Afghan cases decreased slightly less by percentage – to 1,345 (7.2%). Of these, 1,010 were first requests, 335 were repeated requests and 50 were family reunifications. Afghan asylum seekers were, for a brief while, in the Dutch top three countries of origin in the first quarter 2016 (with 600 applicants), whereas they were not even among the top five throughout 2015.

With around 44,000 people, the Netherlands hosts one of the largest Afghan communities in Europe. There are 33,058 (76%) first generation arrivals, while 10,674 (24%) are second generation, meaning they were born in the Netherlands (this figure is from 1 January 2015). The Netherlands (together with Germany) hosts a relatively high proportion of the PDPA elite, many of whom left Afghanistan in the 1990s. Due to a strict implementation of article 1F of the Refugee Charter, all Afghans who worked for KhAD, the intelligence service under the communist government, or who are otherwise suspected of having been part of a chain of command responsible for torture, have been blocked from receiving asylum. The Dutch government has, over the years, tried to deport several of these Afghans. There have been several cases of trials for alleged war crimes (see AAN analysis here).

The Netherlands has a specific policy in place for ‘westernised girls’ who come from countries like Afghanistan: girls over ten years of age, who have not been given a protection status but who have spent at least the last eight years in the country and who are now so westernised they would face problems if returned, can be allowed to stay, together with their families (this is, however, not a given rule; decisions are taken on a case-by-case basis). This policy came into being in 2011, after an upheaval over the intended deportation of a teenage Afghan girl. The Dutch minister responsible for asylum policies estimated in April 2011 that, at the time, there were around 400 girls who might match this criteria.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom remained relatively untouched by the massive 2015/16 influx of migrants, due to its geographical position and to earlier efforts to deter migrants (made after peak numbers of asylum applications, circa 84,000, in 2002, see here). However, for many refugees, the UK was their destination of choice. Thousands of them gathered at the mainland entrance to the Eurotunnel, near the French city of Calais, seeking to illegally board lorries and trains (here a media report where this resulted in an Afghan fatality). This included many Afghans, among whom a proportionally large number were minors. In October 2016, the UK took in 750 children, including many Afghans, from an unofficial camp near Calais known as the ‘Jungle’ when it was closed by French police amidst violent protests. This was highly unusual. The UK normally only accepts claims for asylum from people who have reached Britain.

Between January and September 2016, the UK had registered the highest number of asylum applications of all nationalities in the first three-quarters of a year since 2004, with a total of 33,960. This is a reflection of the Europe-wide developments since 2015. Although relatively few migrants reached Britain compared with other countries, there was still a noticeable boost in UK numbers. In the fourth quarter of 2016, this trend ceased, though, with numbers lower by more 25 per cent compared to the second quarter of the year (from 10,231 to 7,146).

Those seeking asylum in the UK are encouraged to make a claim as soon as they arrive. Decisions usually should take a matter of weeks. While waiting for an asylum decision, there is no automatic state support. Those whose bids are successful are given ‘refugee status’ or, if the application is on human rights grounds, ‘humanitarian protection’: they have the right to work and claim state benefits as well as to seek family reunion (not available for under 18 year-olds). After five years, if it is still considered unsafe for applicants to return to their country of origin, they can apply for ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ in the UK.

Those whose claims are rejected can appeal in a hearing before an immigration judge. If that is rejected, they can usually only make a second appeal if they can present fresh evidence. If a claim is rejected, people are expected to make arrangements to leave the country, or they may be forcibly deported.

The number of Afghans among asylum seekers in 2016 was low compared to other countries, with 2,567 applications, around 7.5 per cent of all applications, but this still made them the fourth largest group (they had ranked only sixth a year earlier, in September 2015). Among unaccompanied, asylum-seeking children, however, as in Sweden, Afghans represented the largest national group, with 783 cases registered by September 2016 (circa 25 per cent), out of a total of 3,144. Many, perhaps most of those had come from the ‘Jungle’ in Calais.

France

France is also an outlier in the trend in 2016, as the number of asylum applicants did not drop as in most other European countries. Throughout the year, it had constantly had the third-highest number of overall asylum applications per month between 6,120 and 7,655. As a result of Europe-wide events, Afghanistan was back in the top ten of France’s main countries of origin in 2015 (ranked at number ten) with 2,122 registered Afghan “requests for international protection” in total; the protection rate was high, with 80.3 per cent. In 2014, Afghanistan was still on rank 31, with only 472 Afghans claiming protection (see here, pp 6, 37, 42, 54). In 2015, Afghanistan also was the most important country of origin for asylum seeking minors (14.6%) for France.

In its 2015 annual report, the French asylum authority OFPRA accredited the increase in asylum applications from Afghans also to the influx into the Calais ‘Jungle’ and Paris. When these camps were shut down in 2016, those inmates not allowed in by the UK were forced to apply for asylum in France. Also, as AAN heard in Italy, many Afghans prefer France over Italy as a destination, also due to relatively high recognition rates for Afghans. This contributed to the increase of Afghans applying for asylum. Their figure by the end of the third quarter in 2016, 4,455, already surpassed the 2015 total. According to IOM figures, 118 Afghan asylum seekers returned voluntarily to their country from France in 2016 (2015: 9), and there were no forced returns from France since 2009.

A brief outlook

With numbers of incoming migrants having dropped significantly, many European countries have speeded up the processing of the large backlog of asylum requests (1.2 million in total), while requiring those still not registered to do so. It can be expected, therefore, that the overall number of rejected asylum seekers will continue to grow. Although all applicants have the right to appeal, which, if exercised, would extend the duration of their stay considerably, also the number of Afghans with a last instance rejection will grow; as a result, the numbers of returns – voluntary or not – is likely to grow throughout 2017.

For those stuck between closed borders in southern and south-eastern Europe it has become almost impossible to reach their favoured destinations north of the Alps, mainly Germany, northern countries or the UK. If the EU remains unable to agree on a distribution quota for all countries, and with the Dublin regulation increasingly being applied again, the danger of so-called ‘chain deportation’ arises once again. If some countries chose to deport asylum seekers across outer EU borders (as Hungary does in the case of Serbia), they might once again end up in the country they had tried to flee from. The German Institute for Human Rights had already warned this might happen in a position paper published after the EU-Turkey deal was concluded – not only for Syrians (pushed back by Turkey to Syria), but also explicitly for Afghans (working translation by AAN):

For non-Syrian asylum seekers, who, for example, had fled from Afghanistan or Iraq, there also is the danger that they might be deported from Turkey back to their countries of origin, in breach of the Geneva Refugee Convention and the European Human Rights Convention.

Italy and Greece, both in economic crisis, will continue to have to carry the biggest share of the burden of accommodating asylum seekers. This might further strain their social systems and possibly result in a negative change of attitude among larger parts of the population vis-à-vis the migrants, with comparatively small but vocal xenophobic movements already active.

 

(1) An AAN dispatch by guest author Noah Arjomand in September 2016 pointed to UNHCR statistics according to which there were 3,109 Afghan refugees and 107,655 Afghan asylum seekers in Turkey at the end of July 2016. A July 2016 report by Amnesty International (AI) report said that “Turkey hosts more than 400,000 non-Syrian refugees“ while a European Parliament document from December 2016 estimated that 40 per cent of non-Syrian refugees in Turkey were Afghans. Putting these two figure together, that would bring the number of Afghans in Turkey to over 160,000.

(2) Eurostat only publishes the top three countries of origin for each EU member-state per quarter. There, Afghanistan was in the top three for Greece only in the third quarter (with 670 applications); in the first and second quarter, Afghanistan had less than 480 resp. 620 applications.

(3) One unlucky Afghan asylum seeker was killed in the summer 2016 earthquake in Amatrice, in central Italy.

(4) In Italy, there is no uniform reception system. Governmental first reception centres can be managed by public local entities, consortia of municipalities and other public or private bodies specialised in the assistance of asylum applicants (more detail here).

(5) This term refers to asylum seekers in the EU who, according to a EU regulation, can be sent back to their first EU country of entry (if registered there) in case they apply for asylum elsewhere. This regulation was adopted in Dublin in 2003 (see more here).

 

 

 

 

In 2016, Afghans remained the second-largest group both of migrants seeking protection in Europe and of those formally applying for asylum. Meanwhile, numbers of arrivals – both in general and in terms of Afghans – have dropped significantly, compared with the peak in late 2015, as European countries have since made getting, staying and integrating there more complicated. Numbers of asylum applications widely differed between European countries. Furthermore, the EU and individual member states put agreements in place with the Afghan government that allow “voluntary” and “enforced” returns of larger numbers of rejected asylum seekers. In this first part of a three-part dispatch, AAN’s co-director Thomas Ruttig looks at the latest figures and trends as well as changes in policy and social climate that impacted the situation for Afghan asylum seekers in Europe. This will be followed by an overview of the situation in a number of individual European countries (part 2) and a case study on Germany, the largest recipient country in Europe for refugees (part 3). The last part will also draw some conclusions.

Unless stated otherwise, all statistical data on the EU in this dispatch is from Eurostat (see here and here), in order to maintain compatibility. The term “asylum applicant” refers to first-time applicant. Applicants have the right to file a follow-up application if personal circumstances relevant to their claim have changed which leads to a higher number of overall applications. 

No full set of data on Afghan migrants for all European countries is available in the Eurostat statistics. For individual member states, only the top 3 or 5 countries of origin are published, leaving out Afghans, for example, in the Netherlands, the UK or Italy in some or all quarters of 2016.  

The following colleagues provided detail, mainly about their home countries: Kaisa Pylkkanen (Finland), Fabrizio Foschini (Italy) and the Guardian’s Sune Engel Rasmussen (Denmark); AAN colleagues Martine van Bijlert (Netherlands), Kate Clark (UK), Jelena Bjelica (Serbia, Romania, Croatia and Hungary) as well as Ann Wilkens from the AAN advisory board (Sweden).

The research for this dispatch is funded by the Kabul office of the German foundation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and is a part of a dispatch series for a joint publication with FES. See also the paper ‘We Knew They Had No Future in Kabul”: Why and How Afghan Families Decide to Leave’ that was part of an earlier project with FES.

Overall figures

The overall number of arriving migrants in Europe has dropped sharply in 2016. Arrivals from non-European countries of origin to Europe – ie the 28 EU member-countries (including brexiting UK) plus the four non-members (Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein) – decreased from the 1,015,000 in the peak year of 2015 to close to over 362,000 in 2016, ie by two thirds. (These UNHCR figures – see a daily update here – only count those arriving across the Mediterranean, which is by far the most important entry route. There are no statistics about other routes where much smaller numbers of migrants can be assumed, for example through Russia.)

Of these first time applicants from all countries of origin, Germany registered just under 63 per cent, almost the same percentage as in 2015 (more detail in part 3). It was followed by Sweden (11.8 per cent), Italy (8.8 per cent) and France (5.2 per cent). Austria, Greece and the UK each had above 3 per cent; Hungary over 2 per cent; Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain each over 1 per cent. Everyone else was under 1 per cent, with Estonia and Slovakia (both 0.01 per cent) at the absolute bottom.

In the first three quarters of 2016, Germany also always had the highest rate of asylum seekers per capita of the population (2,155; 2,273; 2,945). With one exception (Austria in the first quarter) this was more than double than all runner-up countries with the next highest rates (Austria, Malta and Luxemburg; Hungary, Austria and Greece; Malta, Greece and Austria). This had still been different in 2015 when, amidst the highest absolute number of incoming migrants, it registered only a comparatively low percentage of them as asylum applicants. Then, Germany ranked fifth only in Europe – although per capita rates were far higher. Germany had 5,441, trailing Hungary (17,699), Sweden (16,016), Austria (9,970) and Finland (5,876).

The overall number of people applying for asylum or other forms of protection in Europe, after dropping by one third between the last quarter of the peak year of 2015 (with 426,000 applicants) and the first quarter of 2016 (less than 290,000), again started to rise in 2016. A total of over 951,000 was reached by the end of the third quarter according to the most recent published EU data (full 2016 figures are expected in March 2017). If the trend continues, the 2015 level of 1.26 million applicants (more than double 2014) might be reached again.

Incoming but still incomplete national data for the full 2016 year reviewed by the Asylum Information Database (AIDA) (see here) indicated contradictory trends among European countries: While an increase in asylum applications compared to 2015 was reported from Germany, Italy, France and Greece, “most other countries remain far behind Germany and reported a decrease in the number of asylum applications registered last year.”

The seeming contradiction between the drop in arrival figures and continued high levels of asylum applications reflects a situation where, in 2016, many of those who had arrived in 2015 but had not been able to formally register an asylum claim, due to their large numbers, or had avoided doing so finally registered. Also migrants who had arrived before 2015 and lived illegally in Europe may have used the opportunity to register.

Afghan figures  

1. a) Arrivals in Europe

Looking at Afghan in-migration, 43,400 individuals had arrived across the Mediterranean in 2016. In the peak year of 2015, it had been almost five times that many, some 200,000 (find an analysis of 2015 trends in this AAN dispatch). The percentage of Afghans among all arrivals across the Mediterranean Sea dropped from 20 per cent in 2015 to 12 per cent in 2016. This drop by almost 80 per cent in their absolute figures is even steeper than the average from all countries.

In 2016, almost all Afghan migrants to Europe continued to arrive in Greece. Only 349 Afghans came to Italy (0.2 per cent of all arrivals) and none to Spain. The large majority of Afghans that arrived in Greece, over 39,000, came before mid-March 2016 when the updated EU-Turkey migration deal kicked in (here the press release; officially it is called Joint Action Plan the first version of which had come into force in November 2015). After that, Afghan arrival figures in Greece dropped drastically to 1,590 between April and September 2016, ie 265 per month on average.

Relatively smaller numbers of Afghans entered Finland and northern Norway through Arctic Russia, mainly in 2015 and early 2016. The figures for Finland were 720 for 2015, compared to 28 in 2014 and 14 in 2013, according to this government website.  In January and February 2016, according to media reports, the numbers increased again to 1,000 , before Russia and Finland agreed to close their border for third-nation citizens. Norway and Afghanistan agreed in December 2016 that Kabul would take back 90 per cent of its 4,000 citizens who had crossed the temporarily permeable Russian-Norwegian border close to the polar circle in the same period. (On this, more in part 2 of this dispatch; also see this AAN dispatch). (1)

1. b) Asylum applications in Europe

The trend found above for all countries of origin – that the drop in the number of incoming new migrants in 2016 did not result in a drop of asylum applications over the same period – does also apply for Afghans. After the quarterly figure fell by more than half between the last quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016 (from 79,255 to 34,800), figures began rising again from quarter to quarter in 2016. They reached 50,300 in the second and 62,100 in the third quarter. By then, the total amount was 147,200 or 15.5 per cent of the over 951,000 first time applicants from all countries.

The number reached by the end of the third quarter 2016 indicates that, if the trend continues, the overall figure for 2015 (178,200, ie 14.2 per cent of all applicants and four times more than 2014) might have been reached again in 2016.

By the end of the third quarter of 2016, the largest number of Afghan asylum applications was registered in Germany (102,900) (2) – more than two thirds of their total), followed by Austria (10,100), Hungary (9,800), Bulgaria (6,500), France (4,500), Italy (under 3,900), Switzerland (3,000), Sweden and the UK (2,600 each) and Belgium (2,000). In the third quarter of 2016, Afghanistan featured among the top five countries of origin in 16 EU countries plus in Norway and Switzerland. In four countries, Afghanistan was the most important country of origin, although with comparatively low numbers (Austria 2,185, Hungary 1,610, Bulgaria 100 and Slovenia 70) – see here.

Given all figures above, Afghans remained the second largest ‘national’ group in both categories in 2016, arriving migrants and asylum applicants.

1. c) Decisions in Europe

The number of Afghan asylum cases that have been decided upon by member countries’ authorities even in the first instance (there is the right to appeal) remained much lower than the application figure. In the first and second quarters of 2016, decisions were reached on less than 20,000 Afghan cases; figures were picking up in the third quarter with 27,300 decided cases.

These cases still represent only around 20 per cent of the 240,000 Afghan asylum cases that were reportedly pending with the EU by mid-November 2016 – not counting the (unknown) number of Afghans who even had not had a chance or decided not to file an application.

The Europe-wide protection rate for Afghan asylum applicants was above 50 per cent throughout the three first quarters of 2016. In the first quarter, 4,215 of the 7,415 decided cases (56.8 per cent) ended positively, receiving protection status: There were 3,200 negative decisions. In the second quarter, the rate sank slightly to 53.1 per cent, based on a growing number of cases decided (12,840); 6,820 Afghans received protection while this was rejected in 6,020 cases. That gives an overall protection quota of 54.5 per cent for the first half of 2016. In the third quarter, the rate dropped to 50.7 per cent, with more than twice as many cases decided (27,300) than in the previous quarter. Large numbers of rejected asylum applications do not mean that similar numbers of people have been forcibly deported to their country of origin. In fact, countries such as Germany (until 2015) and Sweden (for some of 2016) generally categorised Afghans as ‘protected from deportation’ for humanitarian reasons, due to the on-going war. But this is now changing (see more below).

The German daily Frankfuter Allgemeine reported in December 2016, that “for no other country of origin, the recognition quota in the individual EU member-countries differed so widely” in that year as for the Afghans – “from 14 to 96 per cent.” On the other hand, as a UK government figure shows, Afghans were the nationality with the third highest number of positive decisions (6,820 or 53 per cent) in the EU as a whole in the second quarter of 2016.

The AIDA database, with incomplete all-2016 statistics, also reported general “protection disparities” and also specifically for Afghans. The range went from a 30 percent protection rate in Norway to 59 per cent in Belgium. Finland had 42.4, Sweden 45, Greece 48.8, Germany 55.8 and Austria 56 per cent. (3)

Policy changes: sealing borders

The drop in overall arrivals, and Afghan arrivals, reflects the changes in European policies. ‘Temporary’ border controls, even between EU member states, were re-introduced and are still in force. It started in September 2015 with Germany increasing checks at its Austrian border. At the same time, Hungary sealed and started fencing its borders with non-EU Serbia and also with Croatia; also Slovenia fenced its border with Croatia. Croatia did not seal its Serbian border, as in large part it is formed by Sava River and therefore difficult to cross. This was followed by similar measures taken by the Czech Republic, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, France and non-EU states Norway and Switzerland.

At the end of November 2015, authorities in the most affected countries on the Balkan route decided to allow only Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi nationals to cross their borders. This changed on 18 February 2016, when heads of the national police in Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia decided that Afghans could not pass their borders anymore. An AP journalist wrote at the time: “Suddenly, Afghans appear to be the new pariahs of Europe.” Although Germany, as the greatest recipient of Afghan arrivals, profited most from the decision, chancellor Merkel condemned the move at the time, as she realised that this would put a large burden on Greece and might undermine attempts to set up distribution quotas in the EU – which it did (see here).

A few weeks later, on 9 March 2016, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Croatia fully closed their borders to any new migrants with the implicit backing of the European Union, which announced the Turkey deal at the same time. Slovenia’s and Croatia’s announcements to return to full implementation of the Schengen Border Code had a domino effect among other countries in the region who adopted daily quotas and sought to re-establish greater border control.

As AAN reported at the time, thousands of people got stuck in Greece as well as at various other junctions along the route, with many more on the way from Syria, Afghanistan and other places. In Serbia, which as a result of these measures became an EU antechamber, approximately 800 migrants were stuck in in Preševo (near the Serbian-Macedonian border) and 600 people in Šid (near the Serbian-Croatian border).

On 20 March 2016, the EU-Turkey Action Plan came into force. It stipulated that the legitimacy of asylum claims of all new irregular migrants crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to the Greek islands would be checked there and those found illegitimate returned to Turkey. (Read more detail in this AAN analysis and in this German media report.) But this plan did not work out, as a number of EU countries refused to agree to accept a quota of those legitimate asylum seekers. The EU also did not fully live up to its commitments to send additional migration experts to Greece and even refused to send some to the Greek islands, as the situation was “too dangerous” there. Furthermore, the Turkish government decided in August 2016 to withdraw its liaison officers from the Greek islands, making the practical implementation of the deal even more complicated. It has repeatedly threatened to cancel the deal with the EU as a result of deteriorating EU-Turkey relations after the crackdown following the July 2016 coup attempts.

Although some EU member countries stuck to their commitment under the deal, only 5,875 asylum seekers entering Greece had been relocated to other EU countries by 28 November 2016, according to the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank that reportedly designed the EU-Turkey deal. The same applies for Italy (see more below), from where only 1,802 asylum seekers have been relocated. (Specific numbers about how many Afghans were among them are not available.) The combined figures for Greece and Italy only reach around 5 per cent of the original relocation target. The UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants criticised in mid-2016 that “the EU and the overwhelming majority of EU member States have abandoned Greece – a country that is fighting to implement austerity measures – leaving it to deal with an issue that requires efforts from all.” (see here) Since then, there has been no major change in this situation.

Bulgaria had already started building a fence along most of its border with Turkey in 2014. Greece fenced parts of its Turkish land border, near Bulgaria. In early December 2015, Austria began building a fence along its border with Slovenia, the first to be set up between two Schengen countries. Another fence was erected at the border crossing between Norway and Russia. (The Economist has an interactive map on this.)

For Afghans and others seeking protection, this blocked the way into Europe at the outer EU border, or at least made access to Europe more risky, costly and dangerous (see here). A number of them are trying to wait out the situation in Turkey; others changed their minds and are staying in Turkey for good (as this AAN dispatch showed). Those who had made it into Greece, but were unable to travel on via the closed Balkan route, experienced the Greek government’s increasing pressure to file an asylum application there (also a prerequisite for redistribution in the EU, demanded by Greece, which so far has not happened in any significant numbers) (4). The number of applicants in Greece rose from around 1,000 a month (up to February 2016) to over 7,500 in November 2016, reaching almost 47,000 by that month. Among the total were 3,295 Afghans, but their percentage in this group (7 per cent) is very likely way below their actual proportion of the total number of migrants currently in the country. (Here is an amazing NPR radio show about refugees in Greece broadcast in July 2016.)

A few months after the closure of the Balkan route, in summer 2016, a number of migrants – including Afghans – used what a local newspaper described as “Europe’s last needle’s eye to the North”: the mountainous and unsealed Italian-Swiss border into Switzerland or further into Germany. According to the Swiss authorities, 4,833 incoming migrants left the country via this route again in 2016, 3,385 of them to Germany. This looked like Switzerland making sure that most incoming migrants would leave the country again. Over the same period, between January and October 2016, Switzerland itself had 3,035 Afghans applying for asylum. (5)

Later, according to Swiss media reports, the country’s border police started to reject migrants at the southern border with Italy, even if they tried to request asylum. NGOs also collected cases, on the Italian side of the Swiss border, of asylum seekers who were rejected even though they had family members in Switzerland which, according to regulations, should have given them entry. Dublin cases – migrants whose entry had been registered in another EU county before and, according to EU law, can be returned there to process their asylum application – and even under-age migrants are often not processed according to the official procedures, says Schweizer Flüchtlingshilfe (Swiss Refugee Help), a leading local support organisation for migrants.

After the temporary opening and closure of the route through Arctic Russia into northern Norway and Finland in late 2015, other ‘exotic’ routes came up during 2016. The Washington Post reported that Afghan asylum applications in India had “doubled” by early 2016, compared with the year before. In January 2016, the UNHCR New Delhi Factsheet said that India hosts 13,381 Afghan refugees and asylum seekers, mostly settled in and around the capital, Delhi. Other Afghans reportedly tried to cross into the US or Canada by obtaining visas for Cuba, Mexico or other Latin American countries (see here). A German official statistic included asylum request figures as of October 2016 from other leading western countries, the US (almost 100,500), Canada (almost 37,000), Australia (over 12,200) and New Zealand (319) but did not specify countries of origin.

Policy changes: turning the trend from influx to return . . .

Following border enforcement measures, the European countries sought to reverse migration patterns from influx to return. Afghans were one of the groups that received special attention as it is the second largest group in Europe – while a number of governments claimed that the Afghan war was far less destructive than the one in Syria or Iraq and therefore Afghans were mainly ‘economic migrants’. EU and individual member states concluded a number of multi- and bilateral cooperation agreements on migration with the Afghan government. A framework was set with the finalisation of a re-admission agreement, titled the EU-Afghan “Joint Way Forward on Migration,” that was hurried to signature against some last-minute hurdles in Kabul before the October 2016 international Afghanistan conference in Brussels (see detail here; text here). The conference agenda included donor countries’ reconfirmation of financial pledges for the next phase in Afghanistan’s 2014–24 ‘transformation’ period, providing an opportunity for donor countries to pressure Kabul to agree to take back rejected asylum seekers. As AAN reported at that time, “the organisers of the Brussels conference (…) feared that failure to negotiate a readmission agreement with Afghanistan (…) would leave member countries reluctant to publicly commit to future funding.” (see also this AAN dossier) While European governments have denied using aid conditionality to achieve this aim, Afghan officials have understood it that way and told various media so (read one report from Germany’s main TV network here).

Germany, Finland, Sweden and other countries signed bilateral agreements (some of them renewed) at the same time. These agreements are designed to create conditions to allow the repatriation of larger numbers of Afghans. Although the EU and German agreements, for example, state that signatories see “voluntary returns” as the priority, they also strongly emphasise the option of “non-voluntary returns.” (More detail about the agreements in this AAN analysis. The German agreement has not been published; brief official information about the Swedish agreement can be found here and about the Finnish one here) The EU-Afghan “Joint Way Forward” even includes an option to create the logistical infrastructure to process larger numbers on arrival in Afghanistan: “Both sides will explore the possibility to build a dedicated terminal for return in Kabul airport.”

The figures for rejected Afghan asylum seekers who are legally required to leave Europe are in the tens of thousands. A draft EU paper prepared for the October 2016 Brussels conference on Afghanistan, leaked in March 2016, mentioned that 80,000 Afghans “could potentially need to be returned in the near future” from all member countries. Germany, the largest recipient country, including for Afghans, officially had 12,539 Afghans who were “ausreisepflichtig” (required to leave) (see here) in mid-November 2016. Given the over 240,000 Afghan asylum cases pending all over Europe and the average protection rate of slightly over 50 per cent, 120,000 more potential ‘returnees’ could emerge, however. That would bring the EU-wide number up to around 200,000.

Based on memoranda of understanding on returns and readmissions with several EU/Schengen member states, a number of EU and non-EU countries have been sending back rejected Afghan asylum seekers for some years already. (6)  Including the 2016 ‘return’ flights from Germany (34 deportees), Finland (three) and jointly Sweden and Norway (13 or 14, according to IOM all Afghans from Iran), between 2003 and 2016, in total 8,608 Afghans were deported to their country from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. 6,365 of them were from the UK and 1,382 from Norway. (There were also three non-European countries that have deported Afghans back to their country over the same period: Australia 10, Indonesia 1 and Oman 466.)

Number of Afghan Deportees – IOM data Returning From 2003-2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 Grand Total Australia – – – 2 – 3 4 1 10 Belgium 1 – – 9 11 2 2 3 28 Denmark 62 7 – – – – – – 69 Finland – – – – – – – 3 3 France 39 – – – – – – – 39 Germany 224 – – – – – 1 34 259 Indonesia 1 – – – – – – – 1 Netherlands 71 – 6 78 61 14 2 – 232 Norway 284 41 74 196 250 437 88 12 1,382 Oman 466 – – – – – – – 466 Portugal 1 – – – – – – – 1 Sweden 4 – – 5 74 94 26 26 229 Switzerland 1 – – – – – – – 1 UK 2,989 733 1,023 527 513 404 89 87 6,365 Grand Total 4,143 781 1,103 817 909 954 212 166 9,085

There is also an increasing number of voluntary returns of Afghan asylum seekers. Through IOM-run Afghanistan programmes, 6,864 persons returned voluntarily to Afghanistan in 2016, an IOM official told AAN. (From 2003 to 2016, there were 22,436 voluntary returns of Afghans from all countries according to IOM, so that the 2016 figure – which is almost one third of all – represents a serious increase.) Almost half those in 2016 – 3,159 persons – came from Germany. Most returns occurred in the first three quarters of the year, when on average 200 persons returned a week; between September and December this rate drop to less than 100 returns a week.

In mid-December 2016, Sweden and Germany started to put their new agreements with Afghanistan into practice. On 13 December 2016, some twenty Afghans were returned in a joint Swedish-Norwegian operation. (7) This happened despite the Afghan-Swedish agreement having run into trouble two weeks earlier, when the lower house of the Afghan parliament (the Wolesi Jirga) voted against it on 30 November 2016 (a short report here). According to Abdul Qayum Sajjadi, a member of the house’s international relations commission, a majority of MPs considered the agreement to be against the Afghan constitution and international human rights conventions as, in their view, its content emphasised deportation rather than voluntary return; the vote was 117 against 6 (no abstentions). The Swedish government rejected this view, and the Afghan government, in the person of deputy foreign minister Hekmat Karzai who travelled to Stockholm in early December 2016, ensured Sweden that Kabul would uphold the agreement, de facto overruling the parliament. Despite the parliament’s objection, the Afghan authorities authorised the December ‘return’ flight.

A few days later, on 15 December 2016, Germany repatriated 34 rejected asylum seekers by charter flight to Kabul (see here) – all men, about one third of them convicted for crimes. On the same day, according to an official letter from the German interior minister (see here) dated 9 January 2017, the Netherlands also has carried out what is called “return action.” (IOM data, seen by AAN, however, do not confirm any deportation from the Netherlands to Afghanistan in 2016 – but there were 110 voluntary returns. The minister’s letter also did not give any number.)

In Germany, the forcible return was met by public protests and intra-party controversies, even in the ruling German coalition. A number of MPs from the smaller coalition partner, the Social Democrats, the German parliament’s commissioner for the armed forces (see here) and the government’s commissioner for migration (see here) – not to mention the opposition and human rights groups – all challenged the government’s claim that Afghanistan was “sufficiently safe” to forcibly return rejected Afghan asylum seekers. These doubts are particularly strong in some governments of Germany’s federated states, that consequently refused to put rejected Afghans under their jurisdictions (deportations are in states’ jurisdiction) on the 15 December flight. The Conference of the States’ Interior Ministers, held in early December 2016, had tasked the government to update its assessment of the Afghan situation, with the support of UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration. The UNHCR’s official reply, sent to the German states on 9 January 2017, diplomatically but firmly contradicted the government’s assessment, stating that it was not in a position to distinguish between safe(r) and unsafe areas. (see here) IOM’s director general, in an interview with a German daily in December 2016, supported the government by saying that some Afghan areas were “sufficiently safe” for returnees.

The changing climate in recipient countries

Throughout 2015, the growing numbers of arriving asylum seekers put a strain on local social services, particularly in countries with a high per capita rate of arrivals; local institutions were at times unprepared or unable to cope with the influx. The mood, initially generally welcoming to refugees, seemed to have changed, to a large degree, to one of rejection. A recent poll by Friedrich Ebert Foundation, published in November 2016, showed, however, that 55.5 per cent of Germans continued to welcome the fact that Germany had received many refugees, while 86.1 per cent still agreed with the statement “People who flee from war should be received in Germany.” At the same time, 52.9 per cent supported a capping of refugees allowed into the country (in September, with a different methodology, weekly magazine Focus had 60 per cent).

The changes in the general mood and the problems local authorities faced were picked up by anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe, which were already strong or growing in a number of parliaments. Extra-parliamentarian nationalist groups, often with a violent fringe, became more vocal. These two camps partly overlap in various countries, although in different degrees. In Germany, for example, 120 arson attacks were made on asylum seeker accommodations in 2015, increasing to 141 in 2016, according to research by Berlin daily taz. In contrast, the German police (occasionally accused of turning a blind eye to right-wing terrorism) counted 66 arson and four explosives attacks for 2016. Only in 20 cases, the daily writes, did information show that the case was still being investigated.

In order to counteract voter losses, some governing mainstream parties changed their rhetoric and tightened their policies and laws on migration. German legislation on asylum, residence and integration has been amended twice since October 2015 (more detail in the case study in part 3 of this dispatch). A third legislation package that included plans to further reduce in-cash support for individual asylum seekers was rejected by the upper house of parliament on 16 December 2016 (see here).

Sweden tightened its asylum process to reach what Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, a social democrat, has termed the “EU minimum level” in asylum and migration policy (quoted here). This means, for instance, that fewer applicants get full asylum rights and only those who do have an unconditional right to family reunification. The measures are meant to be provisional, and the intention is to revert to a more generous approach as soon as the reception situation is deemed to be stabilised (see more detail in this AAN analysis). According to Swedish migration lawyers, quoted here, the Swedish Migration Board (SMB) is also using an own version of ‘safe(r) zones’ in Afghanistan, here termed regions “less influenced by war.”

Finland is the first EU country where the government practically declared all of Afghanistan – as well as Somalia and Iraq – safe for returns. It did so in May 2016, stopping short of literally calling it a ‘safe country.’ The statement of the Finnish immigration service on these three countries says:

In the past few months, the security situation has gradually improved in all three countries, although it may have got [sic] worse at times for certain specific areas locally. Due to the improved security situation, it will be more difficult for applicants from these countries to be granted a residence permit on the basis of subsidiary protection. (…) According to the Finnish Immigration Service, it is currently possible for asylum seekers to return to all areas in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia without the ongoing armed conflicts as such presenting a danger to them only because they are staying in the country.

By late 2015, Finland had already stopped giving subsidiary protection to Afghan asylum seekers from the provinces of Helmand, Khost, Paktika, Uruzgan and (additional) parts of Ghazni. It also seriously tightened asylum policies, abolishing the law that allowed for providing refugees status on the grounds of “humanitarian protection” and made family reunification more difficult. (For family reunification to be possible, the whole family now needs to be legally in Finland at the time the application is filed.) In September 2016, Afghan refugees in Finland demonstrated against what they perceived as an unfair asylum process and demanded that their cases be heard and processed according to international norms.

Denmark’s much tightened asylum laws have even been criticised by the UN, as they now include provisions for detaining asylum seekers without a court order. It also makes family reunion more difficult and involuntary return easier and allows the confiscation of asylum seekers’ money and jewellery worth more than 1,350 Euros. The country is reportedly planning even more radical regulations, in a so-called “general plan for a stronger Denmark.” According to this plan, in a “crisis situation” the government could close the border for all asylum seekers; the granting of permanent residence would be delayed (taking place after eight instead of six years) and only granted after the refugee had not claimed social welfare benefits for four years; family reunification would only be granted after 11 years and child benefits after five years; and the threshold for withholding permanent residence because of a conviction was lowered (from 12 to 6 months detention).

A case from Denmark that technically was a voluntary return and was recounted in a 2015 Guardian article also demonstrated how such a practice can go wrong. In this case, two Hazara brothers from Maidan-Wardak province (one adult, one minor) had their asylum applications rejected in 2012 and agreed, under some prompting, to voluntarily return to their country in June 2015. The Danish authorities argued that the elder could act as the younger’s guardian. Both ended up sleeping in the streets of Kabul. The younger one disappeared when they tried to obtain ID cards in their native province and was later reported killed. After that, the older brother moved to Iran and from there, as it is assumed in the article, possibly back to Europe.

In Austria, the parliament decided in June 2016 that the government could request that no new asylum applications be accepted when an annual ceiling of 37,500 was reached. A UNHCR spokesman called this “breaking a taboo,” as migrants would summarily be equated with a “threat” by this legislation. When the threshold is reached, only asylum requests by refugees with close relatives already living in the country, or who are threatened by torture or other inhuman treatment upon return, will be accepted. With 42,073 asylum requests in 2016, figures went down by more than half, compared to the 88,900 cases in 2015. But since less than two thirds of these applicants were admitted only for the asylum procedure, numbers remained under the ceiling (even with 8,800 pending cases from 2015 added) and did not trigger the new measures.

In mid-2016, the Austrian foreign minister proposed an “Australian solution” for migrants entering the EU: Keep them on the Greek islands until their cases had been decided. But this might have been part of the hard fought presidential run-off election campaign, with a right-wing populist as one of the candidates (he narrowly lost in the end).

Hungary – in 2015 the European country with the second highest number of overall (174,435) and Afghan (45,650) asylum applicants as well as the country with the highest per capita number of all asylum seekers (17,699) – took the most draconian measures to bring down the figures. Already in September 2015, it had rigorously closed its border with the main influx country, Serbia, leaving only two official border crossings open, through which small but even further decreasing numbers of migrants were allowed in (mainly families). In October 2015, the border with Croatia followed. It also was the first EU country to start entirely fencing the vulnerable parts of its border (see more detail in here and this AAN dispatch).

Overall numbers of asylum seekers in Hungary dropped to 28,803 in 2016, 38 per cent of them Afghans (almost 11,000) (source: here). On 13 January 2017, the government additionally introduced mandatory detention for all asylum-seekers with pending cases in the country in so-called transit zones. Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on the radio, “We have reinstated alien police detention in the cases of those whose application to enter Europe has not yet been legally judged.” This is against EU law, which allows such a measure only in “exceptional cases.” In early October, however, the government failed to secure a referendum vote for its proposal to close the country for all refugees; although 98 per cent of participants were in favour, participation fell short of the legally required 50 per cent threshold. In November, parliament voted narrowly against the move.

The earlier parts of the FES-funded AAN dispatch series are:

• Fazal Muzhary and Jelena Bjelica, “Afghan Exodus: Can the Afghan government deal with more returnees from Europe?” 31 October 2016 (click here)
• Noah Arjomand, “An Afghan Exodus: Smuggling networks, migration and settlement patterns in Turkey,” 10 September 2016 (click here)

 

(1) Finnish journalists and analysts told AAN they saw Russian steering behind this part of the migration movement; it ended as abruptly as it had started.

(2) As in this case, the quarterly Europe-wider figures published by Eurostat can deviate from national figures. The report of the German asylum authority for the period from January to September 2016 gives 115,342 asylum applications from Afghans. As Eurostat publishes its quarterly figures later (in the third months of the following quarter), they might be more accurate here as they seem to incorporate adjustments. In other cases, as EU sources working on asylum issues told AAN, adjusted national figures are not communicated to Brussels creating other gaps.

Another example for inconsistent figures is Germany’s overall figure for the incoming migrants in 2015: On 30 September 2016, the German government had to correct down this figure from 1.1 million to 890,000, by circa 20 per cent (see media report and video of original statement by the interior minister here). Surprisingly, however, it continues to use the unadjusted figures even in key documents published after the correction, such as its December 2016 asylum statistics report that also doubles as the annual 2016 report and its 2015 Migration Report published in December 2016 (that covers all aspects of migration).

(3) The AIDA figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt, though. 2015 protection rates for Afghans, for example for Germany, seem too high – officially the Afghan protection rate was below 50 per cent there. AIDA has probably used adjusted (excluding Dublin cases) figures for 2015 and unadjusted figures for 2016.

(4) By mid-December 2016, only 6,461 refugees – instead of the 66,400 envisaged – had been redistributed from Greece to other EU member states, according to MSF Germany (quoted here).

(5) In 2015, Switzerland had 7,831 Afghans applying for asylum (5,902 in December alone), making Afghanistan the second largest country of origin for that year (up more than tenfold from 747 applications in 2014; see here) and representing 19.8 per cent of all applicants for 2015. Switzerland also has a significant Afghan community. Currently 1,194 accepted Afghan asylum seekers are living in Switzerland, 4,074 have been granted temporary protection and 12,194 others are still in the process (see here, all figures third quarter 2016).

(6) These countries were: France (2002), UK (2002), Netherlands (2002), Denmark (2004), Switzerland (2005), Norway (2005), and Sweden (2006, valid until 2009) (see AAN analysis here).

In the UK, the Court of Appeal had ruled in March 2016 that ‘removals’ to Afghanistan could be resumed after a temporary halt. Between 2007 and 2015, the UK had already “removed” 2,018 formerly unaccompanied Afghan minors, after their asylum applications were rejected and after they had turned 18, as this 2016 media report had revealed. Sweden had also temporarily halted deportation for some months in 2016.

According to a 2015 masters paper at a Norwegian university (“Unintended Consequences of Deportations to Afghanistan”; not available online, hard copy with the author), Norway started increasing involuntary returns to Afghanistan from 2006 onwards, also including families with children since 2013. Between 2006 and 2014, Norway carried out 762 (37%) “assisted” and 1,299 (63%) involuntary returns.

In July 2016, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court decided that Afghan refugees could not be returned to their country involuntarily. According to December 2016 Swiss media reports, however, an Afghan family with three small children that had been returned to Norway by Switzerland, based on the Dublin regulation, ending up being notified that they would be involuntarily returned to Afghanistan if they did not leave voluntarily.

According to the head of Frontex, the European border management agency (Frontex personnel were also on board the flight with which rejected Afghan asylum seekers were returned from Germany in January 2017), altogether 42 per cent of rejected asylum seekers from all countries of origin are deported from the EU.

(7) Different figures were published. The Guardian reported that “13 Afghans were forcibly returned from Sweden (…). That flight also carried nine Afghan citizens from Norway.” The German interior minister, in a letter dated 9 January 2017, mentioned altogether 27 Afghans on board (not online, quotes here).

 

The Taleban appear to have woken up to the importance of organisational symbols and their political meaning. Compared to how little they cared about their image during the 1990s and the initial years of the insurgency, the Taleban now project an increasing consciousness of their ‘brand’. This is seen in both their media and the actions of fighters and officials on the ground. Borhan Osman traces this change through one phenomenon – the Taleban’s use of their flag.

This piece is part of series looking at the Taleban in transition. Read previous pieces of this series: here, here, and here. This dispatch discusses the heightened importance that the use of the flag has gained among the Taleban as a possible indicator of the movement’s increased self-awareness of its political brand. It first describes the different fields in which the Taleban now assertively showcase their flag and then analyses the apparent reasons for this.  

The proliferation of the flag: from the Qatar office to the battlefield

One area where the Taleban’s sense of a political identity has become most visible is in the use of their flag, which has a white background inscribed with the shahadah, the Islamic statement of faith and sometimes, also, the movement’s official name, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The flag is now on display wherever there is a Taleban presence. This is in sharp contrast with the movement’s years of rule.

During the 1990s, the core of the emerging Taleban movement was drawn primarily from the students of village madrasas who had rarely had any exposure to concepts of protocol used by modern political organisations. Neither fighters or commanders wore uniforms or carried symbols of affiliation. Their clothing was that of any other man from the south ­– black turbans, worn by most men in provinces such as Uruzgan, and loose trousers with particularly long shirts, again normal for southern Pashtun village men. Former fighters recalled in conversations with the author how, on the frontlines, they would have been at risk of losing track of where their own territory ended and that of their enemies began had it not been for the fact that Northern Alliance forces were more distinctively clothed and had flags. The same attitude continued when the Taleban insurgency began around 2003. Until around 2009, as per the author’s observation, it was hard for a stranger visiting the countryside to tell government-controlled from Taleban-controlled territory, unless the Afghan national flag was flown on a government building or armed Talebs were physically in sight. Telling the two sides apart has now become much easier.

In hindsight, the opening of the formal Taleban office in Qatar in 2013 was a landmark moment. For the first time since their fall, the Taleban opened a formal office, in the Qatari capital Doha in June 2013; it was intended to become the movement’s first public face to the world. The office’s opening, with official Qatari hosting and United States endorsement, amounted to some kind of political recognition for the Taleban after they had fought for more than a decade against adversaries – the Afghan government and its foreign backers – who labelled them as mere malcontents and terrorists. The Taleban celebrated the opening of the office as a step in this direction and one towards victory. However, the Afghan government was furious at the way the office was presented to the world as that of some sort of ‘alternative government’ during the inauguration ceremony. At the heart of the dispute was the Taleban’s white flag and the office’s insignia which bore the inscription ‘the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the official name of the Taleban as a movement and its name for the country before it lost power.

Qatari officials, under pressure from Kabul and Washington, lowered the flag and removed the insignia. The Taleban officially closed the office in protest. Although the office has remained de facto open, with officials running their operations not so covertly, the movement’s drastic reaction underscored the value it attaches to its brands of identity, the flag and the name – given how closely it links these to its claim of legitimacy. The proliferation of the flag, however, continued, on the ground and virtually.

The first thing that catches a visitor’s eye when entering ‘Taleban territory’, these days, is their white flag. They are planted on landmarks, such as the rooftops of mosques, the public squares of villages and schools and along major travel routes. When insurgents capture new areas, no matter how small or large, one of the first things they do is mark it by planting their flag. According to the author’s observation and accounts by local residents, in places such as Wardak, Helmand and Ghazni, where the Taleban-controlled territory lies only a stone’s throw away from the bases of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the flags of the two conflicting parties fly almost side by side. At least that is how it looks from a distance.

Nowadays, according to consistent accounts from local residents living in Taleban-controlled areas in a number of provinces (for example, in Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Paktika, Ghazni and Nangarhar), Taleban squads rarely travel without carrying a flag even when they consist of only a few motorbikes or cars. Since the Taleban have in recent years seized many ANSF vehicles, such as the police’s Ford Ranger pickup trucks, and the army’s Humvees, the main identifier distinguishing who is driving is the flag carried. The logos of the army and the police on these vehicles are left intact, but the official tricolour flag is replaced with the white one.

In military training and marches, fighters also carry out synchronised flag waving. They carry the flag when marching, fly it over the vehicle’s flagpole in motorcades and plant it in ground if they are at a training site. These practices are not only carried out in front of the camera for the sake of recording and broadcasting, but have increasingly become part of the movement’s routine exercises in the field.

White headbands modelled after the flag have also been trending among those conducting military exercises, and sometimes, among fighters on the frontline. In some cases, small hand-written banners are pinned on the outside of homes frequently visited by the Taleban (whose residents are usually sympathisers). These banners, as seen by the author or reported by locals in Logar and Ghazni in 2016, bear slogans such as, “Long live the Islamic Emirate,” and, “Long live Amir ul-Mumenin Haibatullah Akhunzada,” and are signed by the local commander.

The use of the flag is not confined to the military sphere. Since a Taleban shadow civil administration of sorts has emerged in recent years, the white flag has also entered the ‘civilian arena’. It is an unmistakable feature in meetings with community members, conferences with education officials and other ceremonies that Taleban organise. Whether fixed or makeshift, the offices where Taleban ‘civilian officers’ work are also decorated with the flag. According to accounts from local people and videos seen by AAN, it is also put on display on the sites of construction projects supervised by the Taleban and paid for with money gathered by the movement from local residents. In 2016, these included the paving of sub-district roads in Kunduz, Baghlan and Nangarhar. In addition to being put on display in fixed sites, the flag was also flown for ground-breaking and inauguration ceremonies. This routine use of the Taleban’s flag is a marked departure from the movement’s years of rule when flags were seen ­relatively rarely and even senior officials did not necessarily have them on their desks.

What does the surge in the use of flag mean?  

The proliferation of the flag in recent years can be explained on several grounds.

First, it (possibly) stems from a sense of increased need for unity among the Taleban. That need is obvious when comparing how the Taleban operate today to how they operated during the 1990s. When Taleban were in the privileged position of comprising the state and the ruling party, it was far easier for them to stick together than now, during an insurgency when they are chased as outlaws and rebels by both ANSF and foreign forces. The flag has emerged as a powerful political symbol and an effective tool for enhancing emotional unity in turbulent times.

Second, the flag is also useful for boosting the morale of fighters. This is especially relevant on the battlefield. The more a territory is dotted with flags, the more it persuades fighters of their influence. Such prolific marking of conquered territory is also more significant for the Taleban of today than in the 1990s. During their time in government, the Taleban were in control of most of Afghanistan and their dominance was taken for granted and, away from the frontlines, rarely challenged. Today, territorial control is scattered along very localised geographical lines. Areas remain contested between ANSF and Taleban often down to the district level. Perhaps nothing else can invoke a sense of the expanding presence of the movement as easily as displaying the flag.

Third, flying the flag is a way for the Taleban to try to demonstrate to the population that they, not the government, are the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. The Taleban constantly frame their campaign as a struggle to restore Afghan sovereignty, rather than just pursuing territorial control. They consider the current government as having been illegally imposed by foreigners. Bringing back their flag is an unequivocal declaration that they are back as the ‘legitimate’ government. This is best manifested in their use of the flag in civil arenas (eg courts and construction works) that they believe signals local governance.

Fourth, the heightened emphasis on the flag arises from the Taleban’s attempts to project their legitimacy to a global audience. The movement craves political legitimacy and recognition not only among the local population, but also from a much broader audience. While it does not have an opportunity to display its flag on international platforms, with the exception of briefly when it opened its office in Qatar, it instead uses its media to showcase this primary indicator of its brand. Taleban media products are directed at various audiences, including foreign governments and nations. Be it visual media, such as films and photographs, or written materials such as magazines and website articles, the white flag is invariably exhibited in a prominent manner.

Conclusion 

The Taleban’s flag has been prominently displayed in their communications in recent years, in evident contrast with the movement’s years in rule, and in a bid to promote the movement’s political brand. The proliferation of the use of flag is based on various rationales and follows practical purposes in different contexts. In general, this is a pattern that, at a macro level, appears to manifest a notable increase in the Taleban’s self-awareness of its political identity as a distinct political force. It may also indicate the Taleban’s enhanced savviness in modern political practices and publicity techniques. This is a phenomenon that also expresses itself through several other trends as well, including the way the Taleban increasingly refer to their movement using its formal name, ‘the Islamic Emirate’, and themselves as ‘Emiratis’. It can also be seen in the concerted way a distinct political identity is promoted on Taleban media and. These other trends will be discussed in future dispatches as part of the Taleban in transition series.

 

Edited by Kate Clark, Thomas Ruttig and Sari Kouvo

 

 

As in most years, the feeling in January 2017 is that this will be another crucial year for Afghanistan. The AAN team has identified several key themes that we think it important to follow this year. They range from crises in the Afghan government and how changes in global politics, particularly the change of administration in Washington, will affect governance and peace efforts in Afghanistan, to the Afghan government’s efforts in the field of basic rights and freedoms for all and, of course, migration, both Afghans leaving and returning. The list of issues reflects the worry that, in 2017, Afghanistan will be left increasingly alone to sort out its old and new challenges, despite commitments of continued international support.

Key issues to watch in 2017:

1. Internal crisis in the government

The Afghan government has been in a state of relatively stable crisis. The set-up of the National Unity Government (NUG) and its complex power-sharing arrangements has paralysed governance in Afghanistan and this is likely to continue with several ongoing crises flaring up again in 2017.

2016 saw several attempts to reorganise the power-sharing arrangement, most recently through the removal of ministers by parliament (which has not yet been accepted by the executive); the negotiations between Balkh provincial governor and chairman of Jamiat-e Islami’s Executive Council Atta Muhammad Nur and the President Ashraf Ghani (which has, by design, undermined the position of Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah); the uproar around the alleged attack on former governor of Jowzjan Ahmad Ishchi by, or on the order of, Vice-President Abdul Rashid Dostum; and Hezb-e Islami’s demands for a greater share in power after its September 2016 peace agreement with the government.

For now, there seems to be a lull in the various negotiations, as the various actors wait to see how the United States administration will pan out and what that will mean for their relative positions. The legality of the NUG, which came into being through the mediation of former US Secretary of State John Kerry, was explicitly supported by the previous US administration. A change or a wavering on the US’s side in this regard could signal a reopening of the discussion over the legitimacy of the current government, while changes in the level of financial and/or military support to Afghanistan would affect the strength of the Afghan administration as a whole. Moreover, it is not only the US administration’s formal policies that are relevant. Equally important for the various Afghan powerbrokers, is to see who will have friends and backers in the new administration, and who will not.

Crises and conflicts in the government and the rearranging of relative power risk further escalating ethnic, religious and geographical tensions. These have, in the past year, became particularly visible around the protests over the electricity power line from Central Asia (TUTAP) and the controversy over the reburial of former king, Habibullah Kalakani. Potential future flashpoints include any attempt to sideline Dostum or to share power between three parties in government (by giving a greater share to Hezb-e Islami) or even four (by giving a share to any Taleban splinter faction that might opt for a similar peace deal). Both new parties to the power sharing equation would be overwhelmingly Pashtun.

The rifts, for the moment, are not expected to be bad enough to pull the country or the government apart. Even the Uzbeks, who are currently the most likely to be disaffected, if Dostum is further sidelined, are expected to continue to play a role in the centre as long as they can. Although the mobilising power of the overwhelmingly Hazara-based Enlightenment Movement is regarded with suspicion by the Afghan government (as well as the current Hazara leaders), the movement is not intended to threaten the centre. Having said that, the political rifts need to be taken seriously both by the Afghan and the international side, with all sides guarding against inflaming tensions further. Even if nothing worse happens, getting anything done in government will remain, of course, difficult.

The upcoming elections will continue to dominate the political arena in 2017, even though it is unlikely that the planned parliamentary election will take place in the coming year. The newly appointed Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) will need at least a year to prepare, which can only happen after the possible changes to the electoral system have been agreed and finalised (which may prove to be a further stumbling block). Ultimately, after a long period of the government insisting that the parliamentary elections will take place as soon as is possible, they may actually be further postponed, possibly to be held together with the next presidential election in 2019. In the meantime, the process of political positioning and alliance building, that precedes every presidential election, had already begun in late 2016. This will continue, and increase, throughout 2017 and 2018, probably inspiring new (whether temporary or lasting) partnerships and rifts.

2. The intensity of the war

The conflict in 2016 continued unabated, showing an increase in Taleban gains, both in territory and influence, particularly in rural areas. The Taleban are likely to seek to intensify their war effort in the coming year and seem to be gearing up to further erode the ANSF’s territorial control and morale by launching intensified and more sophisticated attacks. Alongside the fighting effort, they will probably continue to try and play the ‘soft card’ providing local populations with incentives to surrender and seeking to act as a shadow government in areas under their control or influence – focusing on sectors of the civilian arena such as taxes, security, courts and construction works. Pakistani support to the Taleban’s military effort has continued, despite a series of arrests of key Taleban figures in the autumn. That support is likely to continue in the coming year. However, the forced deportations and departures of large numbers of Afghan refugees from Pakistan may diminish the recruitment pool for the insurgency, at least from Pakistan.

The intensified war effort is likely to lead to further attrition of the Afghan national security forces (ANSF) and losses of territory. The lagging capabilities of the ANSF and the ambiguous role of pro-government ‘auxiliary’ forces (known as ‘National Uprising Groups’) in countering the insurgency, remain points of concern. Although certain units perform well, the ANSF on the whole continue to suffer from attrition, combat readiness, logistics, air power, morale, intelligence capabilities, command and control, lack of coherence and coordination, human rights violations and causing civilian casualties. Not only are the troops on the ground often not able or willing to effectively respond to Taleban attacks, they are also often poorly equipped, left to fend for themselves and faced with an unresponsive, indifferent and sometimes incompetent leadership wracked by political divisions, mistrust and corruption. There have been the first arrests of senior officers accused of fraud or corruption. A deputy to one of the deputy ministers of the interior was found guilty of taking bribes and sent to prison by the newly created Anti-Corruption Criminal Justice Centre.

On both the government and Taleban sides, there were again large numbers of casualties, with little prospect that this will let up. This may have an impact on morale and recruitment on both sides. It could also lead to a further hardening of positions and the entrenching of violence and revenge – or, more hopefully, encourage peace-making.

Whether the ANSF will be able to beat back the Taleban and prevent them from holding on to greater gains, such as key districts, roads or even provincial centres, will largely depend on the extent of sustained international military support. Vulnerable areas in this regard currently include Kunduz, Sar-e pul, Baghlan, Farah and Helmand. The increased recruitment of non-Pashtuns into the Taleban is likely to continue, both in terms of the ground troops and the leadership, providing them with a secure presence in the north.

The US is expected to, in the short run, intensify its military efforts in Afghanistan; General Nicholson, Commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, as well as the incoming US military and national security team around President Donald Trump seem poised to step up counterterrorism air strikes and focus on killing or capturing the leaders and commanders of the insurgency. This could already be seen in summer 2016 as the US military in Helmand and Kunduz (unsuccessfully) sought to kill the senior most commanders of the Taleban. This is likely to accelerate, if more members of the Taleban leadership move into Afghanistan, as a result of increased pressure by Pakistan.

The intensification of the war has led to much suffering: an increase in civilian casualties, IDPs and food insecurity. This trend is likely to continue. As UNOCHA discussed in its humanitarian appeal for 2017: “The continued deepening and geographic spread of the conflict has prompted a 13% increase in the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance in 2017, now 9.3 million […] With no obvious prospects for an improved state of affairs, 2017 is likely to see at least 450,000 new IDPs and potentially as many as a million more Afghan returns from Pakistan and Iran.”

The Afghan-Pakistani Daesh franchise (known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP) will seek to increase its foothold in the east of the country, as well as keep up its media-grabbing presence in the urban centres, particularly Kabul, by committing high-profile terrorist and possibly sectarian attacks. The positioning of regional countries vis-à-vis insurgent and militant groups, including Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China, India and the Gulf states, will continue to affect the relative strengths of the various groups. Changes in patterns of support will obviously have repercussions on the battlefield.

3. Prospects for peace talks

With the expected military escalation from the US backing up the ANSF and the continued ambiguity within the NUG towards a peace process, prospects for serious peace efforts in 2017 are limited. There has been no sign of any real desire desire to work for a negotiated end to the conflict by the Taleban leadership either. Although there have been a series of informal direct discussions between the Taleban and the NUG in recent months, the effort could easily be (and is to some extent already) offset by a more belligerent US approach. Some semi-governmental and independent initiatives for peace are likely to continue, although probably not in a very consistent or centralised manner. These efforts may or may not gain momentum, depending on the situation on ground and the quality of the initiatives.

The increasing ethnic dynamics of Afghan politics may lead to a re-alignment (or deepening) of positions regarding peace talks. For instance, Kandahar pro-government strongman General Raziq, long known for his robust anti-Taleban stance, particularly on the battlefield, has recently come out with statements honouring the late Taleban leader, Mullah Omar ,and proposing to provide the Taleban with a safe zone – in what was generally read as an ethnically-motivated shift of opinion. There have always been suspicions that both former president Karzai’s and current president Ghani’s support for a peace process (as with the recent Hezb-e Islami deal) were motivated by the wish to strengthen the ‘Pashtun hand’ in politics. This could affect the mood towards a possible peace deal, if at some point there is one on the table.

The extent to which the recent ‘peace agreement’ with Hezb-e Islami has an effect on the battlefield (up till now, wholly absent) and/or results in power sharing and privileges (not yet finalised) may have an effect on support for a possible deal with (parts of) the Taleban. At the moment, the privileges offered by the government seem to far outweigh Hezb’s importance, both in the political and military field. Politically, the peace deal will probably lead to a re-unification of a party that had been split into various wings (several of which were already part of the political set-up in Kabul), allowing Hezb to gain political weight. On the military side, the party’s insurgent wing has not been particularly active for a number of years, but has now promised to send fighters against the Taleban, which may further strengthen the party politically.

The next step in the efforts towards ‘peace’ may be another largely inconsequential deal, this time with the (shrinking) splinter factions of the Taleban, which the government seem to be wooing. These factions may also demand formal representation and a cut of government appointments, as Hezb-e Islami did. All in all, these ‘peace deals’ – both those already concluded and those possibly imminent – are likely to strengthen the influence of a conglomerate of (formerly) armed, Islamist factions in the government (although they could also lead to further competition between them).

Reports that Russia and Iran are in direct talks with (or are supporting) the Taleban continue. Russia was reportedly assured by the Taleban that it was a strictly national movement that did not intend to spread beyond Afghanistan’s borders. Russian support fits in a wider policy of allying itself with local forces against Daesh (and against NATO, which Moscow accuses of supporting Daesh). The recent trilateral talks in Moscow between Russia, Pakistan and China, are being followed with much interest in Afghanistan.

4. Rights and freedoms

The crisis in the government and the intensification of the conflict may further erode the protection of human rights in Afghanistan – both in the area of civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights.

Issues to watch, especially as Afghanistan readies itself for new elections, are efforts by the government to limit freedom of expression, and threats and violence, by various powerful groups and individuals, towards journalists, civil society and non-Islamist political activists. The right to education, especially for girls, in conflict-intense areas remains a concern. The already precarious legal protection for girls and women may face specific challenges, as the ongoing efforts to subsume the Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) law into the Penal Code threatens to change or dilute important articles in the EVAW law. In addition, the president may not sign the Law on the Elimination of Harassments against Women and Children, which was recently passed by the Afghan parliament, as Afghanistan’s government tries to combine all separate codes with criminal articles, into a single penal code.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which in the past has been an important voice in defence of human rights, will move to its permanent premises in 2017, but the positions of two commissioners remain empty since last year. Decreased international funding of civil society organisations and independent media outlets (the latter already ongoing for years), as well as a decreased focus on democratic and human rights values, threatens to weaken the effectiveness, or even survival, of important independent voices, including in remote areas.

Towards the end of 2016, the NUG established a Judicial Centre for Corruption that has just started operations. There has also been a focus on justice sector reform, led by Vice President Muhammad Sarwar Danesh; the effort, so far, has led to reforms in the penal code and reforms in the judiciary (several rounds of staff replacement). During 2017 it should become clearer whether the claimed campaign against corruption is indeed serious and effective. If it is, there may be political implications, leading to greater factionalism, particularly if the targeting is seen or can be cast as partisan or uneven.

5. Relations with the US, wider international relations

Changes in US policies on Afghanistan and, more broadly, multilateral cooperation within NATO and the UN, will have a direct effect on the situation in Afghanistan and its region, and on policies in Europe. Changes in US policies on Afghanistan may include an intensification of fighting and targeted killing, in an effort to decisively ‘deal with’ or ‘contain’ the war. It could also result in a decline in funds or a lack of clarity on whether the US will keep its commitments, which will reverberate both in Afghanistan’s national politics and on the battlefield.

Relations with the US may become strained if the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) decides to open an investigation in Afghanistan. A preliminary examination in 2016 showed that the thresholds of admissibility had been reached and that war crimes and crimes against humanity that meet the ICC gravity threshold had been committed in Afghanistan by all parties – the Taleban, US military and CIA, and the NDS and other parts of the ANSF – involved in the armed conflict, after 2003 (the ICC only has jurisdiction of crimes committed from 2003 onwards). The OTP is currently deciding whether to request authorisation from the ICC’s pre-trail chamber to open an investigation.

The Afghan government is ambivalent towards the ICC’s engagement in Afghanistan. President Ghani, although initially supportive of addressing the legacies of war crimes in Afghanistan, has recently said he believes an ICC investigation could undermine peace talks, as it would prevent the Taleban from trusting the government. The fact that the ICC’s preliminary examination names the US as one of the perpetrators, may affect relations between the court and the new US administration.

6. The economy

The economy is a subject that will be on the mind of many Afghans – both in terms of the sustainability of Afghanistan’s national budget, and the economic opportunities (or lack thereof) for Afghans in general. So far, for the general population, the trends have not been good; poverty and food insecurity rates over the last few years have risen, rather than declined, despite the post-2001 investments.

The government has strongly emphasised the importance of regional cooperation, infrastructure investments and job creation, and has proposed several programs that aim to grow the economy and combat unemployment, although their effects may not be immediately felt.

A key component of the government’s economic policy is driven by the need to increase revenues. This includes expanding tax collection, levying new taxes and computerising the customs system to cut down corruption and other losses. Donors, in particular, expect Afghanistan’s revenue generation to steadily grow, as a reassurance that at some point in the future the country will be able to fend for itself without massive international assistance. Experts however have noted that the recent increases in revenue collection are either not replicable or unsustainable and that the economy is set to shrink rather than grow.

For the second year in a row, the number of provinces declared ‘poppy-free’ has decreased; in 2016, 21 provinces were cultivating opium, with only 13 declared poppy-free (UNODC considers a province ‘poppy-free’ if less than 100 hectares is under cultivation). Issues to watch include the drug economy; whether changes in domestic and regional relations lead to a restructuring of who controls the trade; and the festering water management conflicts with the neighbours.

7. Migration: leaving and returning

2015 and the beginning of 2016 saw unprecedented, at least in recent years, numbers of Afghans leaving their country and traveling towards Europe. This was fuelled by the declining hope of a politically and economically stable Afghanistan and the pull of the, temporarily, open route provided by the Balkans corridor (for about half a year, all Afghans who reached the western Balkans were ferried onwards into the EU). The fear of a sustained high influx prompted European countries to tighten their procedures and border controls. As a result, the numbers of Afghans travelling to Europe seem to have returned to pre-2015 levels.

Mass returns of refugees from Pakistan and Iran since, which are expected to continue in 2017 (more than half a million from Pakistan alone since July 2016), have been a heavy burden on the country’s economy and have overburdened already fragile services, particularly health and education, in the most-affected areas. This is exacerbated by the fact that many returnees have not lived in Afghanistan for a long time (or, in many cases, ever). The large numbers of returnees from Pakistan and Iran, and to a lesser extent from Europe, moreover, are likely to result in a serious decline of remittances, both at the national and the household level.

European countries seem poised to continue to view migration as a key issues in their bilateral relations with the Afghan government, with a particular focus on ensuring Afghan cooperation with forcible returns – a politically unpopular position for the government to be in. The miserable conditions in and on the road to Europe, however, mean that far fewer Afghans are currently contemplating the trip. This is what Europe intended, but the diminishing opportunities for young people means that the country has lost an important pressure valve.

Afghanistan’s new electoral law has come into force, which means that the requirement of electoral reform ahead of the next elections has – at least nominally – been met. AAN’s Ali Yawar Adili and Martine van Bijlert discuss the main features of the new law and note that the most controversial and complicated changes have been passed on to the Independent Election Commission to decide on. These include, most prominently, an instruction to decrease the size of the electoral constituencies for the parliamentary and provincial council elections, which could usher in an overhaul of the electoral system. This will be a politically fraught exercise, which will pave the way for a new round of bickering and delay. It also threatens to drag the newly established commission into political controversy.

In September 2016, the government finally managed to agree on a new electoral law, and, in November 2016, the president appointed and inaugurated a new Independent Election Commission (IEC) and Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC). The law was passed by presidential decree, based on a ruling by the Independent Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution (ICOIC), which ruled that, in this case, the president did not need to go through parliament. The ICOIC based its ruling on a different interpretation than the parliament had previously arrived at of an article in the constitution which prohibits the parliament from discussing the electoral law in the last year of its session (for details see previous AAN reporting here).  The new law combines the two main laws that previously governed the electoral process and bodies: the Electoral Law and the Law on the Structures, Authorities and Duties of the Electoral Bodies (or Structure Law, for short). (1) The new law – simply titled ‘Election Law’ – replaces earlier legislative decrees that were issued by President Ashraf Ghani (but not enforced, as they had not been passed by parliament), as well as the two electoral laws that were signed by former president Karzai in 2013, ahead of the 2014 presidential election. The most important changes are discussed below (the full text of the new electoral law, in Dari, can be found here).

Changing the electoral constituencies

Potentially, the most important change in the new law is found in article 35. This article instructs the newly appointed Independent Election Commission (IEC) to “determine the Wolesi Jirga and provincial council electoral constituencies and to divide them into smaller constituencies.” It does not stipulate whether the constituencies should be multi-member or single-member. The decree that endorsed the law further instructs the IEC to conduct a technical study within three months of its establishment on the “better implementation” of article 35 (the study must therefore be finalised by late February, as the new IEC and ECC were sworn in on 22 November 2016). It is unclear what happens after that. The decree states that the cabinet will “assess the report and take a decision accordingly,” but does not specify whether it can modify the IEC’s proposal on the redrawing of the electoral constituencies, a move which, in any case, would reopen the discussions that had bogged down the finalisation of the law from the beginning.

Article 35 is a watered-down version of the ongoing attempts to replace the current electoral system (SNTV, or single non-transferable vote) with a first-past-the-post, single-member constituency system. Such a change would simplify the vote and make the outcome easier to understand for voters, but would also introduce a ‘winner takes all’ system in each constituency.

The Special Electoral Reform Commission (SERC), the commission that was tasked in 2015 by the government to come up with proposals for electoral reform, had been unanimous in their desire to change the SNTV system, but had had trouble agreeing on what should replace it. After considering several possible alternatives, the SERC developed a Multi-Dimensional Representation (MDR) system with multi-member constituencies, which it presented to the government in late 2015. (2) Two dissenting boycotting SERC members presented their own favoured system to the government, which was the first-past-the-post system that the cabinet tried to include in the current law (but failed to reach a consensus on). Opponents of the single-member constituencies fear that the system could fatally split their voter base and/or allow representatives in certain areas to be elected with very small numbers of votes (which is currently already the case in some insecure provinces). They worry that the IEC may be pressured to not only decrease the size of the electoral constituencies, but to also make them single-member.

Apart from raising the stakes of the competition in every single constituency (given that only one person can win), a change to single-member constituencies will also complicate the issue of the women’s quota. As reiterated in article 35 of the new electoral law, the IEC needs to observe article 83 of the constitution (paragraphs 4 and 6), which states that the Wolesi Jirga, apart from not exceeding 250 individuals, should be proportionate to the population of each constituency, and should include, on average, two women from each province. In a single-member constituency system, this would involve different constituencies for the male and female seats (as there are less seats for the women to compete over). This could possibly result in separate elections with separate ballots for male and female candidates, which would be a significant setback for women, particularly for the female politicians who aim to get elected on their own merit, by receiving enough votes vis-à-vis their male counterparts to win regardless of a quota.

The issue of the electoral system risks becoming polarised. Proponents of the different options keep a close eye on how they believe the changes might impact the relative balance of power in parliament. Particular concerns include the parliament’s ethnic make-up, its factional and geographical representation, whether the changes strengthen political parties or not, and what they mean for the women’s quota. In this climate of heightened suspicions, it will be difficult for the IEC to come up with a proposal that can unite the different sides, address the various concerns and not complicate election procedures further.

If the IEC and/or the cabinet fail to come to an agreement on a new electoral system, they may choose to retain the existing STNV system. Despite its drawbacks – large numbers of candidates, narrow margins between winners and losers, high percentages of ‘wasted votes’, and a fragmented parliament – SNTV is a known quantity. As we have seen so far, any change to the system is likely to affect the equation regarding who might benefit, and will draw opposition from those who believe they might lose out.

Linking voters to polling centres

Articles 6 and 8 of the new law describe a system of registration and voting that includes the development of voters’ lists and a database in which voters are, for the first time, linked to specific polling centres:

Article 6.1-6: The person eligible to vote has to personally appear at the polling centre, and register his/her name in the voter’s list based on the citizenship Tazkera (National ID) or [other] document specified by the [Independent Election] Commission for the verification of his/her identity. No person can register his/her name more than once in the voter’s list. The voter is obliged to vote at the polling centre where his/her name has already been registered in the voters’ list of that polling centre. To get a ballot paper, a voter is obliged to present the citizenship Tazkera or [other] document specified by the Commission for the verification of his/her identity. Every voter has the right to one vote and can use it directly in favour of his/her favourite candidate. In case a voter may need guidance to find his/her candidate of choice, he/she can seek the help of a person he/she trusts.

Article 8: The Commission is obliged to prepare the voters’ list by polling centre and shall link it to the Commission’s national database.

At the moment Afghanistan has no voter list system. Although there are databases with information gathered during several rounds of ‘voter registration’ ahead of previous elections, they are not in any usable way linked to the voter cards that have been distributed, nor do they link voters to polling centres. During the ‘registration,’ the emphasis has been on the distribution of voter cards, rather than on the establishment of any kind of voter database. This has resulted in massive over-registration: a total of 21 million voter cards have been distributed throughout the various registration and top-up exercises, for an estimated maximum total voting population of 15 million people (for more details, see here). Many cards were given without ID documents being shown – to accommodate voters who did not have documents – or without the voters present (many people, for instance, took advantage of the leniency shown to female voters by collecting large numbers of cards “for the women of the family,” simply by showing up with long lists of female names).

The technicalities of the new regulation have been left to the IEC. The new law does not specify whether the existing voter cards will be invalidated or whether new voter cards will be issued. However, the wording of the law strongly suggests that there will need to be some form of renewed registration to accommodate the linking of voters to polling centres. Neither does the law specify whether registration will take place prior to the elections or concurrently, which leaves open the possibility of same-day or even simultaneous registration and voting.

The IEC will also need to determine which documents can be used for identification during registration and voting. The Special Electoral Reform Commission (SERC) previously noted that many Afghans have multiple documents, often with different names and birth dates, which might confuse the system (Afghanistan does not have a singular system for last names, or a central birth registry; many Afghans use a takhalus, which is more like a nickname that they can change any time). It also noted that Afghans who do not have valid identification risk being disenfranchised, and recommended that an exception to the identification requirement be made for those without a valid ID. This could open the door to abuse again.

In the past, plans for an improved system of voter registration have often been based on the idea that an accelerated rollout of the e-Tazkera, or electronic ID card, would introduce a secure form of identification that could be used as voter ID as well. The introduction of the e-Tazkera, however, has technical and political difficulties of its own. It is unlikely that it will be implemented any time soon.

Introducing electoral crimes and penalties

Where previous electoral laws only specified electoral violations (distinguishing between negligence and fraud), the new law now lists twenty acts that are considered electoral crimes and carry stricter penalties (art 99). For instance, the act of “preventing the participation of agents, observers and media during the polling and counting process for the purpose of concealing the truth” is now considered a crime that carries a penalty of up to three years imprisonment. (In the 2013 electoral law, the electoral violation of “preventing the national and international monitors and observers from monitoring the electoral process” was punishable by a fine of 100,000-500,000 Afghani, or about 2-10,000 US dollars.)

The list of electoral crimes in the new law reads as a catalogue of the ways that candidates, supporters, electoral staff and others have, in the past, tried to influence the outcome of elections (for more details on these efforts, see here and here). The penalties are generally high (imprisonment). A full list of the crimes can be found in footnote (3).

The criminalisation of electoral violations has been touted by the government as an important measure to mitigate fraud (see the president’s comments during a consultative meeting with political leaders here). However, as always, a law is only as good as its implementation. The law, moreover, is not fully clear about the different lines of authority. According to article 97, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is obligated to investigate and identify electoral crimes and refer the perpetrators to the relevant authorities. According to article 99, however, “penalties will be declared by the [Independent Election] Commission and implemented by the law enforcement authorities.”

Given the heated atmosphere that usually surrounds elections, including sustained allegations of partisanship and manipulation against both electoral bodies, it is potentially problematic to give the authority to prosecute and punish violations to the main implementing bodies. (The IEC conducts the elections and the ECC, although it does not implement the elections per se, has in practice become the final body to rule on which votes get counted and which do not, thus affecting the final outcome of the elections.)

Employing civil servants as temporary electoral staff

The electoral law defines two categories of staff for the IEC and the ECC: permanent staff at headquarters and provincial offices, and temporary staff. In the 2013 law, both permanent and temporary employees were hired through a process of staggered recruitment (many candidates would try to get their supporters recruited as IEC staff). According to the new law (art 23) “temporary electoral workers at the polling centres and stations shall be assigned from amongst school teachers, lecturers of government institutions for higher education and government administrative personnel, in accordance with procedures adopted by the Commission.” The measure to enlist government workers as temporary staff is intended to decrease the costs of temporary recruitment and to simplify the recruitment process. It could, however, also become controversial. Campaign managers and other candidate supporters have, in the past, tried to mobilise all kinds of networks in support of their candidates, including teachers and civil servants. The impartiality of temporary IEC staff will therefore still not be guaranteed.

Structural changes to the committee that selects the electoral commissioners

The Selection Committee for the electoral commissioners (IEC and ECC) was first introduced in 2013, ahead of the 2014 presidential elections, as a way to limit the influence of the president on the appointment of the commissioners. The Selection Committee calls for applications, vets and selects qualified candidates based on criteria specified in the law, and presents the shortlist to the president for his final selection. The new law has brought three changes to this committee: it reduced the number of committee members from six to five, changed the composition of the committee and pre-appointed the elected member of the High Council of the Supreme Court as the chair (previously, the chair was elected from among the members).

The composition of the Selection Committee has changed with every iteration of the law, as the different actors negotiating the law kept a close eye on who would sit on the committee, as a result of the changes, and how this would affect the factional balance. In the previous 2013 law, the committee was made up of six members: the speakers of the Wolesi Jirga and the Meshrano Jirga, the Chief Justice, the chairperson of the Independent Commission for Oversight of the Implementation of the Constitution (ICOIC), the chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and an elected representative from among civil society organisations working on elections. (In previous versions of the current law, which were not passed by parliament, the Selection Committee also included an elected representative of the media).

The new law has removed the speakers of the two houses of parliament (a move that was made possible by the decision not to present the decree to parliament for approval – for more details see here) and replaced them with a civil society member from among the organisations defending women’s rights. The SERC recommended the removal of both speakers, arguing in its report to parliament that “a balance should be struck between government and non-government members.” It argued further that “many advisers” had suggested that the National Assembly should not be represented in the committee, since it was “a beneficiary in the election.”

The new law further substituted the Chief Justice with a member of the high council of the Supreme Court and replaced the chairpersons of the ICOIC and AIHRC with members from these organisations. It retained the member elected from among civil society organisations working on elections.

Structural changes to the IEC and its secretariat

The new law adjusts the structure and operations of the IEC (articles 11, 12 and 22). It decreases the number of commissioners in the IEC from nine to seven, reduces their term from six to five years and introduces staggered appointments so that not all commissioners are replaced at the same time (as a result, the recent new appointments were for two different terms: four members for a period of five years and three members for a period of three years.) This was recommended by the SERC to safeguard both institutional memory and continuity of experience in the future. The terms of the chair, deputies and secretary have also been decreased (two and a half years for the chair and one year for the other positions, instead of three-year terms for all posts). The requirements for the IEC commissioners have been increased: the minimum age went up (from 30 to 35), as did the number of years of required work experience (now ten years for a Bachelor degree, seven years for a Masters and five years for a PhD). The new law also specifies required fields of studies (law, sharia, political sciences, management, sociology, economy or other related fields).

The new law further makes the IEC secretariat subservient and accountable to the commission (art 22.4: “The Secretariat shall carry out its duties in accordance to the provisions of the law and the procedures adopted by the Commission, and shall report to the Commission”), which is new. The 2013 law did not require the secretariat to report to the commission. On the other hand, the IEC now has to propose three candidates for the position of Chief Electoral Officer to the president (instead of just one). Article 27 further gives more detailed instructions on how the IEC should establish a media committee, comprised of three members.

Structural changes to the ECC and its secretariat

Unlike the IEC, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is not enshrined in the constitution, but was established based on the earlier Electoral Law. There were, as a result, extensive discussions within the SERC about the constitutionality of the ECC and whether a complaints mechanism could be introduced under the authorities of the IEC instead. In the new law, however, a separate ECC has been retained “to address objections and complaints arising from electoral negligence and violations, and to identify crimes related to the elections” (art 28:1).

Like the previous 2013 law, the law distinguishes between the Central Electoral Complaints Commission (CECC) and the Provincial Electoral Complaints Commissions (PECC). The CECC, which is based in Kabul, has five members. The new law does not reduce or increase the number, but it does include a provision that the government, in consultation with the United Nations, can appoint two international election experts as non-voting members “to ensure transparency and address challenges” (art 29.6). The ECC has had international members in the past, which was welcomed by some and met with suspicion by others. The SERC had included this in its recommendations, arguing that this was “done in other countries as well,” probably in an attempt to dispel sensitivities towards the involvement of foreigners in the electoral process.

Article 28 of the new law raises the requirements for ECC membership, raising the age from 30 to 35, and stipulating that the candidates should have higher education in the fields of law or Islamic jurisprudence. Article 34 retains the provision that the CECC is independent in its budget spending, after having prepared the budget in consultation with the government, but requires the commission to present its report according to the provisions of the law (it does not specify to whom).

The provincial complaints commissions (PECCs), which are established one month before candidate registration, will have three members each – two of them (one man and one woman) introduced by the CECC and a third introduced by the AIHRC – which have to be approved by the president (art 31.2). In the 2013 law, all three members were introduced by the CECC and approved by the president.

As with the IEC secretariat, the new law makes the ECC secretariat accountable to the CECC, and as with the IEC secretariat, the ECC should propose three candidates to the president for the position of head of the secretariat, instead of just one (article 32).

Changes that affect the composition of the elected bodies: reserved seats for women and Hindus/Sikhs

The constitution stipulates that, on average, at least two women from each province are to be elected to the Wolesi Jirga; that is, at least 64 out 249 seats, which is a little over 25 per cent (art 83.6). Subsequent electoral laws also allocated seats for women in the provincial councils: in the 2013 electoral law this was “at least 20 per cent.” The new law increases the provincial council allocation to “at least 25 per cent” (art 58.2), as it had been in an earlier version of the law, and now also gives the same allocation to the district councils (art 61.2) and village councils (art 64.2). The law does not include a quota for women in the municipal councils, which, to date, have not been formed.

Article 48 increases the number of Wolesi Jirga seats from 249 to 250, maintaining the ten reserved seats for Kuchis and allocating the extra seat to a joint representative of the Hindu and Sikh communities (Article 83.4 of the Constitution sets the maximum number of Wolesi Jirga members at 250). This lumps the two tiny, only non-Muslim communities together (details about them in this AAN dispatch) and separates them, together with the Kuchis, from the rest of the population. The reserved seat for the Hindu and Sikh community had been included in earlier drafts of the electoral law, but removed by the Wolesi Jirga, which argued that the community was not large enough to warrant a separate seat and that the Hindu and Sikhs should be treated equally with other citizens of the country. (4)

The new law also reduces the number of members of the provincial councils, district councils and village councils proportionate to the population. For the provincial councils (art 58), for example, this has now become:

• Population up to 500,000 – 9 seats
• Up to 1,000,000 – 11 seats (down from 15)
• Up to 2,000,000 – 15 seats (down from 19)
• Up to 3,000,000 – 17 seats (down from 23)
• Up to 4,000,000 – 19 seats (down from 29)
• Over 4,000,000 – 21 seats (down from 33)

The largest district council has gone from 15 to 11 members (art 61) and the largest village council from 11 to 7 (art 64).

Article 59 adds the proviso that if a member of the provincial council is unable to fill his/her seat (due to death, resignation, sickness or disability), and more than one year of their term of service remains, the seat will be given to “the next candidate of the same sex (male or female) with the most votes, based on the list prepared by the Commission.” The same proviso was added for members of the district and village councils, and retained for the Wolesi Jirga.

Changes in the articles on campaigning

Article 76 of the new law reduces the campaign period for most races: 20 days for the Wolesi Jirga and provincial council elections (down from 30), 15 days for district council elections (down from 20), and 7 days for village council elections (down from 10). It retains 60 days for the presidential election and 20 days for the municipal council and mayoral elections.

Whereas the 2013 electoral law imposed caps on spending in the various election campaigns, article 77 of the new law leaves it to the IEC to enact a procedure based on the following three criteria: 1) number of eligible voters 2) area and 3) geographical location of the electoral constituency. During SERC discussions, it was argued that setting the same caps for candidates in all provinces might not do justice to the varying challenges they would face. The law now explicitly obliges candidates to report on their campaign spending to the IEC.

Where the previous electoral law prohibited candidates from accepting or receiving either financial or technical assistance from foreign entities during the campaign, the new law (art 77) only bans foreign financial assistance. The argument in the SERC was to not deprive the country of the democratic experiences of other countries.

The presidential election’s second round

Due to the ethnic and factional nature of alignments, Afghanistan’s presidential elections tend to go to a second round, to ensure that the president is voted in with “more than 50 per cent of votes cast by voters through free, general, secret and direct voting” (art 61 of the Constitution). A paragraph in the new law makes explicit what happens when one of the two runner-up presidential candidates decides not to participate in the run-off election (as happened in 2009): “In case one of the candidates does not participate in the elections in the second round, the other candidate is recognised as the winner” (art 45.5). The 2013 electoral law made no reference to such a scenario, even though the IEC, in 2009, had already set the precedent by declaring Hamid Karzai the elected president after the runner-up and current chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew. (5) This explicit addition may invite forced withdrawals and opens the way for a president to be elected with less than 50 per cent of the vote, as the votes in the first round are still divided among many candidates. According to the new provision in the electoral law, if – hypothetically speaking – Karzai had withdrawn in 2009, Abdullah would have been allowed to be president with, according to the IEC results, a little over 30 per cent of votes.

Article 46 of the new law retains the constitutional clause which stipulates that if one of the presidential candidates dies during the first or second round of voting, or before the announcement of the results, new elections will be held among the remaining presidential candidates (this is sometimes referred to as the “assassination clause”). It has, however, done away with the impractical stipulation of a 30-day timeframe during which the new elections had to be held, which was included in the 2013 law.

Reintroducing the exclusion clause for links to illegal armed groups

Article 44 reintroduces the ban on commanders or members of illegal armed groups from running in the elections; the clause existed in earlier versions of the electoral law but was removed in 2013. The article states that:

Commanders or members of illegal armed groups may not stand as candidates in elections. The commandership or membership of illegal armed groups is vetted and necessary decisions made by a separate commission comprising representatives of the Ministries of National Defence and Interior Affairs, the General Directorate of National Security and the Directorate of Local Governance, chaired by the Chairperson of the Complaints Commission. Complaints will be adjudicated by the Complaints Commission, the decisions of which are final.

The vetting of candidates with links to illegal armed groups has been a complicated affair in the past, as these links were often difficult to persuasively prove (at least, this could be argued). As a result, the most powerful commanders were usually unaffected by the process. In the 2005 parliamentary election, for example, out of 208 candidates put forward by election stakeholders for disqualification for having links to illegal armed groups, only 34 were finally barred from running (see this report). Moreover, many commanders have some form of legal cover for at least a proportion of their fighters. As AAN reported in 2013:

The removal of this clause, and of the related vetting procedure (see here) for what this looked like during past elections), means a significant simplification of the process, but it is also a stark admission of defeat: of the failure of disarmament, the proliferation of militias and the inability to separate armed commanders from politics.

It remains to be seen how the reintroduction of vetting for links to illegal armed groups, and the politicking and complaints surrounding the process, will affect the line-up of candidates in future elections. It also remains to be seen whether mechanisms can be introduced to improve the implementation of this legal provision.

Looking ahead

The signing of the new electoral law and the appointment of a new IEC and ECC means that – at least nominally – the requirement of electoral reform, as stipulated in the 2014 National Unity Government agreement and demanded by the chief executive’s camp, has been met. The most controversial and complicated changes, however, have not been finalised and have instead been passed on to the Independent Election Commission. The IEC will now have to grapple with the redrawing of electoral constituencies, a reopened discussion over the electoral system and the introduction of a voter registration system that links voters to polling centres. Each of these issues will require a large amount of technical and political finesse and will most likely result in new rounds of bickering and delay.

The IEC said it intends to announce the date for the upcoming parliamentary elections, as well as its plan for either the cancellation or the re-accreditation the voter cards, at the latest, in the next month. But whatever date gets announced, it is unlikely that elections will still take place in 2017. Practically speaking, once the parameters are clear, the IEC will need around a year to prepare and organise. This means that even in the best-case scenario – that is, if the IEC’s proposal on electoral constituencies is indeed ready by late February and is immediately accepted, and if no other major controversies come up – this will, at the very least, bring us into the spring of 2018.

 

 

(1) The two laws – the Electoral Law and the Law on the Structures, Authorities and Duties of the Electoral Bodies (or Structure Law, for short) – were combined in order to simplify the procedure and to solve the ongoing debate as to whether at least one of the laws still needed to be passed by parliament. For background on the politicking that preceded the current law, see earlier AAN reporting here, here and here.

(2) Initial alternatives to the SNTV system included a first-past-the-post, single-member constituency (FPTP) system, which is discussed above; a list-based Proportional Representation (PR) system (options with open and closed lists were both discussed); and a parallel system, which would combine the current SNTV with a partial PR system.

In a later round of discussions – after the SERC had suggested the parallel system and had lost two dissenting members to a boycott – the SERC (with outside help) developed the Multi-Dimensional Representation (MDR) system. MDR is based on multi-member constituencies, and includes a proposal to possibly decrease the size of the largest constituencies.

The MDR system, which was especially tailored to address the demands and concerns that had come up in the SERC’s discussions, allows individuals to run either as independents or as part of a list (whether a party list, a coalition of parties, or an ad hoc gathering of individuals). Voters would still vote for individuals, but the determination of the winners would be done in two steps – first counting how many seats the best-performing lists have earned and then awarding seats to the individuals on these lists with the most votes. This would not change much for the voter, but the outcomes of the count can be easily misunderstood, as individuals with far fewer votes than others could still win a seat if their list did better than others.

(3) The listed electoral crimes and their penalties, include: misuse of military resources and signs for the purpose of frightening or influencing a person in favour of or against a candidate (imprisonment of up to three months); receiving or offering bribes for the purpose of exerting influence in the electoral processes (five years imprisonment); threat, intimidation, irreverence and exertion of pressure (five years imprisonment); hiding results forms and ballot papers for the purpose of concealing the truth (two years imprisonment); displacing, transferring or taking into possession electoral documents without a lawful permit (up to three years imprisonment); receiving funding from illegal sources (up to three years imprisonment); receiving or accepting material assistance in cash or kind from foreign sources (up to three years imprisonment); bringing changes in the result forms that do not correspond to the votes in the ballot box (up to three years imprisonment); tampering with the software and hardware systems of the results tallying centres without legal authorization (imprisonment of no less than one month and no more than one year); exerting violence or pressure or disrupting the security situation that leads to an interruption of the electoral process (imprisonment of two to five years); stealing or destroying electoral documents, ballot papers or sensitive electoral materials (five years imprisonment); registration of a candidate using fake documents (deprivation of the right to register and short-term imprisonment); voting using fake documents (deprivation of the right to vote and short-term imprisonment); using the vote of a person in his/her absence (deprivation of the right to vote and short-term imprisonment); buying and selling of votes (deprivation of the right to vote and short-term imprisonment); changing or replacing electoral documents, including the registration book, results sheets and ballot papers, in favour of or against a candidate (imprisonment up to three years); increasing or decreasing votes in favour of or against a candidate during elections (imprisonment of more than three years); hiding, or not processing in a timely manner, filed complaints and objections to conceal the truth (imprisonment of more than three years); concealment or failure by staff to report violations witnessed at the polling station (short term imprisonment, no less than three months); preventing the participation of monitors, observers and media during the polling and counting process for the purpose of concealing the truth (imprisonment up to three years). If the crimes were committed as a result of provocation, intimidation or encouragement by someone else, this person shall face the same penalties as the actual perpetrator of the crime.

The law also lists 35 electoral violations that are punishable by fines (art 98). These include violations such as registering more than once as a voter, displaying candidates’ symbols in polling centres, destroying campaign materials, preventing monitors and observers from monitoring the process (apparently without the intent of concealing the truth), etc.

(4) The reserved seat for Hindus and Sikhs was included in the initial draft of the 2013 electoral law, but was rejected by parliament in July of that year. It was re-included in the new electoral law that was introduced by presidential decree on 3 September 2013, but was removed again by the Wolesi Jirga. This is the third time the government has introduced the separate seat for Hindus and Sikhs. This time it is likely to remain as the Wolesi Jirga, according to the ICOIC, is not allowed to discuss or vote on the law. For more background on the back and forth, see AAN’s previous reporting here.

(5) The IEC justified its decision by arguing that Karzai had received the most votes in the first round and, after the withdrawal of Abdullah, had no contender in the second. Abdullah’s supporters, who had contested the outcome of the first round, argued that the IEC’s decision had no basis in the law and warned that this would not solve Afghanistan’s problems (see previous AAN reporting here).

Mehrali Watandost, one of Afghanistan’s most popular actors, has died. For 23 years, he played the role of the iconic character, Nazir, in the Afghan radio drama, “New Home, New Life” which is broadcast in Pashto and Dari on the BBC. Since launching in 1994, the show has never been off the air and Watandost’s distinctive voice and the funny, eccentric character he played were at the heart of the drama’s success. AAN guest author Shirazuddin Siddiqi* who worked with Watandost on the show recalls a man who brought wisdom and humour to the airwaves.

Afghanistan has lost one of its brightest cultural stars. The actor, Mehrali Watandost, was born around 1950 in Butkhak district, east of Kabul, and had a modest upbringing. After completing primary school in Butkhak and secondary school in Nangarhar where his family had moved to, he got a junior job with the Directorate of Information and Culture in the province.

The group included several nationally-recognised cultural personalities, already chosen to work on the new programme as writers and editors. Those wanting to act in the drama, however, had to undergo studio auditions. Many aspiring Afghan actors flocked to the casting venue, among them, Watandost. British drama expert, Dan Garrett, who led the audition and later the training of successful writers and actors, recalls his dilemma – how on earth was he going to chose from “so many hopefuls.”

A star is born

Scripts had been circulated before each applicant was summoned to the studio and it was late in the day, Garrett remembers, when a “craggy-faced man came up to the microphone and filled our ears with a distinctive sound that instantly made my ears prick up… the voice a producer listens out for.” It was Watandost. He was peering and moving the script around in an effort to read it and Garrett asked if he had perhaps forgotten his glasses. “No,” he explained, “I left them in Afghanistan and have been unable to replace them.” Garrett lent him a pair of glasses and when the green button was pressed ­­– the cue for the actor to speak – the man behind the microphone brought “the script to life.” It was clear to all those listening, Garrett said, “We had a star.”

On the basis of this audition, Watandost was offered a role in the new radio soap opera, “New Home, New Life”. Since 1994, it has been broadcast in Pashto and Dari on the BBC World Service. The programme is set in a typical Afghan village and makes use of popular drama to explore topical, practical issues that might enable listeners to manage and improve their daily lives: it might feature something as simple as using the water from the mill to not only grind wheat, but also generate electricity. Tougher issues have also featured. A particularly upsetting storyline involving a girl married to assuage a blood feud – she was married to her family’s enemies in what is called a baad marriage ­– was so compelling it persuaded the then ruler of Afghanistan, Taleban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, to ban the practice.

Watandost’s remarkable acting talent turned Nazir, the character he played for 23 years, into a personal friend for millions of Afghans. Photo: AEPO (2016)

Watandost was chosen to play the role of Nazir (‘watchman’) who served the powerful village land-owner and chieftain, Jabar Khan. Watandost reportedly wept tears of joy when he was offered the role, not least because it meant he would work closely with the already well-known actor, Fazl Muhammad Fazli, who would play his on-air employer. Thus begun nearly 23 years of Watandost’s contribution to Afghan radio drama, a contribution that brought with it great admiration from Afghans of all walks of life.

Listeners propose marriage

Nazir was the most cunning person in the village. A simple village man with a very eccentric approach to everything, whatever he did would go wrong and made listeners laugh. Watandost knew the character as well as he knew his own self and how to play every nuance of every story he was involved in. He managed to develop the role in a way that reached the hearts of many Afghans, crossing social and cultural boundaries. Before long, many listeners to “New Home, New Life” described the watchman as being like a family member, with some even reporting difficulty in sleeping if they did not hear Watandost’s distinctive voice that touched young and old, men and women, rural and urban alike.

Although he only played Nazir in Pashto, the mix of common-sense and humour that Watandost brought to the role was appreciated by Afghans across the linguistic and ethnic divide that still besets the country. As his popularity grew, the production team even received messages from listeners offering their sisters and daughters in marriage to Nazir. In 1996, when rumours spread in Upper Village (where the “New Home, New Life” drama is based) that Jabar Khan might be making arrangements for Nazir’s marriage, the mailbox contained samples of cloth from fans for his and his wife-to-be’s wedding outfits. The relationship between Nazir and Jabar Khan was one of the key dramatic relationships in the soap opera. Yet, even after the actor playing Jabar Khan, Fazli died, in 2005, Nazir’s role survived because of the character’s popularity. New themes emerged in his relationship with Jabar Khan’s son, Sarwar Khan.

Walajan Rafiq (right) plays Baba Aslam, a village elder, with Watandost (left). Photo: AEPO (2016)

Former researcher for “New Home, New Life” Shireen Sultan remembers that during the evaluation trips she made to provinces across Afghanistan “everybody – old, young, religious, educated, uneducated, leaders, women,” listened to Nazir’s wisdom and humour with a keen interest. On one occasion, when a young girl in a remote village repeatedly asked questions about him, her friends explained to Shireen, laughing, that she wanted to “marry Nazir.”

After he heard that Watandost had died, the National Unity Government’s Chief Executive Dr Abdullah described how Watandost had brought a “smile on people’s lips” at a time of “conflict and killing,” adding that there was hardly an Afghan who was not familiar with Nazir’s character. He called the actor’s passing an “irrecoverable loss for Afghan culture.”

Watandost made a significant contribution to “New Home, New Life” becoming a formidable force in ensuring that Afghans across the country and in exile retained a sense of social and cultural identity. Before 2001, surveys showed the soap opera had near universal listenership among Afghans inside and outside the country; those who had access to radio either knew the show or listened to it. Even in today’s crowded media market, in which hundreds of TV, radio and print outlets compete for audiences, drama has retained its popularity; recent surveys indicate that 5.2 million adult Afghans (i.e. not including those under 15) still regularly tune in.

When the production of “New Home, New Life” moved to Kabul in October 2002, Watandost continued to live in Peshawar, explaining that he could not afford the cost of living in the Afghan capital. He would come up to Kabul at weekends to record his role, but stayed on in Peshawar where he was also able to maintain his cooperation with music production outfits for which he wrote lyrics and sometimes composed songs.

Watandost’s family said he had been watering flowers in his home in Peshawar when he fell down some stairs and died. He was given a modest funeral by family and friends in Behsud district in Nangarhar on 12 January 2017. He will rest in peace, no doubt, but he has left the “New Home, New Life” writers with an impossible dilemma: what to do with the role he played so successfully for 23 years? To millions of his fans, he will be irreplaceable.

Mehrali Watandost

Born: 1950 Butkhak, Kabul

Died: 8 January 2017, Peshawar, Pakistan

Buried: 12 January 2017, Behsud District, Nangarhar

 

* Shirazuddin Siddiqi is BBC Media Action’s Country Director for Afghanistan, but has written this piece in his personal capacity. He was working with the “New Home, New Life” team in various capacities from 1994 until 2012 when the Afghan Education Production Organisation (AEPO) which produces “New Home, New Life” transitioned out of the BBC and relaunched itself as a local Afghan institution. The drama has continued to air on the BBC.

American president-elect Donald Trump has said that no more detainees should be transferred out of America’s war on terror detention camp in Guantanamo Bay. He takes office on 20 January 2017, which leaves the Obama administration just a few days to get men cleared for transfer out of Cuba. Among those waiting to see if their cases go through in time are three Afghans, money changer Wali Mohammed, chokidar Abdul Zahir and seller of plastic flowers Bostan Karim. All have been in detention since 2002 and, AAN’s Kate Clark reports, the cases against them were always among the flimsiest.

When Obama came into office in 2009, he vowed to close Guantanamo down. Congress blocked this, stopping him from transferring detainees to the American mainland for trial or incarceration. His only success has been in reducing the population; it should be down from 242 in 2009 to, if all goes to plan, around 40 by 20 January 2017 when he leaves the White House. Anyone remaining after that, it would seem from Trump’s statements on Guantanamo, is likely to be there a very long time. During the election campaign, he praised the detention camp, saying he would like to bring more detainees there. (He also praised waterboarding, although he said it was not “tough enough” and even if it did not work, he would authorise it because “they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.”) Then, on 3 January 2017, Trump tweeted that no more detainees should be transferred; they were “extremely dangerous people,” he said and “should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.”

Prisoners cleared for transfer

In mid-December 2016, there were still 22 detainees who had been cleared for transfer by a body known as the Periodic Review Board – which can also order the continuing detention or military trial of detainees. The New York Times reported that the US government had found countries willing to take 17 or 18 of them:

The effort was part of a burst of urgent, high-level diplomatic talks aimed at moving as many as possible of Guantánamo’s 22 prisoners who are recommended for transfer. By law, the Pentagon must notify Congress 30 days before a transfer, so the deadline to set in motion deals before the end of the Obama administration was Monday [19 December 2016]. By late in the day, officials said, the administration had agreed to tell Congress that it intended to transfer 17 or 18 of the 59 remaining detainees at the prison; they would go to Italy, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Four prisoners were transferred out of the detention facility on 5 January 2017 – all Yemenis bound for Saudi Arabia. The deadline for the others is now approaching fast. Trump’s assessment that these men are extremely dangerous belies the facts, at least for Wali Mohammed, Abdul Zahir, and Bostan Karim. An earlier in-depth investigation by AAN, “Kafka in Cuba: the Afghan Experience in Guantanamo” (which contains sourcing for all the information cited in this dispatch) uncovered just how thin the cases against these three men were. None had been detained on the battlefield. Two had been handed over by Pakistan and the third detained by US forces from his home after a tip-off which proved to be wrong; their case files contain very little, or no evidence of wrongdoing, but rather fantastical allegations, based on hearsay, double hearsay (X said Y said Z was a terrorist), testimony obtained through torture and unverified and unprocessed intelligence reports known as IIRs, some from foreign intelligence services, including the Pakistan’s ISI. Such reports typically bear cautions such as: “WARNING: THIS IS AN INFORMATION REPORT, NOT FINALLY EVALUATED INTELLIGENCE.” There are also some gross factual mistakes in the files. It looks likely that Wali Mohammed and Zahir were victims of mistaken identity. Details of their cases and the other two Afghans still in Guantanamo can be found in an annex at the end of this dispatch.

Prisoners due to remain

If the 17 or 18 detainees do manage to get out before 20 January, that will still leave four or five other men also cleared for transfer, including (according to The New York Times article cited earlier) an Algerian, a Moroccan and a Tunisian, whom the administration is “reluctant to repatriate for reasons having to do with their home countries.” The US will not release people without security guarantees and assurances that they will not be tortured; it is not clear what the problem is in these men’s cases. There is also, reported the paper “a stateless Rohingya man whom no country [has] offered a home.”

The Periodic Review Board had recommended that ten of the other remaining detainees should stand trial in military tribunals in Guantanamo. All have been charged and one has already been convicted. The remaining 27 detainees, who include two Afghans, Harun Gul and Muhammad Rahim(1) have been called ‘forever prisoners’. The Periodic Review Board has ordered them to remain in detention without trial; they are considered too dangerous to release, but the US authorities do not have court-worthy evidence against them.

Both Harun and Rahim are accused of being facilitators for al Qaeda and have been detained since 2007. Harun was captured in Afghanistan probably by the National Directorate of Security, the NDS (the US said it did, the NDS said it did not), and Muhammad Rahim in Pakistan by the ISI. Again, neither was detained in battle; their cases are also based on intelligence. There is far less information in the public domain about their cases than the Afghans detained in earlier years. Neither has had the opportunity to publically defend himself, even in the limited ways open to those men detained earlier.

From court documents, Harun Gul looks to have possibly been a low-level Hezb-e Islami commander, in charge of a handful of men in Nangarhar in the post-2001 era, but allegedly also working as a courier for al Qaeda. In June 2016, the Periodic Review Board encouraged him to continue to “work with his family and representatives on his future plans and be forthcoming with the Board in future reviews.” It sounded like a hint that if he was more organised, the Periodic Review Board might assess his case differently and decide that rather than him continuing to be a ‘forever prisoner’, it could recommend his transfer. Harun Gul had another review on 11 January 2017, but the Periodic Review Board will not decide on his case for months, not until long after the new president takes office.

The fifth Afghan still in Guantanamo, Muhammad Rahim also from Nangarhar, was the last person ever to be rendered and tortured by the CIA and brought to Cuba. The US accuses him of having worked with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. He is the only Afghan in Guantanamo that has been classed as ‘high value’ by the US authorities. His case is so secret his lawyer has complained he cannot say why he thinks his client is innocent because that would reveal classified information. Although the US has not revealed the evidence against Rahim, the sources of that evidence can be seen in court documents from 2010 and they are the same as in the other cases AAN has investigated: hearsay, double hearsay, testimony obtained under torture and unverified and unprocessed intelligence reports.

Prospects for the five Afghan detainees

There are no prospects, at the moment, of Rahim being cleared for transfer. The Periodic Review Board’s assessment of him was unequivocal: “…his indifference to the impact of his prior actions, and.. his extensive extremist connections provide him a path to re-engagement.”

The Board might change its recommendation for Harun from continuing detention to transfer, but if it does, this will be after Trump takes office. His lawyer, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of human rights organization Reprieve, is trying to stay optimistic, despite the looming Trump presidency. She told the Associated Press it was still possible Trump would retain some current policies on Guantanamo once his administration had studied them, “At this point, we are all just keeping our fingers crossed for the best outcome.”

As for the three Afghans cleared for transfer, even if they do get out of Guantanamo, the impact of a decade and a half in prison will remain. A secret assessment of Zahir from 2008, published by WikiLeaks, revealed that he had “chronic lower back pain, sciatica,” and had gone through “hunger striking not requiring enteral feeding, and has a history of major depressive episodes.” His lawyer, Shayana Kadidal, described his life as “irretrievably damaged.” Wali Mohammed’s only son was killed in a road accident as he drove from Pakistan to Kabul to try to reclaim his father’s shop in Kabul’s money market. AAN was told by other money changers that a “strongman” had sold the shop and pocketed the proceeds. Most of our clients, Kadidal has said, “leave [Guantanamo] not angry but rather broken and depressed.”

The Guantanamo detention camp is now into its 16th year (it was opened on 11 January 2001) and will soon be into its third American president. Obama inherited it from Bush and, despite his election promises to close down the facility, will soon bequeath it to Trump. Afghans were, by far, the largest national group there, comprising more than a quarter of the 781 men ever held. Among the 220 Afghan detainees were a scattering of Taleban, but also farmers, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, a few children and one Shia Muslim. Three Afghans died in custody. Almost all of the rest were eventually freed. Whether, at the end of this week, two or five Afghans remain in Guantanamo now depends on last minute work by the Obama administration and host countries to complete the transfers.

Annex: The Afghans still in Guantanamo

Haji Wali Mohammed, a 53 years old money changer from Baghlan, has been detained for more than 15 years. He was picked up by the ISI in Pakistan in January 2002, he believes, because a tribal jirga had just ruled he was owed money by a man who was an ISI agent, and handed over to the Americans. According to his own detailed account, he was tortured by Pakistan and then by the Americans in Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo. The US accused him of being a financier for al Qaeda, the Taleban and Hezb-e Islami. It has never provided evidence that he was doing anything other than running a legal business; money changers in the Central Money Market have always worked with the Kabul government, including the Taleban’s, to ensure the supply and stability of the currency. Indeed, Wali Mohammed had been something of a failure as a money changer, losing half a million dollars in a shared arbitrage scheme with the Central Bank; he was heavily in debt when detained.

When ruling on his petition for habeas corpus, the judge, despite having allowed the government to present evidence kept secret from Wali Mohammed and his lawyer, dismissed the US government’s assertion that Wali Mohammad had “hobnobbed constantly with U.S. enemies and flew all over Europe at bin Laden’s command.” She found it “not credible” that Wali Mohammed could have acted as al Qaeda’s money manager after he had lost so much of the Central Bank’s money, although she did think he had been financing the Taleban and Hezb-e Islami. At the time of his arrest, Hezb-e Islami was not a party to the conflict, nor was it listed as a terrorist organisation, so this accusation should, anyway, have been irrelevant. Wali Mohammed has had the backing of all the other money changers in the Central Money Market in Kabul; they wrote to the US authorities arguing for his release. This was a significant show of support as they represent all parts of the country and strands of opinion.

Wali Mohammed was cleared for transfer on 26 September 2016. His lawyer, contending he had been a victim of mistaken identity, said he had been “very unlucky – most of all in having an extremely common name.”

44 year old Abdul Zahir was detained from his home in Logar by the US military and CIA after a tip-off that he possessed “weapons of mass destruction” in July 2002. Years later, in 2015, it was revealed the Americans had found only salt, sugar, and petroleum jelly at his home. Nevertheless, he ended up in Guantanamo. He had worked as a choki dar (an unarmed guard or doorman) and translator for an Arab commander with al Qaeda, Abdul-Hadi al-Iraqi, before 2001. Although such employment was not uncommon or particularly controversial in the hard-pressed economic times of the Taleban regime, the US contended he had been ideologically committed and was “a trusted member of al Qaida.”

Zahir was also in a car in 2002 from which a grenade was thrown at western civilians. One, a Canadian journalist, was seriously injured. Zahir was put on military trial at Guantanamo in 2006, on charges of “conspiring to commit war crimes, aid the enemy and attack civilians,” although the prosecutor accepted he had not thrown the grenade. The trial collapsed: already in shambles – the applicable law had not been decided and there was no-one to translate for Zahir – it was finally halted after the Supreme Court ruled that the president lacked the constitutional authority to hold such trials.

In July 2015, the Periodic Review Board recommended he be transferred and made a sort of admission that mistakes had been made. It said he had had a “limited role in Taliban structure and activities,” and had “probably [been] misidentified as the individual who had ties to al-Qaeda weapons facilitation.”

Bostan Karim, a seller of plastic flowers from Khost, was accused of being the leader of an al Qaeda IED cell. He was detained by Pakistani police in 2002 on a bus as he travelled to Miram Shah after another passenger, Wazir, had passed a broken Thuraya satellite telephone to Karim; the police had been taking Wazir off the bus for questioning and he said he gave the phone to Karim because he feared the police would steal it. Both men ended up in Guantanamo, although Wazir was released in 2007. The Pakistanis and Americans later asserted – for reasons which are incomprehensible – that the phone was being used as a detonator for IEDs. They did not explain why a terrorist would be taking a detonator out of Afghanistan. Nor did they say why possession of a satellite phone, then in common use in Khost, was evidence of wrong-doing. The judge in Karim’s petition for habeas also agreed the phone was evidence that Karim was an al Qaeda terrorist.

Karim’s fate came to be bound up with his former business partner, Obaidullah, whose house in Khost had been raided a month earlier by the US military and CIA after a tip-off. Obaidullah was tortured and ‘confessed’ that both he and Karim were in the same al Qaeda IED cell. He was also sent to Guantanamo. There was some other evidence against Obaidullah, although it fell away substantially during his habeas petition and appeals. There was never any evidence at all that Karim was an insurgent. However, the case against each man came to prop the other’s up. The judge in Obaidullah’s habeas petition said that his “long-standing personal and business relationship with at least one al Qaida operative [Karim],” was one reason why he must also have been a member; the judge in Karim’s case quoted his fellow judge who had said that Obaidullah was more likely than not “a member of an al Qaeda bomb cell committed to the destruction of [US] and Allied forces,” as evidence against Karim.

Karim had also been a missionary with Jamat al-Tabligh, an organisation with millions of followers in south Asia which proselytises among Muslims, urging them to lead better lives. It has endured a historical and sometimes violent antipathy from militants, including the Afghan and Pakistani Taleban, who dislike its view that now is the time for preaching (dawa), not war (jihad). US intelligence, however, classes Jamat al-Tabligh as a “terrorist support entity” and Karim’s membership and Obaidullah’s occasional attendance at meetings additional proof of them having been terrorists. Karim told one of his review boards at Guantanamo:

First of all, I am not a member of the Taleban and I’m not a member of al-Qaida. I’m a business man. I have two stores. In one store, I sell plastic flowers. In the other store, I rent furniture and dishes for special occasions. I am a missionary; I go house-to-house, village-to-village, spreading my religion.

Bostan was also ‘accused’ of having an uncle who was a member of Hezb-e Islami in the 1980s. At the time, it was actually America’s favourite faction among the mujahedin whom it then supported in their fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In one of the bizarre mistakes that litter the files of the Afghan detainees in Guantanamo, the file describes Hezb-e Islami in the 1980s as “one of the seven Al Qaida terrorist groups operating in Pakistan.” It was of course one of the seven Afghan, mujahedin groups fighting in Afghanistan. At that time, al Qaeda had yet to be founded.

Karim was cleared for transfer by the Periodic Review Board on 2 June 2016. (Obaidullah was released two months later in August 2016 and sent to the United Arabic Emirates where he is believed to be in a ‘de-radicalisation’ programme and still in some form of detention.)

Harun Gul, a 35 year old from Nangarhar, was detained in Afghanistan in 2007 and accused of being a Hezb-e Islami commander and facilitator for al Qaeda. Of all the Afghans, the least is known about his case. However, one document presented to the court in Muhammad Rahim’s petition for habeas corpus quoted notes from Harun’s interrogation (Harun testified against Rahim, although possibly under torture). The notes said Harun Gul had been in charge of six armed groups in Nangarhar province, each with three to five men, and a total operational budget for each group of 20,000 to 40,000 Pakistani rupees (roughly 200-400 US dollars) every one to three months. This does not read like the “senior commander of Hezb-e-Islami/Gulbuddin” the US claimed to have captured. The US said Harun admitted to serving as a courier for the senior leadership of al Qaeda. However, he has described being tortured, and said his captors in Afghanistan “blindfolded, shackled, and hung him by the arms while they were still cuffed behind his back, stripped and tortured him…. kept [him] alone and naked in a cell without even a bucket as a toilet.” He has said that, during interrogations in Guantanamo, he was “shackled for up to twelve hours without water or food in a position that allowed him to neither fully stand nor sit, preventing any sleep.”

On 14 July 2016, the Periodic Review Board recommended his continuing detention, although also hinting that he might be cleared for transfer if he was more forthcoming.

Muhammad Rahim from Nangarhar is accused of having been a facilitator and translator for Osama bin Laden. He was detained by Pakistan in February 2007 and handed over to the CIA; it appears the ISI said he might know the whereabouts of bin Laden. Rahim was rendered to Afghanistan and tortured. In all, he was subject to eight sessions of sleep deprivation, including three which lasted for more than four days and one, the last, which lasted for almost six (138.5 hours). The interrogation was such a failure that the CIA held an internal enquiry, concluding that the fact they had known nothing about Rahim prior to questioning him had been the problem. Nevertheless, when it transferred him to Guantanamo, the CIA announced to the world that it had captured “a tough, seasoned jihadist” who had “bought chemicals for one attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan,” a man who was “best known in counter-terror circles as a personal facilitator and translator” for bin Laden and who had “helped prepare Tora Bora as a hideout for bin Laden in December 2001.”

His case is classified, so it is difficult to assess it, but court documents show he apparently admitted to working with al Qaeda commanders before 2001 and up to their escape from Tora Bora into Pakistan. However, all the serious allegations both before and after 2001 are sourced to unverified and unprocessed intelligence information reports and, to some extent, other detainees’ testimony, including Harun’s.

Like Harun, Rahim has been given no chance to defend himself publically. He has, however, written a series of funny and apparently perceptive letters to his lawyer which have been published. In them, he jokes about the local wildlife in Cuba, discusses pop culture and American television and calls Donald Trump an idiot and, rather than a war hero, a “war zero.”

On 9 September 2016, the Periodic Review Board, 9 September 2016, accepted the US military’s case against him and recommended his continuing, indefinite detention.

 

 

(1) Readers may have noticed two spellings for Mohammad used in this piece. They are as per the original US documents.

Herat – the affluent and vibrant city in western Afghanistan – is going through a ‘scattering’ of political power and a deterioration in security. While Ismail Khan, the self-styled ‘amir of the west’, is still the preeminent figure, political power is no longer concentrated only in his hands, and the new actors are behaving differently from the old-timers. One consequence of this is that security has worsened, with several districts seeing heavy clashes between Afghan government forces and the armed opposition – mostly the Taleban – and between rival Taleban factions. In Herat city, insecurity has taken on a largely criminal face as manifested in assassinations, kidnappings and thefts. Reviewing the recent situation, AAN guest author Said Reza Kazemi* argues that the diffusion of political power and deteriorating security pose a crucial test to the vibrancy of Herat and this, in turn, is reflected in the day-to-day life of its people and their striving for the future.

Struggling to keep centre stage: the ‘amir’ of the west’

One still cannot write about Herat without mentioning its self-proclaimed amir, Ismail Khan. He has risen from a captain in the government army (from which he defected in 1979 to join an anti-communist uprising) to mujahedin commander to governor of Herat and self-declared ‘amir’ of what historically was called the southwestern region (1992 to 1994 and again, 2002 to 2004) to the Minister of Energy and Water to a vice-presidential candidate in the hugely disputed 2014 presidential elections.

A prominent member of the influential Jamiat-e Islami party and of the political opposition group Shura-ye Herasat wa Sobat-e Afghanistan (Council for Protection and Stability of Afghanistan or CPSA) (see AAN reporting here), Ismail Khan currently has no government position. He does not appear on the media much, either. However, there are two specific days in the year when he can always be seen talking to the people around him and to the media: 24 Hut (15 March), the anniversary of Herat’s uprising against the Soviet-backed, Afghan communist government in 1357 (1979) (see AAN reporting here) and 29 Hamal (18 April), the anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and victory of the mujahedin in Herat in 1371 (1992). (1) The reason why Ismail Khan gives special attention to marking these two events is that he believes he played the instrumental role in both. At other times, he gathers his mujahedin commanders, local elders, government officials, journalists and others in his mansion in a street named after himself in downtown Herat to talk about the situation of Afghanistan generally and Herat specifically.

This year, on the two anniversaries (Herat uprising and Soviet withdrawal), as well as at least twice in public meetings at his home (see here and here), Ismail Khan made some very strong points. He repeatedly described insecurity as spreading “to the gates of our city” from nearby provinces like Farah and said that he and his mujahedin would not wait for the Afghan government’s permission to defend Herat if the government hesitated to do so. He vowed to take action to prevent Herat from becoming “another Kunduz” – an explicit reference to the fear that a generally safe province such as Herat could also fall, at least temporarily, to the armed opposition, as Kunduz has done twice (AAN on its fall in 2015 and near fall in 2016 here and here).

Ismail Khan’s rhetoric should be read in terms of messages for opponents, supporters and the general public. An experienced local journalist told this author that 70-year-old Ismail Khan is using worsening security as a pretext for arguing for the need for his Shura-ye Mujahedin (Mujahedin Council). It brings together many of his former Jamiat-e Islami allies from western Afghanistan and, through it, Ismail Khan keeps his central position in Afghanistan’s changing political landscape (more on his mujahedin council project in this previous AAN dispatch). There are at least two changes in the country’s political scene that Ismail Khan is reacting to: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami party’s reconciliation with the Afghan government – its pictures and statements have been on billboards as well as on some car windows in parts of the city – and future parliamentary elections (whenever they happen – for more, see previous AAN dispatch on elections here). A high-ranking government official who is close to both Ismail Khan in Herat and his allies in Kabul told this author:

Ismail Khan and his allies are preparing themselves for the coming parliamentary elections. They see Hekmatyar as a potential rival. They want to have a strong presence in the future parliament, and this will allow them to put pressure on the leadership and ministers of the National Unity Government.

Ismail Khan has so far managed to maintain his Mujahedin Council, not because everybody agrees with him and his agenda, but because he has been able to gratify them, particularly economically. He has accumulated abundant wealth and spent part of it on satisfying and keeping his former mujahedin commanders and members on side. For instance, local sources told this author that he reportedly earns a monthly income of around 19 million AFN (approximately USD 292,000) from leasing out three markets in the centre of Herat city alone. Additionally, he has intervened in other economic sectors from hospitality to partnerships with major business people since 2001. (2) One example is the swish, multi-storey Esteqlal Hotel in downtown Herat that is owned by him and where foreign guests, visiting government officials and those close to the ‘amir’ stay.

Ismail Khan’s continued political and economic influence in Herat would certainly help him sustain and even enhance his standing in Afghanistan’s national political sphere, particularly via the Council for Protection and Stability of Afghanistan, where he heads the defence and security committee. Nevertheless, many in Herat agree that the nature of his influence has changed. “Ismail Khan is no longer the only determining man in town,” said the journalist quoted above, “because others have risen and are vying for power.” This has been possible, broadly speaking, because of Herat’s socioeconomic dynamics, including the entry of more educated younger people into politics and the rise of new economic-political actors. In Herat, we now see a diffusion of political power, what in this dispatch is referred to as ‘scattered politics’.

The shadow of the past governors

After Ismail Khan was moved to Kabul to become the Minister of Energy and Water in 2004 in a bid by then President Hamid Karzai to impose central government authority on the disobedient Herati ‘amir’, Sayyed Muhammad Khairkhwa became the first in an unusually long line of successors. Khairkhwa had worked with Ismail Khan in the resistance before 1992 – something that it was assumed would help reduce the likelihood of Ismail Khan acting as a spoiler against him. (3) Khairkhwa – a Herati transitional solution, at least from Karzai’s perspective – did not last long and was replaced by Sayyed Hussain Anwari the following year. A non-Herati from Parwan province and a Shia Hazara, Anwari met with opposition from the local Herati Sunni elite and population. However, he managed to stay in his position until 2009, during which, some people say, he advanced the interests of the Shia Hazara community, including his support for the development of the populous Mahalla Baba Haji and Jebrail settlements which house thousands of people, mostly Shia Hazaras and Sayyeds, in Herat city. (Anwari died of cancer in July 2016) Like other provinces across Afghanistan, Herat’s security was deteriorating by 2009. One reason was that Ismail Khan, angry about being removed from his home area and not mollified by his promotion to the cabinet, used local allies such as Commander Ghulam Yahya Akbari Siawushani to undermine security in Herat province. (4)

Anwari was replaced by Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, another non-Herati and a technocrat who had been Minister of Irrigation and Environment (2002-04) and Deputy Defence Minister (2005-08) under Karzai. (He had been a supporter of the former king, but later became close to Karzai.) Nuristani did not endure long, because of, among other reasons, his lack of understanding of and involvement in Herat’s local social and political dynamics.

Nuristani’s 2010 replacement, Daud Shah Saba, was different. A Herati with dual Afghan-Canadian citizenship, a geologist by profession (and later Minister of Mines and Petroleum, 2015-16), Saba’s attempts at reform threatened the interests of the established elite, particularly those around Ismail Khan, such as former mayor and Ismail Khan protégé Muhammad Salim Taraki. Saba was forced to resign in June 2013 (more on his resignation in this AAN dispatch). His successor, Fazlullah Wahidi, a non-Herati from Kunar province, did not last long either, as he was, along with many other local government officials, summarily dismissed by President Ghani in a surprise visit to Herat in December 2014.

The repeated changing of Herat governors, writes Jolyon Leslie, an architect and researcher who has been working in Afghanistan since 1989 (p. 22), shows:

… how narrow a path [Herat’s] governors need to tread – and how little support they might expect from Kabul in the end, for their reform or any other efforts.

This past experience weighs heavily on the incumbent governor, Muhammad Asef Rahimi, another non-Herati, this time from Kabul, who has studied public administration and development in the United States and is a former minister of agriculture. He is Herat’s sixth governor since 2004. Officially, the governor is at the apex of power in his (or her) province. In practice, this is often not true, and is certainly not in present-day Herat. Several local journalists and many ordinary people speak of Rahimi as a symbolic and ceremonial official with little influence. They also describe him with phrases like ‘overly conservative’ or ‘extremely cautious.’ He is mostly seen meeting foreigners and various groups of local government officials and people in his office, speaking at events and opening exhibitions. Like other non-Herati governors, Rahimi is not heavily involved in Herat’s political and economic dynamics. Speaking on Tolo TV on 1 November 2016, Rahimi himself even referred publicly to his lack of power in Herat. (5)

Acting in this rather constrained way has helped him do one main thing: maintain his office, albeit without being able to deliver much. Additionally, as a governor on generally good terms with the two NUG leaders, as well as with Ismail Khan, Rahimi represents a weak administration that is more involved in its own internal politicking than public service delivery. (6)

The new generation: political power diffused

The towering shadow of Ismail Khan has diminished since the early years after 2001, not only because of his years of absence from the province, but also because of Herat’s larger societal dynamics. Herat’s political scene has, therefore, seen several new actors emerging. One is the current mayor, Farhad Niayesh, a Herati with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Herat and a master’s degree in water resources management from India. Aged 31 and not belonging to any political faction, he is the youngest mayor Herat has ever seen and is generally viewed by locals as hardworking. Many Heratis know him as a mayor whose civil service appointment test was taken and approved by President Ghani himself. This is seen as an important change in Herat politics because the highest municipal position has traditionally been a prerogative of Ismail Khan. The post is also economically significant: Herat Municipality collects over one billion AFN in revenue on an annual basis.

Niayesh has been actively working to change the face of Herat city. As part of a new urban master plan, the main road in central Herat is being widened (only Iran’s consulate still stands in the way as they have so far refused to move) and the city’s squares are being rebuilt (see, for example, here). Niayesh has also been working to connect Herat internationally. New railway lines are being constructed to link it to neighbouring Iran and Turkmenistan (see here and here). He also recently signed a ‘sister city’ agreement between Herat and Council Bluffs, a city in the US state of Iowa, in July 2016. This was a joint effort by military veterans from Iowa who had served in Afghanistan and Herati leaders to sustain and enhance bilateral understanding and relationships.

However, the young mayor has also run into hurdles. The widening of the main road, for example, has pitted him against the provincial council. Niayesh has accused the council of seeking USD 50,000 in kickbacks from contracts related to the project, an allegation the council has rejected as baseless. No investigation has so far been conducted into the accusation. The road project and the development of informal settlements in and around Herat city have again also revealed the extent and depth of land grabbing in Herat. This is a threat to the young mayor’s push for development, because it is extremely difficult to settle land and property disputes in a fair manner.

The mayor is also reportedly having a difficult relationship with Governor Rahimi. Local sources told this author the mayor tends to work in an independent manner, partly because he believes he enjoys the support of the president. This is putting him in conflict, not only with the governor who expects more consultation, but also with influential members of the provincial council. The pressure of other actors may force the mayor to proceed more carefully in order not to further threaten the interests of the local elite such as Ismail Khan and those around him.

The second recently emerging actor is the head of the provincial council, Haji Kamran Alizai. In contrast to the self-styled amir, the ‘ceremonial’ governor and the independent mayor – with all of whom he has a tense relationship –, Alizai belongs to what a writer in the Afghan daily newspaper, Hasht-e Sobh, has termed “a different generation of emerging local powerbrokers.” (7) A Pashtun from Kohsan district of Herat province and perceived as close to former President Karzai and recently to First Vice-President Abdul Rashid Dostum, Alizai means different things to different people. For his supporters, he is a determined and assiduous man who does what he says. For his opponents, he is a ranting, domineering bully who takes the law into his own hands.

He does not refrain from showing off the wealth he has accumulated, in his own words, from “oil imports from Iraq, Iran and Turkmenistan.” (8) Alizai is reportedly closer than most Herati figures of influence to the Iranian government through that country’s consulate in Herat. He frequently travels to Iran and has assumed an Iranian Farsi accent.

In an incident in May 2016 in downtown Herat, Alizai’s bodyguards shot and severely wounded a provincial National Directorate of Security (NDS) officer who had wanted to search the vehicles in Alizai’s convoy for illicit drugs. (10) It is because of events like this that some, including Hasht-e Sobh, have alleged that a major part of his wealth comes from large-scale smuggling of narcotics from western Afghanistan to Iran and Turkmenistan. (9) In another blatant case, Alizai along with his armed men stormed the Herat Appellate Attorney’s Office (the part of the Attorney General’s Office that deals with appeals) and freed a man accused of embezzlement. (11) This happened at the same time as, in Kabul, the Anti-Corruption Criminal Justice Centre was being opened by new Attorney General Muhammad Farid Hamidi and just before the Brussels conference on aid to Afghanistan when accountability would be one of the major themes (see previous AAN dispatch on Brussels Conference on Afghanistan here).

Until this point, the Afghan government had been either unwilling or unable (or both) to hold Alizai accountable for allegedly breaking the law, but Attorney General Hamidi did try. The confrontation between him and Alizai became what Herati parliamentarian, Ahmad Farhad Majidi, called “the battle between law and force in Herat.” (12) On 18 August 2016, the Attorney General issued an order suspending Alizai as head of Herat’s provincial council, banning him from leaving the country and asking the local government to arrest him. Nothing was actually done, though. This failure, among other things, increased the tension between Alizai and Governor Rahimi whose spokesman Jailani Farhad initially announced that the local administration would implement the Attorney General’s order. Back to Herat from a short visit to Kabul where he was seeking political support, Alizai was welcomed by a cheering crowd of supporters on 27 August 2016. He held a press conference soon afterwards in which he emphasised he did not apologise for his actions and blasted the local government, particularly Governor Rahimi, as “incompetent.” (13)

One of the people Alizai contacted and won backing from in Kabul was First Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum. Billboards showing pictures of Alizai and Dostum were put up in various parts of the city after Alizai’s return to Herat. Even President Ghani has not intervened to remove Alizai after earlier complaints against Alizai’s alleged violations of laws. “The president told us that the people of Herat have elected Haji Kamran [Alizai] as provincial council head, so he couldn’t do anything about it,” said a civil society activist who had attended a meeting with Ghani when he visited Herat to inaugurate the Salma hydropower dam in June 2016.

As expected, Alizai stayed in his post as head of Herat provincial council for a third consecutive term. He reportedly stayed chairman “through the force of money”. The journalist quoted earlier told AAN that Alizai had offered up to USD 200,000 to each provincial council member who voted for him.

Deteriorating security around and in Herat city

In Herat, the elite is divergent and political power scattered among many actors. Additionally, the administration in Herat province and districts is generally dysfunctional. Many officials, including heads of provincial departments, district administrators and district police chiefs, who were summarily dismissed by President Ghani in December 2014, have still not been replaced by fully mandated authorities. These key provincial and district positions continue to be occupied by acting officials whose authority is only weakly recognised. One result of all this is that security has deteriorated across Herat province. Several districts have seen violent clashes not only between the Afghan government and the armed opposition – mostly the Taleban – but also between rival Taleban factions. Government forces’ patrols and checkpoints on the gates and outskirts of Herat are needed to guard the city against insecurity spreading from nearby districts such as Karokh to the northeast and Gozara to the south. In the words of one well-placed local journalist who covers security:

The Taleban are increasingly operating in most districts of Herat. They have their governor for Herat province and their administrators for Herat districts. The government is a physical structure as seen by its offices of governor and district administrators as well as by its security forces. The Taleban operate differently: they want to affect the minds of the people.

In July 2016, the security committee of Herat provincial council raised its concerns over insurgent groups having taken control of numerous areas in a number of districts, pointing to Shindand, Adraskan, Golran, Koshk-e Kohna and Farsi as particularly threatened. The committee members said that Taleban ruled most of the villages in those districts.

The most restive is Shindand, the most southern and strategic district that hosts one of Afghanistan’s largest airbases (and still some US military presence). As AAN reported in April 2016, the district witnessed violent clashes between two rival Taleban groups, from the Mansur/Haibatullah mainstream and the dissident faction loyal to Mullah Rasul. In response, government forces have, on several occasions, intervened in the Shindand conflict to quell the insurgency. The intra-Taleban clashes in Shindand are ongoing and have caused heavy casualties. There has also been government/Taleban fighting, including an attack on Afghan commando forces in October 2016; the number of casualties remains unknown. (14) To make the situation more manageable in this volatile part of Herat province, the Afghan government plans to divide Shindand into several smaller districts. Whether this will contribute to security and governance is doubtful, however.

Other districts have also been getting increasingly unsafe. Like Shindand, there has been Taleban infighting in the district of Pashtun Zarghun to the immediate southeast of Herat city. Further in the east, in Chesht-e Sharif district, where the strategic Salma hydro-electric dam is located, the local Taleban have repeatedly abducted people who work for the Afghan government and also claimed an attack on foreign tourists (see here and here). (15) In the west, in the districts of Kohsan and Golran that border Iran, increasingly active local Taleban has spurred the Afghan government to carry out “mopping-up operations” there (see here and here). The district of Koshk-e Kohna in the north has also witnessed increased Taleban activity. The nearby southern district of Gozara, the centre of which is only around 15 kilometres away from central Herat city, is home to increased criminal activity by armed kidnappers and thieves.

Herat security officials have vowed to improve security in their province. The late commander of the Herat-based, Afghan National Army’s 207th Zafar Corps, General Mohiuddin Ghori, who died in a helicopter crash on 29 November 2016, had vowed to turn Afghanistan’s western region into “the graveyard of the Taleban” and had effectively taken an increasingly offensive posture against the insurgents. General Ghori had replaced General Taj Mohammad Jahed after Jahed was appointed Interior Minister in May 2016. It is not known yet who will replace General Ghori or how his death will affect Afghan security forces in the western region. There has also been a new police chief, General Muhammad Ayub Ansari, who succeeded General Abdul Majid Rozi following the latter’s retirement as per a presidential decree in July 2016. Rozi had been under increased public pressure due to worsening security.

Inside Herat city, insecurity is largely criminal and armed. (16) According to media reports, Herat is becoming notorious as “a city of assassinations, kidnappings and thefts.” (17) In a recent high-profile incident, on 28 April 2016, Samiuddin Rahin, the provincial attorney, was killed in his car by unknown armed motorcyclists in broad daylight in downtown Herat. It is not clear whether this killing was carried out by insurgents or criminals (or both).

This author has also come across at least two local people whose relatives have been kidnapped and, in one case, killed even after they paid a heavy ransom. In May 2016, the provincial NDS arrested what it called “16 professional kidnappers who had, in eight months, abducted ten people, hidden them in eight hideouts across the city, demanded ransom from their families and killed three of them”. As for thefts, both petty and grand, they have become commonplace. Local people are concerned about thefts of their cars, motorcycles and mobile phones. Member of Herat provincial council Habib ul-Rahman Pedram has said there are “at least ten cases of car thefts in Herat city per day.” (18) In late October 2016, armed men wearing police uniform broke into two jewellery stores and stole two kilogrammes of gold in broad daylight in central Herat. A few police officials were sacked in the wake of this robbery.

It seems there are various motives behind rising crime inside Herat and its environs. Several local elders told this author that many assassinations are, in fact, contract killings, paid for by local figures of influence to settle scores among them. Additionally, there are reports that locals whose fortunes have worsened in the wake of the international military drawdown are resorting to abductions and thefts as a quick way to make lots of money. Many believe the criminals operate in collusion with a corrupt police force.

Testing Herat’s dynamism: the experiences of local Heratis

Although political power in Herat has become more diffuse and security has deteriorated as a result, it does not mean that the current order in Herat – at least in the city – will fall apart. Rhetoric by local figures of influence such as Ismail Khan that Herat might fall to the armed opposition as Kunduz did is at best premature. This is because the insurgents – mainly the Taleban – and the criminals are as yet far from being able to counteract government forces. Equally importantly, Herat – again, the city at least – is economically, socially and culturally vibrant and this sustains and motivates the local population to keep up their every-day lives.

The dynamism of Herat is reflected in the day-to-day life of its people. This author has followed three Heratis** with different backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions for around a year. They give an indication of how non-elite Heratis are reacting to security and political developments and are thinking of and striving for the future.

Qader is a medical doctor in Herat Regional Hospital, the hospital that usually receives those killed and injured in security and criminal incidents in the city and surrounding areas. He also works in a number of crowded private clinics and hospitals in Herat city. Undeterred by the generally disappointing news of Herat and Afghanistan, which he follows on a daily basis, Qader is building a future for himself and his family by recently buying a plot of land in the centre of the city. On this land, he has almost finished constructing a house. The land and the house are currently worth around USD 100,000. However, Qader carries a pistol and closely follows his two children between home and school, as do almost all well-off fathers across the city.

The second Herati, Mama Farid, is a former mujahed and patriarch of a family in downtown Herat. He has discouraged his children from migrating abroad. Instead they continue their higher education in the bustling University of Herat, which has around fourteen thousand students, and work in the private sector, including in a money exchange in the major Khorasan Market in the city centre.

The third Herati, Rauf, a returnee from Iran, is a plasterer who has worked on the construction of the houses of both rich and poor people in and around Herat city. He believes in the future of Herat and, more broadly, of Afghanistan, that it will not return to ‘the bad old days’, because, in his words, “there has been so much change in terms of construction and development that makes it difficult for the past to be repeated.”

The lively city of Herat also hosts, on a weekly basis, events related to topics ranging from security to economics to culture and science. Recent examples include a film festival, an exhibition on tourism and souvenirs, the fifth Herat Security Dialogue, held in the ancient, renovated Herat Citadel and the five-star Arg Hotel, an exhibition of rural market products bringing village-based producers together from across the province, a biennial graphics exhibition in the University of Herat, the tenth exhibition of Afghan and Iranian industrial products, an exhibition of forty thousand books and events on mental health and psychotherapy (19), to give just a short list. (20) Of special note are, compared to Herat’s past as well as to other provinces across Afghanistan, the greater numbers of girls and women who are contributing to almost all spheres of Herat’s public life from education to the economy at large.

It is this dynamism that keeps large parts of the population engaged in day-to-day life and away from the insurgents and the criminals. The way that political power has become scattered among many actors and the worsening of security pose a crucial test to this liveliness, but it is premature to say which will overcome which. The current order, in which fragmenting politics and security go on at the same time as the dynamic life of a province and city, will stay, at least as long as Herat has not lost the vibrancy that has made it what it is: a bustling place in the midst of an ongoing battle between law and force.

 

* Said Reza Kazemi is an independent researcher. He has previously worked as a researcher for the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN).

** Names have been changed in order to protect the confidentiality of the local people under study.

 

 

(1) For a concise history of Herat, see this recent work: CPW Gammell, The Pearl of Khorasan: A History of Herat, London: Hurst, 2016.

(2) Antonio Giustozzi wrote in his 2005 paper “Warlords into businessmen: the Afghan transition 2002-2005” that initially “according to available information, Ismail Khan (…) was making so much money out of Islam Qala’s [border crossing] customs that he might not have felt the need to actually get directly involved in business activities. The customs revenue of Herat has been variously estimated at $100-300 million a year.”

Also on Ismail Khan’s interventions in the economy, see Jolyon Leslie, “Political and Economic Dynamics of Herat,” Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace (USIP), 2015, especially pages 15-16 and 22-25.

(3) Jolyon Leslie, “Political and Economic Dynamics of Herat,” Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace (USIP), 2015, 22.

(4) Commander Ghulam Yahya Akbari Siawushani, from Siawushan village in Gozara district, was a former Herat mayor under Ismail Khan’s governorship. He was killed along with 24 of his armed men in a military operation by Afghan government and ISAF forces in October 2009. In 2009, he had told a reporter, “I agree with a lot of what the Taleban do, and I have even helped them out financially. I am in contact with one group of Taleban, but I am operating an independent front.” See Thomas Ruttig, “The Other Side: Dimensions of the Afghan Insurgency: Causes, Actors and Approaches to ‘Talks,’” Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), Thematic Report 01/2009, July 2009, 11.

(5) AAN media monitoring: Tolo TV, 1 November 2016.

(6) Centre-periphery relations are tense in Afghanistan. The central government has used political appointments to compete with established provincial elite, not for institution-building as claimed, but for its own favourite patrimonialism. See Antonio Giustozzi and Dominique Orsini, “Centre-Periphery Relations in Afghanistan: Badakhshan between Patrimonialism and Institution-Building,” Central Asian Survey, 28:1, 2009, 1-16.

(7) Hasht-e Sobh, 7 Sonbola 1395 / 28 August 2016, 4.

(8) Hasht-e Sobh, 31 Asad 1395 / 21 August 2016, 3.

(9) Hasht-e Sobh, 7 Sonbola 1395 / 28 August 2016, 4.

(10) Hasht-e Sobh, 7 Sonbola 1395 / 28 August 2016, 4.

(11) Hasht-e Sobh, 3 Sonbola 1395 / 24 August 2016, 7.

(12) Hasht-e Sobh, 30 Asad 1395 / 20 August 2016, 7.

(13) Hasht-e Sobh, 7 Sonbola 1395 / 28 August 2016, 4.

(14) Afghan Islamic Press, 20 October 2016.

(15) This author’s interview with a relative of a government employee who has been abducted in Chesht-e Sharif, Herat city, October 2016.

(16) However, there was a high-profile security incident in May 2016 in which three rockets were fired from a secharkh [the three-wheeled Herati rickshaw] on the building of Herat governor’s office, killing a civilian man, injuring seven other people and destroying parts of the building. It is not clear whether this was an act carried out by the insurgency.

(17) Somayya Walizada, “Edama-ye Kabus-e Qatl wa Terur dar Herat [Continuation of the Nightmare of Killing and Assassination in Herat],” Killid Magazine, Issue 720, 14 May 2016, 24; Sune Engel Rasmussen, “Afghanistan’s model city is also its kidnapping capital,” The Week, 6 August 2015.

(18) Hasht-e Sobh, 31 Jawza 1395 / 20 June 2016, 5.

(19) The events on mental health and psychotherapy were attended by scores of people, including this author, in Herat city.

(20) In one spectacular recent event, Herati women held their fourth international film festival in the capital city of Kabul in late October 2016. This film festival is attracting participants from across the world and is becoming globally renowned (all about this film festival here.)

Assadullah Sarwari, one of a handful of convicted Afghan war criminals, has been released from prison in Kabul. As head of the intelligence service immediately after the 1978 communist coup d’état, he was responsible for the torture and arbitrary execution of thousands of detainees. Yet, the lack of transparency and the irregular and illegal aspects of his detention and prosecution (including 13 years of pre-trial detention and a continued three and a half years of detention after his sentence had been fulfilled) point to fundamental problems with the Afghan state’s capacity to deal with complex war crimes. This is significant, argue AAN’s Ehsan Qaane and Sari Kouvo, not the least in the light of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) ongoing preliminary examination.

Assadullah Sarwari was the first intelligence chief after the April 1978 military coup d’etat which brought Nur Muhammad Tarakay and his Hezb-e Dimukratik-e Khalq-e Afghanistan (the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA) to power. The intelligence agency, AGSA, (1) launched mass purges of those it considered its enemies, with mass arrests, summary executions and disappearances (for detail and background, see the Afghanistan Justice Project’s (AJP) report and two AAN dispatches, here, and here). After the Soviet invasion in December 1979, a different wing of the PDPA seized power and the new president, Babrak Karmal, appointed Sarwari as deputy prime minister. Soon after, however, he was removed from government and posted (or exiled) as ambassador to Mongolia. For reasons that are unclear, Sarwari returned to Afghanistan in May 1992, after the overthrow of the last PDPA government and the takeover of the mujahedin – and was then detained. Below, we will first provide a chronology of Sarwari’s detention and trial and then discuss what the proceedings against him tell about justice in Afghanistan.

Chronology of events

26 May 1992: Arrest

Sawari returned to Afghanistan on 11 May 1992. Two weeks later, he was arrested from his home in Macrorayon, a part of Kabul consisting of Soviet-style prefabricated housing blocks, and accused of treason by the mujahedin forces of Shura-ye Nazar, a network within the Jamiat-e Islami faction led by late commander Ahmad Shah Massud, who was then, officially, defence minister in the Islamic State of Afghanistan government.

1992 to 1993: Detention in Kabul

From 1992 until the beginning of 1993, Sarwari was detained in one of the detention facilities belonging to Shura-ye Nazar in Kabul. When forces led by (now Vice-President) Abdul Rashid Dostum and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (from respectively the Jombesh and Hezb-e Islami factions) started shelling Kabul at the beginning of 1994 (on 10 Jadi 1372,or 31 December 1993), Sarwari was transported to a Shura-ye Nazar detention facility in the Panjshir, together with several hundred other prisoners and detainees.

1993 to 2005: Detention in Panjshir

Sarwari stayed in detention in Panjshir until 2005. At some point in the first years of the post-Taleban administration, Sarwari wrote a letter to President Hamed Karzai asking for his release. He was not released, but in 2005 he was transferred back to a National Directorate of Security (NDS) detention facility in Kabul.

2005 to 2007: National Directorate of Security (NDS) trials

In 2005, Sarwari was charged by an NDS prosecutor. The trial against him was held in the Primary Court of National Security in Kabul. After three public hearings, Sarwari was found guilty of committing war crimes (torture, murder and forced disappearances) while he was head of AGSA in 1978/79 and, on 25 February 2006, sentenced to death. In the absence of an article relevant for war crimes in the Afghan Criminal Code, the court relied on Article 130 of the Afghan Constitution. According to this article, courts shall, if there is no provision in other laws, “in pursuance of Hanafi jurisprudence, and, within the limits set by this Constitution, rule in a way that attains justice in the best manner.”As will be discussed in more detail in the second part of this dispatch, Judge Bakhtiari who handled the case made it clear that, in his view, this case concerned war crimes that were not covered by the Afghan criminal code, and that he therefore relied on Article 130 of the Constitution for Sarwari’s conviction.

The court proceedings were criticised by the Afghanistan Justice Project, an Afghan-international human rights watch group, and others, for failing to uphold international standards.

Sarwari appealed against the verdict. In the appeal, he argued that because as head of AGSA he had had a military rank, he should not have been tried in a National Security Court, but rather in a Military Court. On 12 December 2006,the Appeals Court of National Security confirmed that it did not have jurisdiction over the case, and the case was moved to the Military Appeals Court in Kabul.

2007 to 2008: Military Court trials

On 3 May 2007, the Military Appeals Court sent a request to the Supreme Court to refer the case to the Military Primary Court. The request was granted, and referred on 22 August 2007. A year later, on 20 July 2008, Sarwari was sentenced to 18 years in prison for misusing his official powers when he arbitrarily killed detainees, and for treason. As the session was held behind closed doors, there is no public information about the details of the proceedings. Sarwari and the prosecutor both appealed against the verdict. On 22 October 2008, the Military Appeals Court sentenced Sarwari to 19 years in prison on the basis of the same accusations. The prosecutor had demanded the death penalty.

While the first session in the appeals court had been held behind closed doors, the latter sessions were public, with journalists and relatives of victims present. According to Sadiq Mossadeq, an Afghan freelance journalist who was following the case, Sarwari argued in his defence that he should not be on trial for war crimes, as hundreds who had committed similar crimes now held senior government positions. Sarwari was not satisfied with the final verdict of the Military Appeal Court and announced he would request a review of his case by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court accepted his request, and the case was sent back to the Primary Military Court. According to the Afghan Criminal Procedure Code, the Supreme Court can ask for a retrial under certain circumstances. AAN has been unable to find out the exact reasons for the Supreme Court to accede to Sarwari’s request for a retrial.

2009 to 2012: The Military Court retrial

0n 26 April 2009, the Military Primary Court, at Sarwari’s retrial, sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Its verdict read:

We, the judges of the [Primary] Military Court of National Security, in the judicial session on the above mentioned date, in unanimity and presence of all parties, convicted you, Assadullah (Sarwari), the head of AGSA during the presidency of Tarakay, to seven years in prison on the accusation of execution of detainees in [Kabul’s] Pul-e Charkhi prison without trial under article 42 of the military code, to five years in prison for neglect of duty pursuant to article 43 of the same code, and to 16 years in prison from the date of your arrest for murdering detainees in Pul-e Charkhi jail according to articles 396 and 39 of the penal code and to 20 years according to article 158 of the penal code.

Finally, on 18 June 2012, the Military Appeals Court confirmed the 20-year prison sentence that had been given by the Military Primary Court (2), but it used different articles of the law and added a new accusation: treason. The final verdict of the Appeals Court read:

We, the judges of the Military Appeals Court, in the judicial session on 29/3/1391 (18 June 2012), in unanimity and presence of all parties, based on article 33 of the Structure, Duties and Jurisdictions of the Courts Code, dismissed the decision of the Military Primary Court, which was issued on 26 April 2009, due to use of the wrong [legal] articles and codes. [Herewith] we have sentenced you to four years in prison for misuse of power and neglect of duty, under article 224 of the military penal code (usulnama-ye jezai-ye askari), to 20 years in prison for illegal detention of our innocent citizens in Pul-e Charkhi jail and later murdering some of them without trial and legal procedures, under article 396 with considering paragraph 2 of article 38 of the same code, and to 16 years in prison for treason pursuant to article 156 of the penal code […]. The private rights claims of those victims’ families whose names are included in this case, are legally protected.

Neither Sarwari or the prosecutors were content with the verdict and, again, both appealed to the Military Appeals Court. The Attorney General, Ishaq Aleko, requested another round of appeal on 20 June 2012. However, the Structure, Duties and Authorities of the Courts Code does not allow a case to be addressed more than three times by the appeals courts. The Supreme Court replied on 6 March 2013 that the verdict of the Military Appeals Court on 18 June 2012 was the final decision. The case was finally closed.

November 2016: Sarwari is released from prison

Prison terms in Afghanistan are counted from the day a person is detained. In Sarwari’s case, this was 26 May 1992, as also mentioned in the Military Appeals Court verdict of 18 June 2012. This means that based on the court’s decision, Sarwari should have been released on 26 May 2012, ie 25 days before what would be the final decision of the Military Appeals Court. So there was an expectation, apparently also from the court’s side, that Sarwari would be released after the trial. However, he was not released and stayed in prison for three and a half more years. AAN has repeatedly tried to get clarification from the Attorney General’s offices as to why there was such a long delay, but no official explanation has been forthcoming. However, a source has suggested to AAN that the reasons may have been political and that Sarwari could only be released after Hazrat Sebghatullah Mujaddedi, the first mujahedin president in 1992, agreed. Dozens of Mujaddedi’s family members were detained and disappeared by AGSA (see here; more detail here).

Justice, accountability and war crimes prosecutions in Afghanistan

AAN has previously reported about the efforts to promote transitional justice, accountability for war crimes and gross human rights violations, and access to justice for victims (see here), as well as the ongoing ICC preliminary investigation in Afghanistan (see here, and here).

So far, the steps towards accountability have been few and far between. In 2005, the Afghan government adopted the now long forgotten Action Plan for Peace, Justice and Reconciliation. The Action Plan sought to promote reconciliation with a focus on documentation, truth-seeking, victim-focused measures and strategies for accountability; it expired in 2008 (see here). Almost at the same time, a parliamentary committee started drafting an amnesty law. This law, passed in May 2008 by the Afghan parliament and published in the Official Gazette in 2008, provides blanket amnesty for all involved in the decades-long conflict in Afghanistan (see here). The choice for amnesty instead of accountability was continued in the Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program (APRP) that aimed to make peace with insurgents and promoted ‘political amnesty’ for those reconciling. This trend has continued in the recent peace negotiations with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Hezb-e Islami (see AAN analysis here and here).

There have been some alternative efforts to at least seek solace and recognise the experiences of victims of war crimes in Afghanistan. However, two official efforts that document war crimes committed between 1978 and 2001 – a report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ and a mapping exercise by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) – remain officially unavailable (the AIHRC’s report has never been published; the UN report was briefly published online and then removed; a cached version can be read here). The main successes of the nascent movement of victims of war crimes were to make the International Human Rights Day, 10 December, also a national day for war victims in Afghanistan and to get the road leading to the infamous Pul-e Charkhi jail named the “War Victims’ Road.”

Although the state can now not prosecute those who committed war crimes or crimes against humanity, the Amnesty Law does leave open the option for victims to bring individual claims against perpetrators, but none have dared do so, so far. This option was also left open by the Military Appeals Court in its 2012 verdict against Sarwari.

One other legal option is the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC began a preliminary examination of potential cases in Afghanistan in 2007 and has since then progressed slowly. The first phase of the examination focused on identifying whether crimes that meet the ICC’s‘gravity threshold’ had been committed in Afghanistan after the ICC gained jurisdiction (2003 onwards). This phase was concluded by the 2016 Preliminary Examination Report, according to which, crimes against humanity and war crimes that meet the ICC threshold had indeed been committed in Afghanistan in the post-2003 period, by Afghan government forces, the US military and CIA and the Taleban (see earlier AAN analysis here). The next step for the ICC is to examine whether Afghanistan can be considered able and willing to prosecute these crimes nationally. The ICC is complementary to national jurisdiction and cannot pursue prosecutions when there is political will and necessary capacity to prosecute crimes in national courts.

There have been next to no war crime-related prosecutions in Afghanistan in the post-2001 era. The preliminary examination reports mentions just two cases: the pre-Amnesty Law conviction of Ettehad-e Islami commander Abdullah Shah for murders committed in 1992-93 during the civil war in Kabul and “reportedly two senior members of the Haqqani Network… prosecuted and convicted by a national primary court in August 2016 for an unknown alleged conduct” (see here). While the lack of prosecutions provide some evidence of the Afghan government’s willingness, or lack thereof, to prosecute alleged perpetrators of war crimes in Afghanistan, and the Amnesty Law, of course, underlines its unwillingness to do so, the detention and prosecution of Assadullah Sarwari is also telling in terms of the Afghan state’s current ability to prosecute complex crimes. Significant shortcomings of the Afghan justice system that were exemplified in the Sarwari trial include:

Lack of relevant provisions in the criminal code: In 2005, when Sarwari was first prosecuted, there were no clear criminal law provisions for war crimes in Afghanistan. The Primary Court of National Security decided to use article 130 of the Constitution, according to which Hanafi jurisprudence has precedence. Judge Bakhtiari, the head of bench of the Primary Court of National Security, told AAN in an interview in 2012,“The Afghan penal code is silent about war crimes. Therefore, I used article 130 in Sarwari’s case.” The legality of using article 130 in this case has been disputed, among others by by Lutful-Rahman Sayid, a member of the Independent Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution (ICOIC) who is writing a PhD on this article. In his view, article 130 cannot be used in criminal cases, as the drafters of the constitution had only intended its usage in civil cases.

The Military Court did not use article 130 and instead referred to articles in the Afghan Criminal Code relating to murder, illegal detention and treason. This, however, was also disputed. According to the files on Sarwari’s case that AAN has received, one of the reasons why the Supreme Court referred the case back to the military courts was the possibly incorrect use of the articles:

The Supreme Court was not convinced by the verdicts of the military courts in relation to the usage of articles relevant to the accusation and the attribution of the accusation to Sarwari. Therefore the Supreme Court sent back Sarwari’s case to the lower courts for correction of the used articles.

Lack of clarity about which court has jurisdiction: The shifting of Sarwari’s case from the national security courts to the military courts shows that the Afghan justice system was quite unclear on how and where war crimes should be prosecuted. On 29 September 2012, in an interview with AAN, Judge Bakhtiari argued that the national security courts were the relevant court for this case. However, those in favour of the military courts as competent argued that the national security courts were established based on the Crimes against Internal and External Security bill, which came into force ten years after the committing of the crimes attributed to Sarwari. Therefore, this law, they argued, and any institutions that were established based on this law, did not have the jurisdiction to handle Sarwari’s case.

Length of the proceedings: Sarwari’s trial started in 2005 and ended in 2012. According to the Afghan Criminal Procedure Code, signed in February 2014 by President Karzai, a suspect or an accused shall not be detained for more than 11 months during the criminal proceedings; the case must be finalised during this period. In Sarwari’s case, this principle was violated. Moreover, he was subsequently kept in prison for three and half years after his term had ended.

Limited access to a defence lawyer: Sarwari was initially not provided with a defence lawyer. He later received one through international support, although he dismissed him, claiming that the lawyer had betrayed him. Another lawyer that was provided by the government, was also dismissed by Sarwari, this time for being “too weak.” Sarwari ended up defending himself.

Victim participation: Dr Sharif, a war crimes victim, who together with his six brothers was detained for two and half months by AGSA and has not seen his eldest brother since, told AAN some days after Sarwari’s release from jail: “In 2006, I was one of the victims who gave testimony in court. I remember that the court convicted Sarwari to death. After that session, the court never informed me about the further proceedings of the case. Now he is released.” He continued: “I gave testimony against him, because I wanted to see the death of the murderer of my brother.”

Other victims also stressed that the court proceedings had lacked transparency and information had been scarce, which was also AAN’s experience. Only by being proactive and repeatedly asking after the case did AAN receive information concerning the three first sessions of the Primary Court of National Security and the last session of the Appeal Military Court – and only informally. The lack of information limited the participation of victims and their families. Such participation is a norm in trials addressing war crimes. Indeed, the victims have a right to see justice carried out with their own eyes. For practical reasons, also, this is how pain is healed.

Conclusion: the Afghan justice system’s limited ability to handle war crimes

Assadullah Sarwari is now 67 years old and apparently not in good health. It is therefore unlikely that there will be any further prosecutions against him, although the option for victims to bring civil proceedings against him still exists. In today’s Afghanistan, it may be too dangerous for victims to individually pursue justice, as their security is not assured and many likely offenders are in official positions, including in the judiciary.

The other case of a convicted war criminal recently released, Sarwar Zardad tried and found guilty of kidnap and torture committed during the civil war in a British court, and released and deported to Afghanistan in December 2016 also shows the legal and political complexities surrounding war crimes trials. Zardad is accused of other civil war-era crimes, including murder, which could be brought to trial in Afghanistan. However, the Attorney General’s Office has said victims could bring prosecutions, but the state would not (email seen by AAN), presumably because he is protected by the Amnesty Law. Moreover, while the witnesses who testified against Zardad are now living in fear of retribution, Zardad himself was welcomed by supporters, some of them armed, insider the security perimeter, at Kabul International Airport (see previous AAN dispatch here).

The Amnesty Law is one factor that may lead the ICC to decide that the Afghan state is unwilling to prosecute war crimes trials. Additionally, Sarwari’s case exemplifies its limited ability to do so, illustrating the lack of clear criminal law provisions, the lack of clear procedures and the lack of a proper administration of justice.

The ongoing efforts to reform the Afghan Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Codes may address some of these shortcomings. The draft Criminal Code, although in its very early draft stages, does enshrine international crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity, the crime of genocide and the crime of aggression – and makes use of the wording of the Statute of the International Criminal Court. The punishments for these crimes are capital punishment and life imprisonment of 15 to 20 years in jail. The new Afghan criminal procedure code that came into force on 22 February 2014 also recognises international crimes that are not affected by the principle of statute of limitations. However, the new code does not clarify the role and protection of witnesses or what would be the competent institutions for proceedings involving international crimes.

Most importantly, the relationship between the Amnesty Law, the new draft Criminal Code and the new Criminal Procedure Code has not been clarified. Would the new codes mean that suspected war criminals will no longer enjoy impunity, or not? The Afghan justice system is, at best, taking only baby steps towards being able to prosecute war crimes. Even if the Afghan state manages to deal with the technical, legal obstacles of putting on war crimes trials, political opposition from many of those in the highest circles of government would still remain.

 

 

(1) The acronym AGSA derives from the Pashto De Afghanistan de Gato Satelo Edara (Department for the Protection of Afghanistan’s Interests).

(2) According to Afghan law, prison sentences are not cumulative but run concurrently, hence the total of 20 years.

The Taleban movement is winning ground in the northern province of Badakhshan, a province that was never conquered when the Taleban were in power in the 1990s. Over the past two years, a new generation of largely Tajik Taleban has come to pose a serious challenge for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) : a number of districts have changed hands between the ANSF and insurgents, and two strategic districts are now insurgent strongholds. Its success seems partly due to a recruitment policy that – in contrast to the 1990s – favours local non-Pashtuns for key provincial positions and as fighters. In this provincial case study, AAN’s Obaid Ali analyses the Taleban’s new recruitment policy and how it has strengthened the movement (with input from Borhan Osman and Thomas Ruttig).

In 2004, as the insurgency began to gather pace, setting up a shadow administration was one of the Taleban’s major political strategies for controlling both territory and population. Over the years, in the Tajik and Uzbek-dominated provinces in the north, the movement increasingly appointed local non-Pashtuns, from shadow governors – both at the provincial and district level – to judges and heads of provincial committees. In Badakhshan, a Tajik-dominated province, most Taleban posts are now occupied by Tajiks.

The shift in the movement’s recruitment strategy seems to have had a visible impact on its battlefield gains in Badakhshan. To put this into historical perspective, a comparison of the Taleban’s recruitment in Badakhshan during the current insurgency period and the movement’s years of rule, is useful.

Badakhshan’s contribution to the Taleban regime during the 1990s

During the Taleban regime in the 1990s, there were no more than a handful of high-ranking Taleb figures from Badakhshan. They were:

• Mawlawi Sayed Ghiasuddin, a Tajik from Badakhshan who served among the Taleban leadership soon after the formation of the movement in the mid-1990s;
• Qari Din Muhammad Hanif, a Tajik originally from Yaftal district in Badakhshan. During the Taleban regime he served as the Taleban minister for Planning and Higher Education. Now, Qari Din Muhammad is a member of the Taleban office in Qatar (read more background here) and was one of the first official Taleban representatives to publicly explain his movement’s position with regards to peace talks, which he did during an academic conference in Kyoto in 2012 (see AAN analysis here);
• And, less well known, Mullah Zaher, Shaber Ahmad and Mullah Nur-ul-Huda, who operated as military commanders, although not in their home province.

While the Badakhshanis’ representation within the Taleban leadership was limited, the province did produce hundreds of Taleban fighters. A sizeable number of religious Badakhshani students who had been studying in madrassas in Peshawar and Karachi joined the movement’s ranks and constituted one of its largest non-Pashtun groups. These Badakhshani fighters suffered hundreds of casualties during the Taleban’s Emirate.

The first significant incident involving the Badakhshani Taleban was a clash between the Taleban and Northern Alliance fighters in Topkhana, an area in Zebak district near Badakhshan’s border with Pakistan, in 1998. Hundreds of Taleban fighters led by Mullah Sharif, a commander originally from Warduj district, stormed check points controlled by Northern Alliance commanders in a cross-border attack from Pakistan. After overcoming minor resistance, the Taleban took control of the area. This first appearance of the Badakhshani Taleban was a warning to the Northern Alliance. Its local commanders, particularly the most famous Jamiat-e Islami commander of the province, Sayed Najmuddin Waseq, took steps to repel Mullah Sharif’s fighters and prevent further Taleban infiltration in the province. He gathered hundreds of fighters to retake control of the Topkhana area, and inflicted heavy casualties: according to locals, hundreds of Taleban fighters, mainly Badakhshanis, as well as their commander, were mercilessly killed.

This incident affected many families in the province, who lost their pro-Taleban young sons. It also created a rift among Badakhshani clerics from both warring sides. The clash in Topkhana amounted to a failure of early Taleban attempts to infiltrate Badakhshan, demonstrating that the province was a Northern Alliance stronghold, impossible for the Taleban to take. Indeed, Badakhshan was one of few places the Taleban never controlled during their regime. Recent events illustrate how much this dynamic has changed, with the Taleban now successfully implementing a strategy not only to infiltrate but also to seize and to hold ground in Badakhshan.

The new non-Pashtun Taleban leadership in Badakhshan

After the reemergence of the Taleban in 2004, the movement invested its energy in recruiting a larger number of non-Pashtun Taleban in Pakistani madrassas in order to strengthen its support among the local population in those provinces. This shift in approach reflected (and still reflects) the movement’s changed attitude towards Afghans of non-Pashtun ethnic backgrounds, which had evolved from essentially seeking to exclude them from most leadership positions, even in areas where they constituted the majority to a more inclusive approach. This shift may also have been a manoeuvre by the Taleban leadership to portray the movement post-2001 as a national rather than a Pashtun-dominated one. In this strategy, the Taleban created more space for other ethnic groups to join the movement, not only as fighters, but also as local Taleban officials.

These Taleban were mainly from rural areas in northern Afghanistan. After 2001, thousands of students from Badakhshan flocked to madrassas in Peshawar and Karachi to take advantage of the free food and accommodation, as well as the religious teaching – a remarkable increase compared to the time of the Taleban regime. As a result, the movement has gained a particularly significant recruitment base from among the students from conservative Warduj, Argo and Jurm districts. This has translated into influence in these areas. It was from Warduj where the Badakhshani Taleban launched their first serious attack. In October 2006, they ambushed a German PRT patrol in the district; the attack lasted for four hours and only ended after US air support was called in.

From 2008, and in sharp contrast to behaviour exhibited during the Taleban regime (1994-2001), the Taleban leadership council offered most local posts to this new generation of local Taleban, instead of merely using Badakhshani recruits from Pakistani madrassas as foot-soldiers.

While the Taleban’s recruitment of the Badakhshani students exploited their radicalisation from Pakistani madrassas, not all those who joined the movement’s ranks did so for ideological reasons. The Taleban’s success in recruitment also seems to have banked on Badakhshan’s fragmented politics. The political dynamics in the province have long been defined by a struggle between local powerbrokers. This provided the Taleban with various opportunities. For instance, Jamiat commanders in Jurm and Kuran wa Munjan districts competed for control of smuggling routes and natural resources and used a small group of armed men, whom they described as Taleban, to threaten each other. On a number of occasions in 2008, powerbrokers granted safe passage to insurgents seeking to reach their battlefields in Takhar and Kunduz. In return the insurgents avoided fighting in those areas of Badakhshan where they received safe passage. In fact, in 2008 the Taleban were not strong enough to pose a threat to the powerbrokers in Badakhshan but the deal helped them to secure safe transit routes. Until 2009, Taleban efforts in Badakhshan still primarily consisted of “travelling recruiters trying to influence local mullahs and perhaps a few small pockets in the process of formation, but without yet much of an impact,” according to this earlier AAN report.

While the Taleban’s strategy of recruiting locally in Badakhshan dates back to 2004, it accelerated from 2012 onwards. Since then, a new cadre drawn mostly from a younger generation has been appointed to lead the insurgents’ fronts in the province. One example of this type was Qari Shamsuddin in conservative Warduj district. Shamsuddin received a religious education in Pakistan. At first he led a small group of around 20 fighters in Warduj, but later he expanded his influence into the neighbouring districts of Zebak, Baharak and Yamgan. In 2012, however, he was killed following a US airstrike. As AAN previously reported (see previous AAN paper about power structures in Badakhshan here), the Taleban received support “from those parts of the population excluded from the provincial patronage networks since the late 2000s” in Badakhshan.

In 2013, the Taleban appointed Qari Fasehuddin from Isterab village in Warduj district as shadow governor and head of the military commission in Badakhshan. Fasehuddin is a young cleric from a well-known religious family. He received his education during the Taleban regime in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fasehuddin’s father, Mawlawi Saifuddin, served as an imam in the 1980s in Warduj. He was not only highly respected and influential there but also in the other conservative districts, such as Yumgan, Jurm and Baharak. Since 2013, Qari Fasehuddin has been known as one of the most prominent commanders in the province.

In the same year, the shadow governor appeared for the first time in a Taleban propaganda film, speaking about the security situation in Badakhshan (the link is no longer available). Thereafter, Fasehuddin, a talented speaker, released a series of videos in which he discussed the virtues of jihad and accused the government of being a puppet to the infidels. In 2015, pro-Taleban social media activists released a video clip of Qari Fasehuddin addressing surrendered Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers in Yumgan district (see this media report), during which he referred to the 2012 Quran burning at the US base in Bagram (read more here) and asked, rhetorically, whether it was fair “to shot dead those who protest against the burning of the holy book”. He appealed to all ANA soldiers not to trust the US and the promises they had made over the past decade.

It is hard to estimate the Taleban’s precise military strength in Badakhshan. However, a source close to the Taleban told AAN that the shadow governor leads more than a thousand fighters. Gholam Sakhi Ghafuri, Badakhshan’s police chief, estimates that there are around 2,000 Taleban fighters and that the number of militants in the province has increased over the past two years. It is not only foot soldiers that Badakhshan has generated: in a remarkable sign of the changes since the time of the Taleban regime, the province has also produced a sizeable number of well-known commanders.

The shadow governor has established administrative and military structures in the province that are run mostly by the new generation of local Taleban. One example is Mawlawi Amanuddin, the head of their Special Operations Unit (Qeta-ye Khas-e Amalyati) in the province, which, according to a source close to the Taleban, consists of 300 to 400 fighters and is tasked to lead most of the local special operations against the ANSF. Mawlawi Amanuddin, who previously served as an imam in Badakhshan’s Baharak district, joined the insurgents in 2013. Locals say he had begun criticising the Afghan government for its servitude to foreigners during his tenure as a government-paid imam, and had expressed his openness towards the Taleban.

The shadow provincial governor also brought in a number of other local commanders capable of challenging the security forces across the province. For instance, Mullah Hafez, a young Tajik commander, serves as the shadow district governor of Baharak. Meanwhile, Matiullah Khalil, the shadow district governor of Yumgan, Mawlawi Mahbub, the head of the Taleban’s provincial education committee, and Mawlawi Saber, the head of the judicial committee, all belong to Badakhshan’s young, local and religiously-educated new cadres. The new policy of accelerated local recruiting and the shadow provincial governor’s comprehensive understanding of local dynamics has helped the insurgency in Badakhshan to become more effective.

The effect of the local Taleban on the battleground

The ‘localisation’ of appointments has enabled the insurgents to expand their influence. Over the past few years, Badakhshan’s Taleban have conducted several large-scale offensives against the ANSF. At the moment, two out of 28 Badakhshani districts (Yamgan and Warduj) are entirely under Taleban control. At least four more districts (Baharak, Raghistan, Argo and Zebak) have changed hands several times, while four others (Jurm, Shohada, Tagab and Kuran wa Munjan) are heavily contested. Taleban activity has also been reported by several Afghan media sources in Khash, Darayem, Teshkan and the district of the provincial capital, Faizabad where, according to one report, the insurgents have a “strong presence” in the village of Spingul, only two kilometres away, whence they threaten the important Baharak-Faizabad road.

The ANSF have conducted several counteroffensives, but with limited effect. In early September, for example, they claimed that the Taleban had been pushed out of an important gold mine in Raghistan; it seems, however, that the mine in fact is not fully controlled by either side. Residents of the districts have also reported that in this case the local Taleban are “Tajik insurgents”. And in late November, the ANSF reported that the district of Tagab had been retaken from the insurgents “after nine months” – the only problem being that the district’s fall had never been reported, and it had been ‘retaken’ from the Taleban once before, in January 2016.

Meanwhile, Taleban insurgents attacked security forces in the Baharak district of Badakhshan in October 2015 and temporarily took control of the district centre (read short report here and here). In November 2015, the Taleban took control of the Raghistan district for almost three days (read report here). The ANSF soon drove the insurgents out of both district centres, but the failure to protect them in the first place reduced the locals’ confidence in the ANSF. At the same time it boosted the insurgents’ morale, and increased their motivation to continue targeting district centres. The collapse of the district centres, even for a short period, has become a “lesson learned”, not for the ANSF, but for the insurgents who now seek to maintain permanent control of the district centres they hold.

Since then, the Taleban have continued to expand their presence in the two strategic districts of Yumgan and Warduj with a series of assaults. Indeed, Warduj was the place where the Taleban first sought to establish a stronghold in Badakhshan (1). From there, the insurgents can threaten the districts of Eshkashem to the northwest, Zebak to the south, Baharak to the northeast and Jurm to the east. Warduj has been known for its militancy since the first phase of the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s, and continued to be a stronghold of Jamiat-e Islami Afghanistan, the party led by the late Burhanuddin Rabbani, both during the remainder of the war against the Soviet occupation and during the resistance against the Taleban regime.

In October 2015, the Taleban stormed Warduj district centre, which fell with minimal resistance into the insurgents’ hands. The Taleban started their attack from Pol-e Ghalchian, an area located ten kilometres to the southeast of the district centre, where, once the security cordon had been breached, the insurgents entered the district centre (see here). According to district governor Dawlat Muhammad Khawari, local government forces made no effort to retake the district centre. He told AAN that the Taleban have now set up administrative and military structures there. Further, he said, the Taleban have recruited a large number of fighters in Warduj. After a month of controlling Warduj, the Taleban then pushed forward in order to gain further territory in Badakhshan.

In November 2015, the Taleban conducted a large-scale attack against Yamgan district. Again, the ANSF failed to protect the district centre and the Taleban were able to overrun it after only minor resistance. The Taleban’s propaganda website released video footage of Yamgan’s fall. The video contained footage of government officials being detained by the Taleban.

Speaking to AAN, Imran Paiman, Yumgan’s district governor, confirmed that the district was still under insurgent control. Further, he told AAN that the central government has promised to deploy forces in order to retake it; however he denied giving further details about the fate of those government officials, who, according to the Taleban propaganda video, had been detained. He told AAN that his appointment took place after the collapse of the district. Separately, provincial police chief Ghafuri stated that security in Badakhshan has improved – although he conceded that some parts of the province still face insecurity. He confirmed that the two districts of Warduj and Yamgan are entirely out of government control but that the security forces plan to conduct a counteroffensive to recapture these districts.

The Taleban strategy of appointing non-Pashtun cadres in Tajik-dominated areas has not only yielded success on the battleground but also politically. The insurgents’ propaganda website has repeatedly featured footage and speeches by Badakhshani Tajik commanders in order to portray the insurgency as a nation-wide, supra-ethnic movement (see, for instance here). This portrayal of the insurgency has in turn helped generate new leaders at the local level, and continues to produce fighters among non-Pashtun ethnic groups (2).

With the mobilisation of local fighters and commanders, the Taleban have managed, over several years, to turn once strongly anti-Taleban Badakhshan into what is, at the very least, contested ground – despite the fact that government forces still continue to hold the majority of the district centres.

Editing by Sari Kouvo, Borhan Osman and Thomas Ruttig.

 

(1) Philipp Münch wrote in a report for AAN (slightly edited):

In Warduj valley, the most influential local anti-Taleban commander, Ashur Beg, was said to have demobilised most of his fighters after the fall of the Taleban. This may be why this area, especially the area of Tirgaran, became a hotbed of the insurgency in the following years. Other reasons were that the area was ecologically degraded, saw many returning refugees and received few state resources – as visible in the low number of students. According to one study, during the drought of 2001 up to 95 per cent of the farmers had to sell or mortgage parts of their land, making them more dependent on landlords. This was fertile ground for Arab Salafists and politically active mullahs to call for resistance against the government, as they had done in the 1980s and 1990s.

The information about Arab Salafists in the area is attributed to information from German intelligence, but not confirmed by AAN.

(2) Structure of the Taleban in Warduj and Yumgan districts, as of October 2016

Warduj’s shadow district governor Haidari, a Tajik from Warduj  

Head of Warduj’s military committee

  Aminullah (from Warduj) previously served as head of the Haj department for Zebak district; he also leads the Taleban’s ‘special unit’ in Badakhshan  

Head of Warduj’s judicial committee Mawlawi Abdulhamed, a Tajik from Warduj  

Yumgan’s shadow district governor

  Matiullah Khalil, a Tajik from Yamgan district  

Head of Yumgan’s military committee

  Ashor Muhammad  

Head of Yumgan judicial committee

  (unknown)

 

 

AAN researchers, individually, each follow the topics that interest us – although we also keep an eye on overall output to make sure we keep our coverage broad and our topics various. But what about you, our readers: what are you interested in? Three years after re-vamping the AAN website in 2014, we took a look back to see which of our dispatches had been the most widely-read. The results appear to show that we have a very ‘well-rounded’ readership. War-related publications and pieces to do with major political developments generally got the highest number of readers, but ‘quirkier’ or esoteric topics – to do with how ethnic groups are studied, or aspect of Afghanistan’s culture and wildlife ­– also featured strongly in the top 50 most-read AAN dispatches. AAN’s Kate Clark reports (data from Sudhanshu Verma).

At AAN, we try to cover not only the big events, but also ‘slow-burn’ developments and issues of minority interest. To make sure we get a nicely broad coverage, we also set ourselves to report on seven key themes:

• War and Peace
• The Political Landscape
• International Engagement
• Economy and Development
• Rights and Freedoms
• Regional Relations
• Context and Culture

By category of dispatch, the percentage breakdown of the most-read dispatches was: war and peace 33%, political landscape 28%, context and culture 25%, economy and development 7%, rights and freedoms 4%, and international engagement 3%. (Regional relations did not feature in the top-50.) It suggests AAN’s readers turn to AAN for what we also perceive as our strengths – in-depth analysis of politics and security and an ability to put events into context.

Looking more closely at the list of our most-read dispatches, it seems that dispatches on major events that are not straightforward to understand attracted readers: why did Kunduz fall in 2015 (and continue to be troubled thereafter)? What did the death of Taleban leaders Mullah Muhammad Omar and then Mullah Akhtar Mansur mean to the insurgent group? What is Daesh? Indeed (as we also asked), why Daesh? In this category, although not war-related, appeared to fall AAN’s reporting on certain controversies, for example, the ethnic-based responses stirred up by the routing of the TUTAP electricity supply line, or the responses of mullahs and women’s rights activists to the mob killing of Farkhunda in 2015. In these pieces, we tried to give more detail and nuance to major events and explain the often complex responses of different parts of Afghan society.

Anything with biographies or information that is of lasting interest appeared to go down well, such as details of the new cabinet, or who was killed in a particular suicide attack, or what was in the Bilateral Security Agreement (signed in 2014 by the United States and Afghanistan).

Other popular dispatches were more surprising hits and may be related to a dearth of information from other sources. Two pieces, one on the study of Afghan ethnic groups, and another on how Uzbeks are reported on were both in the top 50, as was a look at the rise of a new Shia leader in Afghanistan.

Dispatches in our ‘Context and Culture’ category also featured heavily: the history of the pakol, films in which Afghanistan appears, the most useful foraging plants and the story of a houbara bustard tragically suspected of being a bird suicide bomber.

Here then is the list of the 50 dispatches which were most read by the AAN audience, 2014-2016.

• The Park Palace Attack: More losses for Afghanistan (updated with a list of the dead)
 – 14 May 2015: 
The Taleban attack on a Kabul guesthouse which killed 15 people (not 14, as earlier reports said) on 13 May 2015 was aimed, the Taleban claimed, at “invaders”, specifically an “important meeting” of “important people from many invading countries, especially Americans.” In this update of our earlier dispatch, AAN’s Kate Clark identifies all the dead: all were civilian and eight were aid workers, five, Afghans from the regions who had been visiting Kabul for training.
• Finally Towards a Complete Afghan Cabinet? The next 16 minister nominees and their bios (amended)
 – 24 March 2015: 
Six months after the inauguration of the National Unity Government and two months after the last attempt to introduce cabinet members to the parliament, there is now a new list of nominees.
• The Shadows of ‘Islamic State’ in Afghanistan: What threat does it hold?
 – 12 February 2015
: The Islamic State (IS) group, also known by an Arabic acronym, Daesh, has gained a toehold in Afghanistan, although with the loss in a drone strike of its most prominent and recently appointed commander, Rauf Khadem, that toehold is looking precarious.
• New Faces Versus Old Structures: Afghanistan’s national unity cabinet (amended)
 – 12 January 2015: 
Finally, Afghanistan has a cabinet, pending parliament’s approval of course, three and a half months after Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah were inaugurated as president and chief executive officer (CEO) of a national unity government.
• From Alexander the Great to Ahmad Shah Massud: A social history of the pakol
 – 3 January 2014: 
The flat, woollen, rolled-up hat called a pakol is nowadays one of the undisputed symbols of Afghanistan.
• The Study and Understudy of Afghanistan’s Ethnic Groups: What we know – and don’t know
 – 10 September 2014: 
From voting blocs to the share of power in government ministries to the composition of the insurgency, references to ethnic groups are frequently made in reporting and analysis.
• Power to the People: How to extend Afghans’ access to electricity – 
3 February 2015: 
More than four billion dollars have, to date, been spent on Afghanistan’s power infrastructure.
• Rambo Was Too Late: Afghanistan in Western films (part I), from 1909 to 2001
 – 23 December 2014
: Afghanistan has rarely featured in western films, especially when compared to other foreign locales – from countries in Africa to Latin America to East Asia.
• The Fall of Kunduz: What does it tell us about the strength of the post-Omar Taleban?
 – 30 September 2015
: The capture of Kunduz by the Taleban has surely written off any idea of the movement having been seriously undermined or fractured by the death of Mullah Omar and the leadership dispute that followed.
• Taleban in Transition: How Mansur’s death and Haibatullah’s ascension may affect the war (and peace)
 – 27 May 2016: 
The killing of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur in an American drone strike has deprived the Taleban of their official, and before that, de facto leader of six years.
• Taleban Closing in on the City: The next round of the tug-of-war over Kunduz
 – 2 September 2014
: Within the past two months, the Taleban have managed to secure additional territory around the provincial capital of Kunduz and have been closing in on the city itself.
• The Islamic State in ‘Khorasan’: How it began and where it stands now in Nangarhar
 – 27 July 2016: 
The Islamic State’s local franchise in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), has claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on the TUTAP protests in Kabul on 23 July 2016.
• Afghanistan in World War I (1): Afghans in the Kaiser’s jihad
 – 27 July 2014:
 A hundred years ago, on 28 July 1914, the First World War started when Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia after a group of young pro-independence Serbian terrorists shot dead the Austro-Hungarian crown prince in Sarajevo one month earlier.
• To Say It Like It Is: Norway’s evaluation of its part in the international intervention
 – 23 August 2016: 
Norway has published the first comprehensive evaluation of one country’s contribution to the international intervention in Afghanistan.
• A new Afghan Shia Leader: Return to quietism versus political Islam?
 – 2 November 2014: 
A new leader is emerging in Afghanistan’s Shia community, one who so far has chosen to abstain from any presence or involvement in the religious or political affairs of the country.
• Power to the People (2): The TUTAP protests – 
16 May 2016: When protesters interrupted President Ashraf Ghani’s speech in London three times on 13 May 2016, the heated controversy surrounding the route of TUTAP, a main electricity grid initiative, received even international attention.
• Toward Fragmentation? Mapping the post-Omar Taleban
 – 24 November 2015: 
The Taleban movement has entered its third decade with infighting threatening its – up till now – remarkable unity.
• The Murree Process: Divisive peace talks further complicated by Mullah Omar’s death
 – 5 August 2015
: News of Mullah Omar’s death was leaked just a day before a second meeting between Taleban and Afghan government representatives was supposed to have taken place.
• From ‘Slavers’ to ‘Warlords’: Descriptions of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks in western writing
 – 17 October 2014: 
From the early 1800s to the present day, western writers have explored Afghanistan either in person or from a distance, their publications providing a view of Afghanistan’s governments and people to the wider audience in Europe, the United States and the west.
• Three Birds with One Stone: Signing the BSA and NATO SOFA to project reliability
 – 6 October 2014
: By signing long-delayed security agreements with the US and NATO on the second day of its existence (30 September 2014), the new Afghan leadership has hit at least three birds with one stone.
• On the Cultural History of Opium – and how poppy came to Afghanistan
 – 11 January 2016: 
Mention drugs or Google the word ‘opium’ and the link to Afghanistan will never be far away.
• The Kabuliwala of Kolkata: Photo exhibition about a community longing for Afghanistan that once was home – 
22 March 2015: 
In the suburbs of Kolkata, India, lives, in seclusion, a little known community of migrants who once came from Afghanistan – the first of them around the year of 1840.
• An “Afghan Exodus” (1): Facts, figures, trends
 – 14 November 2015
: The on-going “exodus” of Afghans – now the second largest group entering the EU – has contributed to the increasing refugee numbers across Europe.
• Elections 2014 (51): Finally, a deal, but not yet democracy
 – 21 September 2014: 
After more than three months of audits and behind-the-scenes negotiation, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah signed a deal today to set up a government of national unity.
• The Failed Pilot Test: Kunduz’ local governance crisis
 – 5 June 2015: 
The fighting in Kunduz is only one side of the problem.
• Helmand (1): A crisis a long time coming
 – 10 March 2016
: The rapid fall of entire areas of Helmand to the Taleban during the second half of 2015 and early 2016 has left the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) scrambling to hold the line and try to push back, and led to international forces deploying troops to the province.
• The New Taleban Deputy Leaders: Is there an obvious successor to Akhtar Mansur?
 – 10 February 2016: 
Reports of the alleged killing of new Taleban leader Akhtar Mansur in December 2015 as well as his subsequent disappearance from public view have raised the question as to who might be next-in-line and whether there exists an internal, legitimate mechanism for succession.
• A Taleb Lost in a Polish Forest and More: Afghanistan in western films (part 2), 2001 to 2015
 – 11 September 2015: 
Since 2001, there has been a relatively large number of western films that feature Afghanistan – either briefly or, in some cases, for the entire length of the movie.
• From Mullah Omar to Mansur: Change at the Taleban’s top leadership
 – 31 July 2015: 
After almost two days of silence, the Taleban have finally admitted that their supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar Mujahed, as they call him, has died.
• The 2016 Insurgency in the North: Beyond Kunduz city – lessons (not taken) from the Taleban takeover
 – 30 January 2016: 
In the last two months of 2015, Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) conducted a significant counteroffensive to remove the Taleban from areas just outside Kunduz city as well as from a number of its outlying district centres.
• To Syria, not Afghanistan: Central Asian jihadis ‘neglect’ their neighbour – 
8 October 2014: 
Since the American and Northern Alliance defeat of the Taleban and their Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) allies in northern Afghanistan in late 2001, the arrival of would-be fighters from the former Soviet countries of Central Asia to Afghanistan has been a very small trickle.
• The Refugee Dilemma: Afghans in Pakistan between expulsion and failing aid schemes
 – 9 March 2015: 
Nearly 52,000 Afghans living in Pakistan have, within the past ten weeks, packed their belongings and crossed the border back into Afghanistan – more than twice as many as in the whole 12 months of 2014.
• Messages in Chalk: ‘Islamic State’ haunting Afghanistan?
 – 17 November 2014: 
Rumours of the presence of Islamic State (IS) elements in Afghanistan have repeatedly made it into the media over recent months, sparking public debate and adding to the anxiety about what course the insurgency might take.
• Chechens in Afghanistan 1: A Battlefield Myth That Will Not Die
 – 27 June 2016:
 In 2001, as the United States and other allied military forces attacked Taleban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, numerous soldiers, journalists and Afghans allied to the Americans relayed stories of a fearless and deadly opponent, incomparably worse than any other enemy: the Chechen.
• The Start into the Better Governance Marathon: Ghani’s first days – 
11 October 2014: 
New president Ashraf Ghani has proven himself a man intent on not losing time – after so much of it had been lost in post-electoral counting, auditing and political wrangling since April 2014.
• Going in Circles: The never-ending story of Afghanistan’s unfinished Ring Road
 – 16 January 2015: 
Since the presidential campaign and during trips abroad President Ashraf Ghani has been promising to turn Afghanistan into an “Asian roundabout” for regional trade and transit.
• From Point Zero to ‘New Warmth’: Russian-Afghan relations since 1989
 – 8 August 2014: 
After the Soviet occupation years, Afghan-Russian relations were on absolute zero.
• The Cabinet and the Parliament: Afghanistan’s government in trouble before it is formed
 – 20 January 2015: 
President Ashraf Ghani has introduced his cabinet to the parliament, which now has to confirm or reject his candidates.
• The Killing of Farkhunda (2): Mullahs, feminists and a gap in the debate
 – 29 April 2015: 
From ultra-conservative Salafis to secular-minded feminists, an astonishingly diverse range of voices have found their heroine in Farkhunda, the young woman who was lynched by a mob in Kabul on 19 March 2015.
• The IEC Announces 2016 Election Date – but what about electoral reform?
 – 18 January 2016
: In a brief press conference on Monday 18 January 2016, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) announced the date for Afghanistan’s next vote: 15 October 2016.
• ANSF Wrong-Footed: The Taleban offensive in Kunduz – 
3 May 2015
: The Taleban’s first major onslaught in their ‘spring offensive’ this year took the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) by surprise.
• Security in Kunduz Worsening Further: The case of Khanabad
 – 28 October 2014
: Kunduz has had the worst security environment of any province in the north for the past few years.
• Shame and Impunity: Is violence against women becoming more brutal?
 – 30 November 2014
: A father raping his daughter over almost ten years without the family daring to intervene (except to help with abortions); a woman burnt after a family fight; another woman mutilated because her husband enjoyed doing so – these are just some of the cases of violence against women and girls that have been reported in Afghan media over the past months.
• Hazaras in the Crosshairs? A scrutiny of recent incidents
 – 24 April 2015: 
Eight abductions of groups of people have been reported since late February by officials, activists or media as having targeted ethnic Hazaras.
• Stanakzai Goes from Peace to War: For Afghanistan, finally a defence minister? – 
28 May 2015: 
The national unity government is making its fourth attempt to appoint a minister of defence.
• Bird Bomber: Police kill ‘dangerous’ houbara bustard (amended)
 – 5 December 2014: 
Police in Faryab have shot a wild bird which had an antenna attached to it, fearing it had been sent by the Taleban to target them.
• The 2015 Insurgency in the North (3): The fall and recapture of Kunduz
 – 16 October 2015
: It took 15 days of fierce fighting for Afghan government forces and their US allies to push the Taleban back out of Kunduz city.
• Plants of Afghanistan 2: the Koh-e Baba Foraging Top Ten (amended)
 – 11 June 2012: 
Wild rhubarb (chukri or rawash) is surely one of the delights of the Afghan spring.
• Far From Back to Normal: The Kunduz crisis lingers on
 – 17 August 2016
: The Taleban’s recent takeover of both Qala-ye Zal and Dasht-e Archi’s district centres is the latest episode in the long-running battle for possession of Kunduz province.
• Taleban in Transition 2: Who is in charge now?
 – 22 June 2016
: The new Taleban leader, Mullah Haibatullah, is being closely scrutinised to see if he will try to shape the goals and methods of the insurgency.

 

In 2016, more than half a million Afghans fled conflict to places of safety inside Afghanistan’s borders. Over a third of the yearly total fled in just one month – October. This mass movement was caused by heavy fighting between government and insurgent forces. At the year’s end, AAN’s Jelena Bjelica looks at the statistics of Afghanistan’s internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The newly displaced: facts and figures

More than 580,000 people – 84,257 families – had been displaced within Afghanistan by mid-December 2016, the United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reported. (For background on how IDPs are counted and recorded, statistics, see footnote (1)). More than half of the newly displaced population – 56 percent – were children under 18 years of age. In all but three of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, UNOCHA recorded some level of forced displacement, while all 34 provinces hosted the displaced. Kunduz, Uruzgan, Farah and Helmand produced the highest numbers of displaced people in 2016, while those receiving the most were Helmand, Takhar, Farah, Kunduz, Kandahar. That the same or nearby provinces appear in both lists show that many people seek safety near their homes.

October was the worse month. There were simultaneous assaults by the Taleban on several provincial capitals: on Kunduz city (see AAN reporting here), Farah city in the west, Faryab’s Maymana in the north and Helmand’s Lashkar Gah in the south. Over a third of the yearly total fled in this month alone, with 213,000 people (31,402 families) on the move. (More in-depth information on displacement is available from an interactive UNOCHA ‘dashboard’ (see here).

The northeast

The highest number of displaced persons was recorded in the northeast region (Badakhshan, Takhar, Kunduz and Baghlan), where over 198,000 people – 28,354 families, fled from conflict. Almost half of them – 93,500 people – fled their home province in October 2016. However, there were other monthly peaks – 30,000 in January and 21,000 in July 2016. Almost three-quarters of all those displaced in the northeast were from Kunduz province (116,000 from Kunduz district and more than 25,000 from Dasht-e Archi district). While most stayed within the same district (eg over 61,000 in Kunduz district), a considerable number moved to other provinces. For example, over 51,000 people displaced from Kunduz moved to Taloqan district in Takhar province and more than 25,000 to Pul-e Kumri district in Baghlan province.

The south

The second highest number of displacements was documented in the southern region (Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Helmand and Nimroz), where over 164,000 people – 23,867 families (mainly from Helmand and Uruzgan provinces) were on the move. The peak months in the south were August and September, when more than 36,000 and 37,000 people, respectively, were on the move along with March (over 22,000) and October (over 20,000 people). More than a quarter of all those displaced in the south (46,000 individuals) were relocated from Tirinkot district of Uruzgan province (which saw a massive Taleban assault in September. Some remained displaced within the district, but over 22,000 individuals fled to Dand district of Kandahar province. Almost 30,000 people from Nad-e Ali district in Helmand province were displaced, and more than 17,000 of them fled to Lashakar Gah. In the southern region, the conflict seethed throughout the year, resulting in some level of displacement in almost every month of 2016 (the lowest recorded displacement was in June – 2,904 people – possibly related to Ramadan).

The west

The region seeing the third highest number of displacements was the west (Farah, Herat, Ghor and Baghdis). Here. 90,000 people (13,176 families) fled their homes. More than a half of them (around 51,000 people) fled from Farah district alone. While the majority remained displaced within district boundaries, around 11,000 moved to Herat district. However, the district of Farah also received people from the districts of Gullestan (around 2,000 people), Balabuluk (around 3,500 people) and Bakwa (a couple of hundred people). Over 56,000 people ­in the west fled in October 2016.

Annual displacement trends

2016 has been the highest year for IDP numbers ‘on record’, according to UNOCHA. This requires a word of caution; the records on the number of IDPs in the country prior to 2012 are scarce and unreliable. The estimated number of IDPs for the period 2001 to 2009, or earlier periods are patchy, variable and, for some periods, non-existent. A 2015 study by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), which is part of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the leading source of information and analysis on internal displacement worldwide, offers a rough picture on IDP numbers in Afghanistan since 1978. According to the study, “by the mid-1990s more than 400,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) were living in camps near Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat.” Following the Taleban’s rise to power in 1996, another million people were displaced. By 2002, according to IDMC, 1.2 million people had been displaced inside Afghanistan. The data for the period 2002 – 2010 are inconsistent and therefore not quoted.

A new increase in number of IDPs was noticed in early 2010; it coincided with ‘the surge’ in United States troops (an 33,000 extra were sent to Afghanistan) with the aim of defeating, or at least ‘degrading’ the Taleban. However, only after the UNHCR piloted a Population Movement and Tracking (PMT) mechanism “as a tool for live data assessments to enable appropriate tracking of the evolving situation of conflict-induced internal displacement in Afghanistan,” as explained in this UNHCR study in late 2011, have the displacement figures become more reliable. So what we can be certain of saying, is that 2016 saw the highest number of IDPs since 2011.

Between 2012 and 2014, the number of newly displaced persons remained below 200,000 per year (in 2012, 102,715; in 2013, 122,815; in 2014, 196,154). In 2015, the number of IDPs increased sharply with approximately 470,000 individuals on the move. “Between 2012 and 2014 there would be increases in displacement during the traditional summer fighting season,” Danielle Moylan, UNOCHA Public Information Officer told AAN, adding that “that has skewed in the past two years – with sharp increases seen in October, in 2015, due to [fighting and the fall to the Taleban of] Kunduz and, in 2016, due to [fighting in] Kunduz and Farah.” (For more in-depth analysis on Kunduz, see also 2016 AAN’s thematic dossier on insurgency and governance in Afghanistan’s northeast and 2015 AAN thematic dossier on the evolution of insecurity in Kunduz).

In mid-2016, it was already clear that the number of IDPs at the year’s end would have increased. Every week for the first six months of 2016, according to UNAMA, more than 6000 Afghans fled their homes, becoming IDPs. That was ten per cent more than in the first six months of 2015.

Trends noticed in the nature of the conflict, noted by UNAMA (see AAN reporting here). appear to be behind the surge in IDP numbers. In earlier years, the Taleban had been unable to mass fighters and menace urban centres because they were vulnerable to international air power. After international troops drew down to a largely non-combat mission at the end of 2014, the insurgents have been able to change tactics and have moved from using IEDs and assassinations to launching ground offensives. The impact on civilians has been clear. Ground offensives have not only become the largest cause of deaths and injuries in the war, but have also forced greater numbers of people to flee their homes.

The real number of IDPs

IDPs tend to remain relatively close to their homes, moving from rural areas to the provincial capital (if it is safe) or to a neighbouring province (see UNAMA 2014 Civilian casualties report). They often also try to return home as soon as conflict is over. Some manage to flee for relatively short periods. However, hundreds of thousands of Afghans are now living in protracted displacement. In 2015, for example, out of a total 1.17 million IDPs in Afghanistan, an estimated 700,000 individuals had been in displacement since 2008 (see UNOCHA 2015 Strategic Response Plan). Those in prolonged displacement often end up in informal settlements. UNOCHA September 2016 update on IPDs highlighted how living conditions of those in prolonged displacement are often undignified and unhealthy, without access to healthcare, clean water or education for children.

The cumulative estimates, ie those in prolonged displacement, plus those newly displaced show that the number of IDPs grew rapidly as the conflict intensified. At the end of 2010, around 352,000 individuals were living as IDPs. By the end of 2012, that number had increased to 500,000 individuals and by the end of 2015, there were more than 1.17 million IDPS (see IDMC chart for the cumulative estimates of number of people in displacement between 2009 and 2015 available here). In mid-2016, according to UNAMA around 1.2 million Afghans had been displaced within the country’s borders. OCHA warned that some of those had been displaced since 2002.

Those who are newly displaced receive a basic aid package from the UN and/or NGOs (according to a UNOCHA count, 33 organisations are currently providing assistance to IDPs; see here). However, given the shortfall in funding for IDPs and the huge numbers of newly displaced, those who have been displacement for prolonged periods of time may face a reduction in the aid they receive. An increase in the total numbers of IDPs also indicates that those in prolonged displacement will find it more difficult to return home, due to intensified conflict across the country.

Conclusion

2016 was yet another difficult year for many Afghans. As well as the IDPs, more than 600,000 people have been pushed out from Pakistan this year (see AAN latest reporting here). Another 427,000 undocumented refugees and deportees from Iran were also recorded by UNOCHA – although caution needs to be exercised with the Iran numbers as, according to UNOCHA, many of the journeys are circular, ie Afghans cross the border multiple times to seek work and repeatedly get pushed back. UNOCHA says that around 10 per cent of these people are found to be in need of humanitarian assistance. More than quarter of a million Afghans travelled to Europe in 2015 and 2016 and many are now facing deportation or forced return to their country (for example, an estimated half of the 190,000 who had sought asylum in Germany) (see AAN reporting here). Along with the 580,000 newly displaced within Afghanistan, this all adds up to a total of 1.6 million Afghans who have experienced or are now facing some form of displacement in 2016.

The increase in the number of displaced due to conflict, coupled with a shortage in funding (the UN received 82 million USD in pledges against a target of 152 million USD), indicates that displaced Afghans are likely to be extremely vulnerable to poverty. For many displaced, the biggest issue, however, is whether and when they will be able to return home.

Edited by Sari Kouvo and Kate Clark

 

 

(1) For 2016, UNOCHA collected statistics on IDPs by conducting joint assessments (ie different humanitarian agencies jointly assess petitions and make visits) throughout the country. These assessments are logged into a database. In previous years, this was the task of UNHCR.

In 2015, IDMC pointed out that “the figures tend to be underestimates, because they do not include all IDPs living in urban areas, who are often dispersed among economic migrants and the urban poor and so are difficult to identify.” The study also emphasised that figures “also exclude IDPs in inaccessible areas across all regions. Nor is data available on former refugees unable to return to their places of origin with which to determine whether they should be considered IDPs.” See IDMC study available here.

 

 

 

Sarajevo and Kabul lie over 4,000 kilometres apart. One feature that connects the two cities, however, is that both were destroyed during civil wars in the last decade of the twentieth century. Earlier this year, when AAN’s co-director Thomas Ruttig visited Sarajevo and other parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia during a vacation, he came across some haunting images. At the same time, in an Ottoman mosque in Sarajevo as well as a former Sufi monastery near Mostar, he also found a bridge between them. Both regions, the Balkans and ‘Khorasan’, used to be at opposite poles of what was, over many centuries, the ‘Persianate world’ – that vast area that was shaped by both Persian language and culture. An AAN read for the Christmas and New Year holiday season (with input from Obaid Ali on Rumi’s verses and Jelena Bjelica on Balkan history).

At first glance, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina looks abandoned. There is a spray-painted wooden fence around it. Weeds grow on its external staircase. The façade of the whitish, modernist, concrete cuboid has been riddled with bullets. No wonder – it is not far from where many civilians were shot dead in Sarajevo’s so-called Sniper Alley during the four-year Serbian siege of the city, between 1992 and 1995. During this time, virtually all of the city’s infrastructure and much of its rich cultural heritage was destroyed.

We almost missed the museum itself, as well as the exhibition about the siege of Sarajevo on the its second floor. And that would have been a shame.

Sarajevo’s National History Museum. All photos in the text: Thomas Ruttig.

Three bicycles: not so distant wars

The Sarajevo museum’s exhibition speaks for itself. It is heart-wrenching in its simplicity, ­with leaflets and faded newspaper cut-outs, some with horrific photos of victims of the war as well as makeshift equipment used by its inhabitants during the siege (when water, electricity, transportation and other services had mostly been cut off and food only sporadically reached the city.) There’s an arrangement of how it would have looked in a small, bombed-out apartment, with laundry drying over a wood fire stove. (1)

There was a photo of a man, who, according to the caption, regularly cycled to visit the grave of a relative in one of the many makeshift graveyards that had to be dug in the besieged city between apartment blocks. It showed him standing in grief in the snow, his bicycle beside him. The original bike featured in the exhibition: the owner had donated it. Many other Sarajevans had also donated to the museum every day items used during the war.

We emerged from the museum in shock, as it had evoked so many flashbacks to Kabul, the city at the eastern end of the Persianate world (more about this below), from where we had just returned. But our thoughts were not only about Kabul. Images of our own, destroyed city of Berlin in World War II also came to mind, from stories told by my parents. Of my grandmother, for example, pushing her bicycle back home through the ruins, with potatoes or turnips in a bag she had bartered against her silver cutlery in the rural outskirts. She did not know when her husband would be back; he was a prisoner of war and worked in a coalmine in Belgium (he did return, but only four years after the war had ended. His fellow miners had treated him as one of theirs and had fed him.) Of my mother, nine years old in the last year of that war, and her mother, in a trek of refugees, cowering in a ditch in a field while low-flying planes fired shots at them. My father, the same age and always hungry in the last year of the war, crawling out of a basement shelter in Berlin in the middle of street-fighting with his grandfather, both with cobbler knives, to a horse dying in the street, in order to snatch a piece of meat. I later grew up in that same street.

After leaving the exhibition, I could not help but think: how could something like this have happened in Europe at the end of the twentieth century? But, as both authors and readers of AAN know, it can and does still happen in many places. It really does not matter whether it is in Sarajevo or in Kabul or Kunduz. It does not matter whether the people who are forced to live in abject conditions due to war (often without the most basic of services), who face the daily threat of being maimed or killed, are from Europe, Asia or elsewhere.

The picture of the bicycle would come back to us once more in Sarajevo, in another exhibition in a small gallery as part of a local festival (2). It was entitled “After Enduring Freedom” and exhibited works of Kabul-based Australian photographer Andrew Quilty. When we found out about it, we knew we did not want to miss it, either.

Andrew Quilty’s photo exhibition in Sarajevo.

This photo of a bicycle was rather unspectacular at first glance: the bike was muddied and leaning against a wall in a village just outside Kunduz. Quilty had taken the photo while he was documenting the US air attack that destroyed a clinic run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the city on 3 October 2015, during a two-week Taleban takeover of the city, visualising this event for many people around the world (AAN analysis of this episode here). The bicycle in the photo belonged to an Afghan man named Baynazar Muhammad Nazar, 43, who had worked as a security guard in Kunduz. He was killed on the operating table while undergoing surgery for a bullet wound in his leg that he had sustained during the attack. This attack has not yet been investigated satisfactorily and might still amount to a war crime.

Afterwards, Quilty had returned to Kunduz and Nazar’s family. He described this, and the story of Nazar’s death, in detail for Foreign Policy magazine. It ends with a scene where Nazar’s wife and children visit his grave, and one daughter’s heartbreaking remarks: “Father, we washed your bicycle — please wake up — you can come home now.” (Here is a photo of Nazar still alive, reproduced by Quilty.)

A mosque in Sarajevo

Fortunately, there are many older, more positive features that connect Sarajevo – and Bosnia as part of the western Balkans in general – to the region that now contains Kabul and Kunduz, sometimes referred to as “Khorasan.” (3) These are the Persian language and culture. At one time, and for many centuries, it was so influential throughout that vast stretch of land that University of Chicago historian Marshall Hodgson (in his 1974 book, The Venture of Islam: The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods) coined the term “Persianate world.” The Persian (Farsi) language, he wrote (4):

(…) served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. … Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims … depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension.

Sabaheta Gačanin, author in a Turkish academic magazine, calls the Persian language a “civilisation bridge … lasting to this very day.”

Careva Džamija, the Emperor’s Mosque in Sarajevo.

 

Including to Sarajevo, for example, although there, the language has not been in use in everyday or even literary life for some 150 years. There, on the left bank of the River Miljacka, which divides the city, is Careva Džamija, the Emperor’s Mosque, or Bakrbaba Mosque in Turkish. (It is not far from Latinska ćuprija, the Latin Bridge, where, on 28 June 1914, the Bosnian nationalist student Gavrilo Princip killed Austro-Hungarian heir apparent Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which helped trigger World War I.) In the mosque’s yard lies the türbe (the Turkish word for tomb, which, in Persian, would be turbat and in today’s Dari and Pashto, ziarat) of Hadži Hafiz Halid [Khaled] Effendi Hadžimulić (1915-2011) that has – to my surprise – a Persian-language inscription on its knee-high marble enclosure.

Part of the Persian inscription at Sarajevo’s Emperor Mosque.

 

ای دریغا پیش از این بودیم اجل

تاعذابم کم بدی اندر وجل

 

گوی آنجا خاک می بیختم

زین جهان پاک می بگریختم

 

چون از اینجا واری آنجا روی

در شکر خداوند شاکر شوی

 

The du’a:

رضینا بالله ربا” و بالاسلام دینا” و بمحمد صلی الله علیه و سلم رسولا” نبیا

 

Of Ottomans and Seljuqs: Speaking Persian in the Turkic empire

The mosque used to be in the heart of the city. At the beginning of the four hundred year-long Ottoman rule (1461-1878), this place was known as the At Maidan, or Hippodrome. Sarajevo itself was founded by the Ottomans, and its name derives from the Turkish word saray, as in caravan saray. The language the Ottomans used in much of their official business in those days, however, was Persian.

Persian was used because the Ottomans were the heirs of the Seljuqs. This Turkic tribal coalition from Central Asia had conquered Khorasan in the first half of the eleventh century, where they adopted the local Persian language spoken by a sedentary, partly well-educated Iranian population. (The Persian language is part of a larger family of Iranian languages to which many Afghan languages, such as Pashto, Dari, Balochi, Pashai and the Nuristani languages, also belong.) Thomas Barfield in Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton 2010) writes that the Seljuqs created

… states with dual organizations. Administration was placed in the hands of “men of the pen,” literate Persians speakers familiar with government, while military commands were allocated to “men of the swords,” tribal Turks and slave soldiers.

From there, they exported the practice of employing Persian speakers to other parts of the empire, including to Anatolia, which they conquered on their way westwards and which became known as the Sultanate of Rum (1037-1194). Henceforth they were called the Rum-Seljuqs. According to E J W Gibb, the author of the standard A Literary History of Ottoman Poetry, “Persian was the language of the court, while Persian literature and Persian culture reigned supreme.” Turkish remained the everyday language of the non-Iranian population of their empire, and Arabic the language of Islamic theology and law. The Persianate influence on Turkic intellectual life further increased during the thirteenth century, when, fleeing the Mongol invasion, many scholars, writers and poets from Persia came to the Seljuq empire.

The Ottomans, the Seljuqs’ successors, inherited the Persianate culture. They continued to patronise Persian literature for five and a half centuries, according to Ehsan Yarshater, director of the Centre for Iranian Studies at Columbia University, and extended the use of the Persian language to the areas of the Balkans they started conquering in the mid-fifteenth century. According to Austrian Bert Fragner, a leading Iranist, the Persianate world reached an “optimal state (…) in a rather constant spatial dimension” – namely, from the Balkans to Central Asia and India – from the fourteenth to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Ottoman graves in Sarajevo.

Hungarian scholar Iván Szántó has described how this worked in practice in the Ottoman Balkans:

The number of visitors and immigrants from Iran in the Ottoman Empire was considerable; it was also not uncommon to find people of Iranian origin in important positions in the Ottoman administration of Bosnia. In addition to that, Ottoman institutions often had a Persian imprint as a result of continuing contacts between Ottoman Anatolia and Safavid Iran. Recitations in Sufi dervish lodges of the Mevlevi and Bektashi orders, for instance, were often sung in Persian. Many well-educated Bosnians were proficient in the Persian language, as was reported with much admiration by the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller, Evliya Çelebi (whose own mastery of Persian is testified by an autograph graffiti he left inside the now-destroyed Aladža Mosque of Foča [also in Bosnia]). So high was the prestige of this language that many local intellectuals felt compelled to study and compose Persian poetry or to write commentaries on Persian literature […]. It should be noted, however, that Iranian-born migrants were not necessarily ethnic Persians; more often they were Turkic-speaking Azeris […].

The passion for the Persian language among the Ottoman Turks and their local subjects in the Balkans is also reflected in their names. One of Sarajevo’s most famous historical personalities, the first native Muslim governor of Ottoman Bosnia (between 1521 and his death in 1541), had a Persian name: Gazi Husrev Beg (1480-1541); this is the Turkic spelling of Ghazi Khosraw Beg, Khosraw being the name of many famous ancient Persian emperors. He was the founder of Sarajevo’s most beautiful mosque, which is still named after him, the Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque. Similarly, the local waqf comprises a madrassa, a famous clock tower, an important library and a hospital. Together, they make up the most formidable complex of Ottoman architecture in Bosnia, if not the whole of the Balkans. The name of Husrev/ Khosraw Beg’s mother, a daughter of the Ottoman Caliph Bayezid II (who ruled from 1481 to 1512), was Seljuka. (5)

At the Gazi Husrev Beg mosque, Sarajevo

Rumi in Bosnia

In the Emperor’s Mosque in Sarajevo, on that quiet Ramadan day during our visit, the few worshippers present, as well as the janitor, thought the inscription on Hadži Hadžimulić’s tomb was Arabic. They did not know what it meant. But only one of the four verses was Arabic, a prayer (du’a): “we accept that Allah is our Lord, Islam is our religion and Muhammad (peace be upon him) is his messenger.”

As it turned out, the other three verses were in Persian, from Mawlana Jalaluddin Muhammad (1207-73)’s famous oeuvre, the 25,600 verses Mathnawi-ye Manawi (online here). Mawlana Jalaluddin is one of the most important poets in the Persian language and his Mathnawi, which teaches Sufis the path to God through true love of Him, is one of the most influential book, and not only for Muslims. Pointing to his place of birth in what is today Afghanistan, Jalaluddin is often given the takhallos Balkhi. However, he is also known as “Rumi“ (a reference to his grandfather, who, according to some sources, was called Hussain Rumi and, given this takhallos, might have been from further west, ie Anatolia, which is “Rum” in Arabic), or simply as “Mawlana.” As a young man, Mawlana went to Turkey with his father, who was a preacher, mystic and poet himself, and settled in Konya, then the capital of the Rum-Seljuq Turkish empire. There, he founded the Mawlawi (Turkish: Mevlevi) Sufi order, also known as the so-called Whirling Dervishes. (6)

It was the Sufi orders that, to a large extent, kept the Persian language alive throughout the Balkans for centuries. Apart from the Mawlawi Sufis, there was the Naqshbandiya, also prominent in Afghanistan. Its first members came to the Balkans in the fifteenth century, according to this 1975 study. In 1463, the first Sufi tekije (or lodge), that of Sheikh Musafer, was established in Sarajevo. Following a decline, the order was revitalised in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by murids of its Mujaddedi branch (see this 2008 MA thesis on the subject) – also known from Afghanistan. After the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, many Sufis in Yugoslavia migrated to Turkey. In 1952, the communist regime in Yugoslavia banned Sufi orders, but Sufism continued to be practiced underground. In the late 1990s, a revival followed. The Naqshbandiya is still the largest Sufi order active in today’s Bosnia.

Blagaj: Sufi poets and warrior-dervishes in the Balkans

An Iranian shop-owner whom we encountered in Sarajevo’s bazaar quarter of Bašcaršija, and who fetched his nai and tambourine to sing Rumi verses for us one evening, told us to visit the Sufi tekije (monastery) in Blagaj. This is a small town near the city of Mostar, where the famous Ottoman-era Old Bridge was destroyed during the Bosnian war (1992-95), and rebuilt afterwards. He also mentioned the name of one Fawzi Mostari (or Fevzi Mostarac in Bosnian, born between 1670 and 1677, died 1747), who, he said, had still been writing poetry in “pure Persian.” We found a 2011 bilingual (Bosnian/Persian) version of his major work, Bulbulistan, published by the Cultural Centre of the Iranian Embassy to Bosnia. Bulbulistan means “The Book of Nightingales.” (This bird features prominently in Persian-language literature, not only because of its sweet song, but also because its Persian name, bulbul, rhymes with gul, flower.)

Following the Iranian shopkeeper’s advice, we went to Blagaj, where the local Buna River springs from a cave in a 200 metre-high cliff, which reminded me of the Silk Gorge (Tangi-ye Abrishom) between Kabul and Sarobi. The monastery in Blagaj was built by the Sufis of the Bektashi order around 1470. The lover of bulbuls, Mostari (who was born there), was inspired by the classical Persian literature of Rumi, Saadi, Jami and others that constitute a central part of the Sufi philosophy.

Former sufi monastery of Blagaj.

 

Mostari studied Persian in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. There he joined the Sufi order of the Mawlawis founded by Rumi/Balkhi and, at its Dar ul-Masnawi (“House of Masnawi”), wrote his own masterpiece, the Bulbulistan, in 1739, according to Džemal Ćehajić, a Bosnian scholar, who contributed a short biography of Mostari to a 2011 reprint of the Bulbulistan funded by Iran.

Both the title and form of Bulbulistan are reminiscent of, and indeed may have been a conscious reference to, Sa’adi’s famous collection, the Gulistan (The Rose Garden), from thirteenth century Iran. Cultural historian Amila Buturovic describes compares Mostari’s work as a “comprehensive, didactic medley of poetry and prose animated by the rich heritage of Persian poetry (…), but with a distinct touch by his Bosnian author” (here, p 29). Gačanin (quoted above) points out that “many authors in Bosnia and Herzegovina wrote poetry and fiction in the Ottoman, Arabic and Persian languages [who] had their models among the Persian classic poets.” But, he adds, Mostari with his Bulbulistan was “the only Bosniak who wrote an independent literary work (…) in Persian.”

In a shrine on the monastery compound in Blagaj, there are two wooden coffins covered with flags, containing the remains of two holy men.(7) In the case of the first, Shaikh Ačik Paša, a Bektashi also known as Muhammad Hindi, his name speaks for itself. He was either from India, or had spent time there. As for his companion, the plaque outside the room where the graves lie, says: Sari Saltuk, also known as Muhammad Bu[k]hari, from the “Turkistan region [of] [K]Horasan (…), one of the bravest Alperen [an old Turkish word for “hero”, similar to Ghazi] dervish” who “left his country with 700 followers” and took part in the Ottoman conquest of Anatolia and Rumelia (today’s Balkan peninsula). He was buried in Blagaj aged 93. It appears that he came all the way to Bosnia from the Holy City of Bukhara, in Khorasan.

The Sufi graves in the Blagaj monastery.

Libraries under fire

Over the last centuries of the existence of the Ottoman empire, which collapsed at the end of World War I, the Persian language had gradually lost its importance there. The Persianate world became a lot smaller. In the Balkans, much of its cultural heritage was destroyed during the wars of the 1990s – as was the case in Afghanistan, at the other end of the Persianate world.

During the 1992-95 siege of the Bosnian capital, with its destruction and tens of thousands killed, the Sarajevo Oriental Institute was also shelled. Its large collection went almost completely up in smoke after Serbian artillery hit it during the night of 17 May 1992, only two months after the war and the siege started. Of its 5,263 works – with handwritten manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew and alhamijado (Bosnian Slavic in Arabic script), including Qurans and collections of Hadiths, of Sufi and other poetry, covering the eleventh to the early twentieth centuries – as few as 53 manuscripts survived. The former Ottoman provincial archives met the same fate. (More background on the destruction in this article.)

Yet the Persianate legacy, spiritual, written and architectural, can still be found. Another collection of manuscripts survived, sheltered in the stone vaults of the library in Husrev/Khosraw Beg’s sixteenth century madrassa. Sufi Islam is reported to be the main form of Islam practiced in many parts of the Balkans. In Sarajevo, a new tekije was inaugurated in 2013, and Persian is studied in academic circles, still providing a “civilisation bridge.” While much of Afghanistan is increasingly out of reach to visitors due to the deteriorating security situation, anyone travelling to the Balkans can still see its legacy.

 

 

(1) A similarly heart-wrenching rendering of the siege in prose form can be found in Miljenko Jergović, Sarajevo Marlboro, Penguin 1997.

(2) The festival also featured the well-known film ”Frame By Frame“ by Alexandria Bombach & Mo Scarpelli and ”Watani – My Homeland“ by Marcel Mettelsiefen, a German photographer who documented, together with then- Stern reporter and occasional AAN contributor, Christoph Reuter, the German bombing of two oil tankers, also in Kunduz province, in 2009, that killed almost a hundred civilians (more about this here).

(3) Khorasan, originally, refers to the region which is now northeastern Iran, Afghanistan north of the Hindukush mountains and parts of Central Asia, up to the Iaxartes River (Syr Darya), also known as Mawara an-Nahr, or Transoxiana, the Oxus being the historical Greek name for the Amu Darya. The use of the term has frequently been extended to all of Afghanistan and adjacent areas of Pakistan, as they are known today.

(4) Quoted via Wikipedia.

(5) There was also another Ottoman governor of Sarajevo with a Persian-sounding name, Siyavus[h] Pasha, who, in his time, around one and a half centuries after Ghazi Khosraw, endowed a waqf in 1580-81 to erect a large guesthouse (han). This was for the poorer members of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. He was also granted permission for the construction of the city’s first synagogue.

(6) There is a heated controversy about who ‘owns’ Balkhi/Rumi/Mawlana. Turkey (he is buried in Konya) and Iran have jointly – without Afghanistan – applied to register his work as their joint heritage with the UN’s “Memory of the World.”  This sparked outrage in Afghanistan. The governor of Balkh province, Atta Muhammad Nur, urged the Afghan ambassador to the UN to protest against this “imperialistic” step. Atta had already erected a monument in the poet’s honour in his capital Mazar-e Sharif. The city’s recently upgraded airport also carries the poet’s name: Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi International Airport.

On the other hand, Balkhi/Rumi’s assumed birthplace in Afghanistan – the khanaqa of his father – lies in a dilapidated state and is poorly protected by a simple fence (a photo in this article).

(7) As so often is the case, there are several locations that claim the authentic grave of the Sufi is theirs (see here, p 50). An Afghan example is the rauza, the Grand Mosque, of Mazar-e Sharif.

 

 

 

 

 

More than half a million Afghan refugees have returned from Pakistan since July 2016, a huge number, on a scale not seen for a decade. United Nations agencies and human rights organisations have blamed fear of harassment and oppression by the Pakistani authorities, or in the case of undocumented refugees, fear of expulsion for the mass returns. Pakistani hostility towards Afghan refugees had already been growing, but has strengthened markedly as friendship between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s old enemy, India, blossomed this year. The Afghan government, reports AAN’s Jelena Bjelica, has also been encouraging Afghans to come home (with reporting from Jalalabad by AAN’s Fazal Muzhary and input from Thomas Ruttig).

The returnee crisis: facts and consequences

By mid-December, more than half a million Afghans had crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan – all officially called ‘returnees’ even if they were born in Pakistan. According to the UN’s humanitarian coordination agency, UNOCHA, 370,102 were ‘registered’ , ie registered as refugees with the Pakistani authorities and UNHCR, and 244,309 were ‘undocumented’. The majority (96 per cent of the undocumented and 75 per cent of the registered) had been living in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

Most – more than 90 per cent ­– of those 614,411 people moved to Afghanistan after July 2016. Between July and early November 2016, UNOCHA reported, it was not uncommon to see as many as 4,000 people – sometimes more – pass through the border crossings at Torkham and Spin Boldak in a single day. Many returned at short notice, after receiving 48-hour and/or a week’s notice to leave the country. Many had been living in Pakistan since the Soviet invasion when millions of Afghan refugees fled the country. The younger ‘returnees’ include those who have never lived in Afghanistan. Some are even the children of those who have never lived in Afghanistan. Many of the returning Afghans now find themselves in a desperate situation in their homeland, with neither jobs or proper housing.

Returns since 2001

Pakistan has been a generous, albeit sometimes reluctant host to Afghan refugees for almost four decades. Since 2001, more than 3.9 million Afghan refugees have returned home from Pakistan. There was a huge push to bring the refugees home by UNHCR, international donors and the Afghan government after the fall of the Taleban ­– it was seen as proof that the new regime was popular and in the first years after the Taleban regime was overthrown, conditions also seemed amenable. That left, according to UNHCR estimates, about 2.6 million Afghans still residing in Pakistan (1.5 million registered and one million unregistered). (1)

In 2007, after the Pakistan authorities started providing Afghans with individualised computerised identity cards called Proof of Registration (PoR), the number of voluntary returns decreased. Although the cards were granted for a limited period (the first POR cards expired in December 2009), they did enable holders to open bank accounts, purchase mobile phone SIM cards and get driving licenses. This improved the lives of many Afghans in Pakistan. Following the second extension of PoR cards from December 2009 to June 2013, in combination with the ‘wait and see’ approach taken by refugees, themselves, during the security transition phase (ie the withdrawal of foreign troops in the period 2010 to 2014) and with insecurity growing in Afghanistan, the number of returns decreased even further (see table below).

Credit: AAN

Caption: Decrease in number of returns after the introduction of PoR cards in 2007.

*Source IOM, UNHCR and OCHA figures. The table shows combined annual figure for assisted returns of registered Afghan refugees and undocumented Afghan returnees, except for the period 2008 to 2011 for which only assisted returns are presented based on the available data.

**From 1 January to mid-December 2016

All that changed at the end of 2014 when, on 16 December 2014, the Pakistani Taleban, Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar. They killed 145 people, including 132 children. Although the attack was carried out by a Pakistani armed organisation, the authorities said its masterminds were operating from safe havens on the Afghan side of the border (in Nuristan or Kunar) and that Afghan citizens had been among the attackers (see media reporting here and here). The Afghan government rejected these statements. (2) As a result, they became more hostile towards Afghan refugees.

The hostility was manifested in many ways, resulting in both soft and hard pressure. The most obvious soft pressure was changing the PoR cards extensions policy. Since December 2015, the cards have been extended for periods of six months only (to June 2016 and then to December 2016), and then, more recently for just three months (until March 2017). (3) Even these short-term extensions were the result of international pressure on the Pakistani authorities.

At the same time, the Pakistan government’s approach to Afghan refugees has become more violent. Some 52,000 Afghans living in Peshawar returned to Afghanistan in the first three months of that year, following a series of house raids and eviction notices (see AAN reporting) and IOM’s annual report for the number of returns of undocumented Afghans in 2015; these were four times higher than in 2014).

Abuses in 2015 by the Pakistani police were well documented, including in a Human Rights Watch report in which Afghans “described repeated threats, frequent detentions, regular demands for bribes, and occasional violence by Pakistani police in the months since the Peshawar school attack.” Human Rights Watch continued: “The abuse has prompted many Afghans to return to an uncertain fate in Afghanistan; others remained in Pakistan but live in fear. Many of those we interviewed had PoR cards, but this provided little protection against police harassment and abuse.”

Police harassments, threats and extortion in Pakistan continued into 2016 (see this HRW press release from early July 2016). The result was more people crossing the border. UN agencies estimate that while in 2015, on average, 366 individuals returned per day, by August 2016 this number had risen to 476 per day. One cause was an intensification of Islamabad’s harsh policy towards Afghans living in Pakistan, prompted by wider political dynamics. It seems also that Pakistan is targeting Afghan refugees because of anger over Afghanistan’s growing ties with India.

A joint ‘Afghanistan-India front’ against Pakistan?

During President Hamed Karzai’s rule, relations between India and Afghanistan were cordial. When his successor, Ashraf Ghani, took power in 2014, he initially reached out to Pakistan with the hope that its government – especially following the Peshawar massacre – would assist in brokering an end to the Taleban insurgency. Diplomatic pressure on Pakistan to bring the Afghan Taleban to the negotiating table and drop their refusal to directly talk with the Afghan government was built up by the United States and China through the mechanism of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG). But the initiative failed in the turmoil around the leaked demise of Taleban founder Mullah Muhammad Omar and the Taleban’s withdrawal from the July 2015 Murree talks (AAN analysis of this initiative here and here).

In Kabul, this was interpreted as the continuation of Islamabad’s ‘non-constructive’ approach toward Afghanistan and the Taleban. Ghani turned increasingly to India, in order to push his development agenda. Ties have particularly been active since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi first visited Kabul on 25 December 2015 and inaugurated the new parliament building and handed over four Mi-25 attack helicopters to the Afghan air force. Then, on 25 May 2016, Modi invited Ghani to join him for a ceremony in Tehran in which he pledged 500 million USD to help develop Chabahar port in Iran, some 75 kilometres to the west of Pakistan’s Chinese-built port of Gwadar, at the end of the new ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’. Ghani was a witness to this deal which also involves the development of road and rail infrastructure from Chabahar through Iran to Afghanistan. For Afghan traders, and the government in Kabul, if all goes well, the route through Iran will not only shorten ways to the important markets at the Persian-Arabian Gulf, but also significantly lessen land-locked Afghanistan’s decades-long dependence on transit routes through Pakistan. In particular, reliance on the port of Karachi should be diminished. It currently enjoys a near monopolistic position as Afghanistan’s ‘door on the world’. The Afghan hope is that this would also significantly – but by no means fully – diminish Pakistan’s ability to use the bilateral border regime as a means to pressurise Afghanistan.

India’s largess on the aid front has also been noticeable. On 3 June 2016, Ghani and Modi inaugurated the Salma Dam, a hydro-power station in Herat province. Although it had been commissioned during the Karzai period, it was touted by some Afghans as a symbol of growing bilateral ties. Then, on 15 September 2016, Modi pledged one billion US dollars in development aid to Afghanistan at a meeting with Ghani held in New Delhi. Both countries boycotted the summit meeting of the regional organisation SAARC in November 2016, which was held in Pakistan (4) and, ahead of a meeting in Amritsar for the Heart of Asia initiative on 3 December 2016, Modi and Ghani announced a plan to create a joint air corridor to enhance bilateral trade following Pakistan’s reluctance to allow transit rights through its territory. Ahead of the meeting, there were calls in India, as one analyst from the influential daily, The Hindu, put it to “corner Pakistan” as a “state sponsor of terrorism” and blacklist Pakistan-based terrorist groups held responsible for attacks in India. In Amritsar, itself, despite some moderate language from Afghanistan and Pakistan on terrorism (5), President Ghani snubbed Islamabad’s offer of 500 million US dollars of financial assistance, telling Islamabad’s top advisor on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, that Pakistan had better use it to contain extremism at home. In India, there were some triumphal responses to the Amritsar meeting. (6)

For Pakistan, however, unhappiness at the flourishing India-Afghanistan friendship has translated into open hostility towards Afghan refugees and the sharp rise in returns seen in the second half of the year. Returning Afghan refugees traced the upsurge in enmity to the inauguration of the Salma Dam; after that, they said Pakistani police started to insult them, calling them “sons of Hindus” and “nieces of Narendra Modi” (more on this below). The Taleban, who are supported by Pakistan, but also have a constituency among Afghan refugees, also issued two statements on 21 and 29 July 2016 underlining that the Pakistani authorities should not treat the Afghan refugees in a political way and that ordinary Afghan refugees should not become victims of politics. (see here).

Zakhilwal’s campaign

At about the same time, the Afghan government launched, for the first time in recent history, a campaign to encourage its citizens to abandon their refugee life in Pakistan. On 17 July 2016, the Afghan Ministry of Tribal Affairs and its diplomatic mission in Peshawar jointly launched a social media campaign called Khpel Watan, Gul Watan (‘One’s own homeland, a dear (literally flower) homeland’) aimed at encouraging Afghans to return ‘home’. The video message was posted ahead of a tripartite meeting between Pakistan, Afghanistan and UNHCR officials held in Bhurban in Pakistan on 19 July 2016.

The launch of the campaign happened to coincide with a six-month extension of the Proof of Registration cards (until the end of 2016). Despite the extension and possibly because of the campaign, there was a record high of returnees in early August 2016 – 8,500 returnees in 72 hours, according to the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation.

The Afghan government’s spin of the situation was certainly daring. Ghani’s Special Envoy and Ambassador to Pakistan, Omar Zakhelwal, in an interview with Pajhwok, published on 6 August 2016, said that the “newly launched project ‘Khpal Watan Gul Watan’ aimed at encouraging refugees to repatriate had [given] positive results,” and that, “earlier the Afghani [sic] migrants in Pakistan did not feel for the country, but now they had realised that they should live in dignity in their own country.” He added that “as many as 30 million people live in Afghanistan and that the return of two or three million more people would not have such a bad impact on the current situation in the country.” He said Afghanistan has realised its weaknesses which were “economy, transit route and refugees” and that Islamabad had been able to use them as “pressure buttons.” Kabul was working hard in these areas, he said, and would gradually rid itself of dependency on Pakistan. “We have strengthened economic relations with Central Asian states, and signed the Chabahar pact to find access to sea.” In the long term, for example, the influx of largely Pashtun returnees could have an impact on population and voter figures (the refugees abroad, who were able to vote in the first electoral cycle 2004/05, have been unable to do so in the most recent one). There is also speculation that individual politicians might be building a constituency.

Responding to the pressure: the human side of the story

After living for 35 years in the Shabqadar area of Peshawar, Najibullah left, in June 2016 within 20 hours of the police telling him to go. His family members had refugee cards which could have eventually been extended till the end of the year, but they decided to return to Afghanistan and have now settled in Kabul:

I had worked at a printing press in the village of Shabqadar. One day, the police had made a public announcement that Afghan refugees should leave and go to Torkham the following day by 8 o’clock in the morning. The police said that if the Afghans fail to leave for Torkham within the deadline, they would destroy their houses with bulldozers and force them to leave. I got a call from home… I asked around… people told me that it was the truth […] Our Pakistani neighbours wanted us to stay. Some elders from the area and I went to the police and asked the police to give us a more reasonable deadline. The police said they would respect the elders and give us a few more days, but we could not stay beyond the new deadline. After that day, I decided to go to the UNHCR office to register our family for the return to Afghanistan.

A bit apologetically, Najibullah also explained that the lack of resources and property in Afghanistan had been the main reason for his family’s long stay in Pakistan. Najibullah’s family received 350 USD per person and travel expenses to Afghanistan from UNHCR. Recalling his journey back to Afghanistan, Najibullah said the Afghan border forces had behaved well and welcomed his family at Torkham. He also said the Afghan government had promised to distribute plots to landless returnees, but that “no steps have so far been taken in this regard.” The biggest problem for Najibullah is rent. “The rents went up and it is not easy for us to find reasonable houses that we can afford,” he told AAN.

‘Sons of Hindus’

The overall atmosphere in Peshawar in summer 2016 had also fortified Najibullah’s resolve to return to Afghanistan. In his words, the ordinary people of Pakistan have changed and the usual cordial and friendly relationship has been replaced by hatred. “This was the result of the Pakistani government propaganda that Afghanistan is a great supporter of India, and the story that the fighting in Torkham [on 13 June 2016] (7) was not with the Afghan soldiers, but with the Indian soldiers who instigated the fighting against Pakistanis,” Najibullah explained to AAN.

In the past, if the police would see an Afghan they would call him refugee, but they would not call an Afghan refugee ‘the son of a Hindu.’ […] They [now] say Afghans are the servants of the Indian government. The Pakistan government has brainwashed the public and now the public sees Afghan refugees as their worst enemy […] The ordinary people in Pakistan label Afghans as Hindus and friends of Hindus. They say the Afghans have joined hands with the Indians against Pakistan.

Najibullah also pointed out that Afghanistan’s closeness to India was often used as an excuse for extortion and harassment by the Pakistani police. “When people would show the refugee card to the police, they would say there was nothing written on the card and force the men to pay money to them.”

Another man, Gul Khan, who is in his late twenties and also recently returned to Afghanistan was more specific about when the insults started. He told AAN that after the inauguration of the Salma Dam in Herat on 3 June 2016, “the Pakistani police started addressing us as ‘sons of Hindus’,” and added that “even the ordinary Pakistanis would call Afghans ‘nieces of Narendra Modi’.” Gul Khan had lived in Pakistan as an undocumented migrant. He left for Afghanistan after the Pakistani police announced that undocumented refugees had to leave within four days or they would be arrested and deported to Afghanistan. He also reported that, on the way from Peshawar to Torkham, the Pakistani army asked him for bribe:

I paid 6000 rupees (50 USD) at four checkpoints on the road and an additional 1500 rupees (12 USD) to the border police at the Torkham Gate. If I did not give them the money, they would check all my belongings.

Shaista Gul in his forties, who returned to Afghanistan on 1 September 2016 because, he said, of Pakistani police and soldiers’ night raids on Afghan refugees’ houses, also reported that an exacerbation of insults directed at Afghan refugees had made him leave:

One day I was on the bus. The police stopped the bus and asked the driver if there was any Hindu on the bus. The bus driver said there was none, but the policeman took an Afghan man from the bus and said: “This is the Hindu I was looking for!” […] The locals also turned against Afghans after the fighting between Afghan border police and the Pakistani border police at Torkham [on 13 June 2016]. Everywhere in Peshawar, the ordinary people would taunt Afghans for friendship with India.

A plea and many concerns

For many refugees the issue is simple – they want more time to bring their affairs in Pakistan to an end before having to leave. On 31 August 2016, 120 elders from refugee communities in Pakistan came to Kabul for a first-of-its-kind jirga organised by the Afghan government. They pleaded with the president and with the chief executive to intervene at the highest levels of the Pakistani government. They wanted them to mitigate the current push factors which are forcing refugees out and to allow them more time to wrap up their affairs and prepare for return in safety and dignity. An UN official who was at the meeting told AAN that Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah had been willing to talk with the Pakistan government to slow down the pace of return, but the tense relations between him and Ghani at this time did not allow for the “constructive approach” needed to address this issue.

President Ghani, meanwhile, pledged to the tribal elders that he would “ensure that returning Afghans could obtain land and housing, invest in small businesses, send children to school, have access to basic services and settle in any part of the country.” He also presented an exclusive housing project which he said was to be developed in some districts of Nangrahar and Kabul province. The print-out of the housing project, seen by AAN, showed 3D-generated images of a fancy neighbourhood of two-storey buildings, even featuring some modern cars parked on the imagined streets. The project is authored by the governmental Capital Region Independent Development Authority (CRIDA), but on the agency’s website, the betterment of the lives of returnees is not mentioned among its expected outcomes. The Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation website also offers no clues as to what the government is planning on this issue.

This initiative, if it goes ahead, would most probably be implemented under the Afghan government’s land distribution scheme for returnees and IDPs adopted in 2005 by Presidential Decree 104. However, the distribution of land to returnees has one of the poorest of records of any governmental programme. The Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC) and other anti-corruption agencies have found that the land distribution programme has been exceptionally corrupt and ineffective. (For in-depth analysis of land distribution scheme for landless returnees and IDPs, see AAN analysis here). There is no sign yet that this has changed.

Another issue for looking after the returnees is insufficient funding. UN agencies’ Flash Appeal in September 2016, a call for additional funding and a warning of the growing humanitarian crisis, resulted in pledges worth 82 million US dollars against the target of 152 million US dollars. The main issue now, however, is absorption capacity and the willingness of the Afghan government to address the needs of this particularly vulnerable population. According to UN officials working on this issue, the government understands the gravity of the situation, but they question its sincerity to act. “They caught on that this is serious and it is massive,” a senior UN official told AAN, “but it could end up in lip service”.

For now, there is a bit of a breathing space. The number of returns of documented refugees diminished in mid-December. From 11 to 17 December, UNHCR reported that no registered refugees from Pakistan had returned, as a ‘winter pause’ in its repatriation programme, through which registered refugees are returning, came into full effect. In the same period, IOM reported just 2,032 undocumented Afghans had returned or were deported from Pakistan, a relatively low number.

Despite the pledges of aid, many of those who have already returned are simply having to fend for themselves. With winter upon them, many of the poorest face a lack of housing, a lack of jobs and a lack of help.

Edited by Kate Clark and Thomas Ruttig

 

 

(1) Between 1979 and 1992, over six million Afghan refugees entered Pakistan and Iran, fleeing the violence of the Soviet invasion and the ensuing civil war, UNHCR data shows. After Soviet forces withdrew from the country in 1989, two million Afghans returned to their homeland. However, beginning in the mid- 1990s, factional violence and later the Taliban’s capture of major areas of the country and widespread drought renewed the exodus. Although the US-led intervention in late 2001 initially caused further displacement, many refugees returned to Afghanistan, in part because of a massive campaign to get them home after the fall of the Taleban and increasingly difficult conditions refugees faced in Pakistan and Iran. See Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction Report (SIGAR): “Afghan Refugees and Returnees: Corruption and Lack of Afghan Ministerial Capacity Have Prevented Implementation of a Long-term Refugee Strategy”, August 2015, available here.

(2) The participation of Afghan citizen, however, seems to be not fully confirmed. The information, attributed to Pakistan security sources, was only reported by a few Pakistani outlets, not including the country’s main English-language media (see here).

The alleged mastermind of the Peshawar school attack was confirmed killed by US authorities in a US airstrike on Afghan territory in July 2016. Earlier, there were also arrests of suspects in Afghanistan by the local authorities, after tip-offs by Pakistan (media report here).

(3) At the beginning, the Pakistani government issued Afghan refugees with PoR cards for a period of two years or longer. The first PoR cards issued in 2007 were valid until December 2009. The second extension was until June 2013, the third until December 2015. The PoR cards issuance policy became more ad-hoc and erratic in 2016 when the Pakistan government started extending the cards for only short periods of time – until June 2016, then December 2016 and most recently March 2017. Approximately 1.5 million Afghans are registered in Pakistan and have POR cards.

(4) In July 2016, former US ambassador to Afghanistan (the Afghan-born, Zalmay Khalilzad) in an US Congress hearing had called for sanctions against Pakistan, followed by two US senators moving such a bill in Congress. Parts of Indian and Afghan public opinion supported this (see for example here).

(5) Ghani took a multilateral approach toward combating terrorism at the opening event (part of his speech in English in this video):

We propose an Asian or international regime – whatever is acceptable to our neighbour in Pakistan – to verify cross-frontier activities and terrorist operations.

He also said he did not want to engage in a “blame game.” This was reflected in the Amritsar Declaration (full text here) in which all participants – including Pakistan –expressed their

(…) welcome and support [for] Afghanistan’s initiative in taking the lead in exploring a regional counter-terror strategy [and] strongly call for concerted regional and international cooperation to ensure elimination of terrorism, in all its forms and manifestations, including dismantling of terrorist sanctuaries and safe havens in the Heart of Asia region.

The document also names a number of terrorist groups, many of them operating in Pakistan. Pakistan’s top foreign affairs adviser present at the conference, Sartaj Aziz, nevertheless described it as balanced; he also added “that the tradition of blame game should be ended”.

(6) One Indian analyst concluded that the Amritsar conference had:

fulfilled two main objectives of India i.e. isolating Pakistan at the diplomatic level and strengthening the bond with its extended neighbour Afghanistan. After boycotting the SAARC summit meeting in Pakistan, this is the second successful attempt this year by India to isolate Pakistan and corner it on the terrorism issue.

See also this opinion piece.

(7) The Afghan and Pakistani border guards at the Torkham border crossing exchanged fire on 13 June 2016. The incident erupted after the installation of a border gate by Pakistan. A commander of the Afghan Border Police in east General Ayub Hussein Khel told Khaama press that an Afghan policeman lost his life and five others were wounded during the clash, which lasted for several hours. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations, the military’s communications arm, reported that one “Pakistani soldier was injured due to Afghan firing.”

 

 

Afghanistan’s electoral reform process, a major part of the National Unity Government’s programme, has been slow and painful with its high stakes and divided government positions. But over the last few months two significant hurdles have been taken: the new electoral law has finally been passed, and the new electoral commissions have been appointed. Although the commissions are ready to start planning the country’s overdue parliamentary and district council elections, the problems that have long held back the electoral process are far from resolved. In particular, the questions of what electoral system to employ and how to organise voting have now been passed on to the IEC to grapple with. AAN’s Martine van Bijlert and Ali Yawar Adili answer key questions on where we are now.

Why has Afghanistan’s electoral process been so complicated?

Afghanistan’s post-Taleban electoral process has been vulnerable from the very beginning: from fraud during the election itself, to manipulation in its aftermath when trying to settle on the winners, to power games that seek to shape the electoral infrastructure in the run-up to the elections. It was precisely this inability to arrive at an unambiguous outcome in the 2014 presidential elections that resulted in the current, somewhat combustible National Unity Government (NUG) made up of President Ashraf Ghani and the newly established position of Chief Executive, Dr Abdullah Abdullah. As part of the political agreement (full text here), the two sides agreed to fundamental electoral reform ahead of the next elections – planned for 2015, but yet to take place – despite reluctance on the part of the presidential camp.

The demands for electoral reform from the Abdullah camp largely focused on the complete overhaul of the electoral bodies – the Independent Election Commission (IEC) and the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) – which they accused of having overseen widespread fraud in favour of the president in the 2014 elections, and the replacement of the current, unusual electoral system (SNTV, or the Single Non-Transferrable Vote; background here). Both demands required amendment of the electoral laws, but there were legal complications, as, according to article 109 of the constitution, the parliament was not allowed to “include proposals to amend the electoral law in its agenda” during the last year of its legislative term (the parliament’s term constitutionally expired on 22 June 2015, but was extended by presidential decree). This legal ambiguity prolonged the debates and confused the matter as to who, the government or the parliament, would have the last word.

The process was further complicated by high stakes. The laws determine the electoral playing field, while the electoral bodies decide how and how rigorously rules are applied to deal with the many allegations of fraud, which in turn means that they ultimately get to decide which candidates win. And the outcome of the upcoming elections – parliamentary and, if the political agreement is implemented, also district council elections – matters a lot. Both camps in government, as well as other political groupings, will want to have strong support in parliament. A strong showing in the Wolesi Jirga makes it easier to secure senior appointments (MPs get to directly vote on cabinet-level appointments, but are also highly influential in securing other appointments, often by putting pressure on the ministers) and to shape and pass legislation. But the NUG agreement also involves the calling of a Loya Jirga to discuss a possible change in the country’s political system. The majority (86 per cent) of the voting delegates will be, directly or indirectly, determined in the upcoming parliamentary and district council elections. (1)

While the technical expertise within the electoral bodies has grown over the years, the political and security conditions under which the elections need to be organised have only deteriorated. It is thus difficult to envisage the elections taking place, in particular the district council elections, which have been skipped in every electoral round so far (even though the government and the IEC in the run-up to several of the previous elections had, implausibly, insisted that they would indeed take place). Since then, security conditions – which had earlier stood in the way of organising countrywide district council elections – have only deteriorated.

So where are we with the electoral reform process?

The main deadlocks, for the moment, have been broken. In September 2016 the government finally managed to pass a new electoral law, and, in November 2016, the president appointed and inaugurated a new IEC and ECC (see the annex for the commissioners’ short profiles). This means that Afghanistan finally has the necessary electoral management bodies in place, accepted by both camps in the government, to start planning the overdue parliamentary and district council elections. (2)

However, the main controversies remain. The passing of the new electoral law was surrounded by legal disagreement and ambiguity over what was exactly decided. The main controversies have, as a result, been left unresolved and will need to be revisited, by the IEC, in the near future. This includes decisions with regard to a possible change in the electoral system and the practicalities surrounding the introduction of a new voter registry based on ID cards that link voters to polling centres (see below for details). This will lead to new rounds of wrangling as the actual decision-making and implementation approaches, further disrupting and delaying the electoral process.

What were the controversies around the new electoral law?

The first controversy, which has not been fully resolved, relates to how the new law was adopted: by the cabinet instead of by parliament. The government had failed to get parliamentary approval for two earlier legislative decrees, in December 2015 and June 2016 (see previous AAN reporting here and here, and it was unclear whether the second decree was still pending in parliament. So, on 21 July 2016, the president requested a legal opinion from the Independent Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution (ICOIC) (see previous AAN reporting here) on how to proceed.

In its answer, on 3 August 2016, the ICOIC ruled on several issues at once. (3) First, there was the question of whether an earlier legislative decree that had been sent to parliament was still pending (after it had been rejected by the Wolesi Jirga, but approved by the Meshrano Jirga). The ICOIC ruled that it should be rejected, although not all members of the committee agreed. (4) In fact, the ICOIC argued that the government should not have sent the decree to parliament at all. This was a break with the parliament’s interpretation of the constitution which held that the ban on discussing and voting on the Electoral Law did not extend to the Law on the Structures, Authorities and Duties of the Electoral Bodies. (5) The ICOIC concluded that the government could issue any decree regarding the elections and the electoral commissions during the parliamentary recess, and that there was no need to submit the decree to parliament later.

The Wolesi Jirga obviously disagreed and summoned the members of the ICOIC to the house’s plenary session on 24 September 2016. The ICOIC, however, refused to appear and sent a letter saying the Wolesi Jirga did not have the right to question them. This infuriated the MPs even more and some of them threatened to remove the ICOIC from the 2017 budget and to abolish the commission. Since then the Wolesi Jirga has taken no further action, although the issue was discussed again in the session of 23 November 2016. The issue may well resurface again in the future.

The second controversy relates to the heated debates around the possibility of changing Afghanistan’s electoral system. When it became clear that no consensus would be reached before the end of the parliamentary recess – which was the deadline before which the decree needed to be adopted – the cabinet, on 22 August 2016, decided to adopt the law “in principle” while leaving open its most controversial change: the proposal to shift to a system of single-member constituencies for both the parliamentary and provincial council elections. Second Vice-President Muhammad Sarwar Danesh was tasked to “rectify and finalise” the law. Two days later, Danesh issued a statement saying that: “The final text [of the law] is not yet finalised and is not ready to be endorsed. The reason for the delay is that a final agreement has not been reached about important issues, including the electoral constituencies.”

Danesh was the first person in government to bring the argument out into the open, implicitly opposing the single-member constituency by saying he thought “it would face many legal and technical, as well as practical and implementable obstacles and challenges under Afghanistan’s current circumstance.”

When the Special Electoral Reform Commission (SERC), the main vehicle that had been driving the electoral reform process, had discussed possible new systems, the single-member constituency (and, by extension, a system of first-past-the-post voting) had been tabled as one of the possible options, but it had not been part of the SERC’s final recommendations (details here). In fact, the proposed introduction of a parallel system (mixing the current SNTV with partial proportional representation) was the reason two members of the commission, who were generally seen as being on the president’s side, announced they would further boycott the SERC meetings. Later, the SERC recommended a multi-dimensional representation (MDR) system, with multi-member constituencies (possibly smaller than provinces), as another possible alternative to the existing SNTV, while the two boycotting members separately presented their proposal for a first-past-the post (FPTP), single-member constituency to the government. Neither option had been incorporated into the two previous decrees.

On 26 August 2016, the second deputy to the Chief Executive, Muhammad Muhaqeq, also voiced his opposition to the single-member constituency, saying, “The central statistics office does not have the capacity to demarcate [the constituencies] village by village and a huge dispute will start among the people as to which village should go with which district, and which one is small and which one is big. In this conflictual situation, it will just add another dispute.” Naim Ayubzada, the director of the Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA), one of a number of Afghan election observation organisations, summarised the concerns: “The population [data] is unknown, the district and village boundaries have not been delineated yet, and local strongmen are dominant. How will it be possible to ensure electoral justice?”

The inability to reach an agreement within the government and to practically respond to these concerns finally compelled the government to pass the problem on to the IEC, by tasking them to “determine the Wolesi Jirga and provincial councils electoral constituencies, and divide them into smaller constituencies” (art 35.2 of the new law). The decree that endorsed the new law further instructed the IEC to conduct a technical study within three months of its establishment on the “better implementation” of article 35.

The deferring of the decision enabled the new law to be endorsed by decree and to be published in the official gazette on 25 September 2016. But this was not exempt from criticism either. For instance, on 18 September 2016, Abdullah Shafai, a member of the ICOIC, argued that this article was unconstitutional, as according to the constitution (article 83) the electoral constituencies should be determined in the election law, and not by the IEC. He also warned that entrusting this authority to the IEC would transfer the dispute and controversy to the body that should conduct the elections: “This will turn this executive body into a political buzkashi [a local sport; literarily goat-grabbing] field, even more than before, which is very dangerous.”

What are the other main changes to the electoral law? What is the likelihood that the law will change again?

The National Unity Government, first of all, has combined two electoral laws (the Electoral Law and the Law on Structure, Duties and Authorities of the Electoral Commissions) back into one electoral law, which is the way it used to be. This has no bearing on the substance, but it facilitated the government’s move to bypass parliament based on article 109 of the constitution (even though after the ICIOC’s ruling this was, strictly speaking, no longer necessary).

In terms of substance, the new electoral law introduces several major changes, including a new voter registry and, as discussed above, the instruction to look into the size of the electoral constituencies. The new voter registration, according to the new law (6) is to be a based on a voters’ list that ties individual voters to specific polling centres. This is a departure from the previous practice in which voters could simply turn up at any polling centre in the province for which they had a voter card.

The aim is obviously to mitigate fraud in the face of massive over-registration in the past, but it is unclear whether the Cabinet has thought through the practicalities. These include questions such as how to prevent the same kind of over-registration from occurring again (particularly in the continued absence of credible population data), how to determine the list of polling centres in advance of the registration process, and how to maintain those lists in the face of a fluid security situation and a highly mobile population. The cabinet may still be hoping to combine the voter registration process with the planned distribution of electronic ID cards (e-tazkera), but given the political and technical complexities of that process, this is unlikely to be of much help any time in the near future.

Other changes in the law include the deployment of schoolteachers, lecturers of higher education institutes and employees of government agencies as temporary election staff; the introduction of 20 acts that are now considered electoral crimes, with punishments stretching to three years’ imprisonment; adjustments to the composition of the Selection Committee as well as to the composition and structure of the IEC and the ECC, including that the secretariats now report to the commissioners. The new law also adds a (combined) reserved seat for the Hindu and Sikh communities in the Wolesi Jirga (who, because of their small numbers, would not be able to pass the threshold for a seat), bringing the total number of seats to 250; and stipulates that at least 25 per cent of all seats in the provincial, district and village council elections should be reserved for women. (A more exhaustive review of the new law is forthcoming in a separate dispatch).

How did the selection of the new IEC and ECC members go? Were there any controversies and will this affect their work?

The mechanism for the selection of the IEC and the ECC is a Selection Committee. The Selection Committee was first put in place in 2013 based on recommendations from civil society organisations and political parties (see previous AAN reporting here. Since then, the body has been enshrined in the electoral law with the responsibility to vet and shortlist applicants for membership of the IEC and ECC. The composition of the SC has changed every time the law was amended, often in an effort to increase or dilute the influence of certain institutions, factions or individuals (see previous AAN reporting here). The new Selection Committee, comprised of five members, set to work on 28 September 2016. (7)

The composition of the committee was, as usual, carefully scrutinized. There was, in particular, criticism that the representative who had previously been elected and introduced by the civil society organisations had been replaced. Fazl Ahmad Manawi, former chairman of the IEC during the 2010 parliamentary elections and a close adviser to Abdullah, accused circles around the president of interfering in the formation of the committee. This was echoed by several electoral observation organisations. Both the Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA) and Election and Transparency Watch of Afghanistan (ETWA) complained that the election of the civil society representative had taken place when several prominent civil society members had travelled to Brussels for the October 2016 Afghanistan conference. ETWA said that this had given “some elements” the opportunity “to take control of the electoral reform [by] changing the model [composition] of the selection committee through the amendment of the new electoral law.” Yusuf Rashid, the Selection Committee spokesman and civil society representative who was elected, maintained however that he had been chosen in a competitive process and that his contenders had included TEFA’s candidate, Sughra Sadat. (This specific seat on the Selection Committee has always been the most hotly contested. In an earlier iteration of the committee, the seat was left vacant as a result of disagreements between the different ‘factions’ within civil society, see also previous AAN reporting here)

The election observer organisations also questioned the independence and transparency of the committee’s work. TEFA took issue with the fact that the Office of Administrative Affairs of the President had run the committee’s secretariat and that the committee was located within the Office of Administrative Affairs. They also claimed that, despite being notionally transparent, many of the final decisions were made behind closed doors, after the observers had been dismissed, and that the committee had not treated the candidates equally. The general gist of the criticism was that the committee had largely done the president’s bidding.

This time there seemed to have been no complaints from within the government. On the contrary, on 16 November 2016, Omid Maisam, a deputy spokesman for Dr Abdullah, told AAN that the chief executive was happy with the transparency in the Selection Committee and that it did its work in the presence of national and international observers. The chief executive himself said that although “no one can claim that the Selection Committee’s work has been perfect and without shortfalls and defects,” it had done the best job possible given the situation in Afghanistan.

After more than one month of deliberation, the committee on 9 November 2016 submitted a shortlist of candidates to President Ghani. It held a press conference the following day, where it explained in detail the procedures and criteria for the shortlisting process. Jawid Rashidi, the head of the Selection Committee, said that, out of a total of 720 applicants, the committee had selected 21 candidates for the IEC and 15 for the ECC. Rashidi stressed that there had been no undue political pressure and that the committee had received no recommendations. The Selection Committee further detailed the process in a 32-page report (which does not seem to be available online) that provides tables containing code numbers for the applicants who were excluded from the process in each phase, with the reasons for their exclusion.

After receiving the shortlist, President Ghani made a point of engaging a wider circle in the actual selection and appointment of the commissioners. He formed an interview panel (comprised of Chief Executive Abdullah, Second Vice-President Danesh, Attorney General Farid Hamidi, Muhammad Zaman Sangari, a member of the high council of the Supreme Court, and Muhammad Qasim Hashimzai, head of the ICOIC; the president’s office had also requested the UN Special Representative to Afghanistan to be part of the panel, but he had apparently declined) that interviewed all shortlisted candidates and held two meetings with political and jihadi leaders; the first after the Selection Committee submitted the list, and the second after he had finished the interviews.

Earlier, in the summer, the president and the chief executive had been embroiled in an open crisis (see previous AAN reporting here and here), so there was considerable concern that the rift would be reopened during the potentially fraught selection and appointment of the new commissioners. The process, however, seems to have gone smoothly and on 22 November 2016, the 12 new electoral commissioners (seven for the IEC and five for the ECC) were sworn in at the presidential palace. During the event, the president emphasised that “while legally the authority to select candidates from the proposed list is granted to the president, I preferred to share this responsibility with my colleagues, so that we could conduct the assessment and interviews together and select competent personalities for this job.” The chief executive reciprocated and thanked the president for his “essential consultation with us and colleagues” in the process.

On 28 November 2016, however, the New National Front of Afghanistan, a political grouping that has presented itself as political opposition (see AAN reporting here), called the appointments “non-transparent and interest-based,” saying it was “very concerned about the transparency of next parliamentary and presidential election.” (The Front also called the appointment of the former IEC and ECC members as advisers to the president “a political bribe, which aims at hiding the 2014 election frauds.”) This was echoed by Jandad Spinghar, head of Afghanistan Election Watch (AEW) and former electoral adviser to the chief executive, who said that “ethnic quota and doling out quota to politicians” would only cause many more controversies in future elections. The criticism seemed to target the fact that both the committee’s shortlist and the final list of appointees had been neatly divided between people from all different ethnic groups, implying that this must have come at the expense of merit and expertise. (The electoral law, in article 14, does provide for ethnic and gender composition of the electoral commissions). Although both groups represent a minority within in their constituencies, their criticism may linger.

There were also substantive concerns raised, including that the new members of the electoral bodies lacked the necessary electoral experiences and expertise and could not be expected to properly manage future elections. Except for Najibullah Ahmadzai, now the chairman of the IEC, the bios of the other commissioners do not indicate much relevant election-related experiences. There have also been allegations that their educational documents have not been checked properly. According to article 16 of the electoral law, membership of an electoral commission can be terminated if it is proven that a commissioner has falsified biographical data. If this is indeed the case, it will reflect badly on the selection process and the credibility of the new commissions, even before they settle down to plan and embark on the next electoral process.

What will happen now?

On 27 November 2016, the IEC elected Najibullah Ahmadzai as its chairman, Wasima Badghisi as the deputy for operations, Abdul Qader Quraishi as the deputy for finance and administrative affairs, and Gula Jan Badi Sayyad as secretary and spokesman.

The next important appointment is that of Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) and head of the secretariat. Since former CEO Zia-ul-Haq Amarkhel resigned from his position in 2014, amid allegations of serious electoral fraud, the secretariat has been run by an acting head. Sayyad, the IEC spokesman, told AAN that the commission would advertise the position of the CEO soon and conduct an interview process to select three candidates for the post and to introduce them to the president (according to article 22.3 of the new law).

The IEC’s next job, based on the legislative decree, is to conduct a technical study on how to “determine and divide” the electoral constituencies for the Wolesi Jirga and the provincial councils – within three months. It is unclear what happens after that. While the decree states that the cabinet shall assess the report and take a decision accordingly, it is not specified whether it can modify the IEC’s proposal. It is, however, unlikely that the cabinet would be in any better position to agree.

The IEC will also need to plan for the new voter registry. Although the law does not explicitly state that the IEC will have to invalidate the existing voter cards, it will need to organise some form of new registry from scratch. The IEC’s new spokesman Sayyad told Tolo on 3 December 2016, “If other government departments cooperate with us, we in cooperation with the Ministry of Interior and the Central Statistics Organisation will prepare the list of voters and will specify the electoral zones.” This seems to point to an underestimation of what both tasks will entail.

To develop a voter registry that links voters to polling stations, the IEC will first need to specify the list of polling centres, a process wracked by continuous suspicions that certain areas are being under- or over-serviced. Article 7.1 stipulates that the commission has to take into account the number of voters and their geographical locations in a balanced manner, but the lack of solid data and the prevailing security conditions continue to make it difficult to establish a balanced, and stable, distribution. This will only become more pronounced as the size of the constituencies decreases and the stakes rise (with less seats and possibly a winner-takes-all system).

Earlier this year, in its – unrealistic – planning for the missed election date of 16 October 2016, the previous IEC had allotted two months to carry out a reassessment and balancing exercise of the polling centres, and four months for the revalidation of existing cards and the registration of Afghans who had come of age or who for other reasons needed a new card. A whole new registration would obviously take much longer.

The IEC will also need to grapple with the fall-out of the 2014 elections, particularly among the technical staff that had worked in the secretariat. Many of them are still proud of the technical performance of the IEC in 2014, compared to the 2009 presidential and 2010 parliamentary elections, and angry that the process was discredited by what they consider politicisation by the campaign teams. Some reproach themselves that the IEC was unable to prevent the political unravelling of the process. This may have dented their confidence and could affect their ability to start the planning process.

Finally, do all the changes and developments add up to the needed electoral reform?

This question has two parts: do the changes add up to reform as understood and agreed in the NUG agreement and, do they provide the framework for workable elections? The government seems to think this is the case, on both counts. On 22 November 2016, in his speech at the inauguration of the new commissioners, Vice-President Danesh noted that, “It is worth mentioning that all defects of the previous laws have been addressed in this law and that most of the reform recommendations [by the SERC] have been incorporated.” The chief executive, who had pushed for a complete overhaul of the IEC and the ECC members, issued a celebratory statement on 22 November 2016, shortly after the swearing-in of the new commissioners, calling their inauguration the fulfilment of one of his “fundamental commitments in the area of electoral system reform based on the political agreement.” This, however, seems to be a very charitable reading of both the substance of the reforms and the process through which they were arrived at.

Outside the government, Assadullah Sadati, an MP and member of the SERC, seemed to more accurately reflect the prevailing sense of messiness, when he said that “the whole reform has been reduced to the changing or replacing of some individuals and [now] the government thinks they have carried out reform. I think the future elections will not be better than the past elections.”

All in all, although two big hurdles have been taken – the passing of a new electoral law and the appointment of the electoral bodies – the main practical and political problems remain unchanged. And the next controversy is just around the corner, as the IEC will need to come up with a proposal as to how to “determine and divide” the electoral constituencies.

 

(1) The Loya Jirga, according to article 110 of the constitution, would seem to consist of 762 voting delegates: 250 MPs (under the changed electoral law) and 102 Senators, making up a National Assembly of 352; 34 provincial council chairs; and 376 district council chairs (if also counting the 11 temporary districts). Ministers, the chief justice and members of the Supreme Court will participate in the sessions, but will not have the right to vote. The 34 provincial council chairs and 34 Senators that come through the provincial councils have already been elected in the contentious elections of 2014; 34 other Senators have been directly appointed by the president. The remaining 34 senators (who for the moment have also come through the provincial councils) still have to be elected by the – so far – non-existent district councils.

This means that out of the 762 delegates, 660 delegates will be, directly or indirectly, elected in the upcoming election: 250 MPs, 376 district council chairs and 34 district council senators.

(2) The term of the current Wolesi Jirga constitutionally expired on 22 June 2015; the election for a new Wolesi Jirga should have been held 30 to 60 days before that date. The district council election is envisaged in the constitution but has never been held before. The NUG, in its political agreement, committed to holding district council elections, to complete the quorum for a constitutional Loya Jirga (which the NUG committed to convene to discuss possible amendments to the constitution to create a prime ministerial post). After several earlier attempts in 2015, the former IEC finally announced 16 October 2016 as an election date (see AAN’s previous reporting here), but given the pending questions surrounding electoral reform, the date was never taken very seriously by either the government or donors.

(4) The dissidents within the ICOIC argued that the decree still needed to be put to another vote in the Wolesi Jirga (after a joint commission of the two houses failed to settle their difference) before it could be considered definitively rejected. The debate centred on the interpretation of article 100 of the constitution, which states:

If one House rejects decisions of the other, a joint commission comprised of an equal number of members from each House shall be formed to solve the difference. The decision of the commission, after endorsement by the President, shall be enforced. If the joint commission does not solve the difference, the decision shall be considered rejected. In such situation, the Wolesi Jirga shall pass it with two-thirds majority in its next session. This decision, without submission to the Meshrano Jirga, shall be promulgated once endorsement by the President.

The legal opinion was in the end signed by five of the seven members of the ICOIC (the signatures of Lutf-ul-Rahman Said, the deputy chair, and Ghezal Haress, the only female member, were missing). Haress confirmed to AAN that she had not signed the opinion for substantive reasons: “I believe we cannot divide an article into two parts [referring to article 100 of the constitution]. According to this article, the final outcome is determined by the two thirds of the Wolesi Jirga votes, not by the joint commission.” Muhammad Qasem Hashemzai, the head of the ICOIC, said however that there had been no disagreement and that the document had been signed by all members who were present. The other two had been, according to him, travelling.

(5) Article 109 of the constitution sets out that: Proposals for amending the elections law shall not be included in the work agenda of the National Assembly during the last year of the legislative term.

The Parliament argued that this article only referred to the law that was actually called “Election Law,” and not to the Law on the Structure, Duties and Authorities of the Electoral Commissions, given that it was not mentioned in the constitution by name. The ICOIC disagreed and told the president he had not been obliged to send either of the legislative decrees to parliament and that, if he did, the parliament was not allowed to discuss the decrees.

(6) Full text of the article on Registration and Voting (article 6):

• The person eligible to vote has to personally appear at the polling center, and register his/her name in the voters list based on the citizenship Tazkira or document specified by the Commission for verification of his/her identity.
• No person can register his/her name more than once in the voters list.
• The voter is obliged to vote at the polling center, where his/her name has already been registered in the voters list of that polling center.
• To get a ballot paper, a voter is obliged to present the citizenship Tazkira (National ID) or a document which is determined by the Commission for proving his/her identity.
• Every voter has the right of one vote and can use it directly in favor of his/her favorite candidate.
• In case a voter may need guidance about finding his/her candidate of choice, he/she can seek help of a person he/she trusts.

Full text of the article on Preparation of the Voters List (article 8): The Commission is obliged to prepare a voters list by polling centers and shall link it to the national database of the Commission.

(7) As in every previous round of changes, this new law also changed the composition of the Selection Committee (article 13.1):

For the purpose of verification of documents and determining competence and qualification of the candidates for membership of the Commission, the selection committee is established with the following composition: 1- Competent representative (Judge) of the Supreme Court, with the approval of the High Council of the Supreme Court, as the Chairperson of the selection committee. 2- One member of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, as elected by that commission as a member. 3- One member of the Independent Commission of Oversight of Implementation of the Constitution of Afghanistan, as elected by that commission, as a member. 4- An elected representative of the civil society organizations related to elections, as a member. 5- An elected representative of the civil society organizations advocating for the women rights, as a member.

The following people made up the selection committee: Jawid Rashidi (Pashtun), a member of the Supreme Court, as chair; Yusuf Rashid (Pashtun), representing the election-related civil society organisations; Mary Akrami (Tajik), representing the women’s rights organisations; Muhammad Zia Langari (Sayyed), a member of AIHRC; and Abdullah Shafai (Hazara), a member of ICOIC.

Annex. Members of the new electoral bodies

• Members of the Independent Election Commission (IEC):Wasima Badghisi, 35, born in Badghis province, is a Tajik and holds a Master’s degree in Law and Political Sciences from Washington University, USA. She has served as lecturer at Herat University for more than eight years. She speaks Dari and English. On 22 November 2016, she was appointed as a commissioner in the IEC for five years.
• Maliha Hassan, 44, was born in Kabul. She is a Hazara and holds a Master’s degree from Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, USA. She did her BA degree in Law and Political Science at Kabul University, Afghanistan. She was a member of Afghanistan’s Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission (IARCSC) for two years. She has served as lecturer in Kabul University since 2008 and has also worked for several UN agencies, including UNAMA, UNDP and UNHCR. She speaks Dari, Pashto and English. Before her appointment as a member of IEC, she also served briefly as deputy attorney general. On 22 November 2016, she was appointed as a commissioner in the IEC for five years.
• Najibullah Ahmadzai, 40 and a Pashtun, was born in Paktia province. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Al-Khair University, Islamabad, Pakistan (2009), and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Indian School of Business Management and Administration, India (2014). He has worked with the IEC as Regional Election Coordinator for the South East region from 2008 to 2011. He has also worked with IOM as senior adviser for the Out-of-Country Registration and Voting process during the 2004 and 2005 elections. He speaks Pashto, Dari, Urdu and English. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the IEC for five years.
• Abdul Qader Quraishi, 39, is an Uzbek from Balkh province. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Jurisprudence and Law (2011) and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science (2014) from private Khatem ul-Nabeyin University, Kabul. He has worked as a procurement specialist with different organisations, including the Administrative Office of the President and the Ministry of Finance. He speaks Dari, Pashto, Russian and English. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the IEC for five years.
• Mazullah Daulati, 41, is an Aimaq from Ghor province. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law and Political Science (2001) from Kabul University and a Master’s degree in Political Science (2011) from Ferdousi University, Mashhad, Iran. Daulati has served with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in different capacities, inside and outside Afghanistan. He speaks Dari, Pashto, Arabic and English. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the IEC for three years.
• Gula Jan Badi Sayyad, 43, is a Pashtun from Kabul. He holds a PhD degree. Sayyad has served in the following capacities: lecturer at Kabul University, vice-chancellor of the private Karawan University, lecturer at Dawat University, member of the Sharia board of Afghanistan Central Bank, and director of the Islamic Centre for Peace Studies. He has also taught as lecturer at Egyptian and Pakistani universities (from 2002-05 and 2006-10 respectively) and has served as a Pashto broadcaster in Egypt’s National Television (2002-06). He speaks Farsi, Pashto, English, Arabic and Urdu. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the IEC for three years.
• Rafiullah Bidar, 61, born in Nangarhar, is a Pashayi. He holds a Master’s degree in Technical Sciences from Technological Institute of Food Industry, Moscow, Russia (1980), a Master’s degree in Political Science (1985) and a PhD degree in History of International Relations (1988), both from the Institute of Human Science (now Gorbachev Foundation), Moscow, Russia. He has served as head of several regional offices and as head of the Press Office of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). He has taught international relations and diplomacy at Kabul University and the Institute of Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He speaks Pashto, Dari, Russian and English. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the IEC for three years.

Members of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC):

• Ghulam Dastegir Hedayat, 53, is a Pashtun from Wardak province. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law and Political Science from Kabul University (1991) and a Master’s degree in Criminal Law and Criminology from Khatem ul-Nabeyin University in Kabul (2014). He has served at the Attorney General’s Office in different capacities, including since 2014 as head of the appeals department of prosecution of crimes against public security. He also has worked with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) as head of the central region office and as transitional justice programme manager. He has also worked with other institutions, including the Meshrano Jirga, the Red Crescent and the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the ECC for five years.
• Abdul Basir Fayez, 44, is a Tajik from Badakhshan province. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Jurisprudence and Law from Kabul University and is currently working on his dissertation for a Master’s degree in Public Law from Khatem ul-Nabeyin University. Fayez has worked with the Supreme Court in different positions. Prior to his appointment as a member of ECC, he worked as legal adviser to the Afghanistan Telecommunication Regulatory Authority. He speaks Dari, Pashto, Arabic and English. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the ECC for five years.
• Ali Reza Ruhani, 47, is a Hazara from Ghazni province. He holds a Master’s degree in Human Rights and a Bachelor’s decree in Law. He is currently a PhD candidate. Ruhani has worked as senior legal adviser with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and as a member of the academic faculty at the private university of Ibn-e Sina. He has participated in the drafting, reviewing and amending of various laws and was appointed as adviser to Second Vice-President Sarwar Danesh for legal and parliamentary affairs in August 2016. He speaks Dari, Pashto, Arabic and English. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the ECC for five years.
• Humaira Haqmal, 48, is a Pashtun from Kabul. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law and Political Science from Kabul University (1990) and is studying International Relations for her Master’s degree at the private Dawat University. She has worked as lecturer of international relations in private Bakhtar, Tabesh and Dawat universities, as well as Kabul University. She has also worked with NGOs such as IRI and AWOSD and in government, including at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. She speaks Pashto, Dari and English. On 22 November 2016, she was appointed as a commissioner in the ECC for three
• Abdul Aziz Ariayi, 38, is an Uzbek from Badakhshan province. He holds a Master’s degree in Islamic Studies (Sharia Law) (2005) and a Bachelor’s degree in Sharia and Law (1998) from International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He has worked with the Independent Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (MEC) as team leader for their Vulnerability to Corruption Assessments (VCAs). He has also served as technical advisor to the security cluster with Ministry of Finance, and as lecturer of Islamic Studies in Dunya University. He speaks Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Arabic and English. On 22 November 2016, he was appointed as a commissioner in the ECC for three years.

One of the few Afghans convicted of war crimes has been released from a British jail and deported to Afghanistan. Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, a Hezb-e Islami commander, was convicted in 2005 of hostage-taking and torture. He preyed on people fleeing the civil war in Kabul in the mid-1990s, infamously keeping a ‘human dog’, a man who would attack people with his teeth. As AAN’s Kate Clark reports, despite the threat Zardad poses to the witnesses who testified against him, at least some were not informed by the UK government that he was coming back to Afghanistan; nor have any measures been put in place to protect them.

Zardad was released from jail just over half-way through his sentence, AAN understands, for ‘good behaviour’ and has now been deported from the UK to Afghanistan. He was due to arrive in Kabul today, 14 December 2016. Supporters were pictured putting up banners at Kabul International airport naming him a hero and welcoming him home; they included at least one non-uniformed, armed man (see here). The men had gathered just outside the terminal building, past the major security checks and beyond where normal people can go to welcome passengers. Some official authorisation must have been obtained. Pahjwok reported that hundreds of people had “thronged the airport” to welcome the convicted war criminal and “around 50 vehicles with tinted glasses and Zardad photographs left the airport at around 11am.” It was not clear if Zardad was transferred to the convoy or if, as the journalist Bilal Sarwary reported, he was taken into NDS custody at the airport. Whether that was for investigation or for his own protection was also not clear.

The crimes

Zardad’s crimes date back to the mid-1990s, when during a time of extreme brutality, he managed to become one of the most infamous commanders of the Afghan civil war. His rise to power came after the fall of the communist government in 1992. Fighting as a Hezb-e Islami commander, he captured positions outside the town of Sarobi on the main Kabul-Jalalabad road. In Kabul, there was vicious fighting between the mujahedin factions in Kabul and elsewhere in the country, with intense bombardments of the capital and the kidnapping, rape and murder of civilians; it prompted waves of people to flee the capital (for detail, see reports by the United Nations and the Afghanistan Justice Project’s. Zardad’s main activity at his Sarobi base during this period was preying on those trying to escape the conflict and find sanctuary, as well as traders trying to get supplies in to the capital.

When Hezb-e Islami positions fell to the Taleban, Zardad fled, arriving eventually in London on a false passport and claiming asylum. A BBC team tracked him down to a house in a south London suburb in 2000 and he came under police investigation. He was arrested in 2003 and put on trial at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) in London in 2004. Jurors were unable to reach a verdict and a second trial was ordered for the following year.

The Trial

Zardad was not British and his crimes had not been committed on British soil, but under the UN Convention Against Torture, Britain viewed itself as obliged to investigate and prosecute a suspected torturer who had come within its jurisdiction. This was a landmark trial and the attorney general himself, Lord Goldsmith, lead the prosecution. Zardad’s crimes were so “merciless” and such “an affront to justice”, he said, that they could be tried in any country.

At his second trial, Zardad was found guilty of conspiracy to torture and take hostages and sentenced to two prison terms, each of 20 years, to be served concurrently. As I reported at the time:

He and his men would carry out beatings and torture in order to extort money from people or imprison them until their relatives paid ransoms. One witness said he was held for four months and beaten so frequently that his family failed to recognise him. Travellers on the Sarobi road have recalled being terrorised by one of Zardad’s men who was named Zardad’s Dog: he would attack people with his teeth and hands, clawing and biting their ears, nose or testicles, if ordered to do so. Another threat was to be forced to kiss a corpse which had been allowed to decompose, swell up and blacken over a period of days. (1)

The Guardian also reported on the verdict:

[Witnesses] told how they had been imprisoned in containers for months on end, chained up and repeatedly beaten. Zardad himself allegedly executed one driver and a witness told how, aged seven, he witnessed his father’s ear being cut off by Zardad’s men. His father died of a heart attack three days later. Another witness… said [Zardad’s human] “dog” was set upon the occupant of a fruit lorry after it was stopped at the checkpoint. Ordered to hand out the fruit to Zardad’s soldiers the victim was too slow and was bitten by the long-haired man known as the “dog”. “I saw it with my own eyes,” the witness said. 

At his sentencing, the judge, Justice Tready, told Zardad that for a period of over three years, “as a powerful warlord, [you] presided over a brutal regime of terror in areas under your control. You represented the only real form of authority, law and government in the areas under your control and you grossly abused your power.”

The Witnesses

Zardad’s conviction (see the legal details of the case here) “hinged on credible and coherent witness testimony” (see AAN report here). 16 Afghans gave evidence, mostly by video link, but three in person. Humanitarian aid officials who were working in Afghanistan at the time also gave evidence, providing a clear description of Zardad’s base and helping to establish the fact that Zardad had controlled it, thereby corroborating the testimony of the torture victims.

British police, reported The Guardian, had “travelled to Afghanistan under armed guard to interview victims, many of whom were in fear of their lives after receiving threats to stop them giving evidence.” It also quoted Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch, who lead the investigation, saying, “We had to find witnesses in remote parts of Afghanistan and give them the confidence to come forward to give evidence in a British court,” he said. The verdict shows what can be achieved, and that the UK is not a safe haven for people like Zardad.”

Some witnesses were not informed of Zardad’s release and imminent arrival and, as far as AAN knows, no measures have been put in place to protect them. AAN understands the British police had tried to contact all witnesses, spoken directly to some but failed to locate others. A British Embassy spokesperson told AAN it was “usual police process is to notify all witnesses before the release of any convicted criminals.”

Given Zardad’s record of violent abuses and the fact that he continues to have friends and relatives in high places, the threat that he will try to revenge himself on witnesses and their families is credible. Human Rights Watch’s Afghanistan researcher, Patricia Gossman, told AAN:

Zardad’s trial and conviction in the UK was seen as a signal case for universal jurisdiction and a very rare case of justice in the long history of war crimes and human rights abuse in Afghanistan. In cutting his sentence in half and – most importantly – failing to take into consideration the security of witnesses who bravely testified at the trial and to whom Zardad poses a credible threat, the UK has set back justice in Afghanistan and betrayed Zardad’s victims. One has to wonder why any Afghan would give statements to the ICC [International Criminal Court] or speak up for human rights when this is the support they get. (2) 

AAN put in calls to the Ministry of Interior, NDS and the Presidential Palace but could get no comment on government plans. However, it seems top-level meetings were taking place today to decide what to do with Zardad. He is not without influential friends and some tribal backing from among Ahmadzais who will be pushing for his release. Whether or not the government plans to establish mechanisms to ensure he cannot harm witnesses is also not apparent.

 The conviction of Zardad was a landmark case, helping to establish that the most severe crimes can be prosecuted anywhere. If witnesses cannot be assured that they will be protected from reprisal, however, it will become impossible to get this sort of justice in the future.

 

 

(1) Published by Middle East International (not available online).

(2) In November 2016, the International Criminal Court, said it would be taking a decision “imminently” on whether or not to investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity which allegedly have taken place on Afghan soil since 2003, perpetrated by the Taleban, Afghan government forces and the United States military and CIA. For more detail, see AAN reporting here.

 

The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) uses propaganda to carve out new space in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s already crowded jihadi landscape. It uses popular media and promotes a distinct narrative of Salafi-jihadism tailored to local preferences and focused on specific themes. In the first part of this dispatch, AAN’s Borhan Osman analyses the propaganda messages ISKP uses to try to recruit Afghans. In the second part, he takes a closer look at the impact these messages have on their target audience.

In its previous dispatches on ISKP, AAN focused on its emergence as an insurgent group and franchise of the Iraq/Syria-based ‘Islamic State’ (Daesh) in Afghanistan, as well as adjacent parts of Pakistan; why Nangarhar became the locus of the group; and the strength of its Kabul cell that claimed three major attacks (one of them targeting a western embassy’s private guards and two others on Shia gatherings in the capital). With this, we have characterised a new ‘sender’ – the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) – in Afghanistan’s war theatre (and the wider region to which the ISKP refers as “Khorasan” (1)). This war, importantly, is also a propaganda war. In this part of our series on the ISKP, we turn to its message and the channels over which it is spread in an attempt to assess the impact it could have on its target audience.  

ISKP’s use of media

ISKP uses several media platforms to spread its propaganda. This includes through Afghanistan’s most popular medium, the radio (given the country’s high rates of illiteracy), as well as through social media, which is extremely popular among young Afghans. ISKP maintains an on-and-off FM radio station, Khilafat Ghag (Voice of the Caliphate), diffused throughout most of Nangarhar and parts of Kunar. It has issued dozens of short propaganda films, brochures and e-books and efficiently uses social media – Facebook, Twitter and Telegram – to publicise its statements and reach out to potential recruits. ISKP’s visual media products are professional and sophisticated, and its Dari and Pashto contents are often presented with Arabic subtitles.

From a close monitoring of these various media platforms between early 2015 and autumn 2016, a picture of an agile and deft media operation emerges. From a study of the full archive of Khilafat Ghag broadcasts, the group’s social media feed and its multimedia products, it becomes clear that ISKP has put far greater effort into its media activities than would normally be expected from a nascent group of its size.

ISKP is already outmatching the Taleban in terms of the quality and diversity of the media it employs, as well as the activeness of its loyalists in promoting the group’s message – especially taking into account the differing size of the two groups and their level of establishment in Afghanistan. ISKP is most notably ahead of the Taleban in its usage of FM radio and social media. ISKP employs a dedicated team of broadcasters and reporters who produce reporting on military advances and life under the caliphate that is engaging to its audience. The radio reporters interview fighters, talk to local residents and record reportages featuring life under the caliphate. The language used by the broadcasters is brisk, energetic and focused on attracting listeners and new recruits. Similarly, in their use of social media, ISKP loyalists are dedicated and give the appearance of a well-connected community, although it is not clear if this is centrally coordinated. The Taleban’s De Shariat Ghag (Voice of Sharia) Radio, that intermittently broadcasts throughout Paktika and Ghazni provinces, on the other hand, mainly plays tarane (Pashto plural for tarana, chants performed without instrumental accompaniment) and reads out articles that have been posted on its website.

The four main themes in ISKP’s propaganda

 ISKP’s propaganda – in the media platforms it uses – focuses on four over-arching themes: calling people to jihad, establishing and affirming itself as the only legitimate jihadi force in the region, projecting a transnational cause and casting rival militant groups and antipathetic religious actors as deviant.

Theme one: inciting people to jihad  

An important part of the group’s media content is dedicated to direct recruitment, in particular by calling people to join ISKP’s ranks. Radio channel Khilafat Ghag stresses the importance of the caliphate as an alternative form of the world order and emphasises religious obligation to establishing a caliphate through armed struggle. To invite people to experience jihad in its ranks, the radio channel often broadcasts the allegedly “jubilant feeling and the prideful environment” in which ISKP soldiers fight. During reports and interviews in the trenches of Nangarhar, the radio’s broadcasters have celebrated the fighters’ lives in the “prideful peaks of the Spin Ghar mountains.” ISKP has also made articulate appeals targeting specific professions, such as doctors, engineers and journalists. Radio and digital brochures, downloadable from the internet, contain stories of cheerful professionals serving in Syria and Iraq. ISKP has also released films of uniformed, apparently Afghan teenagers conducting military training, carrying ISKP flags and talking about bringing down the infidel rulers of the world. These youths then call on their cohorts, in Pashto and Dari, to join the global cause. ISKP’s romanticisation of living as one of its fighters is unparalleled in the jihadist media in Afghanistan.

An important sub-theme in ISKP’s recruitment appeals is its emphasis on the special status of Khorasan, as portrayed in the apocalyptic jihadi literature. ISKP ideologues constantly refer to apocalyptic narrations attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which foretell a decisive victory for bearers of the black flag from Khorasan as the world moves towards the end of times. This portrayal fits well into the global IS’s play of the apocalyptic narrative, in which the group depicts itself as the flag-bearer of the righteous party in the final episodes of the sacred wars that will, in ISKP’s thinking, lead to a worldwide establishment of a caliphate. Having Khorasan in its name and operating in the region historically called Khorasan grants ISKP a symbolic significance that makes it stand out from other IS franchises. In its propaganda, ISKP thus portrays the land of Khorasan as a particularly blessed battlefield, a divinely rewarding and prized theatre of jihad. (2)

Theme two: claiming exclusive jihadi legitimacy

A significant part of ISKP’s messaging revolves around claims to exclusive legitimacy. It tries to project itself as the only genuine jihadi force in the Khorasan region, calling on other jihadi groups to dissolve and merge into it. ISKP frequently highlights the aspects of its organisation and ideology that, in its view, make it unique and “the true proprietor of jihad.” This includes an emphasis on Salafi-jihadism (3) and showing off its multinational elements.

The emphasis on Salafi-jihadism: ISKP, in its propaganda, takes pains to project itself as a follower of the global IS’s manhaj (literally: methodology, but in the Salafi usage it means the ultimate true and authentic understanding of Sharia) of Salafi-jihadism. ISKP members, in their discussions, social media feeds and radio interviews find a common language in the manhaj: they refer to themselves as mowahedin (monotheists, but used in an extremely narrow way, which denies the monotheism of non-Salafis) and followers of the pure manhaj. They also find a common language in the pursuit of their ultimate cause of establishing a caliphate and defeating all tawaghit (plural of taghut, which means one who rebelled against God’s rule or sovereignty, that, in the reading of the Salafi-jihadists, includes all incumbent governments and political systems). They frequently talk about al-wala wa al-bara (loyalty and disavowal), a principle in international, interpersonal, inter-social and interfaith relations made popular by medieval ulama and revived by modern Salafi-jihadist theologians. These theologians have redefined the concept of rendering the recognition of any type of friendly relations with non-Muslims and non-Muslim entities, or with ‘deviant’ Muslims, as nullifiers of faith. These concepts are now so ingrained in ISKP’s rhetoric and self-image that illiterate commanders, who most probably know very little about their theological meaning (but do know how to exploit them to justify violence), repeat them verbatim.

ISKP has also translated and published the main Salafi-jihadism works into Pashto, Dari and Urdu, in particular the works by early medieval Muslim theologian Ibn Taymiyyah and 18th century Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (4) ­– after which Wahhabism is named – on jihad, global relations and the Salafi creed. The translations are distributed digitally in the form of sleek brochures, and in print in Nangarhar, Kabul and Peshawar.

ISKP frames its struggle for the caliphate’s revival as the continuation, by inheritance, of the cause of the previous jihadists who fought in Afghanistan, from the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahedin, to the late Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. The latter two are mentioned with respect, while their organisations are described as having deviated after their death from the path they had envisioned.

To prove their commitment to the principles of Salafism beyond mere propaganda, ISKP fighters have intervened in traditional religious practices in areas under their control. They have levelled graves, destroyed saints’ shrines, and, in some instances, forced imams to pray according to the Salafi method. 

Theme three: projecting a borderless struggle

Entertaining transnational goals: ISKP, in the first instance, projects itself as the local representative of the Islamic State with a mandate to topple the taghuti regimes of the Khorasan region. It talks of “liberating” Afghanistan and Pakistan. But ideologues have also occasionally spoken about the group’s plans for other (historical) parts of the region. On Khilafat Ghag, members have mentioned Central Asian republics, such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and have talked of fighting Russia and China and liberating East Turkistan, before joining other IS armies in toppling western super-powers.

Showing off foreign fighters to prove its multinational face: ISKP proudly talks of having members from various ethnic groups of Afghanistan as well as from other nationalities in its ranks. It projects the existence of these fighters as proof of it being unbound by modern borders and nationalities. While the majority of ISKP’s fighters are Pashtuns from Afghanistan and from Pakistan’s tribal areas, the presence of a minority made up of Afghans from other ethnic groups, non-Pashtun Pakistanis and Central Asians, is forcefully highlighted as evidence of a transnational, umma-wide face. Some propaganda films feature fighters who speak in heavily accented, non-native Dari (with Central Asian facial features), sometimes overseeing executions. Khilafat Ghag radio has given airtime to reporters who speak Dari in Herati, Badakhshani or Tajikistani accents, as well as those reporting in Urdu and Pashto. There are interviews with fighters who speak Pashai, a small language spoken in some parts of eastern Afghanistan. One Salafi sheikh who incites people to jihad in a Nuristani language, (5) has been a regular speaker on the radio. Epic jihadi anashid (Arabic for songs performed without instrumental accompaniment) are produced and broadcast in Uzbek, Punjabi and Arabic. On social media, ISKP activists have published pictures and names of “comrades and martyrs” described as being from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Myanmar and Gilgit-Baltistan (in the north of Pakistan).

Theme four: discrediting rival jihadi and religious groups

Disclosing ‘aberrations’ of rival jihadi groups accounts for a substantial part of ISKP’s propaganda, as shaking the faith of rival groups’ supporters in their current organisations is an important means of persuading them to join ISKP. ISKP’s criticism of its rivals is conspicuously more prominent than its propaganda against its supposed main enemy, the government. This is particularly salient when compared to ‘IS Central’ in Syria and Iraq, which also dedicates a sizeable part of its propaganda to the criticism of rivals, but to a much lesser proportion. In its rhetorical war, ISKP has also directed its publicity against non-violent religious actors and has, in particular, tried to challenge the religious authority of ulama and Islamists opposed to the group’s ideology. These include the Pakistani political parties Jamiat-e Ulama-ye Islam and Jamaat-e Islami as well as the violently sectarian Salafi group, Jamaat-ud Dawah of Pakistan. Similarly, in Afghanistan, the group has lambasted leading Afghan Islamists who started their career in the anti-Soviet jihad era, such as Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and the late Burhanuddin Rabbani, whom it mocked for having “sold out their jihad.”

Rejecting the Taleban for betraying Islamic principles: In its messaging, ISKP frequently castigates the actions, ideologies and policies of the Taleban. For example, on its radio and social media platforms, ISKP members have ranted about the Taleban’s “un-Islamic” attitudes towards the population in the areas they control. The movement’s tolerance of farmers cultivating opium, its recognition of adjudications of tribal councils and its subsistence on food from local residents are some of the ‘aberrances’ ISKP members in their propaganda frequently mention. The understandable aim of the criticism is to invalidate the jihad of its main rival group.

ISKP has also condemned the Taleban on the grounds of its relations and alliances with regional governments. The Taleban’s relations with the ‘rafidhi’ (literally: rejectionist, used in a derogatory manner for the Shia) Iran and with the ‘murtad’ (apostate) regime of Pakistan, are regularly repeated. The Taleban’s friendly relations with the ‘taghuti’ states of Central Asia, China and Russia and its maintaining of a political office in Qatar are rebuked as stances that have invalidated the Taleban’s claim to being a true jihadi organisation.

Additionally, ISKP’s propaganda makes references to the Taleban’s Deobandi creed, casting it as impure, superstitious and even idolatric. (6) ISKP uses these Taleban stances to argue the movement’s deviance from the Ahl us-Sunnah wa al-Jamaah (Sunni) manhaj, or path.

Casting the Taleban as nationalists: ISKP, with its emphatic highlighting of trans-nationalism, often depicts the Taleban as “filthy nationalists.” It criticises the movement for confining its armed struggle to Afghanistan’s borders, for its statements of non-intervention as part of its policy towards other countries and for its respect for international bodies such as the United Nations.

Declaring the Taleban infidels: While the official IS and ISKP literature often derogatorily uses the term “nationalist” to describe the Taleban as an essentially anti-caliphate force, their followers tend to be more ruthless. Through both radio and social media, they often rampantly declare individuals, communities and entities unsympathetic with their own group as “apostates” (their ideologues even wrote an e-book dedicated to a single argument: why those who fight IS(KP) are apostates). Foot soldiers have been particularly ruthless in declaring people murtadin (apostates) and mushrekin (idolaters) and have expressed the view that working with the government, even as teachers or doctors, can make people apostates. The Taleban do not escape this harsh judgement. In daily discussions or reporting and interviews on Khilafat Ghag, Taleban fighters are mentioned in the same breath as Afghan government forces, members of the arbaki or lashkar (both referring to the so-called public uprisings or local pro-government militias), the Pakistani army and even international forces, which are collectively described as murtadin (apostates). Takfir (declaring a Muslim an apostate) seems much more prevalent in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s ISKP than at ‘IS Central’ and it is done mainly on political grounds, such as when referring to friendly relations and alliances with, or getting help from, non-Muslims.

Vilifying ulama as courtiers: ISKP has also unleashed a vicious campaign of threats targeting different categories of vocal people in society, ranging from civil society organisations to the media, and from tribal elders to politicians and religious scholars. Ulama unsympathetic to ISKP have received a particularly large share of threatening messages. The virulent propaganda campaign is mainly carried out through Khilafat Ghag radio. It regularly runs programmes dedicated to the condemnation of pro-state ulama and vocal non-Salafi clerics. Those ulama have frequently been referred to as ‘darbari’ (courtiers) and ‘PRT ulama’, ie as having lost their independence and respect because they have been co-opted by the ruler and are allegedly being bankrolled by the international military. (7)

Radio broadcasters and ideologues issued threats in recorded sermons against the ulama, such as these: “The knives of the caliphate will soon reach your necks” and “You are under the surveillance of the caliphate’s alert eyes that monitor everything carefully.” According to the ISKP’s ideologues, the group has so far observed “self-restraint” against their opponents, but they could act in a far harsher and more brutal manner should ISKP’s antagonists continue their hostility against the group.

The appeal: who is lured by the propaganda?

ISKP’s media efforts seem tailored to local audiences and their preferences. By focusing their propaganda on the above-mentioned themes, ISKP targets different categories of potential recruits. In Khorasan’s ‘jihad-dense’ arena, many of those who are potentially – in ISKP’s eyes – amenable to joining the group are already in jihadi groups or following radical (but hitherto non-violent) trends (see author’s previous paper for more background).

There are certain categories of people who seem potentially receptive to the group’s appeal, each for their own reasons. These are the following:

Young men who are not yet in jihadist groups but who are receptive to the group’s romantic and apocalyptic appeal: To attract those who are not yet in jihadi groups but who may be interested, ISKP uses messaging that romanticises life as a mujahed and emphasises the religious obligation of jihad, playing up the symbolic significance of Khorasan’s past characterised by jihad. The claim of an apocalyptic prediction that victorious forces will rise from Khorasan is perhaps seen as the most important bait for potential recruits who would wish to be a part of this prophesised divine army. Throughout the Islamic period of history, there have been many movements in the region (which, historically, included parts of Iran), bearing black flags, trying to incite people to jihad and claiming to be the prophesised armies of God. ISKP is the latest iteration that has tried to project itself as the materialisation of that prophecy.

ISKP’s presenting of itself as the true and exclusive jihadi force by the virtue of its ‘pure’ ideology and manhaj, its stated strict adherence to the principles of jihad and its transnational vision and composition is meant to resonate both with hitherto non-violent radicals and with members of existing militant groups. The group’s grandiose talk about liberating the region’s countries seems aimed not only at strengthening the morale of its members, but also of luring more delusional radicals away from other groups, who may find the aims of their own groups too weak in comparison. Attempts to discredit the armed struggle of rival jihadi forces and the calls to shun the authority of religious leaders who preach against ISKP seem aimed at planting doubts in the minds of their (potential) followers. By calling into question the very raison d’être of their rivals, ISKP’s propaganda offers potential new recruits an ‘authentic’ alternative, in the form of a narrative to embrace and an organisation to join.

ISKP’s propaganda tactics are not without impact. There have been instances of educated youths who have joined the group after having been impressed by its public communiqués. AAN knows of several students in Nangarhar University who gave up their studies after having been regularly exposed to ISKP radio broadcasts and online publications (there may be more cases, as yet unknown). In Jalalabad, young men from various social backgrounds told AAN they were listening to Khilafat Ghag, some of them out of curiosity, others because they were genuinely interested in the new narrative of jihad. These included both students and professionals. In January 2016, a local TV channel interviewed a policeman in Jalalabad, who admitted that he found the radio sermons quite convincing and that they had made him question the wisdom of working for the government, instead of for ISKP.

ISKP’s adroit use of social media is not only paying off in urban centres, where there is easy access to the internet, but apparently also in prisons. People recently freed from Afghanistan’s largest prison, Pul-e Charkhi, told AAN that IS(KP) was being discussed among segments of the prison’s population as a favourite group to fight for in the future. There have been at least two verifiable cases of former Taleban who ideologically defected to ISKP while imprisoned in Pul-e Charkhi. One of them, Hujatullah Said from Paghman, was among the six Taleban fighters who were executed after being prosecuted by the Afghan government on 8 May 2016 for their involvement in “major attacks.” Said already had Salafi inclinations when fighting alongside the Taleban, but his allegiance to ISKP emerged while he was in prison. After his execution, ISKP sources claimed that he had defected to the group after reading their propaganda on the internet and interacting with them online. His postings on social media confirmed that. (Spending time on social media appears to be one of the main pastimes for many prisoners, who use smartphones that have been smuggled in to them by visitors and relatives.)

Local jihadists who view ISKP as a defiant brand: ISKP markets distinct ideas as the basis of its struggle, which are not found elsewhere among armed groups, especially in the Afghan sphere of jihad. The group’s rants against Pakistan – on which it is publicly much more outspoken than the Taleban – resonate with fighters (and with so-far non-violent radicals) who have deep grievances against Islamabad for helping the US ‘invade’ Afghanistan and hand over the Afghan Taleban and Arab jihadists to the Americans after 9/11. ISKP’s defiance against the governments of the region and their rejection of the current world order makes it potentially attractive to jihadists and extremists who seek a radical remapping of the world. This defiant stance particularly attracts fighters who are not happy with the Taleban’s close relations with Pakistan and Iran, or the movement’s ‘nationalism’. One reason cited in an interview on Khilafat Ghag by a former Taleb who defected to ISKP, was the fact that the Taleban movement was “in tandem” with the governments of Pakistan and Qatar. Another former, and higher-ranking Taleb, who first defected to al Qaeda and then to ISKP, sharply criticised the fact that the movement had grown too pragmatic in its relations with the tawaghit. In a memoir he published online, he said that after the disappearance of Mullah Omar, the Taleban had leapt towards nationalism at the cost of a borderless jihad.

Central Asian jihadists who view ISKP as an alternative to the ‘nationalist’ Taleban: The Taleban’s ‘nationalism’ seems, in particular, to have hit a nerve with some of the foreign fighters who have long fought in Afghanistan. A group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) with dozens of fighters who switched their allegiance from the Taleban to IS(KP) in 2015 in Zabul, justified their move by referring to the increasing disregard for the muhajer (guest/migrant) mujahedin, especially compared to the late 1990s, when Mullah Omar held the Central Asian (and Arab) fighters in high regard. (More than a hundred of these IMU-cum-ISKP fighters were killed by the Taleban in November 2015, while others made it safely to Nangarhar.) In letters and memoirs seen by AAN, IMU-turned-ISKP members, moreover, described the Taleban’s statements of non-interference in neighbouring countries as deeply disturbing. They pointed, in particular, to what it alleges are the movement’s covert relations with some Central Asian countries.

For these foreign jihadists, their distant future probably looks more promising with an ally that promises to break down borders, than one they fear may abandon them after victory or a political settlement (ie the Afghan Taleban).

The foreign jihadists, although proportionally small in numbers, are a dangerous contribution to the ISKP phenomenon. They are the fighters who have lived in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past decade and a half, and who seem to have gone through an evolution of ideologies and objectives, moving from a struggle to ‘liberate’ their countries of origin from their ‘infidel’ governments to a transnational jihad, as manifested by their recent publications. Now, when faced with the stark reality of being unable to ‘liberate’ anywhere, let alone establish a transnational caliphate in the near future, the aim for many of them has become more reckless and deadly: martyrdom in hijra (away from home), making them potential suicide bombers. In two instances, Uzbek fighters from ISKP blew themselves up to kill Afghan Taleban commanders. In Zabul, one of the fighters ended up killing his own comrades who were surrendering to the Taleban.(8)

‘Non-violent’ radicals who view ISKP as bringing a ‘clear vision’: So far, ISKP seems to have struck a chord not only among existing armed militants, but also with members of a new generation of, so far, non-violent extremists (see author’s previous paper for more background). With ISKP’s emergence, some of the hitherto non-armed radicals who wish to replace the incumbent government with a more radical Islamic version, appear to have discovered an address for their struggle. (See also earlier reporting by AAN on ISKP recruitment in Kabul).

Is ISKP’s ideology here to stay?

ISKP’s cause and methods continue to hold little appeal for most Afghans. Its ideology is largely alien to Afghan culture. Its traditional conceptions of Islam and propaganda often fall flat with its listeners and its brutal tactics are off-putting to most Afghans who are weary after decades of war. As a result, even among those who are attracted by (parts of) their messaging, there will often be a reluctance to join. But this does not necessarily mean the group will have no staying power. It can still try its luck within Afghan society by capitalising on the breakdown of traditional power structures (as described in an earlier piece). The erosion of communities’ resilience against intruders and predators means that even the most out-of-the-way trends may endure, as long as their proponents manage to muster a critical mass of committed followers.

While ISKP’s influence on the battlefield seems to be waning – at least for now – its ideological potential does not seem to be in a concordant state of decline. The Afghanistan-Pakistan region is dense with extremists of all sorts. Among this spectrum of radicals, there are those who feel that there is a void in the existing landscape of extremist groups, whether in terms of ideological purity, internationalist appeal or brutality. ISKP seeks to reach out to this segment of extremists by investing in its propaganda. ISKP’s ideology, for now, remains a fringe phenomenon, an outlier in extremism and brutality, even when compared to the dominant radical trends in Afghan Islamism and jihadism. While it has only been adopted by a small constituency, it is, however, a by-product of the build-up of extremist ideas over decades. In this sense, it is rooted in Afghanistan’s history and society. It will probably not go away that easily. The fact that IS(KP)’s message and deft use of propaganda has resonated with a part of the diverse spectrum of radicals means that ISKP’s ideological impact may well outlast its waning success on the battlefield.

Edited by Sari Kouvo, Martine van Bijlert and Thomas Ruttig

 

 

 

(1) Khorasan, originally, refers to the region which is now northeastern Iran, Afghanistan north of the Hindukush and parts of Central Asia, up to the Laxartes River (Syr Darya), also known as Mawara aln-Nahr, or Transoxiana. The use of the term has frequently been extended to all of Afghanistan and adjacent areas of Pakistan, as it is known today. ISKP, in its name, refers to this extended version.

(2) In fetishising Khorasan, ISKP builds on (or recycles) the literature of previous jihadist forces, which used to be based in or around Afghanistan. Perhaps, in the initial stage, it was the Arab fighters who had flocked to the Pakistani training camps to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, who rediscovered the apocalyptic narrations about Khorasan. The Arabs, from which al Qaeda later emerged, used these narrations and expanded them at great length. Later on as the Afghan jihad ended, these fighters disseminated their memories of Afghanistan with nostalgic depictions of the life, terrain and people, adding another layer of literature that romanticised the Afghan jihad-field. Their portrayal of the land of Afghanistan made many Middle Eastern jihadists who had missed the earlier Afghan experience of jihad yearn to fight there, before Iraq and other destinations close to their homes emerged as more urgent hot spots of jihad. ISKP is now building on precisely those layers of literature to propagate the value of the struggle for the caliphate from Khorasan.

(3) Salafi-Jihadism, as described by Shadi Hamid, an expert of modern Islamism at the Brookings Institution, is an approach to jihadism that is coupled with an adherence to Salafism. Salafi-jihadists tend to emphasize the military exploits of the Salaf (the early generations of Muslims) to give their violence an even more immediate divine imperative. Most jihadist groups today can be classified as Salafi-jihadists, including al-Qaeda and ISIS. Given their exclusivist view that their approach to Islam is the only authentic one, Salafi-jihadists often justify violence against other Muslims, including non-combatants, by recourse to takfir, or the excommunication of fellow Muslims. For these groups, if Muslims have been deemed to be apostates, then violence against them is licit. Only a minority of Salafis are Salafi-jihadists, according to Hamid.

(4) Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 – 1328) was a controversial theologian and jurisprudence-practitioner who lived during the Crusade wars. Among medieval Muslim clerics, his views are some of the most extreme on takfir and jihad, with takfir targeting Muslims and jihad being waged against non-Muslims or rulers found to be not up to Islamic laws. Ibn Taymiyyah’s works slid into obscurity after this period, but were reinvigorated during the rise of jihadism in the second half of the 20th century.

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703 – 1792) is the founder of modern Salafism. He echoed and revived some of the medieval theology and law, but also added his own views. He is considered the theological founding father of the modern state of Saudi Arabia. His views, as those of Ibn Taymiyyah, are most extreme when it comes to takfir and his works have been used as a source by modern ultra-sectarian Sunni groups to declare Shias and Sufis, and some traditionalist Muslims, as non-Muslims. Wahhab, from which the (derogatory) label Wahhabism is derived, and Ibn Taymiyyah are at the core of the current Salafi-jihadism movement’s discourse, with Wahhab mostly inspiring the theology, and Ibn Taymiyyah embodying the jihadist scholar.

(5) Nuristani is actually a group of several languages spoken by small groups of people in eastern Afghanistan and adjacent areas of Pakistan.

(6) The Taleban, in their theology and interpretation of Islamic law, follow the dominant scholastic tradition of South Asia rooted in the Darul Uloom Deoband, which is situated in India’s Uttar Pradesh and founded in 1867. In theology, Deobandism follows the Maturidi school and, in Islamic law, they are strong proponents of the doctrine of taqlid, ie strict adherence to one of the four schools (madhhabs) of Sunni jurisprudence, which is predominantly the Hanafi madhhab in the context of South Asia and Afghanistan. Deobandism generally discourages inter-school eclecticism. While essentially a legal-theological tradition, Deobandism has also integrated Sufism as a strong element of the school. It is usually this Sufi element, but also the strict adherence to interpretations of Hanafi scholars, that sectarian Salafis, and in this case ISKP, attacks as impure.

(7) PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams) were made up of civilian and military teams that coordinated and sometimes implemented projects as part of a stabilisation and counterinsurgency effort, until the drawdown of the international forces in late 2014. They often worked with and through religious figures, in an attempt to avoid these projects being labelled as ‘un-Islamic’ by the insurgents.

(8) The two attacks were reported by the media, but without much detail. The attack against a senior Taleban commander in Zabul in November 2015 was reported to have killed the commander. However, according to local sources and Taleban members, the Uzbek suicide bomber ended up killing his own comrades who had gathered at the commander’s base, for surrendering themselves. Another Uzbek bomber blew himself up in Nangarhar in February 2016. The bomber was identified by both Taleban and ISKP sources as an Uzbek formerly affiliated with IMU.